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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Fountain Sealed, by Anne Douglas Sedgwick
+
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+Title: A Fountain Sealed
+
+Author: Anne Douglas Sedgwick
+
+Release Date: May, 2005 [EBook #8087]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on June 13, 2003]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ISO-Latin-1
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A FOUNTAIN SEALED ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Distributed Proofreaders.
+
+
+
+
+
+A FOUNTAIN SEALED
+
+by
+
+ANNE DOUGLAS SEDGWICK
+
+(Mrs. Basil de Sélincourt)
+
+Author of 'The Little French Girl,' 'Franklin Winslow Kane,' 'Tante,' etc.
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+Three people were sitting in a small drawing-room, the windows of which
+looked out upon a wintry Boston street. It was a room rather empty and
+undecorated, but the idea of austerity was banished by a temperature
+so nearly tropical. There were rows of books on white shelves, a pale
+Donatello cast on the wall, and two fine bronze vases filled with roses on
+the mantelpiece. Over the roses hung a portrait in oils, very sleek and
+very accurate, of a commanding old gentleman in uniform, painted by a
+well-known German painter, and all about the room were photographs of young
+women, most of them young mothers, with smooth heads and earnest faces,
+holding babies. Outside, the snow was heaped high along the pavements
+and thickly ridged the roofs and lintels. After the blizzard the sun was
+shining and all the white glittered. The national colors, to a patriotic
+imagination, were pleasingly represented by the red, white and blue of the
+brick houses, the snow, and the vivid sky above.
+
+The three people who talked, with many intimate pauses of silence, were all
+Bostonians, though of widely different types. The hostess, sitting in an
+easy chair and engaged with some sewing, was a girl of about twenty-six.
+She wore a brown skirt of an ugly cut and shade and a white silk shirt,
+adorned with a high linen collar, a brown tie and an old-fashioned gold
+watch-chain. Her forehead was too large, her nose too short; but her lips
+were full and pleasant and when she smiled she showed charming teeth. The
+black-rimmed glasses she wore emphasized the clearness and candor of her
+eyes. Her thick, fair hair was firmly fastened in a group of knobs down the
+back of her head. There was an element of the grotesque in her appearance
+and in her careful, clumsy movements, yet, with it, a quality almost
+graceful, that suggested homely and wholesome analogies,--freshly-baked
+bread; fair, sweet linen; the safety and content of evening firesides. This
+was Mary Colton.
+
+The girl who sat near the window, her furs thrown back from her shoulders,
+a huge muff dangling from her hand, was a few years younger and exceedingly
+pretty. Her skin was unusually white, her hair unusually black, her velvety
+eyes unusually large and dark. In. her attitude, lounging, graceful,
+indifferent, in her delicate face, the straight, sulky brows, the coldly
+closed lips, the coldly observant eyes, a sort of permanent discontent was
+expressed, as though she could find, neither in herself nor in the world,
+any adequate satisfaction. This was Rose Packer.
+
+The other guest, sitting sidewise on a stiff chair, his hand hanging over
+the back, his long legs crossed, was a young man, graceful, lean and
+shabby. He was clean-shaven, with brown skin and golden hair, an unruly
+lock lying athwart his forehead. His face, intent, alert, was veiled in
+an indolent nonchalance. He looked earnest, yet capricious, staunch, yet
+sensitive, and one felt that, conscious of these weaknesses, he tried to
+master or to hide them.
+
+These three had known one another since childhood. Jack's family was old
+and rich; Mary's old and poor; Rose Packer's new and of fantastic wealth.
+Rose was a young woman of fashion and her whole aspect seemed to repudiate
+any closeness of tie between herself and Mary, who passed her time in
+caring for General Colton, her invalid father, attending committees, and,
+as a diversion, going to "sewing-circles" and symphony concerts; but she
+was fonder of Mary than of any one else in the world. Rose, who had, as
+it were, been brought up all over the world, divided her time now between
+two continents and quaintly diversified her dancing, hunting, yachting
+existence by the arduous study of biology. Jack, in appearance more
+ambiguous than either, looked neither useful nor ornamental; but, in point
+of fact, he was a much occupied person. He painted very seriously, was
+something of a scholar and devoted much of his time and most of his large
+fortune to intricate benevolences. His shabby clothes were assumed, like
+the air of indolence; his wealth irked him and, full of a democratic
+transcendentalism, he longed to efface all the signs that separated him
+from the average toiler. While Rose was quite ignorant of her own country
+west of the Atlantic seaboard, Jack had wandered North, South, West. As
+for Mary, she had hardly left Boston in her life, except to go to the
+Massachusetts coast in summer and to pay a rare visit now and then to New
+York. It was of such a visit that she had been talking to them and of the
+friend who, since her own return home only a few days before, had suffered
+a sudden bereavement in the death of her father. Jack Pennington, also a
+near friend of Imogen Upton's, had just come from New York, where he had
+been with her during the mournful ceremonies of death, and Mary Colton,
+after a little pause, had said, "I suppose she was very wonderful through
+it all."
+
+"She bore up very well," said Jack Pennington. "There would never be
+anything selfish in her grief."
+
+"Never. And when one thinks what a grief it is. She is wonderful," said
+Mary.
+
+"You think every one wonderful, Molly," Rose Packer remarked, not at all
+aggressively, but with her air of quiet ill-temper.
+
+"Mary's enthusiasm has hit the mark this time," said Pennington, casting a
+glance more scrutinizing than severe upon the girl.
+
+"I really can't see it. Of course Imogen Upton is pretty--remarkably
+pretty--though I've always thought her nose too small; and she is certainly
+clever; but why should she be called wonderful?"
+
+"I think it is her goodness, Rose," said Mary, with an air of gentle
+willingness to explain. "It's her radiant goodness. I know that Imogen has
+mastered philosophies, literatures, sciences--in so far as a young and very
+busy girl can master them, and that very wise men are glad to talk to her;
+but it's not of that one thinks--nor of her great beauty, either. Both seem
+taken up, absorbed in that selflessness, that loving-kindness, that's like
+a higher kind of cleverness--almost like a genius."
+
+"She's not nearly so good as you are, Molly. And after all, what does she
+do, anyway?"
+
+Mary kept her look of leniency, as if over the half-playful naughtinesses
+of a child. "She organizes and supports all sorts of charities, all sorts
+of reforms; she is the wisest, sweetest of hostesses; she takes care of her
+brother; she took care of her father;--she takes care of anybody who is in
+need or unhappy."
+
+"Was Mr. Upton so unhappy? He certainly looked gloomy;--I hardly knew him;
+Eddy, however, I do know, very well; he isn't in the least unhappy. He
+doesn't need help."
+
+"I think we all need help, dear. As for Mr. Upton,--you know," Mary spoke
+very gravely now, "you know about Mrs. Upton."
+
+"Of course I do, and what's better, I know her herself a little. _Elle est
+charmeuse_."
+
+"I have never seen her," said Mary, "but I don't understand how you can
+call a frivolous and heartless woman, who practically deserted her husband
+and children, _charmeuse_;--but perhaps that is all that one can call her."
+
+"I like frivolous people," said Rose, "and most women would have deserted
+Mr. Upton, if what I've heard of him was true."
+
+"What have you heard of him?"
+
+"That he was a bombastic prig."
+
+At this Mary's pale cheek colored. "Try to remember, Rose, that he died
+only a week ago."
+
+"Oh, he may be different now, of course."
+
+"I can't bear to hear you speak so, Rose. I did know him. I saw a great
+deal of him during this last year. He was a very big person indeed."
+
+"Of course I'm a pig to talk like this, if you really liked him, Molly."
+
+But Mary was not to be turned aside by such ambiguous apology. "You see,
+you don't know, Rose. The pleasure-seeking, worldly people among whom you
+live could hardly understand a man like Mr. Upton. Simply what he did for
+civic reform,--worked himself to death over it. And his books on ethics,
+politics. It isn't a question of my liking him. I don't know that I ever
+thought of my feeling for him in those terms. It was reverence, rather, and
+gratitude for his being what he was."
+
+"Well, dear, I do remember hearing men, and not worldly men, as you call
+them, either, say that his work for civic reform amounted to very little
+and that his books were thin and unoriginal. As for that community place he
+founded at, where was it?--Clackville? He meddled that out of life."
+
+"He may have been Utopian, he may have been in some ways ineffectual; but
+he was a good man, a wonderful, yes, Rose, a wonderful man,"
+
+"And do you think that Molly has hit the mark in this, too?" Rose asked,
+turning her eyes on Pennington. He had been listening with an air of light
+inattention and now he answered tersely, as if conquering some inner
+reluctance by over-emphasis, "Couldn't abide him."
+
+Rose laughed out, though with some surprise in her triumph; and Mary,
+redder than before, rejoined in a low voice, "I didn't expect you, Jack, to
+let personal tastes interfere with fair judgment."
+
+"Oh, I'm not judging him," said Jack.
+
+"But do you feel with me," said Rose, "that it's no wonder that Mrs. Upton
+left him."
+
+"Not in the least," Pennington replied, glad, evidently, to make clear his
+disagreement. "I don't know of any reason that Mrs. Upton had for deserting
+not only her husband but her children."
+
+"But have they been left? Isn't it merely that they prefer to stay?"
+
+"Prefer to live in their own country? among their own people? Certainly."
+
+"But she spends part of every year with them. There was never any open
+breach."
+
+"Everybody knew that she would not live with her husband and everybody knew
+why," Mary said. "It has nearly broken Imogen's heart. She left him because
+he wouldn't lead the kind of life she wanted to lead--the kind of life she
+leads in England--one of mere pleasure and self-indulgent ease. She hasn't
+the faintest conception of duty or of patriotism. She couldn't help her
+husband in any way, and she wouldn't let him help her. All she cares for is
+fashion, admiration and pretty clothes."
+
+"Stuff and nonsense, my dear! She doesn't think one bit more about her
+clothes than Imogen does. It requires more thought to look like a saint in
+velvet than to go to the best dressmaker and order a trousseau. I wonder
+how long it took Imogen to find out that way of doing her hair."
+
+"Rose!--I must beg of you--I love her."
+
+"But I'm saying nothing against her!"
+
+"When I think of what she is suffering now, what you say sounds cruelly
+irreverent. Jack, I know, feels as I do."
+
+"Yes, he does," said the young man. He got up now and stood, very tall, in
+the middle of the room looking down at Mary. "I must be off. I'll bring
+you those books to-morrow afternoon--though I don't see much good in your
+reading d'Annunzio."
+
+"Why, if you do, Jack?" said Mary, with some wonder. And the degree of
+intimate equality in the relations of these young people may be gaged by
+the fact that he appeared to receive her rejoinder as conclusive.
+
+"Well, he's interesting, of course, and if one wants to understand modern
+decadence in an all-round way--"
+
+"I want to understand everything," said Mary. "And please bring your best
+Italian dictionary with them."
+
+"Before you go, Jack," said Rose, "pray shut the register. It's quite
+stifling in here."
+
+"Far too hot," said Jack, showing his impartiality of spirit by his
+seconding of Rose's complaint, for it was evident she had much displeased
+him. "I've often told you, Mary, how bad it was for you. That's why you are
+so pale."
+
+"I'm so sorry. Have you been feeling it much? Leave the door into the hall
+open."
+
+"And do cast one glance, if only of disapprobation, upon me, Jack," Rose
+pleaded in mock distress.
+
+"You are a very amusing child, Rose, sometimes," was Pennington's only
+answer.
+
+"He's evidently very cross with me," said Rose, when he was gone. "While
+you are not--you who have every right to be, angelic Molly."
+
+"I hope you didn't realize, Rose, how you were hurting him."
+
+"I?" Rose opened wide eyes. "How, pray?"
+
+"Don't you know that he is devoted to Imogen Upton?"
+
+"Why, who isn't devoted to her, except wicked me?"
+
+"Devoted in particular--in love with her, I think," said Mary.
+
+Rose's face took on a more acutely discontented look, after the pause in
+which she seemed, though unrepentantly, to acquiesce in a conviction of
+ineptitude. "Really in love with her?"
+
+"I think so; I hope so."
+
+"How foolish of him," said Rose. Mary, at this, rested a gaze so long and
+so reproachful upon her that the discontent gave way to an affectionate
+compunction. "The truth is, Mary, that I'm jealous; I'm petty; I'm horrid.
+I don't like sharing you. I like you to like me most, and not to find other
+people wonderful."
+
+"If you own that you are naughty, Rose, dear, and that you try hard to be
+naughtier than you really are, I can't be angry with you. But it does hurt
+me, for your own sake, to see you--really malicious, dear."
+
+"Oh, dear! Am I that?"
+
+"Really you are."
+
+"Because I called Imogen Upton a saint in velvet?--and like her mother so
+much, much more?"
+
+"Yes, because of that--and all the rest. As for jealousy, one doesn't love
+people more because they are wonderful. One is glad of them and one longs
+to share them. It's one of my dearest hopes that you may come to care for
+Imogen as I do--and as Jack does."
+
+Rose listened, her head bent forward, her eyes, ambiguous in their
+half-ironic, half-tender, meaning, on her friend; but she only said, "_I_
+shall remain in love with you, Mary." She didn't say again, though she was
+thinking it, that Jack was very foolish.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+"Darling, darling Mother:
+
+"I know too well what you have been feeling since the cable reached you;
+and first of all I want to help you to bear it by telling you at once that
+you could not have reached him in time. You must not reproach yourself for
+that.
+
+"I am shattered by this long day. Father died early this morning, but I
+must hold what strength I have, firmly, for you, and tell you all that you
+will want to hear. He would have wished that; you know how he felt about a
+selfish yielding to grief.
+
+"He seemed quite well until the beginning of this week--five days ago--but
+he was never strong; the long struggle that life must always mean to those
+who face life as he did, wore on him more and more; for others' sakes he
+often assumed a buoyancy of manner that, I am sure,--one feels these things
+by intuition of those one loves--often hid suffering and intense weariness.
+It was just a case of the sword wearing out the scabbard. A case of, 'Yes,
+uphill to the very end.' I know that you did not guess how fragile the
+scabbard had become, and you must not reproach yourself, darling, for that
+either. We are hardly masters of the intuitions that warn us of these
+things. Death teaches us so much, and, beside him, looking at his quiet
+face, so wonderful in its peace and triumph, I have learned many lessons.
+He has seemed to teach me, in his silence, the gentler, deeper sympathy
+with temperament. You couldn't help it, darling, I seem to understand that
+more and more. You weren't at the place, so to speak, where he could help
+you. Oh, I want to be so tender with you, my mother,--and to help you to
+wise, strong tenderness toward yourself.
+
+"On Tuesday he worked, as usual, all morning; he had thrown himself heart
+and soul, as you know, into our great fight with civic corruption--what a
+worker he was, what a fighter! He was so wonderful at lunch, I remember.
+I had my dear little Mary Colton with me and he held us both spellbound,
+talking, with all his enthusiasm and ardor, of politics, art, life and the
+living of life. Mary said, when she left me that day, that to know him had
+been one of the greatest things in her experience. In the afternoon he went
+to a committee meeting at the Citizens' Union. It was bitterly cold and
+though I begged him to be selfish for once and take a cab, he wouldn't--you
+remember his Spartan contempt of costly comforts--and I can see him now,
+going down the steps, smiling, shaking his head, waving his hand, and
+saying with that half-sad, half-quizzical, smile of his, 'Plenty of people
+who need bread a good deal more than I need cabs, little daughter.' So, in
+the icy wind, he walked to the cable-car, with its over-heated atmosphere.
+He got back late, only in time to dress for dinner. Several interesting men
+came and we had a splendid evening, really wonderful talk, _constructive_
+talk, vitalizing, inspiring, of the world and the work to be done for it. I
+noticed that father seemed flushed, but thought it merely the interest of
+the discussion. He did not come down to breakfast next morning and when I
+went to him I found him very feverish. He confessed then that he had caught
+a bad chill the day before. I sent for the doctor at once, and for a little
+while had no anxiety. But the fever became higher and higher and that night
+the doctor said that it was pneumonia.
+
+"Dearest, dearest mother, these last days are still too much with me for me
+to feel able to make you see them clearly. It is all a tragic confusion in
+my mind. Everything that could be done was done to save him. He had nurses
+and consultations--all the aids of science and love. I wired for Eddy at
+once, and dear Jack Pennington was with me, too, so helpful with his deep
+sympathy and friendship. I needed help, mother, for it was like having my
+heart torn from me to see him go. He was very calm and brave, though I am
+sure he knew, and once, when I sat beside him, just put out his hand to
+mine and said: 'Don't grieve overmuch, little daughter; I trust you to turn
+all your sorrow to noble uses.' He spoke only once of you, dear mother,
+but then it was to say: 'Tell her--I forgive. Tell her not to reproach
+herself.' And then--it was the saddest, sweetest summing up, and it will
+comfort you--'She was like a child.' At the end he simply went--sleeping,
+unconscious. Oh, mother, mother!--forgive these tears, I am weak.... He
+lies now, up-stairs, looking so beautiful--like that boyish portrait, you
+remember, with the uplifted, solemn gaze--only deeper, more peaceful and
+without the ardor....
+
+"Darling mother, don't bother a bit about me. Eddy and Jack will help me in
+everything, all our friends are wonderful to us.--Day after to-morrow we
+are to carry him to his rest.--After that, when I feel a little stronger, I
+will write again. Eddy goes to you directly after the funeral. If you need
+me, cable for me at once. I have many ties and many claims here, but I will
+leave them all to spend the winter with you, if you need me. For you may
+not feel that you care to come to us, and perhaps it will be easier for you
+to bear it over there, where you have so many friends and have made your
+life. So if I can be of any help, any comfort, don't hesitate, mother dear.
+
+"And--oh, I want to say it so lovingly, my arms around you--don't fear
+that I have any hardness in my heart toward you. I loved him--with all
+my soul--as you know; but if, sometimes, seeing his patient pain, I have
+judged you, perhaps, with youth's over-severity,--all that is gone now. I
+only feel our human weakness, our human need, our human sorrow. Remember,
+darling, that our very faults, our very mistakes, are the things that may
+help us to grow higher. Don't sink into a useless self-reproach. 'Turn your
+sorrow to noble uses.' Use the past to light you to the future. Build on
+the ruins, dear one. You have Eddy and me to live for, and we love you. God
+bless you, my darling mother.
+
+"IMOGEN."
+
+This letter, written in a large, graceful and very legible hand, was being
+read for the third time by the bereaved wife as she sat in the drawing-room
+of a small house in Surrey on a cold November evening. The room was one of
+the most finished comfort, comfort its main intention, but so thoroughly
+attained that beauty had resulted as if unconsciously. The tea-table, the
+fire, the wide windows, their chintz curtains now drawn, were the points
+around which the room had so delightfully arranged itself. It was a room
+a trifle overcrowded, but one wouldn't have wanted anything taken away,
+the graceful confusion, on a background of almost austere order, gave the
+happiest sense of adaptability to a variety of human needs and whims. Mrs.
+Upton had finished her own tea, but the flame still burned in waiting under
+the silver urn; books and reviews lay in reach of a lazy hand; lamps,
+candle-light and flowers made a soft radiance; a small _griffon_ dozed
+before the fire. The decoration of the room consisted mainly in French
+engravings from Watteau and Chardin, in one or two fine black lacquer
+cabinets and in a number of jars and vases of Chinese porcelain, some
+standing on the floor and some on shelves, the neutral-tinted walls a
+background to their bright, delicate colors.
+
+Mrs. Upton was an appropriate center to so much ease and beauty. In deep
+black though she was, her still girlish figure stretched out in a low
+chair, her knees crossed, one foot held to the fire, she did not seem
+to express woe or the poignancy of regret. The delicate appointments of
+her dress, the freshness of her skin, her eyes, bright and unfatigued,
+suggested nothing less than a widow plunged in remorseful grief. Her
+eyes, indeed, were thoughtful, her lips, as she read her daughter's
+communication, grave, but there was much discrepancy between her own aspect
+and the letter's tone, and, letting it drop at last, she seemed herself
+aware of it, sighing, glancing about her at the Chinese porcelain, the
+tea-table, the dozing dog. She didn't look stricken, nor did she feel so.
+The first fact only vaguely crossed her mind; the latter stayed and her
+face became graver, sadder, in contemplating it. She contemplated it for a
+long time, going over a retrospect in which her dead husband's figure and
+her own were seen, steadily, sadly, but without severity for either.
+
+Since the shock of the announcement, conveyed in a long, tender cable over
+a week ago, she had had no time, as it were, to cast up these accounts with
+the past. Her mind had known only a confused pain, a confused pity, for
+herself and for the man whom she once had loved. The death, so long ago, of
+that young love seemed more with her than her husband's death, which took
+on the visionary, picture aspect of any tragedy seen from a distance, not
+lived through. But now, in this long, firelit leisure, that was the final
+summing of it all. She was grave, she was sad; but she could feel no
+severity for herself, and, long ago, she had ceased to feel any for poor
+Everard. They had been greatly mistaken in fancying themselves made for
+each other, two creatures could hardly have been less so; but Everard had
+been a good man and she,--she was a harmless woman. Both of them had meant
+well. Of course Everard had always, and for everything, meant a great deal
+more than she, in the sense of an intentional shaping of courses. She had
+always owned that, had always given his intentions full credit; only, what
+he had meant had bored her--she could not find it in herself now to fix on
+any more self-exonerating term. After the first perplexed and painful years
+of adjustment to fundamental disappointment she had at last seen the facts
+clearly and not at all unkindly, and it seemed to her that, as far as her
+husband went, she had made the best of them. It was rather odious of her,
+no doubt, to think it now, but it seemed the truth, and, seen in its light,
+poor little Imogen's exhortations and consolations were misplaced. Once or
+twice in reading the letter she had felt an inclination to smile, an
+inclination that had swiftly passed into compunction and self-reproach.
+
+Yes, there it was; she could find very little of self-reproach within her
+in regard to her husband; but in regard to Imogen her conscience was not
+easy, and as her thoughts passed to her, her face grew still sadder and
+still graver. She saw Imogen, in the long retrospect,--it was always
+Imogen, Eddy had never counted as a problem--first as a child whom she
+could take abroad with her for French, German, Italian educational
+experiences; then as a young girl, very determined to form her own
+character, and sure, with her father to second her assurance, that
+boarding-school was the proper place to form it. Eddy was also at school,
+and Mrs. Upton, with the alternative of flight or an unbroken tête-à-tête
+with her husband before her, chose the former. There was no breach, no
+crash; any such disturbances had taken place long before; she simply slid
+away, and her prolonged absences seemed symbols of fundamental and long
+recognized divisions. She came home for the children's holidays; built,
+indeed, the little house among the Vermont hills, so that she might, as it
+were, be her husband's hostess there. She hoped, through the ambiguous
+years, for Imogen's young-womanhood; looking forward to taking her place
+beside her when the time came for her first steps in the world. But here,
+again, Imogen's clear-cut choice interfered. Imogen considered girlish
+frivolities a foolish waste of time; she would take her place in the world
+when she was fully equipped for the encounter; she was not yet equipped to
+her liking and she declared herself resolved on a college course.
+
+Imogen had been out of college for three years now, but the routine of Mrs.
+Upton's life was unchanged. The rut had been made too deep for her to climb
+out of it. It had become impossible to think of reentering her husband's
+home as a permanent part of it. Eddy was constantly with her in England
+in the intervals of his undergraduate life; but how urge upon Imogen more
+frequent meetings when her absence would leave the father desolate? The
+summers had come to be their only times of reunion and Mrs. Upton had more
+and more come to look forward to them with an inward tremor of uncertainty
+and discomfort. For, under everything, above everything, was the fact, and
+she felt herself now to be looking it hard in the face, that Imogen had
+always, obviously, emphatically, been fondest of her father. It had been
+from the child's earliest days, this more than fondness, this placid
+partizanship. In looking back it seemed to her that Imogen had always
+disapproved of her, had always shown her disapproval, gently, even
+tenderly, but with a sad firmness. Her liberation from her husband's
+standard was all very well; she cared nothing for Imogen's standard either,
+in so far as it was an echo, a reflection; only, for her daughter not to
+care for her, to disapprove of her, to be willing that she should go out of
+her life,--there was the rub; and the fact that she should be considering
+it over a tea-table in Surrey while Imogen was battling with all the somber
+accompaniments of grief in New York, challenged her not to deny some
+essential defect in her own maternity. She was an honest woman, and after
+her hour of thought she could not deny it, though she could not see clearly
+where it lay; but the recognition was but a step to the owning that she
+must try to right herself. And at this point,--she had drawn a deep breath
+over it, straightening herself in her chair,--her friends came in from
+their drive and put an end to her solitude.
+
+For the first years of her semi-detached life Mrs. Upton had been as gay as
+a very decorous young grass-widow can be. Her whole existence, until her
+marriage, which had dropped, or lifted, her to graver levels, had been
+passed among elaborate social conditions, and wherever she might go she
+found the protection of a recognized background. She had multitudes of
+acquaintances and these surrounding nebulæ condensed, here and there, into
+the fixed stars of friendship. Not that such condensations were swift or
+frequent. Mrs. Upton was not easily intimate. Her very graces, her very
+kindnesses, her sympathy and sweetness, were, in a manner, outposts about
+an inner citadel and one might for years remain, hospitably entertained,
+yet kept at a distance. But the stars, when they did form, were very fixed.
+Of such were the two friends who now came in eager for tea, after their
+nipping drive: Mrs. Pakenham, English, mother of a large family, wife of
+a hard-worked M.P. and landowner; energetically interested in hunting,
+philanthropy, books and people; slender and vigorous, with a delicate,
+emaciated face, weather-beaten to a pale, crisp red, her eyes as blue as
+porcelain, her hair still gold, her smile of the kindest, and Mrs. Wake,
+American, rosy, rather stout, rather shabby, and extremely placid of
+mien. Mrs. Pakenham, after her drive, was beautifully tidy, furred as to
+shoulders and netted as to hair; Mrs. Wake was much disarranged and came
+in, smiling patiently, while she put back the disheveled locks from her
+brow. She was childless, a widow, very poor; eking out her insufficient
+income by novel-writing; unpopular novels that dealt, usually, with gloomy
+themes of monotonous and disappointed lives. She was, herself, anything but
+gloomy.
+
+She gave her friend, now, swift, short glances, while, standing before
+her, her back to the fire, she put her hair behind her ears. She had
+known Valerie Upton from childhood, when they had both been the indulged
+daughters of wealthy homes, and through all the catastrophes and
+achievements of their lives they had kept in close touch with each other.
+Mrs. Wake's glances, now, were fond, but slightly quizzical, perhaps
+slightly critical. They took in her friend, her attitude, her beautifully
+"done" hair, her fresh, sweet face, so little faded, even her polished
+finger-nails, and they took in, very unobtrusively, the American letter on
+her lap. It was Mrs. Pakenham who spoke of the letter.
+
+"You have heard, then, dear?"
+
+"Yes, from Imogen."
+
+Both had seen her stunned, undemonstrative pain in the first days of the
+bereavement; the cables had supplied all essential information. Her quiet,
+now, seemed to intimate that the letter contained no harrowing details.
+
+"The poor child is well, I hope?"
+
+"Yes, I think so; she doesn't speak much of herself; she is very brave."
+
+Mrs. Pakenham, a friend of more recent date, had not known Mr. Upton, nor
+had she ever met Imogen.
+
+"Eddy was with her, of course," said Mrs. Wake.
+
+"Yes, and this young Mr. Pennington, who seems to have become a great
+friend. May Smith and Julia Halliwell, of course, must have helped her
+through it all. She says that people are very kind." Mrs. Upton spoke
+quietly. She did not offer to show the letter.
+
+"Jack Pennington. Imogen met him when she went last year to Boston. You
+remember old Miss Pennington, his great-aunt, Valerie."
+
+"Very well. But this Jack I've never met."
+
+"He is, I hear, devoted to Imogen."
+
+"So I infer."
+
+"And the very nicest kind of young man, though over-serious."
+
+"I inferred that, too."
+
+"And now," said Mrs. Wake, "Eddy will be here on Saturday; but what of
+Imogen?"
+
+"Imogen says that she will come over at once, if I want her."
+
+"Far the best plan. She will live with you here--until she marries Mr.
+Pennington, or some other devotee," said Mrs. Pakenham comfortably.
+
+Mrs. Upton looked up at her. "No, I shall go to her, until she marries Mr.
+Pennington or some other devotee."
+
+There was after this a slight pause, and it was Mrs. Pakenham who broke it
+with undiminished cheerfulness. "Perhaps, on the whole, that will be best,
+for the present. Of course it's a pity to have to shut up your home, just
+as you are so nicely installed for the winter. But, you mustn't let her
+delay, my dear, in getting married. You can't wait over there indefinitely,
+you know."
+
+"Ah, it's just that that I must do," said Mrs. Upton.
+
+There was, again, silence at this, perhaps over a further sense of fitness,
+but in it Mrs. Pakenham's eyes met Mrs. Wake's in a long interchange. Mrs.
+Upton, in the event of Imogen "delaying," would not stay; that was what,
+plainly, it intimated.
+
+"Of course," said Mrs. Pakenham, after some moments of this silent
+acquiescence and silent skepticism, "that will make it very evident why you
+didn't stay before."
+
+"Not necessarily. Imogen has no one with her now; my preferences as to a
+home would naturally go down before such an obvious duty."
+
+"So that you will simply take up all the threads, yours and hers?"
+
+"I shall try to."
+
+"You think she'll like that?" Mrs. Pakenham inquired.
+
+"Like what?" Mrs. Upton rather quickly asked.
+
+"That you should take up her threads. Isn't she very self-reliant? Hasn't
+her life, the odd situation, made her so?"
+
+At this Mrs. Upton, her eyes on the fire, blushed; faintly, yet the
+deepening of color was evident, and Mrs. Pakenham, leaning impulsively
+forward, put her hand on hers, saying, "Dear Valerie, I don't mean that
+you're responsible!"
+
+"But I am responsible." Mrs. Upton did not look at her friend, though her
+hand closed gently on hers.
+
+"For nothing with which you can reproach yourself, which you can even
+regret, then. It's well, altogether well, that a girl should be
+self-reliant and have her own threads."
+
+"Not well, though," said Mrs. Wake, folding the much-entangled veil she had
+removed, "that a daughter should get on so perfectly without her mother."
+
+"Really, I don't know about that"--Mrs. Pakenham was eager in generous
+theories--"not well for us poor mothers, perhaps, who find it difficult to
+believe that we are such background creatures."
+
+"Not well for the daughter," Mrs. Wake rejoined. "In this case I think that
+Imogen has been more harmed than Valerie."
+
+"Harmed!" Mrs. Pakenham exclaimed, while Valerie Upton's eyes remained
+fixed on the fire. "How can she have been harmed? From all I hear of her
+she is the pink of perfection."
+
+"She is a good girl."
+
+"You mean that she's suffered?"
+
+"No, I don't think that she has suffered."
+
+Mrs. Wake was evidently determined to remain enigmatical; but Valerie Upton
+quietly drew aside her reserves. "That is the trouble, you think; she
+hasn't."
+
+"That is a symptom of the trouble. She doesn't suffer; she judges. It's
+very harmful for a young girl to sit in judgment."
+
+"But Valerie has seen her so much!" Mrs. Pakenham cried, a little shocked
+at the other's ruthlessness. "Three months of every year--almost."
+
+"Three months when they played hostess to each other. It was really Valerie
+who was the guest in the house when Imogen and her father were there. The
+relation was never normal. Now that poor Everard is gone, the necessary
+artificiality can cease. Valerie can try her hand at being a mother, not a
+guest. It will do both her and Imogen good."
+
+"That's just the conclusion I had come to. That's just how I had been
+seeing it." The fresh tea-pot was brought in at this juncture, and, as she
+spoke, Valerie roused herself to measure in the tea and pour on the boiling
+water. She showed them, thus, more fully, the grace, the freshness, the
+look of latent buoyancy that made her so young, that made her, even now, in
+her black dress and with her gravity, remind one of a flower, submerged,
+momentarily, in deep water, its color hardly blurred, its petals delicately
+crisp, its fragrance only needing air and sunlight to diffuse itself. For
+all the youthfulness, a quality of indolent magic was about her, a soft
+haze, as it were, woven of matured experience, of detachment from youth's
+self-absorption, of the observer's kindly, yet ironic, insight. Her figure
+was supple; her nut-brown hair, splendidly folded at the back of her head,
+was hardly touched with white; her quickly glancing, deliberately pausing,
+eyes were as clear, as pensive, as a child's; with almost a child's candor
+of surprise in the upturning of their lashes. A brunette duskiness in the
+rose of lips and cheeks, in the black brows, in the fruit-like softness of
+outline, was like a veil drawn across and dimming the fairness that paled
+to a pearly white at throat and temples. Her upper lip was ever so faintly
+shadowed with a brunette penciling of down, and three _grains de beauté_,
+like tiny patches of velvet, seemed applied with a pretty coquetry, one on
+her lip and two high on her cheek, where they emphasized and lent a touch
+of the Japanese to her smile. Even her physical aspect carried out the
+analogy of something vivid and veiled. She was clear as day, yet melting,
+merged, elusive, like the night; and in her glance, in her voice, was that
+mingled brightness and shadow. When she had given them their tea she left
+her friends, taking her toasted little dog, languid and yawning, under her
+arm, and, at a sharp yelp from this petted individual, his paw struck by
+the opening of the door, they heard her exclaiming in contrition over him,
+"Darling lamb! did his wicked mother hurt him!"
+
+Mrs. Pakenham and Mrs. Wake sipped their tea for some time in silence, and
+it was Mrs. Pakenham who voiced at last the thought uppermost for both of
+them, "I wonder how Sir Basil will take it."
+
+"Everard's death, you mean, or her going off?"
+
+"Both."
+
+"It's obvious, I think, that if he doesn't follow her at once it will only
+be because he thinks that now his chance has come he will make it surer by
+waiting."
+
+"It's rather odious of me to think about it at all, I suppose," Mrs.
+Pakenham mused, "but one can't help it, having seen it all; having seen
+more than either of them have, I'm quite sure, poor, lovely dears."
+
+"No, one certainly can't help it," Mrs. Wake acquiesced. "Though I,
+perhaps, should have been too prudish to own to it just now--with poor
+Everard hardly in his grave. But that's the comfort of being with a frank,
+unscrupulous person like you; one gets it all out and need take no
+responsibility."
+
+Mrs. Pakenham smiled over her friend's self-exposure and helped her to
+greater comfort with a still more crude, "It will be perfect, you know, if
+he does succeed. I suppose there's no doubt that he will."
+
+"I don't know; I really don't know," Mrs. Wake mused.
+
+"One knows well enough that she's tremendously fond of him,--it's just that
+that she has taken her stand on so beautifully, so gracefully."
+
+"Yes, so beautifully and so gracefully that while one does know that, one
+can't know more--he least of all. He, I'm pretty sure, knows not a scrap
+more,"
+
+"But, after all, now that she's free, that is enough."
+
+"Yes--except--".
+
+"Really, my dear, I see no exception. He is a delightful creature, as
+sound, as strong, as true; and if he isn't very clever, Valerie is far too
+clever herself to mind that, far too clever not to care for how much more
+than clever he is."
+
+"Oh, it's not that she doesn't care--"
+
+"What is it, then, you carping, skeptical creature? It's all perfect. An
+uncongenial, tiresome husband--and she need have no self-reproach about
+him, either--finally out of the way; a reverential adorer at hand; youth
+still theirs; money; a delightful place--what more could one ask?"
+
+"Ah," Mrs. Wake sighed a little, "I don't know. It's not, perhaps, that one
+would ask more, but less. It's too pretty, too easy, too _à propos_; so
+much so that it frightens me a little. Valerie has, you see, made a mess of
+it. She has, you see, spoiled her life, in that aspect of it. To mend it
+now, so completely, to start fresh at--how old is she?--at forty-six, it's
+just a little glib. Somehow one doesn't get off so easily as that. One
+can't start so happily at forty-six. Perhaps one is wiser not to try."
+
+"Oh, nonsense, my dear! It's very American, that, you know, that picking of
+holes in excellent material, furbishing up your consciences, running after
+your motives as if you were ferrets in a rat-hole. If all you have to say
+against it is that it's too perfect, too happy,--why, then I keep to my own
+conviction. She'll be peacefully married and back among us in a year."
+
+Mrs. Wake seemed to acquiesce, yet still to have her reserves. "There's
+Imogen, you know. Imogen has to be counted with."
+
+"Counted with! Valerie, I hope, is clever enough to manage that young
+person. It would be a little too much if the daughter spoiled the end of
+her life as the husband spoiled the beginning."
+
+"You are a bit hard on Everard, you know, from mere partizanship. Valerie
+was by no means a misused wife and his friends may well have thought him a
+misused husband; Imogen does, I'm sure. She has, perhaps, a right to feel
+that, as her father's representative, her mother owes her something in the
+way of atonement."
+
+"It does vex me, my dear, to have you argue like that against your own
+convictions. It was all his fault,--one only has to know her to be sure of
+it. He made things unbearable for her."
+
+"It was hardly his fault. He couldn't help being unbearable."
+
+"Well--certainly _she_ couldn't help it!" cried Mrs. Pakenham, laughing
+as if this settled it. She rose, putting her hands on the mantelpiece and
+warming her foot preparatory to her departure; and, summing up her cheerful
+convictions, she added: "I'm sorry for the poor man, of course; but, after
+all, he seems to have done very much what he liked with his life. And I
+can't help being very glad that he didn't succeed in quite spoiling hers.
+Good luck to Sir Basil is what I say."
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+Mrs. Upton was in the drawing-room next morning when Sir Basil Thremdon
+was announced. She had not seen this old friend and neighbor since the
+news of her bereavement had reached her, and now, rising to meet him, a
+consciousness of all that had changed for her, a consciousness, perhaps
+more keen, of all that had changed for him, showed in a deepening of her
+color.
+
+Sir Basil was a tall, spare, stalwart man of fifty, the limpid innocence of
+his blue eyes contrasting with his lean, aquiline countenance. His hair and
+mustache were bleached by years to a light fawn-color and his skin tanned
+by a hardy life to a deep russet; and these tints of fawn and russet
+predominated throughout his garments with a pleasing harmony, so that in
+his rough tweeds and riding-gaiters he seemed as much a product of the
+nature outside as any bird or beast. The air of a delightfully civilized
+rurality was upon him, an air of landowning, law-dispensing, sporting
+efficiency; and if, in the fitness of his coloring, he made one think of a
+fox or a pheasant, in character he suggested nothing so much as one of the
+deep-rooted oaks of his own park. His very simplicity and uncomplexity of
+consciousness was as fresh, as wholesome, as genially encompassing, as full
+summer foliage. One rested in his shade.
+
+He was an inarticulate person and his eyes, now, in their almost seared
+solicitude, spoke more of sympathy and tenderness than his halting tongue.
+He ended by repeating a good many times that he hoped she wasn't too
+frightfully pulled down. Mrs. Upton said that she was really feeling very
+well, though conscious that her sincerity might somewhat bewilder her
+friend in his conceptions of fitness, and they sat down side by side on a
+small sofa near the window.
+
+We have said that for the first years of her freedom Mrs. Upton had been
+very gay. Of late years the claims on her resources from the family across
+the Atlantic had a good deal clipped her wings, and, though she made a
+round of spring and of autumn visits, she spent her time for the most part
+in her little Surrey house, engaged desultorily in gardening, study, and
+the entertainment of the friend or two always with her. She had not found
+it difficult to fold her wings and find contentment in the more nest-like
+environment. She had never been a woman to seek, accepting only, happily,
+whatever gifts life brought her; and it seemed as natural to her that
+things should be taken as that things should be given. But with the
+renouncement of more various outlooks this autumnal quietness, too, had
+brought its gift, discreet, delicate, a whispered sentence, as it were,
+that one could only listen to blindfolded, but that, once heard, gave one
+the knowledge of a hidden treasure. Sir Basil had been one of the reasons,
+the greatest reason, for her happiness in the Surrey nest. It was since
+coming there to live that she had grown to know him so well, with the
+slow-developing, deep-rooted intimacy of country life. The meadows and
+parks of Thremdon Hall encompassed all about the heath where Valerie
+Upton's cottage stood among its trees. They were Sir Basil's woods that ran
+down to her garden walls and Sir Basil's lanes that, at the back of the
+cottage, led up, through the heather, to the little village, a mile or so
+away. She had met Sir Basil before coming to live there, once or twice in
+London, and once or twice for week-ends at country-houses; but he was not a
+person whom one came really to know in drawing-room conditions; indeed, at
+the country-houses one hardly saw him except at breakfast and dinner; he
+was always hunting, golfing, or playing billiards, and in the interludes to
+these occupations one found him a trifle somnolent. It was after settling
+quite under his wing--and that she was under it she had discovered only
+after falling in love with the little white cottage and rushing eagerly
+into tenancy--that she had found out what a perfect neighbor he was; then
+come to feel him as a near friend; then, as those other friends had termed
+it, to care for him.
+
+Valerie Upton, herself, had never called it by any other name, this feeling
+about Sir Basil; though it was inevitable, in a woman of her clearness of
+vision, that she should very soon recognize a more definite quality in Sir
+Basil's feeling about her. That she had always kept him from naming it more
+definitely was a feat for which, she well knew it, she could allow herself
+some credit. Not only had it needed, at some moments, dexterity; it had
+needed, at others, self-control. Self-control, however, was habitual
+to her. She had long since schooled herself into the acceptance of her
+stupidly maimed life, seeing herself in no pathetic similes at all, but,
+rather, as a foolish, unformed creature who, partly through blindness,
+partly through recklessness, had managed badly to cripple herself at the
+outset of life's walk, and who must make the best of a hop-skip-and-jump
+gait for the rest of it. She had felt, when she decided that she had a
+right to live away from Everard, that she had no right to ask more of
+fortune than that escape, that freedom. One paid for such freedom by
+limiting one's possibilities, and she had never hesitated to pay. Never to
+indulge herself in sentimental repinings or in sentimental musings, never
+to indulge others in sentimental relationships, had been the most obvious
+sort of payment; and if, in regard to Sir Basil, the payment had sometimes
+been difficult, the reward had been that sense of unblemished peace, that
+sense of composure and gaiety. It was enough to know, as a justification
+of her success, that she made him happy, not unhappy. It was enough to
+know that she could own freely to herself how much she cared for him, so
+much that, finding him funny, dear, and dull, she was far fonder of his
+funniness, of his dullness, than of other people's cleverness. He made
+her feel as if, on that maimed, that rather hot and jaded walk, she had
+come upon the great oak-tree and sat down to rest in its peaceful shadow,
+hearing it rustle happily over her and knowing that it was secure strength
+she leaned against, knowing that the happy rustle was for her, because she
+was there, peaceful and confident. So it had all been like a gift, a sad,
+sweet secret that one must not listen to except with blindfolded eyes. She
+had never allowed the gift to become a burden or a peril. And now, to-day,
+for the first time, it was as though she could raise the bandage and look
+at him.
+
+She sat beside him in her widow's enfranchising blackness and she couldn't
+but seer at last, how deep was that upwelling, inevitable fondness. So
+deep that, gazing, as if with new and dazzled eyes, she wondered a little
+giddily over the long self-mastery; so deep that she almost felt it as a
+strange, unreal tribute to trivial circumstance that, without delay, she
+should not lean her head against the dear oak and tell it, at last, that
+its shelter was all that she asked of life. It was necessary to banish
+the vision by the firm turning to that other, that dark one, of her dead
+husband, her grief-stricken child, and, in looking, she knew that while it
+was so near she could not dwell on the possibilities of freedom. So she
+talked with her friend, able to smile, able, once or twice, to use toward
+him her more intimate tone of affectionate playfulness.
+
+"But you are coming back--directly!" Sir Basil exclaimed, when she told him
+that she expected her boy in a few days and that they would sail for New
+York together.
+
+Not directly, she answered. Before very long, she hoped. So many things
+depended on Imogen.
+
+"But she will live with you now, over here."
+
+"I don't think that she will want to leave America," said Valerie. "I don't
+think, even, that I want her to."
+
+"But this is your home, now," Sir Basil protested, looking about, as though
+for evidences of the assertion, at the intimate comforts of the room. "You
+know that you are more at home here than there."
+
+"Not now. My home, now, is Imogen's."
+
+Sir Basil appeared to reflect, and then to put aside reflection as, after
+all, inapplicable, as yet, to the situation.
+
+"Well, I must pay America a visit," he said with an unemphatic smile. "I've
+not been there for twenty years, you know. I'll like seeing it again, and
+seeing you--in Miss Imogen's home."
+
+Valerie again flushed a little. In some matters Sir Basil was anything but
+dull, and his throwing, now, of the bridge was most tactfully done. He
+intended that she should see it solidly spanning the distance between them
+and only time was needed, she knew, to give him his right of walking over
+it, and her right--but that was one of the visions she must not look at.
+A great many things lay between now and then, confused, anxious, perhaps
+painful, things. The figure of Imogen so filled the immediate future that
+the place where Sir Basil should take up his thread was blotted into an
+almost melancholy haze of distance. But it was good to feel the bridge
+there, to know him so swift and so sure.
+
+"She is very clever, your girl, isn't she? I've always felt it from what
+you've told me," he said, defining for himself, as she saw, the future
+where they were to meet.
+
+"Very, I think."
+
+"Very learned and artistic. I'm afraid she'll find me an awful Philistine.
+You must stand up for me with her."
+
+"I will," Valerie smiled, adding, "but Imogen is very pretty, too, you
+know."
+
+"Yes, I know; one can see that in the photographs," said Sir Basil. There
+were several of these standing about the room and he get up to look at
+them, one after the other--Imogen in evening, in day dress, all showing her
+erect slenderness, her crown of hair, her large, calm eyes.
+
+"She looks kind but very cool, you know," he commented. "She would take one
+in at a great rate; not find much use for an every-day person like me."
+
+"Oh, you won't be an every-day person to Imogen. And her great point, I
+think, is her finding a use for everybody."
+
+"Making them useful to her?"
+
+"No--to themselves--to the world in general."
+
+"Improving them, do you mean?"
+
+"Well, yes, I should say that was more it. She likes to give people a
+lift."
+
+"But--she's so very young. How does she manage it?" Sir Basil queried over
+the photograph, whose eyes dwelt on him while he spoke,
+
+"Oh, you'll see," Valerie smiled a little at his pertinacity. "I've no
+doubt that she will improve you."
+
+"Well," said Sir Basil, recognizing her jocund intention, "she's welcome
+to try. As long as you are there to see that she isn't too hard on me." He
+dismissed Imogen, then, from his sight and thoughts, replacing her on the
+writing-table and suggesting that Mrs. Upton should take a little walk with
+him. His horse had been put into the stable and he could come back for him.
+Mrs. Upton said that when they came back he must stay to lunch and that be
+could ride home afterward, and this was agreed on; so that in ten minutes'
+time Mrs. Pakenham and Mrs. Wake, from their respective windows, were able
+to watch their widowed friend walking away across the heather with Sir
+Basil beside her.
+
+Neither spoke much as they wended their way along the little paths of
+silvery sand that intersected the common. The day was clear, with a milky,
+blue-streaked sky; the distant foldings of the hills were of a deep,
+hyacinthine blue.
+
+From time to time Sir Basil glanced at the face beside him, thoughtful to
+sadness, its dusky fairness set in black, but attentive, as always, to the
+sights and sounds of the well-loved country about her. He liked to watch
+the quick glancing, the clear gazing, of her eyes; everything she looked at
+became at once more significant to him--the tangle of tenacious roots that
+thrust through the greensand soil of the lane they entered, the suave, gray
+columns of the beeches above, the blurred mauves and russets of the woods,
+the swift, awkward flight of a pheasant that crossed their way with a
+creaking whir of wings, the amethyst stars of a bush of Michaelmas daisies,
+showing over a whitewashed cottage wall, the far blue distance before them,
+framed in the tracery of the beech-boughs. He knew that she loved it all
+from the way she looked at it and, almost indignantly, as though against
+some foolish threat, he felt himself asseverating, "It _is_ her home--she
+knows it--the place she loves like that." And when they had made their wide
+round, down the lane, up a grassy dell, into his park, where he had to show
+her some trees that must come down; when they had skirted the park, along
+its mossy, fern-grown wall, and under its overhanging branches, until, once
+more, they were on the common and the white of Valerie's cottage glimmered
+before them, he voiced this protest, saying to her, as he watched her eyes,
+dwell on the dear little place, "You could never bear to leave all this for
+good--even if, even if we let you; you know you couldn't."
+
+Valerie looked round at him, and in his face, against its high background
+of milk-streaked blue, she saw the embodiment of his words; it was that,
+not the hyacinthine hills, not the beech-woods, not the heathery common,
+not even the dear cottage, that she could not bear to leave for good. But
+since this couldn't be said, she consented to the symbol of it that he put
+before her, that "all this," and answered, as he had hoped, "No, indeed; I
+couldn't think of leaving it all, for good."
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+It was an icy, sunny day, and Imogen Upton and Jack Pennington were walking
+up and down the gaunt wharf, not caring to take refuge from the cold in the
+stifling waiting-rooms. The early morning sky was still pink. The waters of
+the vast harbor were whitened by blocks and sheets of ice. The great city,
+drawn delicately on the pink in white and pearl, marched its fantastic
+ranges of "sky-scrapers"--an army of giants--down to the water's edge.
+And, among all the rose and gold and white, the ocean-liner, a glittering
+immensity of helpless strength, was being hauled and butted into her dock,
+like some harpooned sea-monster, by a swarm of blunt-nosed, agile little
+tugs.
+
+Jack Pennington thought that he had never seen Imogen looking so
+"wonderful" as on this morning. The occasion, to him, was brimming over
+with significance. He had not expected to share it, but Imogen had spoken
+with such sweetness of the help that he would give her if he could be with
+her in her long, cold waiting, that, with touched delight, he found himself
+in the position of a friend so trusted, so leaned upon, that he could
+witness what there must be of pain and fear for her in this meeting of her
+new life. The old life was with them both. Her black armed her in it, as it
+were, made her valiant to meet the new. And for him that old life, the life
+menaced, though so trivially, by the arriving presence, seemed embodied in
+the free spaces of the great harbor, the soaring sky of frosty rose, the
+grotesque splendor of the giant city, the glory, the ugliness of the
+country he loved, the country that made giant-like, grotesque cities, and
+that made Imogens.
+
+She was the flower of it all--the flower and the so much more than flower.
+He didn't care a fig, so he told himself, about the mere fact of her being
+beautiful, finished, in her long black furs, her face so white, her hair so
+gold under her little hat. She wasn't to be picked and placed high, above
+the swarming ugliness. No, and that was why he cared for her when he had
+ceased to care for so many pretty girls--her roots were deep; she shared
+her loveliness; she gave; she opened; she did not shut away. She was the
+promise for many rather than the guerdon of the few. Jack's democracy was
+the ripe fruit of an ancestry of high endeavor and high responsibility. The
+service of impersonal ends was in his blood, and no meaner task had ever
+been asked of him or of a long line of forebears. He had never in his own
+person experienced ugliness; it remained a picture, seen but not felt by
+him, so that it was not difficult for him to see it with the eyes of faith
+as glorified and uplifted. It constituted a splendid burden, an ennobling
+duty, for those who possessed beauty, and without that grave and happy
+right to serve, beauty itself would lose all meaning. He often talked about
+democracy to Imogen. She understood what he felt about it more firmly, more
+surely, than he himself did; for, where he sometimes suspected himself of
+theory, she acted. She, too, rejoiced in the fundamental sameness of the
+human family that banded it together in, essentially, the same great
+adventure--the adventure of the soul.
+
+Imogen understood; Imogen rejoiced; Imogen was bound on that adventure--not
+only with him, but, and it was this that gave those wide wings to his
+feeling for her, with _them_--with all the vast brotherhood of humanity.
+Now and then, to be sure, faint echoes in her of her father, touches of
+youthful assurance, youthful grandiloquence, stirred the young man's sense
+of humor; but it was quickly quelled by an irradiating tenderness that
+showed her limitations as symptoms of an influence that, in its foolish
+aspects, he would not have had her too clearly recognize; her beautiful,
+filial devotion more than compensated for her filial blindness--nay,
+sanctified it; and her heavenly face had but to turn on him for him to
+envelop all her little solemnities and importances in a comprehending
+reverence. Jack thought Imogen's face very heavenly. He was an artist by
+profession, as we have said, taking himself rather seriously, too, but the
+artistic perception was so strongly colored by ethical and intellectual
+preoccupations that the spontaneous satisfaction in the Eternal Now of mere
+beauty was rarely his. Certainly he saw the flower-like texture of Imogen's
+skin; the way in which the light azured its whiteness and slid upon its
+child-like surfaces. He saw the long oval of the face, the firm and gentle
+lips, drawn with a delicate amplitude, the broad hazel eyes set under
+a level sweep of dark eyebrow and outlined, not shadowed, so clear, so
+wide they were, by the dark lashes. But all the fresh loveliness of line,
+surface, color, remained an intellectual appreciation; while what touched,
+what penetrated, were the analogies she suggested, the lovely soul that the
+lovely face vouched for. The oval of her face and the charming squaring
+of her eyes, so candid, so unmysterious, made him think of a Botticelli
+Madonna; and her long, narrow hands, with their square finger-tips, might
+have been the hands of a Botticelli angel holding a votive offering of
+fruit and flowers. His mind seldom rested in her beauty, passing at once
+through it to what it expressed of purity, strength and serenity. It
+expressed so much of these that he had never paused at the portals, as it
+were, to feel the defects of her face. Imogen's nose was too small; neat
+rather than beautiful. Her eyes, with the porcelain-like quality of their
+white, the jewel-like color of their irises, were over-large; and when
+she smiled, which she did often, though with more gentleness than gaiety,
+she showed an over-spacious expanse of large white teeth. For the rest,
+Imogen's figure was that of the typical well-groomed, well-trained,
+American girl, long-limbed, slender, rounded; in her carriage a girlish
+air of consciousness; the poise of her broad shoulders and slender hips
+expressing at once hygienic and fashionable ideals that reproved slack
+gaits and outlines. As they walked, as they talked, watching the slow
+advance of the great steamer; as their eyes rested calmly and intelligently
+on each other, one could see that the girl's relation to this dear friend
+was untouched by any trace of coquetry and that his feeling for her, if
+deep, was under most perfect control.
+
+"It's over a year, now, since I saw mama," Imogen was saying, as they
+turned again from a long scrutiny of the crowded decks--the distance was as
+yet too great for individual recognition. "She didn't come over this summer
+as usual,--poor dear, how bitterly she must regret that now, though it was
+hardly her fault, papa and I fixed on our Western trip for the summer. It
+seems a very long time to me."
+
+"And to me," said Jack. "It's only a year since I came really to know you;
+but how much longer it seems than that."
+
+"It's strange that we should know each other so well and yet that you have
+never seen my mother," said Imogen. "Is that she? No, she is not so tall.
+Poor darling, how tired and sad she must be."
+
+"You are tired and sad, too," said Jack.
+
+"Ah, but I am young--youth can bear so much better. And, besides, I don't
+think that my sadness would ever be like mama's. You see, in a way, I have
+so much more in my life. I should never sit down in my sadness and let it
+overwhelm me. I should use it, always. It is strange that grief should so
+often make people selfish. It ought, rather, to open doors for us and give
+us wider visions."
+
+He was so sure that it had performed these offices for her, looking, as he
+now looked, at her delicate profile, turned from him while she gazed toward
+the ship, that he was barely conscious of the little tremor of amusement
+that went through him for the triteness of her speech. Such triteness was
+beautiful when it expressed such reality.
+
+"I suppose that you will count for more, now, in your mother's life," he
+said,--that Imogen should, seemingly, have counted for so little had been
+the frequent subject of his indignant broodings. "She will make you her
+object."
+
+Imogen smiled a little. "Isn't it more likely that I shall make her mine?
+one of mine? But you don't know mama yet. She is, in a way, very
+lovely--but so much of a child. So much younger--it seems funny to say it,
+but it's true--than I am."
+
+"Littler," Jack amended, "not younger."
+
+But Imogen, while accepting the amendment, wouldn't accept the negation.
+
+"Both, I'm afraid," she sighed.
+
+"Will she like it over here?" Jack mused more than questioned.
+
+"Hardly, since she has always lived as little here as she could manage."
+
+"Perhaps she will want to take you back to England," he surmised,
+conscious, while he spoke the almost humorous words, of a very firm
+determination that she shouldn't do so.
+
+Imogen paused in her walk at this, fixing upon him eyes very grave indeed.
+"Take me back to England? Do you really think that I would consent to that?
+Surely you know me better, Jack?"
+
+"I think I do. Only you might yield against your will, if she insisted."
+
+"Surely you know me well enough to know that I would never yield against my
+will, if I knew that my will was right. I might sacrifice a great deal for
+mama--I am prepared to--but never that; Never," Imogen repeated. "There are
+some things that one must not sacrifice. Her living in England is a whim;
+my living in my own country is part of my religion."
+
+"I know, of course, dear Imogen. But," Jack was argumentative, "as to
+sacrifice, say that it was asked of you, by right. Say, for instance, that
+you married a man who had to take you out of your own country?"
+
+She smiled a little at the stupid surmise. "That hardly applies. Besides, I
+would never marry a man who was not one of my own people, who was not a
+part--as I am a part--of the Whole I live for. My life is here, all its
+meaning is here--you know it--just as yours is."
+
+"I love to know it--I was only teasing you."
+
+He loved to know it, of course. Yet, while it answered to all his own
+theories that the person should be so much less to her than the idea the
+person lived for, he couldn't but feel at times, with a rueful sense of
+unworthiness, that this rare capacity in her might apply in most unwelcome
+fashion to his own case. In Jack, the deep wells of feeling and emotion
+were barred and bolted over by a whole complicated system of reticences;
+by a careful sense of responsibility, not only toward others, but toward
+himself; by a disciplined self-control that was a second nature. But, he
+could see it well enough, if such, deep wells there were in Imogen, they,
+as yet, were in no need of barring and bolting. Her eyes could show a quiet
+acceptance of homage, a placid conviction of power, a tender sympathy, but
+the depth and trouble of emotion was not yet in them. He often suspected
+that he was nearer to her when he talked to her of causes than when he
+ventured, now and then, to talk about his feelings. There was always the
+uncomfortable surmise that the man who could offer a more equipped faculty
+for the adventure of the soul, might altogether outdistance him with
+Imogen. By any emotion, any appeal or passion that he might show, she would
+remain, so his intuition at moments told him, quite unbiased; while she
+weighed simply worth against worth, and weight--in the sense of strength of
+soul--against weight. And it was this intuition that made self-control and
+reticence easier than they might otherwise have been. His theories might
+assure him that such integrity of purpose was magnificent; his manly
+common-sense told him that in a wife one wanted to be sure of the taint of
+personal preference; so that, while he knew that he would never need to
+weigh Imogen's worth against anybody else's, he watched and waited until
+some unawakened capacity in her should be able happily to respond to the
+more human aspects of life. Meanwhile the steamer had softly glided into
+the dock and the two young people at last descried upon the crowded decks
+the tall, familiar figure of Eddy Upton, like Imogen in his fairness,
+clearness, but with a more masculine jut of nose and chin, sharper lines of
+brow and cheek and lip. And beside Eddy--Jack hardly needed the controlled
+quiet of Imogen's "There's mama" to identify the figure in black.
+
+She leaned there, high and far, on the deck of the great steamer that
+loomed above their heads, almost ominous in its gigantic bulk and darkness;
+she leaned there against the rosy sky, her face intent, searching, bent
+upon the fluttering, shouting throng beneath; and for Jack, in this first
+impression of her, before she had yet found Imogen, there was something
+pathetic in the earnestness of her searching gaze, something that softened
+the rigors of his disapprobation. But, already, too, he fancied that he
+caught the expected note of the frivolous in the outline of her fur-lined
+coat, in the grace of her little hat.
+
+Still she sought, her face pale and grave, while, with an imperceptible
+movement, the steamer glided forward, and now, as Imogen raised her muff
+in a long, steady wave, her eyes at last found her daughter and, smiling,
+smiling eagerly down upon them, she leaned far over the deck to wave her
+answer. She put her hand on her son's arm, pointing them out to him, and
+Eddy, also finding them, smiled too, but with his rather cool kindness,
+raising his hat and giving Jack a recognizing nod. It was then as if he
+introduced Jack. Jack saw her question, saw him assent, and her smile went
+from Imogen to him enveloping him with its mild radiance.
+
+"She is very lovely, your mother, as you say," Jack commented, feeling a
+little breathless over this silent meeting of forces that he must think of
+as hostile, and finding nothing better to say.
+
+Imogen, who had continued steadily to wave her muff, welcoming, but for her
+part unsmiling, answered, "Yes."
+
+"I hope that she won't mind my being here, in the way, after a fashion,"
+said Jack.
+
+"She won't mind," said Imogen.
+
+He knew the significance of her voice; displeasure was in its gentleness,
+a quiet endurance of distress. It struck him then, in a moment, that it
+was rather out of place for Mrs. Upton to smile so radiantly at such a
+home-coming. Not that the smile had been a gay one. It had shone out after
+her search for her daughter's face; for the finding of it and for him it
+had continued to shine. It was like sunlight on a sad white day of mist; it
+did not dispel mournfulness, it seemed only to irradiate it. But--to have
+smiled at all. With Imogen's eyes he saw, suddenly, that tears would have
+been the more appropriate greeting and, in looking back at the girl once
+more, he saw that her own, as if in vicarious atonement, were running down
+her cheeks. She, then, felt a doubled suffering and his heart hardened
+against the woman who had caused it.
+
+The two travelers had disappeared and the decks were filled with the
+jostling hurry of final departure. Jack and Imogen moved to take their
+places by the long gangway that slanted up from the dock.
+
+He said nothing to her of her tears, silent before this subtle grief;
+perhaps, for all his love and sympathy, a little disconcerted by its
+demonstration, and it was Imogen who spoke, murmuring, as they stood
+together, looking up, "Poor, poor papa."
+
+Yes, that had been the hurt, to see her dead put aside, almost forgotten,
+in the mother's over-facile smile.
+
+The passengers came trooping down the gangway, with an odd buoyancy of step
+caused by the steep incline, and Jack, for all his expectancy, had eyes,
+appreciative and critical, for the procession of his country-people. Stout,
+short men, embodying purely economic functions, with rudimentary features,
+slightly embossed, as it were, upon pouch-like faces. Thin, young men,
+whose lean countenances had somewhat the aspect of steely machinery, apt
+for swift, ruthless, utilitarian processes. Bloodless old men, many of
+whom looked like withered, weary children adorned with whitened hair.
+The average manhood of America, with its general air of cheap and hasty
+growth, but varied here and there by a higher type; an athletic collegian,
+auspiciously Grecian in length of limb, width of brow, deep placidity
+of eye; varied by a massive senatorial head or so, tolerant, humorous,
+sagacious; varied by a stalwart Westerner, and by the weedier scholar,
+sensitive, self-conscious, too much of the spiritual and too little of the
+animal in the meager body and over-intelligent face.
+
+There was a certain discrepancy, in dress and bodily well-being, between
+the feminine and the masculine portion of the procession; many of the heavy
+matrons, wide-hipped, well-corseted, benignant and commanding of mien, were
+ominously suggestive, followed as they were by their fragile husbands,
+of the female spider and her doomed, inferior, though necessary, mate.
+The young girls of the happier type resembled Imogen Upton in grace, in
+strength, in calm and in assurance; the less fortunate were sharp, sallow,
+anxious-eyed; and the children were either rosy, well-mannered, and
+confident, or ill-mannered, over-mature, but also, always, confident.
+
+Highly equipped with every graceful quality of his race, not a touch of the
+male spider about him, Eddy's head appeared at last, proud, delicate and
+strong. His mother, carrying a small dog, was on his arm, and, as she
+emerged before the eyes that watched for her, she was smiling again at
+something that Eddy had said to her. Then her eyes found them, Jack and
+Imogen, so near now, sentinels before the old life, that her smile, her
+aspect, her very loveliness, seemed to menace, and Jack felt that she
+caught a new gravity from the stern gentleness of Imogen's gaze; that
+she adjusted her features to meet it; that, with a little shock, she
+recognized the traces of weeping on her daughter's face and saw, in his own
+intentionally hardened look, that she had tuned herself to a wrong pitch
+and had been, all unconsciously, jarring.
+
+He couldn't but own that her readjustment, if readjustment it was, was very
+beautifully done. Tears rose in her eyes, too. He saw, as she neared them,
+that her face was pale and weary; it looked ever so gently, ever so sadly,
+perhaps almost timidly, at her daughter, and as she came to them she put
+out her hand to Imogen, laid hold on her and held her without speaking
+while they all moved away together.
+
+The tears of quick sympathy had risen to Jack's own eyes and he stood apart
+while the mother and daughter kissed. After that, and when they had gone
+on a little before him and Eddy, Mrs. Upton turned to him, and if she
+readjusted herself she didn't, as it were, retract, for the smile again
+rested on him while Eddy presented him to her. He saw then that she had
+suffered, though with a suffering different from any that he would have
+thought of as obvious. How or what she had suffered he could not tell, but
+the pale, weary features, for all their smile, reassured him. She wasn't,
+at all events, a heartless, a flippant woman.
+
+Eddy and Mrs. Upton's maid remained behind to do battle with the
+custom-house, and Jack, with Imogen and her mother, got into the capacious
+cab that was waiting for them.
+
+The streets in this mean quarter were deep in mud. The snow everywhere had
+been trampled into liquid blackness, and the gaunt horses that galloped
+along the wharfs dragging noisy vans and carts were splashed all over. It
+might have been some sordid quarter of an Italian town that they drove
+through, so oddly foreign were the disheveled houses, their predominant
+color a heavy, glaring red. Men in white uniforms were shoveling snow from
+the pavements. The many negro countenances in the hurrying crowds showed
+blue tints in the bitter air. Coming suddenly to a wide, mean avenue, when
+the carriage lurched and swayed on the street-car tracks, they heard,
+mingled in an inconceivably ugly uproar, the crash and whine of the
+cable-cars about them, and the thunder of the elevated-railway above their
+heads.
+
+Jack, sensitive to others' impressions, wondered if this tumultuous
+ugliness made more dreary to Mrs. Upton the dreary circumstances of her
+home-coming. There was no mitigation of dreariness to be hoped for from
+Imogen, who was probably absorbed in her own bitter reflections. She gazed
+steadily out of the window, replying only with quiet monosyllables to her
+mother's tentative questions; her face keeping its look of endurance. One
+could infer from it that had she not so controlled herself she must have
+wept, and sitting before the mother and daughter Jack felt much awkwardness
+in his position. If their meeting were not to be one with more conventional
+surface he really ought not to have been invited to share it. Imogen, poor
+darling, had all his sympathy; she hadn't reckoned with the difficulties;
+she hadn't reckoned with that hurting smile, with the sharp reawakening of
+the vicarious sense of wrong; but, all the same, before her look, her
+silence, he could but feel for her mother, and feel, too, a keener
+discomfort from the fact that his inopportune presence must make Mrs.
+Upton's discomfort the greater.
+
+Mrs. Upton stroked her tiny dog, who, fulfilling all Jack's conceptions of
+costly frivolity, was wrapped in a well-cut coat, in spite of which he was
+shivering, from excitement as much as from cold, and her bright, soft gaze
+went from him to Imogen. She didn't acquiesce for long in the silence.
+Leaning forward to him presently she began to ask him questions about
+Boston, the dear old great-aunt; to make comments, some reminiscent,
+some interrogative, upon the scenes they passed through; to lead him so
+tactfully into talk that he found himself answering and assenting almost
+as fluently as if Imogen in her corner had not kept those large, sad eyes
+fixed on the passing houses. So mercifully did her interest and her ease
+lift him from discomfort that, with a sharp twinge of self-reproach, he
+more than once asked himself if Imogen found something a little disloyal
+in his willingness to be helped. One couldn't, all the same, remain at
+the dreadful depth where her silence plunged them; such depths were too
+intimate. Mrs. Upton had felt that. It was because she was not intimate
+that she smiled upon him; it was because she intended to hold them both
+firmly on the surface that she was so kind. He watched her face with
+wonder, and a little fear, for which he was angry with himself. He noted
+the three _grains de beauté_ and the smile that seemed to break high on
+her cheek, in a small nick, like that on the cheek of a Japanese doll.
+She frightened him, made him feel shy, yet made him feel at ease, too,
+as though her own were contagious; and his impression of her was softly
+permeated with the breath of violets. Jack disapproved of perfumes; but he
+really couldn't tell whether it wasn't Mrs. Upton's gaze only, the sweet
+oddity of her smile, that, by some trick of association, suggested the
+faint haze of fragrance.
+
+They reached the long, far sweep of Fifth Avenue, piled high with
+snow--dazzling in white, blue, gold--on either side, and they turned
+presently into a street of brownstone houses, houses pleasant, peaceful,
+with an air of happy domesticity.
+
+Mrs. Upton's eyes, while the cab advanced with many jolts among the heaps
+of snow, fixed themselves on one of these houses, and Jack fancied that he
+saw in her glance a whole army of alarmed memories forcibly beaten back.
+Here she had come as a bride and from here, not three weeks ago, her dead
+husband had gone with only his children beside him. Now, if ever, she
+should feel remorse. Whether she did or not he could not tell, but the eyes
+with which she greeted her old home were not happy.
+
+Imogen, as they alighted, spoke at last, asking him to stay to lunch. He
+recognized magnanimity in her glance. He had seemed to ignore her hurt, and
+she forgave him, understanding his helplessness. But though her mother
+seconded her invitation with, "Do, you must be so tired and hungry, after
+all these hours," Jack excused himself. Already he thought, a woman with
+such a manner as Mrs. Upton's--if manner were indeed the word for such a
+gliding simplicity--must wonder what in the name of heaven he did there.
+She was simple, she was gliding; but she was not near.
+
+"May I come in soon and see you?" he said to Imogen while they paused at
+the foot of the stone steps. And, with at last her own smile, sad but
+sweet, for him, she answered, "As soon as you will, dear Jack. You know how
+much of strength and comfort you mean to me."
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+Jack, however, did not go for three or four days, giving them plenty of
+time, as he told himself, to get used to each other's excesses or lacks of
+grief. And as he waited for Imogen in the long drawing-room that had been
+the setting of so many of their communings, he wondered what adjustment the
+mother and daughter had come to.
+
+The aspect of the drawing-room was unchanged; changelessness had always
+been for him its characteristic mark; in essentials, he felt sure, it had
+not changed since the days of old Mrs. Upton, the present Mrs. Upton's long
+deceased mother-in-law. Only a touch here and there showed the passage of
+time. It was continuous with the dining-room, so that it was but one long
+room that crossed all the depth of the house, tall windows at the back,
+heavily draped, echoing dimly the windows of the front that looked out
+upon the snowy, glittering street. The inner half could be shut away by
+folding-doors, and its highly polished sideboard, chairs, table, a silver
+épergne towering upon it, glimmered in a dusky element that relegated
+it, when not illuminated for use, to a mere ghostly decorativeness.
+By contrast, the drawing-room was vivid. Its fringed and buttoned
+furniture,--crimson brocade set in a dark carved wood, the dangling lusters
+of the huge chandelier, the elaborate Sèvres vases on the mantelpiece,
+flanking a bronze clock portentously gloomy, expressed old Mrs. Upton's
+richly solid ideals; but these permanent uglinesses distressed Jack less
+than the pompous and complacent taste of the later additions. A pretentious
+cabinet of late Italian Renaissance work stood in a corner; the dark marble
+mantelpiece, that looked like a sarcophagus, was incongruously draped with
+an embroidered Italian cope, and a pseudo-Correggio Madonna, encompassed
+with a wilderness of gilt frame, smiled a pseudo-smile from the embossed
+paper of the walls. It was one of Jack's little trials to hear Imogen refer
+to this trophy with placid conviction.
+
+Yet, for all its solemn stupidity, the room was not altogether unpleasing;
+it signified something, were it only an indifference to fashion, It was,
+funnily, almost Spartan, for all the carving, the cushioning, the crimson,
+so little concession did it make to other people's standards or to small,
+happy minor uses. Mr. Upton and his daughter had not changed it because
+they had other things to think of; and they thought of these things not in
+the drawing-room but in the large library up-stairs. There one could find
+the personal touches, that, but for the cope, the cabinet, the Correggio,
+were lacking below. There the many photographs from the Italian primitives,
+the many gracious Donatello and Delia Robbia bas-reliefs, expressed
+something of Imogen, too, though Jack always felt that Imogen's esthetic;
+side expressed what was not very essential in her.
+
+While he waited now, he had paused at last before two portraits. He had
+often so paused while waiting for Imogen. To-night it was with a new
+curiosity.
+
+They hung opposite the Correggio and on either side of the great mirror
+that rose from the mantelpiece to the cornice. One was of a young man
+dressed in the fashion of twenty-five years before, dressed with a rather
+self-conscious negligence. He was pale, earnest, handsome, though his nose
+was too small and his eyes too large. A touch of the histrionic was in
+his attitude, in his dark hair, tossed carelessly, in the unnecessarily
+weighty and steady look of his dark eyes, even in the slight smile of
+his firm, full lips, a smile too well-adapted, as it were, to the needs
+of any interlocutor. Beneath his arm was a book; a long, distinguished
+hand hanging slackly. Jack turned away with a familiar impatience. In
+twenty-five years Mr. Upton had changed very little. It was much the same
+face that he had known; in especial, the slack, self-conscious hand, the
+smile--always so much more for himself than for you--were familiar. The
+hand, the necktie, the smile, so deep, so dark, so empty, were all, Jack
+was inclined to suspect, that there had ever been of Mr. Upton.
+
+The other portrait, painted with the sleek convention of that earlier
+epoch, was of a woman in a ball-dress. The portrait was by a French master
+and under his brush the sitter had taken on the look of a Feuillet heroine.
+She was gay, languid, sentimental, and extraordinarily pretty. Her hair was
+dressed in a bygone fashion, drawn smoothly up from the little ears, coiled
+high and falling across her forehead in a light, straight fringe. Her
+wonderful white shoulders rose from a wonderfully low white bodice; a
+bracelet of emeralds was on her arm, a spray of jasmine in her fingers;
+she was evidently a girl, yet in her apparel was a delicate splendor, in
+her gaze a candid assurance, that marked her as an American girl. And she
+expressed charmingly, with sincerity as it were, a frivolous convention.
+This was Miss Cray, a year or so before her marriage with Mr. Upton. The
+portrait had been painted in Paris, where, orphaned, lovely, but not
+largely dowered, she had, under the wing of an aunt domiciled in France
+for many years and bearing one of its oldest names, failed to make the
+brilliant match that had been hoped for her. This touch of France in
+girlhood echoed an earlier impress. Imogen had told him that her mother
+had been educated for some years in a French convent, deposited there
+by pleasure-loving parents during European wanderings, and Imogen had
+intimated that her mother's frequent returns to her native land had never
+quite effaced alien and regrettable points of view. Before this portrait,
+Jack was accustomed, not to impatience, but to a gaze of rather ironic
+comprehension. It had always explained to him so much. But to-night he
+found himself looking at it with an intentness in which was a touched
+curiosity; in which, also, and once more he was vexed with himself for
+feeling it, was an anxiety, almost a fear. Of course it hadn't been like,
+even then, he was surer than ever of that to-night, with his memory of the
+pale face smiling down at him and at Imogen from the deck of the great
+steamer. The painter had seen the mask only; even then there had been more
+to see. And sure, as he had never been before, of all that there must have
+been besides to see, he wondered with a new wonder how she had come to
+marry Mr. Upton.
+
+He glanced back at him. Handsome? Yes. Distinguished? Yes; there was no
+trace of the shoddy in his spiritual histrionics. He had been fired by
+love, no doubt, far beyond his own chill complacency. Such a butterfly
+girl, falling with, perhaps, bruised wings from the high, hard glare of
+worldly ambitions, more of others for her than her own for herself--of that
+he felt, also quite newly sure to-night--such a girl had thought Mr. Upton,
+no doubt, a very noble creature and herself happy and fortunate. And she
+had been very young.
+
+He was still looking up at Miss Cray when Imogen came in. He felt sure,
+from his first glance at her, that nothing had happened, during the
+interval of his abstention, to deepen her distress. In her falling and
+folding black she was serene and the look of untroubled force he knew so
+well was in her eyes. She had taken the measure of the grown-up butterfly
+and found it easy of management. He felt with relief that the mother could
+have threatened none of the things they held dear. And, indeed, in his
+imagination, her spirit seemed to flutter over them in the solid, solemn
+room, reassuring through its very lightness and purposelessness.
+
+"I am so glad to see you," Imogen said, after she had shaken his hand and
+they had seated themselves on the sofa that stretched along the wall under
+the Correggio. "I have been sorry about the other day."
+
+"Oh!" he answered vaguely, not quite sure for what the regret was.
+
+"I ought to have mastered myself; been more able to play the trivial part,
+as you did; that was such real kindness in you, Jack, dear. I couldn't have
+pretended gaiety, but I didn't intend to cast a gloom. It only became that,
+I suppose, when I was--so hurt."
+
+He understood now. "By there not being gloom enough?"
+
+"If you like to put it so. To see her smile like that!"
+
+Jack was sorry for her, yet, at the same time, sorry for the butterfly.
+
+"Yes, I know how you must have felt. But, it was natural, you know. One
+smiles involuntarily at a meeting, however sad its background. I believe
+that _you_ would have smiled if she hadn't."
+
+Imogen's clear eyes were upon him while he thus shared with her his sense
+of mitigations and she answered without a pause: "Yes, I could have smiled
+at her. That would have been different."
+
+"You mean--that you had a right to smile?"
+
+"I can't see how she _could_," said Imogen in a low voice, not answering
+his question; thinking, probably, that it answered itself. And she went on:
+"I was ready, you know, to help her to bear it all, with my whole strength;
+but, and it is that that still hurts me so, she doesn't seem to know that
+she needs help. She doesn't seem to be bearing anything."
+
+Jack was silent, feeling here that they skirted too closely ground upon
+which, with Imogen, he never ventured. He had brought from his study of the
+portraits a keener sense of how much Mrs. Upton had to bear no longer.
+
+"But," Imogen continued, oddly echoing his own sense of deeper insights, "I
+already understand her so much better than I've ever done. I've never come
+so near. Never seen so clearly how little there is to see. She's still
+essentially that, you know," and she pointed to the French portrait that,
+with softly, prettily mournful eyes, gazed out at them.
+
+"The butterfly thing," Jack suggested rather than acquiesced.
+
+"The butterfly thing," she accepted.
+
+But Jack went on: "Not only that, though. There is, I'm very sure, more to
+see. She is so--so sensible."
+
+"Sensible?" again Imogen accepted. "Well, isn't that portrait sensible?
+Doesn't that lovely, luxurious girl see and want all the happy, the easy
+things of life? It is sensible, of course, clearly to know what they are,
+and firmly to make for them. That's just what I recognize now in her, that
+all she wants is to make things easy, to _glisser_."
+
+"Yes, I can believe that," he murmured, a little dazed by her clear
+decisiveness; he often felt Imogen to be so much more clear-sighted, so
+much more clever than himself when it came to judgments and insights, that
+he could only at the moment acquiesce, through helplessness. "I suppose
+that is the essential--the desire of ease."
+
+"And it hurts you that I should be able to see it, to say it, of my
+mother." Her eyes, with no hardness, no reproach, probed him, too. She
+almost made him feel unworthy of the trust she showed him.
+
+"No," he said, smiling at her, "because I know that it's only to a friend
+who so understands you, who so cares for all that comes into your life."
+
+"Only to such a friend, indeed," she returned gently.
+
+"Have they been hard, these days?" he asked her, atoning to himself for the
+momentary shrinking that she had detected.
+
+"Yes, they have," she answered, "and the more so from my seeing all her
+efforts to keep them soft; as if it was ease _I_ wanted! But I have faced
+it all."
+
+"What else has there been to face?"
+
+She said nothing for some moments, looking at him with a thoughtful
+openness that, he felt, was almost marital in its sharing of silence.
+
+"She's against everything, everything," she said at last.
+
+"You mean in the way we feared?--that she'll try to change things?"
+
+"She'll not seem to try. She'll seem to accept. But she's against my
+country; against my life; against me."
+
+"Well, if she accepts, or seems to, that will make it easy for you. There
+will be nothing to fight, to oppose."
+
+"Don't use her word, Jack. She will make it easy on the surface; but it's
+that that will be so hard for me to bear; the surface ease over the hidden
+discord."
+
+"You may resolve the discord. Give her time to grow her roots. How can you
+expect anything but effort now, in this soil that she can't but associate
+with mistakes and sorrows?"
+
+"The mistakes and sorrows were in her, not in the soil," said Imogen; "but
+don't think that though I find it hard, I don't face it; don't think that
+through it all I haven't my faith. That is just what I am going to do: give
+her time, and help her to grow with all the strength and love there is in
+me."
+
+Something naughty, something rebellious and dissatisfied in him was vaguely
+stirring and muttering; he feared that she might see into him again and
+give it a name, although he could only have given it the old name of
+a humorous impatience with her assured rightness. Really, she was so
+over-right that she almost irked and irritated him, dear and beloved as she
+was. One could only call it over-rightness, for wasn't what she said the
+simple truth, just as he had always seen it, just as she had always known
+that, with her, he saw it? She had this queer, light burden suddenly on her
+hands, so much more of a burden for being so light, and if her own weight
+and wisdom became a little too emphatic in dealing with it, how could he
+reproach her? He didn't reproach her, of course; but he was afraid lest she
+should see that he found her, well, a little funny.
+
+"What does she do with herself?" he asked, turning hastily from his
+consciousness of amusement.
+
+Imogen's pearly face, bent on him with such confidence, made him, once
+more, ashamed of himself.
+
+"She has seen a good many of her friends. We have had quite a stream of
+fashionable, furbelowed dames trooping up the steps; very few of them
+people that papa and I cared to keep in touch with; you know his dislike
+for the merely pleasure-seeking side of life. And she has seen the dear
+Delancy Pottses, too, and was very nice to them, one of the cases of
+seeming to accept; I saw well enough that they were no more to her than
+quaint insects she must do her duty by. And she has been very busy with
+business, closeted every day with Mr. Haliwell. And she takes a walk with
+me when I can spare the time, and for the rest of the day she sits in her
+room dressed in a wonderful tea-gown and reads French memoirs, just as she
+used always to do."
+
+Jack was smiling, amused, now, in no way that needed hiding, by her smooth
+flow of description. "You must take her down to the girls' club some day,"
+he suggested, "and to see your cripples and all the rest of it. Get her
+interested, you know; give her something else to think of besides French
+memoirs."
+
+"Indeed, I'm going to try to. Though among my girls I'm not sure that she
+would be a very wise experiment. Such an _ondulée_, _parfumée_,
+polished person with such fashionable mourning would be, perhaps, a little
+resented."
+
+"You dress very charmingly, yourself, my dear Imogen."
+
+"Oh, but quite differently. Mamma's is fashion at its very flower of subtle
+discretion. My clothes, why, they are of any time you will." She swept
+aside her wing-like sleeves to show the Madonna-like lines of her dress. "A
+factory girl could wear just the same shape if she wanted to."
+
+"And she doesn't want to, foolish girl? She wants to wear your mother's
+kind instead?"
+
+"She would dimly recognize it as the unattainable perfection of what she
+wants. It would pierce."
+
+"Make for envy, you think?"
+
+"Well, I can't see that she would do them any _good_," said Imogen, now
+altogether in her lighter, happier mood, "but since they may do _her_ good
+I must, I think, take her there some day."
+
+"And am I to do her some good? Am I to see her to-night?" Jack asked,
+feeling that though her humor a little jarred on him he could do nothing
+better than echo it. Imogen, now, had one of her frankest, prettiest looks.
+
+"Do you know, she is almost too discreet, poor dear," she said. "She wants
+me to see that she perfectly understands and sympathizes with the American
+freedom as to friendships between men and women, so that she vacates
+the drawing-room for my people just as a farmer's wife would do for her
+daughter's young men. She hasn't asked me even a question about you, Jack!"
+
+Her gaiety so lifted and warmed him that he was prompted to say that Mrs.
+Upton would have to, very soon, if the answer to a certain question that he
+wanted to ask Imogen were what he hoped for. But the jocund atmosphere of
+their talk seemed unfit for such a grave allusion and he repressed the
+sally.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+When Jack went away, after tea, Imogen remained sitting on the sofa,
+looking up from time to time at the two portraits, while thoughts, quiet
+and mournful, but not distressing, passed through her mind. An interview
+with Jack usually left her lapped about with a warm sense of security; she
+couldn't feel desolate, even with the greatness of her loss so upon her,
+when such devotion surrounded her. One deep need of her was gone, but
+another was there. Life, as she felt it, would have little meaning for her
+if it had not brought to her deep needs that she, and she alone, could
+satisfy. With Jack's devotion and Jack's need to sustain her, it wasn't
+difficult to bear with a butterfly. One had only to stand serenely in one's
+place and watch it hover. It was, after all, as if she had strung herself
+to an attitude of strength only to find that no weight was to come crushing
+down upon her. The pain was that of feeling her mother so light.
+
+"Poor papa," Imogen murmured more than once, as she gazed up into the
+steady eyes; "what a fate it was for you--to be hurt all your life by a
+butterfly." But he had been far, far too big to let it spoil anything. He
+turned all pain to spiritual uses. What sorrow there was had always been,
+most of all, for her.
+
+And then--and here was the balm that had perfumed all her grief with
+its sacred aroma--she, Imogen, had been there to fill the emptiness for
+him. She had always been there, it seemed to her, as, in her quiet, sad
+retrospect, she looked back, now, to the very beginnings of consciousness.
+From the first she had felt that her place was by his side; that, together
+they stood for something and against somebody. In this very room, so
+unchanged--she could even remember the same dull thump of the bronze clock,
+the blazing fire, the crimson curtains drawn on a snowy street,--had
+happened the earliest of the episodes that her memory recalled as having
+so placed her, so defined her attitude, even for her almost babyish
+apprehension. She had brought down her dolls from her nursery, after tea,
+and ranged them on the sofa, while her father walked up and down the room,
+his hands in his pockets, his head thrown back, reciting something to
+himself, some poem, or stately fragment of antique oratory. He paused now
+and then as he passed her and laid his hand upon her head and smiled down
+at her. Then the lovely lady of the portrait,--just like the portrait
+in Imogen's recollection,--had come, all in white, with wonderful white
+shoulders, holding a fan and long white gloves in her hand, and, looking
+round from her dolls, small Imogen had known in a moment that displeasure
+was in the air. "You are not dressed!" Those had been her mother's first
+words as she paused on the threshold; and then, echoing her father's words
+with amazement and anger, "You are not coming!"
+
+The dialogue that followed, vivid on her mother's side as sparks struck
+from steel, mild as milk on her father's, had been lost upon her; but
+through it all she had felt that he must be right, in his gentleness, and
+that she, in her vividness, must be wrong. She felt that for herself, even
+before, turning as if from an unseemly contest, her father said, looking
+down at her with a smile that had a twinge of tension, "_You_ would rather
+go and see sick and sorry people who wanted you, than the selfish, the
+foolish, the overfed,--wouldn't you, beautiful little one?"
+
+She had answered quickly, "Yes, papa," and had kept her eyes on him, not
+looking at her mother, knowing in her childish soul that in so answering,
+so looking, she shared some triumph with him.
+
+"I'll say you're suddenly ill, then?" had come her mother's voice, but with
+a deadened note, as though she knew herself defeated.
+
+"Lie? No. I must ask you, Valerie, never to lie for me. Say the truth, that
+I must go to a friend who needs me; the truth won't hurt them."
+
+"But it's unbelievable, your breaking a dinner engagement, at the last
+hour, for such a reason," the wife had said.
+
+"Unbelievable, I've no doubt, to the foolish, the selfish, the over-fed.
+Social conventions and social ideals will always go down for me, Valerie,
+before realities, such realities as brotherhood and the need of a lonely
+human soul."
+
+While he spoke he had lifted, gently, Imogen's long, fair curls, and
+smoothed her head, his eyes still holding her eyes, and when her mother
+turned sharply and swept out of the room, the sense of united triumph
+had made him bend down to her and made her stretch her arms tip to him,
+so that, in their long embrace, he seemed to consecrate her to those
+"realities" that the pretty, foolish mother flouted. That had been her
+initiation and her consecration.
+
+After that, it could not have been many years after, though she had brought
+to it a far more understanding observation, the next scene that came up for
+her was a wrangle at lunch one day, over the Delancy Pottses--if wrangle it
+could be called when one was so light and the other so softly stern. Imogen
+by this time had been old enough to know for what the Pottses counted. They
+were discoveries of her father's, Mr. Potts a valuable henchman in that
+fight for realities to which her father's life was dedicated. Mr. Potts
+wrote articles in ethical reviews about her father's books--they never
+seemed to be noticed anywhere else--and about his many projects for reform
+and philanthropy. Both he and Mrs. Potts adored her father. He lent them,
+indeed, all their significance; they were there, as it were, only for
+the purpose of crystallizing around his magnetic center. And of these
+good people her mother had said, in her crisp, merry voice, "I hate
+'em,"--disposing of the whole question of value, flipping the Pottses away
+into space, as it were, and separating herself from any interest in them.
+Even then little Imogen had comprehendingly shared her father's still
+indignation for such levity. Hate the excellent Pottses, who wrote so
+beautifully of her father's books, so worshiped all that he was and did,
+so tenderly cherished her small self? Imogen felt the old reprobation as
+sharply as ever, though the Pottses had become, to her mature insight,
+rather burdensome, the poor, good, dull, pretentious dears, and would be
+more so, now that their only brilliant function, that of punctually,
+coruscatingly, and in the public press, adoring her father, had been taken
+from them. One need have no illusion as to the quality of their note;
+it lacked distinction, serving only, in its unmodulated vehemence, the
+drum-like purpose of calling attention to great matters, of reverberating,
+so one hoped, through lethargic consciousness.
+
+But Imogen loved the Pottses, so she told herself. To be sure of loving
+the Pottses was a sort of pulse by which one tested one's moral health.
+She still went religiously at least twice in every winter to their
+receptions--funny, funny affairs, she had to own it--with a kindly smile
+and a pleasant sense of benign onlooking at oddity. One met there young
+girls dressed in the strangest ways and affecting the manners of budding
+Margaret Fullers--young writers or musicians or social workers, and funny
+frowsy, solemn young men who talked, usually with defective accents, about
+socialism and the larger life over ample platefuls of ice-cream. Sweetness
+and light, as Mrs. Potts told Imogen, was the note she tried for in her
+reunions, and high endeavor and brotherly love.
+
+Mrs. Potts was a small, stout woman, who held herself very straight indeed;
+her hands, on festive occasions, folded on a lace handkerchief before her.
+She had smooth, black hair, parted and coiled behind, and a fat face, pale
+fawn-color in tint, encompassing with waste of cheek and chin such a small
+group of features--the small, straight nose, the small, sharp eyes, the
+small, smiling mouth--all placed too high, and spanned, held together, as
+it were, by a _pince-nez_ firmly planted, like a bow-shaped ornament
+pinning a cluster of minute trinkets on a large cushion.
+
+Mr. Delancy Potts was tall, limp, blond, and, from years of only dubious
+recognition, rather querulous. He had a solemn eye under a fringe of
+whitened eyebrow, a long nose, that his wife often fondly alluded to as
+"aristocratic" (they were keen on "blood," the Delancy Pottses), and a very
+retreating chin that one saw sometimes in disastrous silhouette against the
+light. Draped in the flowing fullness of hair and beard, his face showed a
+pseudo-dignity.
+
+Imogen saw the Pottses with a very candid eye, and her mind drifted from
+that distant disposal of them to the contrast of the recent meeting,
+recalling their gestures and postures as they sat, with an uneasy
+assumption of ease, before her mother, of whom, for so many years, they had
+disapproved more, almost, than they disapproved of municipal corruption and
+"the smart set." As onlooker she had been forced to own that her mother's
+manner toward them had been quite perfect. She had accepted them as her
+husband's mourners; had accepted them as Imogen's friends; had, indeed, so
+thoroughly accepted them, in whatever capacity they were offered to her,
+that Imogen felt that a slight enlightenment would be necessary, and that
+her mother must be made to feel that her own, even her father's acceptance
+of the Pottses, had had always its reservations.
+
+And some acceptances, some atonements, came too late. The Pottses had not
+been the only members of the little circle gathered about her father who
+had called forth her mother's wounding levity. She had taken refuge on many
+other occasions in the half-playful, half-decisive, "I hate 'em," as if
+to throw up the final barrier of her own perversity before pursuit. Not
+that she hadn't been decent enough in her actual treatment, it was rather
+that she would never take the Pottses, or any of the others--oddities she
+evidently considered them-seriously; it was, most of all, that she would
+never let them come near enough to try to take her seriously. She held
+herself aloof, not disdainful, but indifferently gay, from her father's
+instruments, her father's friends, her father's aims.
+
+Later on, as Imogen grew into girlhood, her mother lost most of the gaiety
+and all of the levity. Imogen guessed that storms, more violent than any
+she was allowed to witness, intervened between young rebellion and the
+cautious peace, the hostility that no longer laughed and no longer lost
+its temper, but that, quiet, kind, observant, went its own way, leaving
+her father to go his. The last memory that came up for her was of what had
+followed such a storm. It seemed to mark an epoch, to close the chapter of
+struggle and initiate that of acceptance. What the contest had been she
+never knew, but she remembered in every detail its sequel, remembered lying
+in bed in her placid, fire-lit room and hearing in her mother's room next
+hers the sound of violent sobbing.
+
+Imogen had felt, while she listened, a vague, alarmed pity, a pity
+mingled with condemnation. Her father never lost his self-control and had
+taught her that to do so was selfish; so that, as she listened to the
+undisciplined grief, and thought that it might be well for her to go in to
+her mother and console her, she thought, too, of the line that, tenderly,
+she would say to her--for Imogen, now, was fourteen years old, with an
+excellent taste in poetry:
+
+    "The gods approve
+  The depth, but not the tumult, of the soul."
+
+It was a line her father often quoted to her and she always thought of him
+when she thought of it.
+
+But, just as she was rising to go on this errand of mercy, her father
+himself had come in. He sat down in silence by her bed and put out his hand
+to hers and then she seemed to understand all from the very contrast that
+his silence made. The sobs they listened to were those of a passionate, a
+punished child, of a child, too, who could use unchildlike weapons, could
+cut, could pierce; she must not leave her father to go to it. After a
+little while the sobs were still and, as her father, without speaking, sat
+on, stroking her hair and hand, the door softly opened and her mother came
+in. Imogen could see her, in her long white dressing-gown, with her wide
+braids falling on either side, all the traces of weeping carefully effaced.
+She often came in so to kiss Imogen good-night, gently, and with a slight
+touch of shyness, as though she knew herself shut away from the inner
+chamber of the child's heart, and the moment was their tenderest, for
+Imogen, understanding, though powerless to respond, never felt so sorry
+or so fond as then. But to-night her mother, seeing them there together
+hand in hand, seeing that they must have listened to her own intemperate
+grief,--their eyes gravely, unitedly judging her told her that,--seeing
+that her husband, as at the very beginning, had found at once his ally,
+drew back quickly and went away without a word. Whatever the cause of
+contest, Imogen knew that in this silent confrontation of each other in her
+presence was the final severance. After that her mother had acquiesced.
+
+She acquiesced, but she yielded nothing, confessed nothing. One couldn't
+tell whether she, too, judged, but one suspected it, and the dim sense
+of an alien standard placed over against them more and more closely drew
+Imogen and her father together for mutual sustainment. If, however, her
+mother judged, she never expressed judgment; and if she felt the need of
+sustainment, she never claimed it. It would, indeed, have been rather
+fruitless to claim it from the fourth member of the family group. Eddy
+seemed so little to belong to the group. As far as he went, to be sure,
+he went always with her and against his father, but then Eddy never went
+far enough to form any sort of a bulwark. A cheerful, smiling, hard young
+pagan, Eddy, frankly bored by his father, coolly fond of his mother,
+avoiding the one, but capable of little effective demonstration toward the
+other. Eddy liked achievement, exactitude, a serene, smiling outlook, and
+was happily absorbed in his own interests.
+
+So it had all gone on,--Imogen traced it, sitting there in her quiet
+corner, holding balances in fair, firm hands,--her mother drifting into a
+place of mere conventionality in the family life; and Imogen, even now,
+could not see quite clearly whether it had been she who had judged and
+abandoned her husband, or he who had judged and put her aside. In either
+case she could sum it up, her eyes lifted once more to the portrait's
+steady eyes, with, "Poor, wonderful papa."
+
+He was gone, the dear, the wonderful one, and she was left single-handed
+to carry on his work. What this work was loomed largely, though vaguely,
+for her. The three slender volumes, literary and ethical, were the only
+permanent testament that her father had given to the world; and dealing, as
+in the main they did, with ultimate problems, their keynote an illumined
+democracy that saw in most of the results as yet achieved by his country a
+base travesty of the doctrine, the largeness of their grasp was perhaps a
+trifle loose. Imogen did not see it. Her appreciation was more of aims than
+of achievements; but she felt that her father's writings were the body,
+only, of his message; its spirit lived--lived in herself and in all those
+with whom he had come in fruitful--contact. It was to hand on the meaning
+of that spirit that she felt herself dedicated. Perfect, unflinching truth;
+the unfaltering bearing witness to all men of his conception of right;
+the seeing of her own personality as but an instrument in the service of
+good--these were the chief words of the gospel. Life in its realest sense
+meant only this dedication. To serve, to love, to be the truth. Her eyes
+on her father's pictured eyes, Imogen smiled into them, promising him and
+herself that she would not fail.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+It was in the library next morning that Valerie asked Imogen to join her,
+and the girl, who had come into the room with her light, soft step, paused
+to kiss her mother's forehead before going to the opposite seat.
+
+"Deep in ways and means, mamma dear?" she asked her. "Why, you are quite
+a business woman." "Quite," Valerie replied. "I have been going over
+things with Mr. Haliwell, you know." She smiled thoughtfully at Imogen,
+preoccupied, as the girl could see, by what she had to say.
+
+Imogen was slightly ruffled by the flavor of assurance that she felt in
+her mother, as of someone who, after gently and vaguely fumbling about for
+a clue to her own meaning in new conditions, had suddenly found something
+to which she held very firmly. Imogen was rejoiced for her that she
+should find a field of real usefulness-were it only that of housekeeping
+and seeing to weekly bills; but there was certainly a touch of the
+inappropriate, perhaps of the grotesque, in any assumption on her mother's
+part of maturity and competence. She therefore smiled back at her with
+much the same tolerantly interested smile that a parent might bestow on a
+child's brick-building of a castle.
+
+"I'm so glad that you have that to give yourself to, mama dear," she said.
+"You shall most certainly be our business woman and add figures and keep
+an eye on investment to your heart's content. I know absolutely nothing of
+the technical side of money--I've thought of it only as an instrument, a
+responsibility, a power given me in trust for others."
+
+Valerie, whose warmth of tint and softness of outline seemed dimmed and
+sharpened, as though by a controlled anxiety, glanced at her daughter,
+gravely and a little timidly. And as, in silence, she lightly dotted her
+pen over the paper under her hand, uncertain, apparently, with what words
+to approach the subject, it was Imogen, again, who spoke, kindly, but with
+a touch of impatience.
+
+"We mustn't be too long over our talk, dear. I must meet Miss Bocock at
+twelve."
+
+"Miss Bocock?" Valerie was vague. "Have I met her?"
+
+"Not yet. She is a _protégée_ of mine--English--a Newnham woman--a
+folk-lorist. I heard of her from some Boston friends, read her books, and
+induced her to come over and lecture to us this winter. We are arranging
+about the lectures now. I've got up a big class for her--when I say 'I,' I
+mean, of course, with the help of all my dear, good friends who are always
+so ready to back me up in my undertakings. She is an immensely interesting
+woman; ugly, dresses tastelessly; but one doesn't think of that when one is
+listening to her. She has a wonderful mind; strong, disciplined,
+stimulating. I'm very happy that I've been able to give America to her and
+her to America."
+
+"She must be very interesting," said Valerie. "I shall like hearing her. We
+will get through our business as soon as possible so that you may keep your
+appointment." And now, after this digression, she seemed to find it easier
+to plunge. "You knew that your father had left very little money, Imogen."
+
+Imogen, her hands lightly folded in her lap, sat across the table, all mild
+attention.
+
+"No, I didn't, mama. We never talked about money, he and I."
+
+"No; still--you spent it."
+
+"Papa considered himself only a steward for what he had. He used his money,
+he did not hoard it, mama dear. Indeed, I know that his feeling against
+accumulations of capital, against all private property, unless used for the
+benefit of all, was very strong."
+
+"Yes," said Valerie, after a slight pause, in which she did not raise her
+eyes from the paper where her pen now drew a few neat lines. "Yes. But
+he has left very little for Eddy, very little for you; it was that I was
+thinking of."
+
+At this Imogen's face from gentle grew very grave.
+
+"Mama dear, I don't think that you and papa would have agreed about the
+upbringing of a man. You have the European standpoint; we don't hold with
+that over here. We believe in equipping the man, giving him power for
+independence, and we expect him to make his own way. Papa would rather have
+had Eddy work on the roads for his bread than turn him into a _fainéant_."
+
+Valerie drew her lines into a square before saying, "I, you know, with Mr.
+Haliwell, am one of your trustees. He tells me that your father gave you a
+great deal."
+
+"Whatever I asked. He had perfect trust in me. Our aims were the same."
+
+"And how did you spend it? Don't imagine that I'm finding fault."
+
+"Oh, I know that you couldn't well do that!" said Imogen with a smile a
+little bitter. "I spent very little on myself." And she continued, with
+somewhat the manner of humoring an exacting child: "You see, I helped a
+great many people; I sent two girls to college; I sent a boy--such a dear,
+fine boy--for three years' art-study in Paris; he is getting on so well.
+There is my girls' club on the East side, my girls' club in Vermont; there
+is the Crippled Children's Home,--quite numberless charities I'm interested
+in. It's been one thing after another, money has not lacked,--but time has,
+to answer all the claims upon me. And then," here Imogen smiled again,
+"I believe in the claims of the self, too, when they are disciplined
+and harmonized into a larger experience. There has been music to keep
+up; friends to see and to make things nice for; flowers to send to sick
+friends; concerts to send poor friends to; dinners and lunches to give so
+that friends may meet--all the thousand and one little things that a large,
+rich life demands of one."
+
+"Yes, yes," said Valerie, who had nodded at intervals during the list.
+"I quite see all that. You are a dear, generous child and love to give
+pleasure; and your father refused you nothing. It's my fault, too. My more
+mercenary mind should have been near to keep watch. Because, as a, result,
+there's very little, dear, very, very little."
+
+"Oh, your being here would not have changed our ideas as to the right way
+to spend money, mama. Don't blame yourself for that. We should have bled
+_you_, too!"
+
+"Oh, no, you wouldn't," Valerie said quickly. "I've too much of the
+instinctive, selfish mother-thing in me to have allowed myself to be bled
+for cripples and clubs and artistic boys. I don't care about them a bit
+compared to you and Eddy. But this is all beside the mark. The question now
+is, What are we to do? Because that generous, expensive life of yours has
+come to an end, for the present at all events."
+
+Imogen at this sat silent for some moments, fixing eyes of deep, and
+somewhat confused, cogitation upon her mother's face.
+
+"Why--but--I supposed that you _had_ minded for Eddy and me, mama," she
+said at last.
+
+"I have very little money, Imogen."
+
+Imogen hesitated, blushing a little, before saying, "Surely you were quite
+rich when papa married you."
+
+"Hardly rich; but, yes, quite well off."
+
+"And you spent it all--on yourself?"
+
+Valerie's color, too, had faintly risen. "Not so much on myself, Imogen,
+though I wish now that I had been more economical; but I was ignorant
+of your father's rather reckless expenditure. In the first years of my
+marriage, before the selfish mother-thing was developed in me, I handed a
+good deal of my capital over to him, for his work, his various projects; in
+order to leave him as free for these projects as possible, I educated you
+and Eddy--that, too, came out of my capital. And the building of the house
+in Vermont swallowed a good deal of money."
+
+Imogen's blush had deepened. "Of course," she said, "there is no more
+reckless expenditure possible--since you use the term, mama--than keeping
+up two establishments for one family; that, of course, was your own choice.
+But, putting that aside, you must surely, still, have a good deal left. See
+how you live; see how you are taken care of, with a maid,--I've never had
+a maid, papa, as you know, thought them self-indulgences,--see how you
+dress," she cast a glance upon the refinements of her mother's black.
+
+"How I dress, my child! May I ask what that dress you have on cost you?"
+
+"I believe only in getting the best. This, for the best, was inexpensive.
+One hundred dollars."
+
+"Twenty pounds," Valerie translated, as if to impress the sum more fully on
+her mind. "I know that clothes over here are ruinous. Now mine cost only
+eight pounds and was made by a very little woman in London."
+
+Imogen cast another glance, now of some helpless wonder, at the dress.
+
+"Of course you are so clever about such things; I shouldn't wish to spend
+my thought--and I couldn't spend my time--on clothes. And then the standard
+of wages is so scandalously low in Europe; I confess that I would rather
+not profit by it."
+
+"I am a very economical woman, Imogen," said Valerie, with some briskness
+of utterance. "My cottage in Surrey costs me fifty pounds a year. I keep
+two maids, my own maid, a cook, a gardener; there's a pony and trap and a
+stable-boy. I have friends with me constantly and pay a good many visits.
+Yet my income is only eight hundred pounds a year."
+
+"Eight hundred--four thousand dollars," Imogen translated, a note of sharp
+alarm in her voice. "That, of course, would not be nearly enough for all of
+us."
+
+"Not living as you have, certainly, dear."
+
+"But papa? Surely papa has left something! He must have made money at his
+legal practice."
+
+"Never much. His profession was always a by-issue with him. I find that his
+affairs are a good deal involved; when all the encumbrances are cleared
+off, we think, Mr. Haliwell and I, that we may secure an amount that will
+bring our whole income to about five thousand dollars a year. If we go on
+living in New York it will require the greatest care to be comfortable on
+that. We must find a flat somewhere, unless you cared to live in England,
+where we could be very comfortable indeed, without effort, on what we
+have."
+
+Imogen was keeping a quiet face, but her mother, with a pang of helpless
+pity and compunction, saw tears near the surface, and that, to control
+them, she fixed herself on the meaning of the last words. "Live out of my
+own country! Never!"
+
+"No, dear, I didn't think that you would want to; I didn't want it for you,
+either; I only suggested it so that you might see clearly just where we
+stand, and in case you might prefer it, with our limited means."
+
+Imogen's next words broke out even more vehemently. "I can't leave this
+house! I _can't_! It is my home." The tears ran down her face.
+
+"My poor darling!" her mother exclaimed. She rose quickly and came round
+the table to her, putting her arm around her and trying to draw her near.
+
+But Imogen, covering her eyes with one hand, held her off. "It's wrong.
+It's unfair. I should have been told before."
+
+"Imogen, _I_ did not know. I was not admitted to your father's confidence.
+I used to speak to you sometimes, you must remember, about being careful."
+
+"I never thought about it. I thought he made a great deal--I thought you
+had a great deal of money," Imogen sobbed.
+
+"It _is_ my fault, in one sense, I know," her mother said, still standing
+beside her, her hand on her shoulder. "If I had been here I could have
+prevented some of it. But--it has seemed so inevitable." The tears rose in
+Valerie's eyes also; she looked away to conquer them. "Don't blame me too
+much, dear. I shall try to do my best now. And then, after all, it's not of
+such tragic importance, is it? We can be very happy with what we have."
+
+Imogen wept on: "Leave my home!"
+
+"There, there. Don't cry so. We won't leave it. We will manage somehow. We
+will stay on here, for a time at least--until you marry, Imogen. You will
+probably marry," and Valerie attempted a softly rallying smile, "before so
+very long."
+
+But the attempt was an unfortunately timed one. "Oh, mama!
+don't--don't--bring your horrible European point of view into _that_, too!"
+cried Imogen.
+
+"What point of view? Indeed, indeed, dear, I didn't mean to hurt you, to be
+indiscreet--"
+
+"The economic, materialistic, worldly point of view--that money problems
+can be solved by a thing that is sacred, sacred!" Imogen passionately
+declared, her face still hidden.
+
+Her mother now guessed that the self-abandonment was over and that, with
+recovered control, she found it difficult to pick up her usual dignity. The
+insight added to her tenderness. She touched the girl's hair softly, said,
+in a soothing voice, that she had meant nothing, nothing gross or
+unfeeling, and, seeing that her nearness was not, at the moment, welcome,
+returned to her own place at the other end of the table.
+
+Imogen now dried her eyes. In the consternation that her mother's
+statements had caused her there had, indeed, almost at once, arisen the
+consoling figure of Jack Pennington, and she did not know whether she were
+the more humiliated by her own grief, for such a mercenary cause, or by
+this stilling of it, this swift realization that the cramped life need
+last no longer, for herself, than she chose. To feel so keenly the need of
+escape was to feel herself imprisoned by the new conditions; for never,
+never for one moment, must the need of escape weigh with her in her
+decision as to Jack's place in her life. She must accept the burden, not
+knowing that it would ever be lifted, and with this acceptance the sense of
+humiliation left her, so that she could more clearly see that she had had a
+right to her dismay. Her crippled life would hurt not only herself, but all
+that she meant to others--her beneficence, her radiance, her loving power;
+so hurt it, that, for one dark moment, had come just a dart of severity
+toward her father. The memory of her mother's implied criticism had
+repulsed it; dear, wonderful, transcendentalist, she must be worthy of him
+and not allow her thoughts, in their coward panic, to sink to the mother's
+level. This was the deepest call upon her courage that had ever come to
+her. Calls to courage were the very breath of the spiritual life. Imogen
+lifted her heart to the realm of spirit, where strength was to be found,
+and, though her mother, with those implied criticisms, had pierced her, she
+could now, with her recovered tranquility of soul, be very patient with
+her. In a voice slightly muffled and uncertain, but very gentle, she said
+that she thought it best to live on in the dear home. "We must retrench in
+other places, mama. I would rather give up almost anything than this. _He_
+is here to me." Her tears rose again, but they were no longer tears of
+bitterness. "It would be like leaving him."
+
+"Yes, dear, yes; that shall be as you wish," said Valerie, who was deeply
+considering what these retrenchments should be. She, too, was knowing a
+qualm of humiliation over self-revelations. She had not expected that it
+would be really so painful, in such trivial matters, to adjust herself to
+the most ordinary maternal sacrifices. It only showed her the more plainly
+how fatal, how almost fatal, it was to the right impulses, to live away
+from family ties; so that at their first pressure upon her, in a place that
+sharply pinched, she found herself rueful.
+
+For the first retrenchment, of course, must be the sending back to
+England of her dear, staunch Felkin, who had taken such care of her for
+so many years. Her heart was heavy with the thought. She was very fond
+of Felkin, and to part with her would be, in a chill, almost an ominous
+way, like parting with the last link that bound her to "over there."
+Besides,--Valerie was a luxurious woman,--unpleasant visions went through
+her mind of mud to be brushed off and braid to be put on the bottoms of
+skirts; stockings to darn-she was sure that it was loathsome to darn
+stockings; buttons to keep in their places; all the thousand and one little
+rudiments of life, to which one had never had to give a thought, looming,
+suddenly, in the foreground of one's consciousness. And how very tiresome
+to do one's own hair. Well, it couldn't be helped. She accepted the
+accompanying humiliation, finding no refuge in Imogen's spiritual
+consolations.
+
+"Eddy leaves Harvard this spring and goes into Mr. Haliwell's office. He
+will live with us here, then. And we can be very economical about food and
+clothes; I can help little dressmakers with yours, you know," she said,
+smiling at her child.
+
+"Everything, mama, everything must be done, rather than leave this house."
+
+"We mustn't let the girls' clubs suffer, either," Valerie attempted further
+to lighten the other's gloomy resolution. "That's one of the first claims."
+
+"I must balance all claims, with justice. I have many other calls upon me,
+dear, and it will need earnest thought to know which to eliminate."
+
+"Well, the ones you care about most are the ones we'll try to fit in."
+
+"My caring is not the standard, mama. The ones that need me most are the
+ones I shall fit in."
+
+Imogen rose, drawing a long, sighing breath. Under her new and heavy
+burden, her mother, in these suggestions for the disposal of her life,
+was glib, assured. But the necessity for tenderness and forbearance was
+strongly with her. She went round the table to Valerie, pressed her head to
+her breast and kissed her forehead, saying, "Forgive me if I have seemed
+hard, darling."
+
+"No, dear, no; I quite understood all you felt," Valerie said, returning
+the kiss. But, after Imogen had left her, she sat for a long time, very
+still, her hand only moving, as she traced squares and circles on her
+paper.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+Jack thought that he had never seen Imogen looking graver than on that
+night when he came again. Her face seemed calm only because she so
+compressed and controlled all sorts of agitating things. Her mother was
+with her in the lamp-lit library and he guessed already that, in any case,
+Imogen, before her mother, would rarely show gaiety and playfulness. Gaiety
+and playfulness would seem to condone the fact that her mother found so
+little need of help in "bearing" the burden of her regret and of her
+self-reproach. But, allowing for that fact, Imogen's gravity was more than
+negative. It confronted him like a solemn finger laid on firmly patient
+lips; he felt it dwell upon him like solemn eyes while he shook hands with
+Mrs. Upton, whom he had not seen since the morning of her arrival.
+
+Mrs. Upton, too, was grave, after a fashion; but her whole demeanor might
+be decidedly irritating to a consciousness so burdened with a sense of
+change as Imogen 'a evidently was. Even before that finger, those eyes,
+into which he had symbolized Imogen's manner, Mrs. Upton's gravity could
+break into a smile quite undisturbed, apparently, by any inappropriateness.
+She sat near the lamp crocheting; soft, white wool sliding through her
+fingers and wave after wave of cloudy substance lengthening a tiny baby's
+jacket, so very small a jacket that Jack surmised it to be a gift for an
+expectant mother. He further surmised that Mrs. Upton would be very nice to
+expectant mothers; that they would like to have her abound.
+
+Mrs. Upton would not curb her smile on account of Imogen's manner, nor
+would she recognize it to the extent of tacitly excluding her from the
+conversation. She seemed, indeed, to pass him on, in all she said, to
+Imogen, and Jack, once more, found his situation between them a little
+difficult, for if Mrs. Upton passed him on, Imogen was in no hurry to
+receive him. He had, once or twice, the sensation of being stranded, and
+it was always Mrs. Upton who felt his need and who pushed him off into the
+ease of fresh questions.
+
+He was going back to Boston the next day and asked Imogen if he could take
+any message to Mary Osborne.
+
+"Thank you, Jack," said Imogen, "but I write to Mary, always, twice a week.
+She depends on my letters."
+
+"When is she coming to you again?"
+
+"I am afraid she is not to come at all, now."
+
+"You're not going away?" the young man asked sharply, for her voice of sad
+acceptance implied something quite as sorrowful.
+
+"Oh, no!" Imogen answered, "but mama does not feel that I can have my
+friend here now."
+
+Jack, stranded indeed, looked his discomfort and, glancing at Mrs. Upton,
+he saw it echoed, though with, a veiled echo. She laid down her work; she
+looked at her daughter as though to probe the significance of her speech,
+and, not finding her clue, she sat rather helplessly silent.
+
+"Well," said Jack, with attempted lightness, "I hope that I'm not exiled,
+too."
+
+"Oh, Jack, how can you!" said Imogen. "It is only that we have discovered
+that we are very, very poor, and one's hospitable impulses are shackled.
+Mama has been so brave about it, and I don't want to put any burdens upon
+her, especially burdens that would be so uncongenial to her as dear, funny
+Mary. Mama could hardly care for that typical New England thing. Don't mind
+Jack, mama; he is such a near friend that I can talk quite frankly before
+him."
+
+For Mrs. Upton was now gathering up her innocent work, preparatory, it was
+evident, to departure.
+
+"You are not displeased, dear!" Imogen protested as she rose, not angry,
+not injured--Jack was trying to make it out--but full of a soft withdrawal.
+"Please don't go. I so want you and Jack to see something of each other."
+
+"I will come back presently," said Mrs. Upton. And so she left them. Jack's
+thin face had flushed.
+
+"She means that _she_ won't talk quite frankly before you, you see," said
+Imogen. "Don't mind, dear Jack, she is full of these foolish little
+conventionalities; she cares so tremendously about the forms of things; I
+simply pay no attention; that's the best way. But it's quite true, Jack; I
+don't know that I can afford to have my friends come and stay with me any
+more. Apparently mama and papa, in their so different ways, have been very
+extravagant; and I, too, Jack, have been extravagant. I never knew that I
+mustn't be. The money was given to me as I asked for it--and there were
+so many, so many claims,--oh, I can't say that I'm sorry that it is gone
+as it went. 'But now that we are very poor, I want it to be my pleasures,
+rather than hers, that are cut off; she depends so upon her pleasures, her
+comforts. She depends more upon her maid, for instance, than I do even upon
+my friends. To go without Mary this winter will be hard, of course, but our
+love is founded on deeper things than seeing and speaking; and mama would
+feel it tragic, I'm quite sure, to have to do up her own hair."
+
+"Good heaven, my dear Imogen! if you are so poor, surely she can learn to
+do up her own hair!" Jack burst out, the more vehemently from the fact
+that Mrs. Upton's unprotesting, unexplanatory departure had, to his own
+consciousness, involved him with Imogen in a companionship of crudity
+and inappropriateness. She would not interfere with their frankness, but
+she would not be frank with them. She didn't care a penny for what his
+impression of her might be. Imogen might fit as many responsibilities upon
+her shoulders as she liked and, with her long training in a school of
+reticences and composures, she would remain placid and indifferent. So Jack
+worked it out, and he resented, for Imogen and for himself, such tact and
+such evasion. He wished that they had been more crude, more inappropriate.
+Thank heaven for crudeness if morality as opposed to manners made one
+crude. He entrenched himself in that morality now, open-eyed to its
+seeming priggishness, to say, "And it's a bigger question than that of her
+pleasures and yours, Imogen. It's a question of right and wrong. Mary needs
+you. Your mother ought not to keep a maid if other people's needs are to be
+sacrificed to her luxuries."
+
+Imogen was looking thoughtfully into the fire, her calmness now not the
+result of mastery; her own serene assurance was with her.
+
+"I've thought of all that, Jack; I've weighed it, and though I feel it, as
+you do, a question of right and wrong, I don't feel that I can force it
+upon her. It would be like taking its favorite doll from a child. She is
+trying, I do believe, to atone; she is trying to do her duty by making, as
+it were, _une acte de présence_; one wants to be very gentle with her; one
+doesn't want to make things more difficult than they must already seem.
+Poor, dear little mama. But as for me, Jack, it's more than pleasures that
+I have to give up. I have to say no to some of those claims that I've given
+my life to. It's like cutting into my heart to do it."
+
+She turned away her head to hide the quiet tears that rose involuntarily,
+and by the sight of her noble distress, by the realization, too, of such
+magnanimity toward the trivial little mother, Jack's inner emotion was
+pushed, suddenly, past all the bolts and barriers. Turning a little pale,
+he leaned forward and took her hand, stammering as he said: "Dear, dearest
+Imogen, you know--you know what I want to ask--whenever you will let me
+speak; you know the right I want to claim--"
+
+It had come, the moment of avowal; but they had glided so quietly upon it
+that he felt himself unprepared for his own declaration. It wad Imogen's
+tranquil acceptance, rather than his own eagerness, that made the situation
+seem real.
+
+"I know, dear Jack, of course I know," she said. "It has been a deep, a
+peaceful joy for a long time to feel that I was first with you. Let it rest
+there, for the present, dear Jack."
+
+"I've not made anything less joyful or less peaceful for you by speaking?"
+
+"No, no, dear. It's only that I couldn't think of it, for some time yet."
+
+"You promise me that, meanwhile, you will think of me, as your friend, just
+as happily as before?"
+
+"Just as happily, dear Jack; I could never, as long as you are you and I
+am I, think of you in any other way." And she went on, with her tranquil
+radiance of aspect, "I have always meant, you know, to make something of my
+life before I chose what to do with it."
+
+Jack, too, thought Imogen's life a flower so precious that it must be
+placed where it could best bloom; but, feeling in her dispassionateness a
+hurt to his hope that it would best bloom in his care, he asked: "Mightn't
+the making something of it come after the choice, dear?"
+
+Very clear as to what was her own meaning, Imogen shook her lovely,
+unconfused head. "No, only the real need could rightly choose, and one can
+only know the real need when one has made the real self."
+
+These were Jack's own views, but, hearing them from her lips, they chilled.
+
+"It seems to me that your self, already, is very real," he said, smiling
+a little ruefully. And Imogen now, though firm, was very wonderful, for,
+leaning to him, she put for a moment her hand on his and said, smiling back
+with the tranquil tenderness: "Not yet, not quite yet, Jack; but we trust
+each other's truth, and we can't but trust,--I do, dear Jack, with all my
+heart,--that it can never part us."
+
+He kissed her hand at that, and promised to trust and to be patient, and
+Imogen presently lifted matters back into their accustomed place, saying
+that he must help her with her project for building a country home for her
+crippled children. She had laid the papers before him and they were deep in
+ways and means when a sharp, imperious scratching at the door interrupted
+them.
+
+Imogen's face, as she raised it, showed a touch of weary impatience.
+"Mamma's dog," she said. "He can't find her. Let him scratch. He will go
+away when no one answers."
+
+"Oh, let's satisfy him that she isn't here," said Jack, who was full of a
+mild, though alien, consideration for animals.
+
+"Can you feel any fondness for such wisps of sentimentality and greediness
+as that?" Imogen asked, as the tiny _griffon_ darted into the room and ran
+about, sniffing with interrogative anxiety.
+
+"Not fondness, perhaps, but amused liking."
+
+"There, now you see he will whine and bark to be let out again. He is as
+arrogant and as troublesome as a spoilt child."
+
+"I'll hold him until she comes," said Jack. "I say, he is a nice little
+beast--full of gratitude; see him lick my hand." He had picked up the dog
+and come back to her.
+
+"I really disapprove of such absurd creatures," said Imogen. "Their very
+existence seems a wrong to themselves and to the world."
+
+"Well, I don't know." Theoretically Jack agreed with her as to the
+extravagant folly of such morsels of frivolity; but, holding the
+_griffon_ as he was, meeting its merry, yet melancholy, eyes, evading
+its affectionate, caressing leaps toward his cheek, he couldn't echo her
+reasonable rigor. "They take something the place of flowers in life, I
+suppose."
+
+"What takes the place of flowers?" Mrs. Upton asked. She had come in while
+they spoke and her tone of kind, mild inquiry slightly soothed Jack's
+ruffled sensibilities.
+
+"This," said he, holding out her possession to her.
+
+"Oh, Tison! How good of you to take care of him. He was looking for me,
+poor pet."
+
+"Imogen was wondering as to the uses of such creatures and I placed them in
+the decorative category," Jack went on, determined to hold his own firmly
+against any unjustifiable claims of either Tison or his mistress. He
+accused himself of a tendency to soften under her glance when it was so
+kindly and so consciously bent upon him. Her indifference cut him and made
+him hostile, and both softness and hostility were, as he told himself,
+symptoms of a silly sensitiveness. The proper attitude was one of firmness
+and humor.
+
+"I am afraid that you don't care for dogs," Mrs. Upton said. She had gone
+back to her seat, taking up her work and passing her hand over Tison's
+silky back as he established himself in her lap.
+
+"Oh yes, I do; I care for flowers, too," said Jack, folding his arms and
+leaning back against the table, while Imogen sat before her papers,
+observant of the little encounter.
+
+"But they are not at all in the same category. And surely," Mrs. Upton
+continued, smiling up at him, "one doesn't justify one's fondness for a
+creature by its uses."
+
+"I think one really must, you know," our ethical young man objected,
+feeling that he must grasp his latent severity when Mrs. Upton's vague
+sweetness of regard was affecting him somewhat as her dog's caressing
+little tongue had done. "If a fondness is one we have a right to, we
+can justify it,--and it can only be justified by its utility, actual or
+potential, to the world we are a part of."
+
+Mrs. Upton continued to smile as though she did not suspect him of wishing
+to be taken seriously. "One doesn't reason like that before one allows
+oneself to become fond."
+
+"There are lots of things we must reason about to get rid of," Jack smiled
+back.
+
+"That sounds very chilly and uncomfortable. Besides, something loving,
+pretty, responsive--something that one can make very happy--is useful to
+one."
+
+"But only that," Imogen now intervened, coming to her friend's assistance
+with decision. "It serves only one's own pleasure;--that is its only use.
+And when I think, mama darling, of all the cold, hungry, unhappy children
+in this great town to-night,--of all the suffering children, such as those
+that Jack and I have been trying to help,--I can't but feel that your
+petted little dog there robs some one."
+
+Mrs. Upton, looking down at her dog, now asleep in a profound content,
+continued to stroke him in silence.
+
+Jack felt that Imogen's tone was perhaps a little too rigorous for the
+occasion. "Not that we want you to turn Tison out into the streets," he
+said jocosely.
+
+"No; you mustn't ask that of me," Valerie answered, her tone less light
+than before. "It seems to me that there is a place for dear unreasonable
+things in the world. All that Tison is made for is to be petted. A child is
+a different problem."
+
+"And a problem that it needs all our time, all our strength, all our love
+and faith to deal with," Imogen returned, with gentle sadness. "You _are_
+robbing some one, mama dear."
+
+"Apparently we are a naughty couple, you and I, Tison," Mrs. Upton said,
+"but I am too old and you too eternally young to mend."
+
+She had begun to crochet again; but, though she resumed all her lightness,
+her mildness, Jack fancied that she was a little angry.
+
+When he was gone, Mrs. Upton said, looking up at her daughter: "Of course
+you must have Mary Osborne to stay with you, Imogen,"
+
+Imogen had gone to the fire and was gazing into it. She was full of a deep
+contentment. By her attitude toward Jack this evening, her reception of his
+avowal, she had completely vindicated herself. Peace of mind was impossible
+to Imogen unless her conscience were clear of any cloud, and now the
+morning's humiliating fear was more than atoned for. She was not the woman
+to clutch at safety when pain threatened; she had spoken to him exactly as
+she would have spoken yesterday, before knowing that she was poor. And,
+under this satisfaction, was the serene gladness of knowing him so surely
+hers.
+
+Her face, as she turned it toward her mother, adjusted itself to a task of
+loving severity. "I cannot think of having her, mama."
+
+"Why not? She will add almost nothing to our expenses. I never for a moment
+dreamed of your not having her. I don't know why you thought it my wish."
+
+Imogen looked steadily at her: "Not your wish, mama? After what you told me
+this morning?"
+
+"I only said that we must be economical and careful."
+
+"To have one's friends to stay with one is a luxury, is not to be
+economical and careful. I don't forget what you said of my expensive mode
+of life, of my clothes--a reproof that I am very sure was well deserved; I
+should not have been so thoughtless. But it is not fair, mama, really it is
+not fair--you must see that--to reproach me, and my father--by implication,
+even if not openly--with our reckless charities, and then refuse to take
+the responsibility for my awakening."
+
+Imogen, though she spoke with emotion, spoke without haste. Her mother sat
+with downcast eyes, working on, and a deep color rose to her cheeks.
+
+"I do want things to be open and honest between us, mama," Imogen went on.
+"We are so very different in temperament, in outlook, in conviction, that
+to be happy together we must be very true with each other. I want you
+always to say just what you mean, so that I may understand what you really
+want of me and may clearly see whether I can do it or not. I have such a
+horror of any ambiguity in human relations, I believe so in the most
+perfect truth."
+
+Valerie was still silent for some moments after this. When she did speak it
+was only of the practical matter that they had begun with. "I do want you
+to have your friends with you, Imogen. It will not be a luxury. I will see
+that we can afford it."
+
+"I shall be very, very glad of that, dear. I wish I had understood before.
+You see, just now, before Jack, I felt that you were hurt, displeased, by
+my inference from our talk this morning. You made me feel by your whole
+manner that you found me graceless, tasteless, to blame in some
+way--perhaps for speaking about it to Jack. Jack is very near me, mama."
+
+"But not near me."
+
+"Ah, you made me feel that, too; and that you reproached me with having, as
+it were, forced an intimacy upon you."
+
+Valerie was drawing her dark brows together, as though her clue had indeed
+escaped her. Imogen's mind slipped from link to link of the trivial, yet
+significant, matter with an ease and certainty of purpose that was like the
+movement of her own sleek needle, drawing loop after loop of wool into a
+pattern; but what Imogen's pattern was she could hardly tell. She abandoned
+the wish to make clear her own interpretation, looking up presently with a
+faint smile. "I'm sorry, dear. I meant nothing of all that, I assure you.
+And as to 'Jack,' it was only that I did not care to seem to justify myself
+before him--at your expense it might seem."
+
+"Oh, mama dear!" Imogen laughed out. "You thought me so wrong, then, that
+you were afraid of harming his devotion to me by letting him see how very
+wrong it was! Jack's devotion is very clear-sighted. It's a devotion that,
+if it saw wrongs in me, would only ask to show them to me, too, and to
+stand shoulder to shoulder with me in fighting them."
+
+"He must be a remarkable young man," said Valerie, quite without irony.
+
+"He is like most _real_ people in this country, mama," said Imogen, on a
+graver note. "We have, I think, evolved a new standard of devotion. We
+don't want to have dexterous mamas throwing powder in the eyes of the men
+who care for us and sacrificing their very conception of right on the altar
+of false maternal duty. The duty we owe to any one _is_ our truth. There is
+no higher duty than that. Had I been as ungenerous, as unkind, as you, I'm
+afraid, imagined me this evening, it would still have been your duty, to
+him, to me, to bring the truth fearlessly to the light. I would have been
+amused, hadn't I been so hurt, to see you, as you fancied, shielding me!
+Please never forget, dear, in the future, that Jack and I are
+truth-lovers."
+
+Looking slightly bewildered by this cascade of smooth fluency, Valerie,
+still with her deepened color, here murmured that she, too, cared for the
+truth, but the current bore her on. "I don't think you _see_ it, mama, else
+you could hardly have hurt me so."
+
+"Did I hurt you so?"
+
+"Why, mama, don't you imagine that I am made of flesh and blood? It was
+dreadful to me, your leaving me like that, with the situation on my hands."
+
+Valerie, after another little silence, now repeated, "I'm sorry, dear,"
+and, as if accepting contrition, Imogen stooped and kissed her tenderly.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+Mary's visit took place about six weeks later, when Jack Pennington was
+again in New York, and Mrs. Wake, returned from Europe, had been for some
+time established in her little flat not very far away in Washington Square.
+
+The retrenchments in the Upton household had taken place and Mary found
+her friend putting her shoulder to the wheel with melancholy courage. The
+keeping up of old beneficences meant redoubled labor and, as she said to
+Mary, with the smile that Mary found so wonderful: "It seems to me now that
+whenever I put my hand out to help, it gets caught and pinched." Mary,
+helper and admirer, said to Jack that the way in which Imogen had gathered
+up her threads, allowing hardly one to snap, was too beautiful. These young
+people, like the minor characters in a play, met often in the drawing-room
+while Imogen was busy up-stairs or gone out upon some important errand.
+Just now, Miss Bocock's lectures having been set going, the organization
+of a performance to be given for the crippled children's country home was
+engaging all her time. Tableaux from the Greek drama had been fixed on, the
+Pottses were full of eagerness, and Jack had been pressed into service as
+stage-manager. The distribution of rôles, the grouping of the pictures, the
+dressing and the scenery were in his hands.
+
+"It's really extraordinary, the way in which, amidst her grief, she goes
+through all this business, all this organization, getting people together
+for her committee, securing the theater," said Mary. "Isn't it too bad that
+she can't be in the tableaux herself? She would have been the loveliest of
+all."
+
+Jack, rather weary, after an encounter with a band of dissatisfied
+performers in the library, said: "One could have put one's heart into
+making an Antigone of her; that's what I wanted--the filial Antigone,
+leading Oedipus through the olive groves of Colonus. It's bitter, instead
+of that, to have to rig Mrs. Scott out as Cassandra; will you believe it,
+Mary, she insists on being Cassandra--with that figure, that nose! And she
+has fixed her heart on the scene where Cassandra stands in the car outside
+the house of Agamemnon. She fancies that she is a tragic, ominous type."
+
+"She has nice arms, you know," said the kindly Mary.
+
+"Don't I know!" said Jack. "Well, it's through them that I shall circumvent
+her. Her arms shall be fully displayed and her face turned away from the
+audience."
+
+"Jack, dear, you mustn't be spiteful," Mary shook her head a little at him.
+"I've thought that I felt just a touch of--of, well--flippancy in you once
+or twice lately. You mustn't deceive poor Mrs. Scott. It's that that is so
+wonderful about Imogen. I really believe that she could make her give up
+the part, if she set herself to it; she might even tell her that her nose
+was too snub for it--and she would not wound her. It's extraordinary her
+power over people. They feel, I think, the tenderness, the
+disinterestedness, that lies beneath the truth."
+
+"I suppose there's no hope of persuading her to be Antigone?"
+
+"Don't suggest it again, Jack. The idea hurt her so."
+
+"I won't. I understand. When is Rose coming?"
+
+"In a day or two. She is to spend the rest of the winter with the Langleys.
+What do you think of for her?"
+
+"Helen appearing between the soldiers, before Hecuba and Menelaus. I only
+wish that Imogen had more influence over Rose. Your theory about her power
+doesn't hold good there."
+
+"Ah, even there, I don't give up hope. Rose doesn't really know Imogen. And
+then Rose is a child in many ways, a dear, but a spoiled, child."
+
+"What do you think of Mrs. Upton, now that you see something of her?" Jack
+asked abruptly.
+
+"She is very sweet and kind, Jack. She is working so hard for all of us.
+She is going to make my robe. She is addressing envelopes now--and you know
+how dull that is. I am sure I used to misjudge her. But, she is very queer,
+Jack."
+
+"Queer? In what way queer?" Jack asked, placing himself on the sofa, his
+legs stretched out before him, his hands in his pockets.
+
+"I hardly know how to express it. She is so light, yet so deep; and I can't
+make out why or where she is deep; it's there that the queerness comes in.
+I feel it in her smile, the way she looks at you; I believe I feel it more
+than she does. She doesn't know she's deep."
+
+"Not really found herself yet, you think?" Jack questioned; the phrase was
+one often in use between these young people.
+
+Mary mused. "Somehow that doesn't apply to her--I don't believe she'll ever
+look for herself."
+
+"You think it's you she finds," Jack suggested; voicing a dim suspicion
+that had come to him once or twice of late.
+
+"What do you mean, exactly, Jack?"
+
+"I'm sure I don't know," he laughed a little. "So you like her?" he
+questioned.
+
+"I think I do; against my judgment, against my will, as it were. But that
+doesn't imply that one approves of her."
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Why, Jack, you know the way _you_ felt about it, the day you and I and
+Rose talked it over."
+
+"But we hadn't seen her then. What I want to know is just what _you_ feel,
+now that you have seen her."
+
+Mary had another conscientious pause. "How can one approve of her while
+Imogen is there?" she said at last.
+
+"You mean that Imogen makes one remember everything?"
+
+"Yes. And Imogen is everything she isn't."
+
+"So that, by contrast, she loses."
+
+"Yes, and do you know, Jack," Mary lowered her voice while she glanced up
+at Mrs. Upton's portrait, "I can hardly believe that she has suffered,
+really suffered, about him, at all. She is so unlike a widow."
+
+"I suppose she felt herself a widow long ago."
+
+"She had no right to feel it, Jack. His death should cast a deeper shadow
+on her."
+
+As Jack, shamefully, could see Mr. Upton as shadow removed, he only said,
+after a slight pause: "Perhaps that's another of the things she doesn't
+obviously show--suffering, I mean."
+
+"I'm afraid that she's incapable of feeling any conviction of sin," said
+Mary, "and that wise, old-fashioned phrase expresses just what I mean as to
+a lack in her. On the other hand, in a warmhearted, pagan sort of way, she
+is, I'm quite sure, one of the kindest of people. Her maid, when she went
+back to England the other day, cried dreadfully at leaving her, and Mrs.
+Upton cried too. I happened to find them together just before Felkin went.
+Now I had imagined, in my narrow way, that a spoilt beauty was always a
+tyrant to her maid."
+
+"Oh, so her maid's gone! How does she do her hair, then?"
+
+"Do her hair, Jack? What a funny question. As we all do, of course, with
+her wits and her hands, I suppose. Any one with common-sense can do their
+hair."
+
+Jack kept silence, reflecting on the picture that Imogen had drawn for
+him--the child bereft of its toy. Had it given it up willingly, or had it
+been forced to relinquish it by the pressure of circumstance? Remembering
+his own stringent words, he felt a qualm of compunction. Had he armed
+Imogen for this ruthlessness?
+
+The lustrous folds of Mrs. Upton's hair, at lunch, reassured him as to her
+fitness to do without Felkin in that particular, but his mind still dwelt
+on the picture of the crying child and he asked Imogen, when he was next
+alone with her, how the departure of Felkin had been effected.
+
+"You couldn't manage to let her keep the toy, then?"
+
+"The toy?" Imogen was blank.
+
+He enlightened her. "Her maid, you know, who had to do her hair."
+
+"Oh, Felkin! No," Imogen's face was a little quizzical, "it couldn't be
+managed. I thought it over, what you said about sacrificing other people's
+needs to her luxuries, and felt that you were right. So I put it to her,
+very, very gently, of course, very tactfully, so that I believe that she
+thinks that it was she who initiated the idea. Perhaps she _had_ intended
+from the first to send her back; it was so obvious that a woman as poor as
+she is ought not to have a maid. All the same, I felt that she was a little
+vexed with me, poor dear. But, apart from the economical question, I'm glad
+I insisted. It's so much better for her not to be so dependent on another
+woman. It's a little degrading for both of them, I think."
+
+Jack, who theoretically disapproved of all such undemocratic gauds, was
+sure that Mrs. Upton was much better off without her maid; yet something of
+the pathos of that image remained with him--the child deprived of its toy;
+something, too, of discomfort over that echo of her father that he now and
+then detected in Imogen's serene sense of rightness.
+
+This discomfort, this uneasy sense of echoes, returned more than once
+in the days that followed. Mrs. Upton seemed, as yet, to have made very
+little difference in the situation; she had glided into it smoothly,
+unobtrusively--a silken shadow; when she was among them it was of that she
+made him think; and in her shadowed quietness, as of a tranquil mist at
+evening or at dawn, he more and more came to feel a peace and sweetness.
+But it was always in this sweetness and this peace that the contrasting
+throb of restlessness stirred.
+
+He saw her at the meals he frequently attended, meals where the
+conversation, for the most part, was carried on by Imogen. Mrs. Wake, also
+a frequent guest, was a very silent one, and Mary an earnest listener.
+
+If Imogen's talk had ceased to be very interesting to Jack, that was only
+because he knew it so well. He knew it so well that, while she talked,
+quietly, fluently, dominatingly, he was able to remain the dispassionate
+observer and to wonder how it impressed her mother. Jack watched Mrs.
+Upton, while Imogen talked, leaning her head on her hand and raising
+contemplative eyes to her daughter. Those soft, dark eyes, eyes almost
+somnolent under their dusky brows and half-drooped lashes,--how different
+they were from Imogen's, as different as dusk from daylight. And they
+were not really sad, not really sleepy, eyes; that was the surprise of
+them when, after the downcast mystery, they raised to one suddenly their
+penetrating intelligence. The poetry of their aspect was constantly
+contradicted by the prose of their glance. But she did more than turn her
+own poetry into prose, so he told himself; she turned other people's into
+prose, too. Her glance became to him a running translation into sane,
+almost merry, commonplace, of Imogen's soarings. He knew that she made the
+translation and he knew that it was a prose one, but its meaning she kept
+for herself. It was when, now and then, he felt that he had hit upon a
+word, a phrase, that the discomfort, the bewilderment, came; and he would
+then turn resolutely to Imogen and grasp firmly his own conception of her
+essential meaning, a meaning that could bear any amount of renderings.
+
+She was so beautiful, sitting there, the girl he loved, her pearly face
+and throat, her coronet of pale, bright gold, rising from the pathetic
+blackness, that it might well be that the mother felt only his own joy in
+her loveliness and could spare no margin of consciousness for critical
+comment. She was so lovely, so young, so good; so jaded, too, with all
+the labor, the giving of herself, the long thoughts for others; why
+shouldn't she be dominant and assured? Why shouldn't she even be didactic
+and slightly complacent? If there was sometimes a triteness in her
+pronouncements, a lack of humor, of spontaneity, in her enthusiasms, surely
+no one who loved her could recognize them with any but the tenderest of
+smiles. He felt quite sure that Mrs. Upton recognized them with nothing
+else. He felt quite sure that the "deepest" thing in Mrs. Upton was the
+most intense interest in Imogen; but he felt sure, too, that the thing
+above it, the thing that gazed so quietly, so dispassionately, was complete
+indifference as to what Imogen might be saying. Didn't her prose, with its
+unemphatic evenness, imply that some enthusiasms went quite without saying
+and that some questions were quite disposed of for talk just because they
+were so firmly established for action? When he had reached this point
+of query, Jack felt rising within him that former sense of irritation
+on Imogen's behalf, and on his own. After all, youthful triteness and
+enthusiasm were preferable to indifference. In the stress of this
+irritation he felt, at moments, a shock of keen sympathy for the departed
+Mr. Upton, who had, no doubt, often felt that disconcerting mingling of
+interest and indifference weigh upon his dithyrambic ardors. He often felt
+very sorry for Mr. Upton as he looked at his widow. It was better to feel
+that than to feel sorry for her while he listened to Imogen. It did not do
+to realize too keenly, through Imogen's echo, what it must have been to
+listen to Mr. Upton for a lifetime. When, on rare occasions, he had Mrs.
+Upton to himself, his impulse always was to "draw her out," to extract from
+her what were her impressions of things in general and what her attitude
+toward life. She must really, by this time, have enough accepted him as
+one of themselves to feel his right to hear all sorts of impressions. He
+was used to talking things over, talking them, indeed, over and over;
+turning them, surveying them, making the very most of all their possible
+significance, with men and women to whom his relationship was half
+brotherly and wholly comradely, and whom, in the small, fresh, clear world,
+where he had spent his life, he had known since boyhood. It was a very
+ethical and intellectual little world, this of Jack's, where impressions
+passed from each to each, as if by right, where some suspicion was felt for
+those that could not be shared, and where to keep anything so worth while
+to oneself was almost to rob a whole circle. Reticence had the distinct
+flavor of selfishness and uncertainty of mind, the flavor of laxity. If one
+were earnest and ardent and disciplined one either knew what one thought,
+and shared it, or one knew what one wanted to think, and one sought it.
+Jack suspected Mrs. Upton of being neither earnest, nor ardent, nor
+disciplined; but he found it difficult to believe that, as a new inmate of
+his world, she couldn't be, if only she would make the effort, as clear as
+the rest of it, and that she wasn't as ready, if manipulated with tact and
+sympathy, to give and to receive.
+
+Wandering about the drawing-room, while, as usual in her leisure moments,
+she crocheted a small jacket, Tison in her lap, he wondered, for instance,
+what she thought of the drawing-room. He knew that it was very different
+from the drawing-room in her Surrey cottage, and very different from the
+drawing-rooms with which, as he had heard from Imogen, she was familiar in
+the capitals of Europe. Mrs. Upton was, to-day, crocheting a blue border as
+peacefully as though she had faced pseudo-Correggios and crimson brocade
+and embossed wall-paper all her life, so that either her tastes shared the
+indifference of her intelligence or else her power of self-control was
+commendably complete.
+
+"I hope that you are coming to Boston some day," he said to her on this
+occasion, the occasion of the blue border. "I'd like so much to show you my
+studio there, and my work. I'm not such an idler as you might imagine."
+
+Mrs. Upton replied that she should never for a moment imagine him an idler
+and that since she was going to Boston to stay with his great-aunt, a dear
+but too infrequently seen friend of hers, she hoped soon for the pleasure
+of seeing his work. "I hear that you are very talented," she added.
+
+Jack, who considered that he was, did not protest with a false modesty,
+but went on to talk of the field of art in general, and questioning her,
+skeptical as to her statement that her artistic tastes were a mere medley,
+he put together by degrees a conception of vague dislikes and sharp
+preferences. But, in spite of his persistence in keeping her to Chardin and
+Japanese prints, she would pass on from herself to Imogen, emphasizing her
+satisfaction in Imogen's great interest in art. "It's such a delightful
+bond between people," And Mrs. Upton, with her more than American parental
+discretion, smiled her approval of such bonds.
+
+Jack reflected some moments before saying that Imogen knew, perhaps, more
+than she cared. He didn't think that Imogen had, exactly, the esthetic
+temperament. And that there was no confidential flavor in these remarks he
+demonstrated by adding that it was a point he and Imogen often discussed;
+he had often told her that she should try to feel more and to think less,
+so that Valerie might amusedly have recalled Imogen's explanation to her
+of the fundamental frankness that made lovers in America such "remarkable
+young men." Jack's frankness, evidently, would be restrained by neither
+diffidence nor affection. She received his diagnosis of her daughter's case
+without comment, saying only, after a moment, while she turned a corner of
+her jacket, "And you are of the artistic temperament, I suppose?"
+
+"Well, yes," he owned, "in a sense; though not in that in which the word
+has been so often misused. I don't see the artist as a performing acrobat
+nor as an anarchist in ethics, either. I think that art is one of the big
+aspects of life and that through it one gets hold of a big part of
+reality."
+
+Mrs. Upton, mildly intent on her corner, looked acquiescent.
+
+"I think," Jack went on, "that, like everything else in life worth having,
+it's a harmony only attained by discipline and by sacrifice. And it's
+essentially a social, not a selfish attainment; it widens our boundaries of
+comprehension and sympathy; it reveals brotherhood. The artist's is a high
+form of service."
+
+He suspected Mrs. Upton, while he spoke, of disagreement; he suspected her,
+also, of finding him sententious; but she continued to look interested, so
+that, quite conscious of his didactic purpose and amused by all the things
+he saw in their situation, he unfolded to her his conception of the
+artist's place in the social organism.
+
+She said, finally, "I should have thought that art was much more of an end
+in itself."
+
+"Ah, there we come to the philosophy of it," said Jack. "It _is_, of
+course, a sort of mysticism. One lays hold of something eternal in all
+achievement; but then, you see, one finds out that the eternal isn't cut up
+into sections, as it were--art here, ethics there--intellect yonder; one
+finds out that all that is eternal is bound up with the whole, so that you
+can't separate beauty from goodness and truth any more than you can divide
+a man's moral sense from his artistic and rational interests."
+
+"Still, it's in sections for us, surely? What very horrid people can be
+great artists," Mrs. Upton half questioned, half mused.
+
+"Ah, I don't believe it! I don't believe it!" Jack broke out. "You'll find
+a flaw in his art, if you find a moral chaos in him. It must be a harmony!"
+
+The corner was long since turned, and on a simple stretch of blue Mrs.
+Upton now looked up at him with a smile that showed him that whether she
+liked what he said or not, she certainly liked him. It was here that the
+slight bewilderment came in, to feel that he had been upholding some
+unmoral doctrine she would have smiled in just the same way; and the
+bewilderment was greater on feeling how much he liked her to like him. Over
+the didactic intentions, a boyish, an answering, smile irradiated his face.
+
+"I'm not much of a thinker, but I suppose that it does all come together,
+somehow," she said.
+
+"I'm sure that you make a great deal of beauty, wherever you are," Jack
+answered irrelevantly. "I've heard that your cottage in England is so
+charming. Mrs. Wake was telling me about it."
+
+"It is a dear little place."
+
+He remembered, suddenly, that the room where they talked contradicted his
+assertion, and, glancing about it furtively, his eye traversed the highly
+glazed surface of the Correggio. Mrs. Upton's glance followed his. "I don't
+think I ever cared, so seriously, about beauty," she said, smiling quietly.
+"I lived, you see, for a good many years in this room, just as it is."
+There was no pathos in her voice. Jack brought it out for her.
+
+"I am sure you hated it!"
+
+"I thought it ugly, of course; but I didn't mind so much as all that. I
+didn't mind, really, so much as you would."
+
+"Not enough to try to have it right?"
+
+He was marching his ethics into it, and, with his question, he felt now
+that he had brought Mr. Upton right down from the wall and between them.
+Mr. Upton had not minded the room at all, or had minded only in the sense
+that he made it a matter of conscience not to mind. And aspects of it Mr.
+Upton had thought beautiful. And that Mrs. Upton felt all this he was sure
+from the very vagueness of her answer.
+
+"That would have meant caring more for beauty than for more important
+things in life."
+
+He knew that it was in horribly bad taste, but he couldn't help having it
+out, now that he had, involuntarily, gone so far. "If you like Chardin, I'm
+sure that that hurts you," and he indicated the pseudo-Correggio, this time
+openly.
+
+She followed his gesture with brows of mildly lifted inquiry, "You mean
+it's not genuine?"
+
+"That, and a great deal more. It's imitation, and it's bad imitation; and,
+anyway, the original would be out of place here--on that wall-paper."
+
+But Mrs. Upton wouldn't be clear; wouldn't be drawn; wouldn't, simply,
+share. She shook her head; she smiled, as though he must accept from her
+her lack of proper feeling, repeating, "I didn't like it, but, really, I
+never minded much." And he had to extract what satisfaction he could from
+her final, vague summing-up. "It went with the chairs--and all the rest."
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+"Mama," said Imogen, "who is Sir Basil?" She had picked up a letter from
+the hall table as she and Jack passed on their way up-stairs after their
+walk, and she carried it into the library with the question.
+
+Mrs. Upton was making tea beside the fire, Mrs. Wake and Mary with her,
+and as Imogen held out the letter with its English stamp and masculine
+handwriting a dusky rose-color mounted to her face. Indeed, in taking the
+letter from her daughter's hand, her blush was so obvious that a slight
+silence of recognized and shared embarrassment made itself felt.
+
+It was Jack who felt it most. After his swiftly averted glance at Mrs.
+Upton his own cheeks had flamed in ignorant sympathy. He was able, in a
+moment, to see that it might have been the fire, or the tea, or the mere
+suddenness of an unexpected question that had caused the look of helpless
+girlishness, but the memory stayed with him, a tenderness and a solicitude
+in it.
+
+Imogen had apparently seen nothing. She went on, pulling off her gloves,
+taking off her hat, glancing at her radiant white and rose in the glass
+while she questioned. "I remember him in your letters, but remember him so
+little--a dull, kind old country squire, the impression, I think. But what
+does a dull, kind old country squire find to write about so often?"
+
+If Mrs. Upton couldn't control her cheeks she could perfectly control
+her manner, and though Jack's sympathy guessed at some pretty decisive
+irritation under it, he could but feel that its calm disposed of any absurd
+interpretations that the blush might have aroused.
+
+"Yes, I have often, I think, mentioned him in my letters, Imogen, though
+not in those terms. He is a neighbor of mine in Surrey and a friend."
+
+"Is he clever?" Imogen asked, ignoring the coolness in her mother's voice.
+
+"Not particularly."
+
+"What does he do, mama?"
+
+"He takes care of his property."
+
+"Sport and feudal philanthropy, I suppose," Imogen smiled.
+
+"Very much just that," Mrs. Upton answered, pouring out her daughter's tea.
+
+Jack, who almost expected to see Imogen's brow darken with reprobation for
+the type of existence so described, was relieved, and at the same time
+perturbed, to observe that the humorous kindliness of her manner remained
+unclouded. No doubt she found the subject too trivial and too remote for
+gravity. Jack himself had a general idea that serious friendships between
+man and woman were adapted only to the young and the unmated. After
+marriage, according to this conception, the sexes became, even in social
+intercourse, monogamous, and he couldn't feel the bond between Mrs. Upton
+and a feudal country squire as a matter of much importance. But, on the
+other hand, Mrs. Upton had said "friend" with decision, and though the
+word, for her, could not mean what it meant to people like himself and
+Imogen--a grave, a beautiful bond of mutual help, mutual endeavor, mutual
+rejoicing in the wonder and splendor of life--even a trivial relationship
+was not a fit subject for playful patronage. It was with sharp
+disapprobation that he heard Imogen go on to say, "I should like to meet a
+man like that--really to know. One imagines that they are as extinct as the
+dodo, and suddenly, if one goes to England, one finds them swarming. Happy,
+decorative, empty people; perfectly kind, perfectly contented, perfectly
+useless. Oh, I don't mean your Sir Basil a bit, mama darling. I'm quite
+sure, since you like him, that he is a more interesting variation of the
+type. Only I can't help wondering what he _does_ find to write about."
+
+"I think, as I am wondering myself, I will ask you all to excuse me if
+I open my letter," said Mrs. Upton, and, making no offer of satisfying
+Imogen's curiosity, she unfolded two stout sheets of paper and proceeded
+to read them.
+
+Imogen did not lose her look of lightness, but Jack fancied in the
+steadiness of the gaze that she bent upon her mother a controlled anger.
+
+"One may be useful, Imogen, without wearing any badge of usefulness," Mrs.
+Wake now observed. Her bonnet, as usual, on one side, and her hair much
+disarranged, she had listened to the colloquy in silence.
+
+Imogen was always very sweet with Mrs. Wake. She had the air of a full,
+deep river benignly willing to receive without a ripple any number of such
+tossed pebbles, to engulf and flow over them. She had told Jack that Mrs.
+Wake's dry aggressiveness did not blind her for a moment to Mrs. Wake's
+noble qualities. Mrs. Wake was a brave, a splendid person, and she had the
+greatest admiration for her; but, beneath these appreciations, a complete
+indifference as to Mrs. Wake's opinions and personality showed always in
+her demeanor toward her. She was a splendid person, but she was of no
+importance to Imogen whatever.
+
+"I don't think that one can be useful unless one is actively helping on the
+world's work, dear Mrs. Wake," she now said. "Mary, we have tickets for
+Carnegie Hall to-morrow night; won't that be a treat? I long for a deep
+draft of music."
+
+"One does help it on," said Mrs. Wake, skipping, as it were, another
+pebble, "if one fills one's place in life and does one's duty."
+
+Imogen now gave her a more undivided attention. "Precisely. And one must
+grow all the time to do that. One's place in life is a growing thing, It
+doesn't remain fixed and changeless--as English conservatism usually
+implies. Are you a friend of Sir Basil's, too?"
+
+"I met him while I was with your mother, and I thought it a pity we didn't
+produce more men like him over here--simple, unselfconscious men, contented
+to be themselves and to do the duty that is nearest them."
+
+"Anglomaniac!" Imogen smiled, sugaring her second cup of tea.
+
+Mrs. Wake flushed slightly. "Because I see the good qualities of another
+country?"
+
+"Because you see its defects with a glamour over them."
+
+"Is it a defect to do well by instinct what we have not yet learned to do
+without effort!"
+
+"Ah,--but the danger there is--" Jack here broke in, much interested, "the
+danger there is that you merge the individual in the function. When
+function becomes instinctive it atrophies unless it can grow into higher
+forms of function. Imogen's right, you know."
+
+"In a sense, no doubt. But all the same our defect is that we have so
+little interest except as individuals."
+
+"What more interest can any one have than that?"
+
+"In older civilizations people may have all the accumulated interest of the
+deep background, the long past, that, quite unconsciously, they embody."
+
+"We have the interest of the future."
+
+"I don't think so, quite; for the individual, the future doesn't seem to
+count. The individual is sacrificed to the future, but the past is, in a
+sense, sacrificed for the individual; in the right sort it's all
+there--summed up."
+
+Imogen had listened, still with her steady smile, to these heresies and to
+Jack's over-lenient dealing with them. She picked up a review, turning the
+pages and glancing through it while she said, ever so lightly and gently:
+
+"I think that you would find most aristocrats against you in our country,
+dear Mrs. Wake. With all the depth of our background, the length of our
+past, you would find, in Jack and Mary and me, for instance, that it's our
+sense of the future, of our own purposes for it, that makes our truest
+reality."
+
+Jack was rather pleased with this apt summing-up, too pleased, in his
+masculine ingenuousness, to feel that for Mrs. Wake, with no ancestry at
+all to speak of, such a summing could not be very gratifying. He didn't see
+this at all until Mrs. Upton, folding her letter, came into the slightly
+awkward silence that followed Imogen's speech, with the decisiveness that
+had subtly animated her manner since Imogen's entrance. She remarked that
+the past, in that sense of hereditary tradition handed on by hereditary
+power, didn't exist at all in America; it was just that fact that made
+America so different and so interesting; its aristocrats so often had the
+shallowest of backgrounds. And in her gliding to a change of subject, in
+her addressing of an entirely foreign question to Mrs. Wake, Jack guessed
+at a little flare of resentment on her friend's behalf.
+
+Imogen kept her calm, and while her mother talked to Mrs. Wake she talked
+to Mary; but that the calm was assumed she showed him presently when they
+were left alone. She then showed him, indeed, that she was frankly angry.
+
+"One doesn't mind Mrs. Wake," she said; "it's that type among us, the
+type without background, without traditions, that is so influenced by
+the European thing; you saw the little sop mama threw to her--she an
+aristocrat!--because of a generation of great wealth; that could be her
+only claim; but to have mama so dead to all we mean!"
+
+Jack, rather embarrassed by the pressure of his enlightenments, said that
+he hadn't felt that; it seemed to him that she did see what they meant, it
+was their future that counted, in the main.
+
+"A rootless future, according to her!"
+
+"Why, we have our past; it's the way we possess it that's new in the world;
+that's what she meant. Any little advantage that you or I may have in our
+half-dozen or so generations of respectability and responsibility, is ours
+only to share, to make us _tell_ more in the general uplifting,"
+
+"You think that you need say that to _me_, Jack! As for respectability,
+that homespun word hardly applies; we do have lineage here, and in the
+European sense, even if without the European power. But that's no matter.
+It's the pressing down on me of this alien standard, whether expressed or
+not, that stifles me. I could feel mama's hostility in every word, every
+glance."
+
+"Hardly hostility, Imogen. Perhaps a touch of vexation on Mrs. Wake's
+account. You didn't mean it, of course, but it might have hurt, what you
+said."
+
+"That! That was a mere opportunity. Didn't you feel and see that it was!"
+
+Jack's aspect now took on its air of serious and reasonable demonstration.
+
+"Well, you know, Imogen, you were a little tactless about her
+friendship--about this Sir Basil."
+
+He expected wonder and denial, but, on the contrary, after going to the
+window and looking out silently for some moments, Imogen, without turning,
+said, "It's not a friendship I care about."
+
+"Why not?" Jack asked, taken aback.
+
+"I don't like it," Imogen repeated.
+
+"Why under the sun should you dislike it? What do you know about it,
+anyway?"
+
+Imogen still gazed from the window. "Jack, I don't believe that mama is at
+all the woman to have friends, as we understand the word. I don't believe
+that it is simply a friendship. Yes, you may well look surprised,"--she
+had turned to him now--"I've never told you. It seemed unfair to her. But
+again and again I've caught her whispers, hints, about the sentimental
+attachments mama inspires. You may imagine how I've felt, living here with
+_him_, in his loneliness. I don't say, I don't believe, that mama was ever
+a flirt; she is too dignified, too distinguished a woman for that; but the
+fact remains that whispers of this sort do attach themselves to her name,
+and a woman is always to blame, in some sense, for that."
+
+Jack, looking as startled as she had hoped he would, gazed now with
+frowning intentness on the ground and made no reply.
+
+"As for this Sir Basil," Imogen went on, "I used to wonder if he were
+another of these triflers with the sanctity of love, and of late I've
+wondered more. He writes to her constantly. What can the bond between mama
+and a man of that type be unless it's a sentimental one? And didn't you see
+her blush to-day?"
+
+Jack now raised his eyes to her and she saw that he, at all events, was
+blushing. "I can't bear to hear you talk like this, Imogen," he said.
+
+Imogen's own cheeks flamed at the implied reproach. "Do you mean that I
+must lock everything, everything I have to suffer, into my own heart? I
+thought that to you, Jack, I could say anything."
+
+"Of course, of course, dear. Only don't _think_ in this way."
+
+"I accuse her of nothing but accepting this sort of homage."
+
+"I know; of course,--only not even to me. They are friends. We have no
+right to spy upon them; it's almost as if you had laid a trap for her and
+then pointed her out to me in it. Oh, I know that you didn't mean it so."
+
+"Spy on her! I only wanted to know!"
+
+"But your tone was, well, rather offensively--humorous."
+
+"Can you feel that a friendship to be taken seriously? The very kindest
+thing is to treat it lightly, humorously, as I did. She ought to be laughed
+out of tolerating such an unbecoming relationship. A woman of her age ought
+not to be able to blush like that."
+
+Looking down again, still with his deep flush, Jack said, "Really, Imogen,
+I think that you take too much upon yourself."
+
+Imogen felt her cheeks whiten. She fixed her eyes hard on his downcast
+face.
+
+"It will be the last touch to all I have to bear, Jack, if mama brings
+a misunderstanding between you and me. If you can feel it fitting,
+appropriate, that a widow of barely four months should encourage the
+infatuation of a stupid old Englishman, then I have no more to say. We
+have different conceptions of right and wrong, that is all." Imogen's lips
+trembled slightly in pronouncing the words.
+
+"I should agree with you if that were the case, Imogen. I don't believe
+that it is."
+
+"Very well. Wait and see if it isn't the case," said Imogen.
+
+It was Jack who broached another subject, asking her about some concerts
+she had gone to recently; but, turned from him again and looking out into
+the evening, her answers were so vague and chill, that presently, casting a
+glance half mournful and half alarmed upon her, he bade her good-by and
+left her.
+
+Imogen stood looking out unseeingly, a sense of indignation and of fear
+weighing upon her. Jack had never before left her like this. But she could
+not yield to the impulse to call out to him, run after him, beg him not to
+go with a misunderstanding unresolved between them, for she was right and
+he was wrong. She had told him to wait and see if it wasn't the case, what
+she had said; and now they must wait. She believed that it was the case,
+and the thought filled her with a sense of personal humiliation.
+
+Since her summing up of the situation in the library, not three months ago,
+that first quiet sense of mastery had been much shaken, and now for weeks
+there had been with her constantly a strange gliding of new realizations.
+This one seemed the last touch to her mother's wrongness--a wrongness that
+had threatened nothing, had crushed down on nothing, and that yet pervaded
+more and more the whole of life--that she should bring back to her old
+deserted home not a touch of penitence and the incense of absurd devotions.
+Friends of that sort, middle-aged, dull Englishmen, didn't, Imogen had
+wisely surmised, write to one every week. It wasn't as if they had uniting
+interests to bind them. Even a literary, a political, a philanthropic,
+correspondence Imogen would have felt as something of an affront to her
+father's memory, now, at this time; such links with the life that had
+always been a sore upon their family dignity should have been laid aside
+while the official mourning lasted, so to speak. But Sir Basil, she felt
+sure, had no mitigating interests to write about, and the large, square
+envelope that lay so often on the hall-table seemed to her like a pert,
+placid face gazing in at the house of mourning. To-day, yes, she had wanted
+to know, to see, and suspicions and resentments from dim had become keen.
+
+And now, to complete it all, Jack did not understand. Jack thought her
+unfair, unkind. He had left her with that unresolved discord between them.
+A sense of bereavement, foreboding, and desolation filled her heart. On the
+table beside her stood a tall vase of lilies that he had sent her, and as
+she stood, thinking sad and bitter thoughts, she passed her hand over them
+from time to time, bending her face to them, till, suddenly, the tears rose
+and fell and, closing her eyes, holding the flowers against her cheek, she
+began to cry.
+
+That was what she had meant to be like, the pure, sweet aroma of these
+flowers, filling all the lives about her with a spiritual fragrance. She
+did so want to be good and lovely, to make goodness and loveliness grow
+about her. It was hard, hard, when that was what she wanted--all that she
+wanted--to receive these buffets from loved hands, to see loved eyes look
+at her with trouble and severity. It was nothing, indeed,--it was, indeed,
+only to be expected,--that her mother should not recognize the spiritual
+fragrance; that Jack should be so insensible to it pierced her. And feeling
+herself alone in a blind and hostile world, she sobbed and sobbed, finding
+a sad relief in tears. She was able to think, while she wept, that though
+it was a relief she mustn't let it become a weakness; mustn't let herself
+slide into the danger of allowing grief and desolation to blur outlines for
+her. That others were blind mustn't blind her; that others did not see her
+as good and lovely must not make her, with cowardly complaisance, forswear
+her own clear consciousness of right. She was thinking this, and her sobs
+were becoming a little quieter, when her mother, now in her evening
+tea-gown, came back into the room.
+
+Imogen was not displeased that her grief should have this particular
+witness. Besides all the deep, unspoken wrongs, her mother must be
+conscious of smaller wrongs against her this afternoon, must know that she
+had--well--tried to put her, as it were, in her place, first about the
+letter and then about Mrs. Wake's lack of aristocratic instinct. She must
+know this and must know that Imogen knew it. These were trivial matters,
+not to be recognized between them; and how completely indifferent they
+were to her her present grief would demonstrate. Such tears fell only for
+great sorrows. Holding the flowers to her cheek, she wept on, turning her
+face away. She knew that her mother had paused, startled, at a loss; and,
+gravely, without one word, she intended, in a moment, unless her mother
+should think it becoming to withdraw, to leave the room, still weeping. But
+she had not time to carry this resolution into effect. Suddenly, and much
+to her dismay, she felt her mother's arms around her, while her mother's
+voice, alarmed, tender, tearful, came to her: "Poor darling, my poor
+darling, what is it? Please tell me."
+
+Physical demonstrations were never pleasing to Imogen, who, indeed,
+disliked being touched; and now, though she submitted to having her head
+drawn down to her mother's shoulder, she could not feel that the physical
+contact in any way bridged the chasm between them. She felt, presently,
+from her mother's inarticulate murmurs of compunction and pity, that this
+was, apparently, what she had hoped for. It was evidently with difficulty,
+before her child's unresponsive silence, that she found words.
+
+"Is it anything that I've done?" she questioned. "Have I seemed cross this
+afternoon? I _was_ a little cross, I know. Do forgive me, dear."
+
+Enveloped as she was in her mother's arms, so near that she could feel the
+warmth and smoothness of her shoulder through the fine texture of her gown,
+so near that a fresh fragrance, like that from a bank of violets, seemed
+to breathe upon her, Imogen found it a little difficult to control the
+discomfort that the contact aroused in her. "Of course I forgive you, dear
+mama," she said, in a voice that had regained its composure. "But, oh
+no!--it was not at all for that--I hardly noticed it. It's nothing that you
+can help, dear."
+
+"But I can't bear to have you cry and not know what's the matter."
+
+"Your knowing wouldn't help me, would it?" said Imogen, with a faint smile,
+lifting her hand to press her handkerchief to her eyes.
+
+"No, of course not; but it would help _me_--for my sake, then."
+
+"Then, if it helps you, it was papa I was thinking of. I miss him so." And
+with the words, that placed before her suddenly a picture of her own
+desolation, a great sob again shook her. "I'm so lonely now, so lonely."
+Her mother held her, not speaking, though Imogen now felt that she, too,
+wept, and a greater bitterness rose in her at the thought that it was not
+for her dead father that the tears fell but in pure weak sympathy and
+helplessness. She, herself, was the only lonely one. She alone, remembered.
+She alone longed for him. In this sharpened realization of her own sorrow
+she forgot that it had not been the actual cause of her grief.
+
+"Poor darling; poor child," her mother said at last. "Imogen, I know that
+I've failed, in so much. But I want so to make up for things, if I can; to
+be near you; to fill the loneliness a little; to have you love me, too,
+with time."
+
+"Love you, my dear mother? Why, I am full of love for you. Haven't you felt
+that?" Imogen drew herself away to look her grieved wonder into her
+mother's eyes. "Oh, mama, how little you know me!"
+
+Valerie, flushed, the tears on her cheeks, oddly shaken from her usual
+serenity, still clasped her daughter's hands and still spoke on. "I know, I
+know,--but it's not in the way it ought to be. It's not your fault, Imogen;
+it's mine; it must be the mother's fault if she can't make herself needed.
+Only you can't know how it all began, from so far back--that sense that you
+didn't need me. But I shirked; I know that I shirked. Things seemed too
+hard for me--I didn't know how to bear them. Perhaps you might have come
+almost to hate me, if I had stayed, as things were. I'm not making any
+appeal. I'm not trying to force anything. But I so want you to know how I
+long to have my chance--to begin all over again. I so want you to help."
+
+Imogen, troubled and confused by her mother's soft yet almost passionate
+eagerness, that seemed to pull her down to some childish, inferior
+place, just as her mother's arms had drawn down her head to an attitude
+incongruous with its own benignant loftiness, had yet been able, while she
+spoke, to gather her thoughts into a keen, moral concentration upon her
+actual words. She was accustomed, in moments of moral stress, to a quick
+lifting of her heart and mind for help and insight toward the highest that
+she knew, and she felt herself pray now, "Help me to be true, to her, for
+her." The prayer seemed to raise her from some threatened abasement, and
+from her regained height she spoke with a sense of assured revelation.
+"We can't have things by merely _wanting_, them. To gain anything we must
+_work_ for it. You left us. We didn't shut you out. You were
+different.--You _are_ different."
+
+But her mother's vehemence was still too great to be thrown back by
+salutary truths.
+
+"Yes; that's just it; we were different. It was that that seemed to shut me
+out. You were with him--against me. And I'm not asking for any change in
+you; I don't think that I expect any change in myself,--I am not asking for
+any place in your heart that is his, dear child; I know that that can't be,
+should not be. But people can be different, and yet near. They can be
+different and yet love each other very much. That's all I want--that you
+should see how I care for you and trust me."
+
+"I do trust you, darling mama. I do see that you are warm-hearted, full of
+kind impulses. But I think that your life is confused, uncertain of any
+goal. If you are to be near me in the way you crave, you must change. And
+we _can_, dear, with faith and effort. When you have found yourself, found
+a goal, I shall feel you near."
+
+"Ah, but don't be so over-logical, dear child. You're my goal!" Valerie
+smiled and appealed at once.
+
+Imogen, though smiling gravely too, shook her head. "I'm afraid that I'm
+only your last toy, mama darling. You have come over here to see if you can
+make me happy, just as if you were refurnishing a house. But, you see, my
+happiness doesn't depend on you."
+
+"You are hard on me, Imogen."
+
+"No; no; I mean to be so gentle. It's such a dangerous view of life--that
+centering it on some one else, making them an end. I feel so differently
+about life. I think that our love for others is only sound and true when it
+helps them to power of service to some shared ideal. Your love for me isn't
+like that. It's only an instinctive craving. Forgive me if I seem ruthless.
+I only want to help you to see clearly, dear."
+
+Valerie, still holding her daughter's hands, looked away from her and
+around the room with a glance at once vague and a little wild.
+
+"I don't know what to say to you," she murmured. "You make all that I mean
+wither." She was sad; her ardor had dropped from her. She was not at all
+convicted of error; indeed, she was trying, so it seemed, to convict her,
+Imogen, of one.
+
+Imogen felt a cold resistance rising within her to meet this
+misinterpretation. "On the contrary, dear," she said, "it is just the
+poetry, the reality of life, in all its stern glory,--because it is and
+must be stern if it is to be spiritual,--it is just that, it seems to me,
+that you are trying to reduce to a sort of pretty, facile lyric."
+
+Valerie still held the girl's hands very tightly, as though grasping hard
+some dying hope. And looking down upon the ground she stood silent for some
+moments. Presently she said, not raising her eyes, "I have won no right, I
+suppose, to be seen more significantly by you. Only, I want you to
+understand that I don't see myself like that."
+
+Again Imogen felt the unpleasant sensation of being made to seem young
+and inexperienced. Her mother's very quiet before exhortation; her sad
+relapse into grave kindliness, a kindliness, too, not without its touch of
+severity, showed that she possessed, or thought that she possessed, some
+inner assurance for which Imogen could find no ground. In answering her she
+grasped at all her own.
+
+"I'm very sure you don't," she said, "for I don't for one moment misjudge
+your sincerity. And what I want you to believe, my dear mother, is that I
+long for the time when any strength and insight I may have gained through
+my long fight, by _his_ side, may be of use to you. _Trust_ your own best
+vision of yourself and it will some day realize itself. I will trust it
+too, indeed, indeed, I will. We must grow if we keep a vision,"
+
+Mrs. Upton now raised her eyes and looked swiftly but deeply at her
+daughter. It was a look that left many hopes behind it. It was a look
+that armed other, and quite selfless, hopes, with its grave and watchful
+understanding. The understanding would not have been so clear had it not
+been fed by all the springs of baffled tenderness that only so could find
+their uses. Giving her daughter's hands a final shake, as if over some
+compact, perhaps over that of growth, she turned away. Tison, who had
+followed her into the room and had stood for long looking up at the
+colloquy that ignored him, jumped against her dress and she stooped and
+picked him up, pressing her cheek against his silken side.
+
+"You had better dress now, Imogen," she said, in tones of astonishing
+commonplace. "You've only time. I've kept you so long." And holding Tison
+against her cheek she went to the window.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+The tableaux were not to come off until the end of April, and Jack, having
+set things in motion, was in Boston at the beginning of the month. It was
+at this time that Mrs. Upton, too, was in Boston, with her old friend and
+his great-aunt, and it was at this time that he came, as he phrased it to
+himself, really into touch with her.
+
+Jack's aunt lived in a spacious, peaceful house on the hill, and the
+windows of Jack's large flat, near by, looked over the Common, the Gardens,
+the Charles River, a cheerful, bird's-eye view of the tranquil city,
+breathed upon now by the first, faint green of spring.
+
+Jack was pleased that Mrs. Upton and his aunt--a mild, blanched old lady
+with silvery side-curls under the arch of an old-fashioned bonnet-should
+often come to tea with him, for in the arrangement of his rooms-that
+looked so unarranged--he felt sure that she must recognize a taste as fine
+and fastidious as her own. He suspected Mrs. Upton of finding him merely
+ethical and he was eager that she should see that his grasp on life was
+larger than she might imagine. His taste was fine and fastidious; it was
+also disciplined and gracefully vagrant; she must see that in the few but
+perfect pictures and mezzotints on his walls; the collection of old white
+Chinese porcelain standing about the room on black carved stands; in his
+wonderful black lacquer cabinets and in all the charming medley of the rare
+and the appropriate.
+
+Certainly, whatever was Mrs. Upton's impression of him, she frequently
+expressed herself as delighted with his rooms, and as they sat in the deep
+window-seat, which commanded the view of the city, he felt more and more
+sure that whatever that impression of him might be, it rested upon an
+essential liking. It was pleasant to Jack to feel sure of this, little as
+he might be able to justify to himself his gratification. Somehow, with
+Mrs. Upton, he didn't find himself occupied with justifying things. The
+ease that she had always made for him shone out, now, uninterruptedly, and
+as they talked, while the dear old aunt sat near, turning the leaves of a
+book, joining in with a word now and then, it was, in the main, the soft,
+sweet sense of ease, like the breath of violets in the air, that surrounded
+him. They talked of all sorts of things, or rather, as he said to himself,
+they babbled, for real talk could hardly be so discursive, so aimless,
+so merely merry. She made him think of a child playing with a lapful of
+flowers; that was what her talk was like. She would spread them out in
+formal rows, arrange them in pretty, intricate posies, or, suddenly, gather
+them into generous handfuls which she gave you with a pleased glance and
+laugh. It was queer to find a person who took all "talk" so lightly and who
+yet, he felt quite sure, took some things hard. It was like the contrast
+between her indolent face and her clear, unbiased gaze, that would not
+flinch or deceive itself from or about anything that it met. Apparently
+most of the things that it met she didn't take solemnly. The world, as far
+as he could guess, was for her mainly made up of rather trivial things,
+whether hours or people; but, with his new sense of enlightenment, he
+more and more came to realize that it might be so made up and yet, to her
+apprehension, be very bad, very sad, and very worth while too. And after
+seeing her as a child playing with flowers he could imagine her in some
+suddenly heroic rôle--as one of the softly nurtured women of the French
+Revolution, for instance, a creature made up of little gaieties, little
+griefs; of sprigged silk and gossamer, powder and patches; blossoming,
+among the horrors of a hopeless prison, into courageous graces. She would
+smile, talk, play cards with them, those doomed ones, she herself doomed;
+she would make life's last day livable, in every exquisite sense of the
+word. And he could see her in the tumbril, her arm round a terrified girl;
+he could see her mounting the steps of the guillotine, perhaps with no
+upward glance to heaven, but with a composure as resolute and as serene as
+any saint's.
+
+These were strange visions to cross his mind as they sat and talked, while
+she made posies for him, and even when they did not hover he often found
+himself dwelling with a sort of touched tenderness upon something vaguely
+pathetic in her. Perhaps it was only that he found it pathetic to see her
+look so young when, measured beside his own contrasted youth, he felt how
+old she was. It was pathetic that eyes so clear should fade, that a cheek
+so rounded should wither, that the bloom and softness and freshness that
+her whole being expressed should be evanescent. Jack was not given to such
+meditations, having a robust, transcendental indifference to earthly gauds
+unless he could fit them into ethical significances. It was, indeed, no
+beauty such as Imogen's that he felt in Mrs. Upton. He was not consciously
+aware that her loveliness was of a subtler, finer quality than her
+daughter's. She did not remind him of a Madonna nor of anything to do with
+a temple. But the very fact that he couldn't tabulate and pigeon-hole her
+with some uplifting analogy made her appeal the most direct that he had
+ever experienced. The dimness of her lashes; the Japanese-like oddity of
+her smile; the very way in which her hair turned up from her neck with an
+eddy of escaping tendrils,--these things pervaded his consciousness. He
+didn't like to think of her being hurt and unhappy, and he often wondered
+if she wasn't bound to be both. He wondered about her a great deal. He
+received, on every day they met, hints and illuminations, but never the
+clear revealment that he hoped for. The thing that grew surer and surer
+for him was her essential liking, and the thing that became sweeter and
+sweeter, though the old perplexity mingled with it, was the superficial
+amusement he caused her. One of the things that, he began to see, amused
+her a little was the catholicity of taste displayed in the books scattered
+about his rooms, the volumes of French and Italian that the great-aunt
+would take up while they talked. They were books that she felt, he was
+quite sure, as funnily incongruous with his whole significance, and that
+their presence there meant none of the things that in another environment
+they would have stood for; neither cosmopolitanism nor an unbiased
+connoisseurship interested in all the flowers--_du mal_ among the rest--of
+the human intelligence. That they meant for him his own omniscient
+appreciation, unshakenly sure of the ethical category into which he could
+place each fruit, however ominous its tainted ripeness; each flower,
+however freaked with perverse tints, left her mildly skeptical; so
+that he felt, with just a flicker of his old irritation, that the very
+plentifulness of esthetic corruption that he could display to her testified
+for her to his essential guilelessness, and, perhaps, to a blandness and
+narrowness of nature that lacked even the capacity for infection. Jack had
+to own to himself that, though he strove to make it rigorously esthetic,
+his seeing of d'Annunzio--to take at random one of the _fleurs du mal_--was
+as a shining, a luridly splendid warning of what happened to decadent
+people in unpleasant Latin countries. Such lurid splendor was as far from
+him as the horrors of the Orestean Trilogy. In Mrs. Upton's eyes this
+distance, though a distinct advantage for him, was the result of no choice
+or conflict, but of environment merely, and she probably thought that the
+problems of Nietzschean ethics were not to be solved and disposed of by
+people whom they could never touch. But all the same, and it was here that
+the atoning softness came in, he felt that she liked him the better for
+being able to see a _fleur du mal_ only as if it were a weird pressed
+product under a glass case. And if he amused her it was not because of
+any sense of superior wisdom; she didn't deny her consciousness of wider
+contrasts, but she made no claim at all for deeper insight;--the very way
+in which she talked over the sinister people with him showed that,--asking
+him his opinion about this or that and opening a volume here and there to
+read out in her exquisite French or Italian some passage whose full beauty
+he had never before so realized. Any criticism or comment that she offered
+was, evidently, of the slightest weight in her own estimation; but, there
+again one must remember, so many things seemed light to Mrs. Upton, so
+light, indeed, that he had often with her a sense of pressures removed and
+an easier world altogether.
+
+"The trouble with him--with all his cleverness and beauty--is that his
+picture isn't true," Mrs. Upton said of d'Annunzio, standing with a volume
+in her hand in the clear afternoon light.
+
+"True to him," Jack amended, alert for the displayal of his own
+comprehension.
+
+"I can't think it. Life is always, for everybody, so much more commonplace
+than he dares make it. He is afraid of the commonplace; he won't face it;
+and the revenge life takes on people who do that, people who are really
+afraid, people who attitudinize, is to infect them in some subtle, mocking
+way with the very thing they are trying to escape."
+
+"Well, but he isn't commonplace."
+
+"No; worse; he's silly." She had put down the book and taken up another,
+an older one. "Clough,--how far one must travel from d'Annunzio to come to
+him.
+
+  'It fortifies my soul to know
+  That though I perish, Truth is so.'"
+
+She meditated the Stoic flavor.
+
+"The last word of heroism, of faith," Jack said, thinking of the tumbril.
+But Valerie turned the leaf a little petulantly. "Heroism? Why?"
+
+"Why,"--as usual he was glad to show her that, if she really wanted to see
+clearly, he could show her where clearness, of the best sort, lay,--"why,
+the man who can say that is free. He has abdicated every selfish claim to
+the Highest."
+
+"Highest? Why should it fortify my soul to know that truth is 'so' if 'so'
+happens to be some man-devouring dragon of a world-power?"
+
+"Clough assumed, of course, that the truth was high--as it might be, even
+if it devoured one."
+
+"I've no use for a truth that would have no better use for me," smiled
+Valerie, and on this he tried to draw her on, from her rejection of such
+heroism, to some exposal of her own conception of truth, her own opinions
+about life, a venture in which he always failed. Not that she purposely
+eluded. She listened, grave, interested, but, when the time came for her to
+make her contribution, fingering about, metaphorically, in a purse, which,
+though not at all empty, contained, apparently, a confused medley of
+coinage. If she could have found the right coin, she would have tendered
+it gladly; but she seemed to consider a vague chink as all that could be
+really desired of her, to take it for granted that he knew that he had lost
+nothing of any value.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Sometimes he and Mrs. Upton, Tison trotting at their heels, took walks
+together, passing down the steep old streets, austere and cheerful, to the
+gardens and along the wide avenue with its lines of trees and broad strip
+of turf, on and out to the bridge that spanned the river. They enjoyed
+together the view of the pale expanse of water, placidly flowing in the
+windless sunshine, and, when they turned to come back, their favorite
+aspect of the town. They could see it, then, silhouetted in the vague grays
+and reds of its old houses, climbing from the purplish maze of tree-tops in
+the Common, climbing with a soft, jostling irregularity, to where the dim
+gold bubble of the State House dome rounded on the sky. It almost made one
+think, so silhouetted, of a Dürer etching.
+
+"Dear place," Mrs. Upton would sigh restfully, and that she was resting in
+all her stay here, resting from the demands, the adjustments, of her new
+life, he was acutely aware. Resting from Imogen. Yes, why shouldn't he very
+simply face that fact? He, too, felt, for the first time, that Imogen had
+rather tired him and that he was glad of this interlude before taking up
+again the unresolved discord where they had left it. Imogen's last word
+about her mother had been that very ominous "Wait and see," and Jack felt
+that the discord had grown, more complicated from the fact that, quite
+without waiting, he saw a great deal that Imogen, apparently, did not. He
+had seen so much that he was willing to wait for whatever else he was to
+see with very little perturbation of mind, and that, in the meanwhile, as
+many Sir Basils as it pleased Mrs. Upton to have write to her should do so.
+
+But Mrs. Upton talked a great deal about Imogen, so much that he came
+to suspect her of adjusting the conversation to some supposed craving
+in himself. She had never asked a question about his relations with her
+daughter, accepting merely with interest any signs they might choose to
+give her, but insinuating no hint of an appeal for more than they might
+choose to give. She probably took for granted what was the truth of the
+situation, that it rested with Imogen to make it a definite one. She
+did not treat him as an accepted lover, nor yet as a rejected one; she
+discriminated with the nicest delicacy. What she allowed herself to see,
+the ground she went upon, was his deep interest, his deep attachment. In
+that light he was admitted by degrees to an intimacy that he knew he could
+hardly have won so soon on his own merits. She had observed him; she had
+thought him over; she liked him for himself; but, far more than this, she
+liked him for Imogen. He often guessed, from a word or look, at a deep core
+of feeling in her where her repressed, unemphatic, yet vigilant, maternity
+burned steadily. From her growing fondness for him he could gage how fond
+she must be of Imogen. The nearness that this made for them was wholly
+delightful to Jack, were it not embittered by the familiar sense, sharper
+than ever now, of self-questioning and restlessness. A year ago, six months
+ago--no, three months only, just before her own coming--how exquisitely
+such sympathy, such understanding would have fitted into all his needs. He
+could have talked to her, then, by the hour, frankly, freely, joyously,
+about Imogen. And the restlessness now was to feel that it was just
+because of her coming, because of the soft clear light that she had so
+unconsciously, so revealingly, diffused, that things had, in some odd way,
+taken on a new color, so that the whole world, so that Imogen especially,
+looked different, so that he couldn't any longer be frank, altogether. It
+would have been part of the joy, three months ago, to talk over his loving
+perception of Imogen's little foibles and childishnesses, to laugh, with
+a loving listener, over her little complacencies and pomposities. He had
+taken them as lightly as that, then. They had really counted for nothing.
+Now they had come to count for so much, and all because of that clear,
+soft light, that he really couldn't laugh at them. He couldn't laugh at
+them, and since he couldn't do that he must keep silence over them, and
+as a result the talks about Imogen with Imogen's mother were, for his
+consciousness, a little random and at sea. Imogen's mother confidently
+based their community on a shared vision, and that he kept back his real
+impression of what he saw was made all the worse by his intuition that she,
+too, kept back hers, that she talked from his supposed point of view, as
+it were, and didn't give him a glimmer of her own. She loved Imogen, or,
+perhaps, rather, she loved her daughter; but what did she think of Imogen?
+That was the question that had grown so sharp.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the day before he and Mrs. Upton went back together to New York, Jack
+gave a little tea that was almost a family affair. Cambridge had been one
+of their expeditions, in Rose Packer's motor-car, and there Eddy Upton had
+given them tea in his room overlooking the elms of the "Yard" at Harvard.
+Jack's tea was in some sort a return, for Eddy and Rose both were there and
+that Rose, in Eddy's eyes, didn't count as an outsider was now an accepted
+fact.
+
+Eddy had taken the sudden revelation of his poverty with great coolness,
+and Jack admired the grim resolution with which he had cut down expenses
+while relaxing in no whit his hold on the nonchalant beauty. Poverty would,
+to a certain extent, bar him out from Rose's sumptuous world, and Rose did
+not seem to take him very seriously as a suitor; but it was evident that
+Eddy did not intend to remain poor any longer than he could possibly help
+it and evident, too, that his assurance in regard to sentimental ambitions
+had its attractions for her. They chaffed and sparred with each other and
+under the flippant duel there flashed now and then the encounters of a real
+one. Rose denied the possession of a heart, but Eddy's wary steel might
+strike one day to a defenceless tenderness. She liked him, among many
+others, very much. And she was, as she frequently declared, in love with
+his mother. Jack never took Rose seriously; she remained for him a pretty,
+trivial, malicious child; but to-day he was pleased by the evidences of her
+devotion.
+
+The little occasion, presided over by Valerie, bloomed for him. Everybody
+tossed nosegays, everybody seemed happy; and it was Rose, sitting in a
+low chair beside Mrs. Upton's sofa, who summed it up for him with the
+exclamation, "I do so love being with you, Mrs. Upton! What is it you do
+to make people so comfortable?"
+
+"She doesn't do anything, people who do things make one uncomfortable,"
+remarked Eddy, lounging in his chair and eating sandwiches. "She is, that's
+all."
+
+"What is she then," Rose queried, her eyes fixed with a fond effrontery on
+Valerie's face. "She's like everything nice, I know; nice things to look
+at, to hear, to taste, to smell, to touch. Let us do her portrait, Eddy,
+you know the analogy game. What flower does she remind you of? and what
+food? Acacia; raspberries and cream. What musical instrument? What animal?
+Help me, Jack."
+
+"The musical instrument is a chime of silver bells," said Jack, while
+Valerie looked from one to the other with amused interest. "And the animal
+is, I think, a bird; a bright, soft-eyed bird, that flits and poises on
+tall grasses."
+
+"Yes; that does. And now we will do you, Jack. You are like a very nervous,
+very brave dog."
+
+"And like a Christmas rose," said Valerie, "and like a flute."
+
+"And the food he reminds me of," finished Eddy, "is baked beans."
+
+"Good," said Rose. "Now, Imogen. What flower is she like? Jack, you will
+tell us."
+
+Jack looked suddenly like the nervous dog, and Rose handsomely started the
+portrait with, "Calla lily."
+
+"That's it," Eddy agreed. "And the food she's like is cold lemon-shape, you
+know the stuff I mean; and her animal,--there is no animal for Imogen; she
+is too loftily human."
+
+"Her instrument is the organ," Rose finished, as if to end as handsomely as
+she had begun; "the organ playing the Pilgrims' March from 'Tannhäuser.'"
+
+"Excellent," said Eddy.
+
+These young people had done the portrait without help and after the slight
+pause with which their analogies were received Jack swiftly summed up Rose
+as _Pâte-de-foie-gras_, gardenia, a piano, and a toy Pomeranian.
+
+"Thanks," Rose bowed; "I enjoy playing impudence to your dignity."
+
+"What's Imogen up to just now?" Eddy asked, quite unruffled by Jack's
+reflections on his beloved. "When did you see her last, Jack?"
+
+"I went down for a dress-rehearsal the day before yesterday." Jack had
+still the air of the nervous dog, walking cautiously, the hair of its back
+standing upright.
+
+"Oh, the Cripple-Hellenic affair. How Imogen loves running a show."
+
+"And how well she does it," said Rose. "What a perfect queen she would have
+made. She would have laid corner-stones; opened bazaars; visited hospitals,
+and bowed so beautifully from a carriage--with such a sense of
+responsibility in the quality of her smile."
+
+"How inane you are, Rose," said Jack. "Nothing less queen-like, in that
+decorative sense, than Imogen, can be imagined. She works day and night for
+this thing in which you pretty young people get all the sixpences and she
+all the kicks. To bear the burden is all she does, or asks to do."
+
+"Why, my dear Jack," Rose opened widely candid eyes, "queens have to work
+like fun, I can tell you. And who under the sun would think of kicking
+Imogen?"
+
+"Besides," said Eddy, rising to saunter about the room, his hands in his
+pockets, "Imogen isn't so superhuman as your fond imagination paints her,
+my dear Jack. She knows that the most decorative rôle of all is just that,
+the weary, patient Atlas, bearing the happy world on his shoulders."
+
+Mrs. Upton, in her corner of the sofa, had been turning the leaves of a
+rare old edition, glancing up quietly at the speakers while the innocent
+ripples slid on from the afternoon's first sunny shallows to these
+ambiguous depths. It was now in a voice that Jack had never heard from her
+before that she said, still continuing to turn, her eyes downcast:
+
+"How excessively unkind and untrue, Eddy."
+
+If conscious of unkindness, Eddy, at all events, didn't resort to artifice
+as Rose,--Jack still smarted from it,--had done. He continued to smile,
+taking, up a small, milky vase to examine it, while he answered in his
+chill, cheerful tones: "Don't be up in arms, mama, because one of your
+swans gives the other a fraternal peck. Imogen and I always peck at each
+other; it's not behind her back alone that I do it. And I'm saying nothing
+nasty. It's only people like Imogen who get the good works of the world
+done at all. If they didn't love it, just; if they didn't feel the delight
+in it that an artist feels in his work, or that Rose feels in dancing
+better and looking prettier than any girl in a ball-room,--that any one
+feels in self-realization,--why, the cripples would die off like anything."
+
+"It's a very different order of self-realization"; Mrs. Upton continued to
+turn her leaves.
+
+Jack knew that she was deeply displeased, and mingled with his own baffled
+vexation was the relief of feeling himself at one with her, altogether
+at one, in opposition to this implied criticism of Imogen. Together they
+shared the conviction--was it the only one they shared about Imogen?--that
+she simply cared about being good more than about anything else in the
+world; together they recognized such a purpose and such a longing as a high
+and an ennobling one.
+
+The tone of her last remark had been final. The talk passed at once away
+from Imogen and turned on Jack's last acquisitions in white porcelain and
+on his last piece of work, just returned from a winter exhibition. Eddy
+went with him into the studio to see it and Mrs. Upton and Rose were left
+alone. It was then that Mrs. Upton, touching the other's shoulder so that
+she looked up from the fur she was fastening, said, "You are not a nice
+little girl, Rose."
+
+The "little girl" stared. Anything so suave yet so firmly intended as
+unpleasant had never been addressed to her. For once in her life she was at
+a loss; and after the stare she flushed scarlet, the tears rushing to her
+eyes.
+
+"Oh, Mrs. Upton," she faltered, "what do you mean?"
+
+"Hitting in the dark isn't a nice thing to do."
+
+"Hitting in the dark?"
+
+"Yes. You know quite well."
+
+"Oh, but really, really,--I didn't mean--" Rose almost wailed. There was no
+escape from those clear eyes. They didn't look sad or angry; they merely
+penetrated, spreading dismay within her.
+
+Mrs. Upton now took the flushed face between her hands and gravely
+considered it. "_Didn't_ you?" she asked.
+
+Rose could look back no longer. Before that gaze a sense of utter darkness
+descended upon her. She felt, helplessly, like a naughty, cowering child.
+Her eyes dropped and the tears rolled down her cheeks.
+
+"Please, please forgive me. I didn't dream you'd understand. I didn't mean
+anybody to understand, except, perhaps, Eddy. I don't know why, it's odious
+of me--but Imogen does irritate me, just a little, just because she is so
+good, you know--so lovely."
+
+But this, too, Mrs. Upton penetrated. "Whether Imogen is so good and lovely
+that she irritates you is another matter. But, whatever you may think of
+her, don't,"--and here she paused a little over the proper expressing of
+Rose's misdeed,--"don't call her a calla lily," she found. And she
+finished, "Especially not before her mother, who is not so blind to your
+meaning as we must hope that Jack is."
+
+Poor Rose looked now like the naughty child after a deserved chastisement.
+
+"Oh, I am so miserable"; this statement of smarting fact was all she found
+to say. "And I do care for you so. I would rather please you than any
+one.--Can't you forgive me?"
+
+But at this point the darkness was lifted, for Mrs. Upton, smiling at last,
+put her arms around her, kissed her, and said, "Be a nice little girl."
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+Imogen, during this fortnight of her mother's absence, had time to
+contemplate her impressions of change.
+
+Their last little scene together had emphasized her consciousness of the
+many things that lay beneath it.
+
+Her mother had felt that the tears on that occasion were in part a result
+of the day's earlier encounter, muffled though it was, over Sir Basil, and
+had attempted, on ground of her own choosing, to lure her child away from
+the seeing, not only of Sir Basil--he was a mere symbol--but of all the
+things where she must know that Imogen saw her as wrong.
+
+"She wanted to blur my reason with instinct; to mesh me in the blind filial
+thing," Imogen reflected. In looking back she could feel with satisfaction
+that her reason had dominated the scene as a lighthouse beacon shines
+steadily over tossing and ambiguous waters. Satisfaction was in the vision;
+the deep content of having, as she would have expressed it, "been true to
+her light." But it was only in this vision of her own stability of soul
+that satisfaction lay.
+
+In Jack's absence, and in her mother's, she could gage more accurately what
+her mother had done to Jack. She had long felt it, that something different
+growing vaguely in him--so vaguely that it was like nothing with a definite
+edge or shape, resembling, rather, a shadow of the encompassing gloom, a
+shadow that only her own far-reaching beams revealed. As the light hovers
+on the confines of the dark she had felt--a silence.
+
+He was silent--he watched. That was the summing up of the change. He really
+seemed to convey to her through his silence that he understood her now,
+or was coming to, better than he had ever done before, better than she
+understood herself. And with the new understanding it was exactly as if he
+had found that his focus was misdirected. He no longer looked up; Imogen
+knew that by the fact that when, metaphorically, her eyes were cast down
+to meet with approbation and sweet encouragement his upturned admiration,
+vacancy, only, met their gaze. He no longer--so her beam pierced further
+and further--looked at her on a level, with the frankness of mere mutual
+need and trust. No; such silence, such watchfulness implied superiority.
+The last verge of shadow was reached when she could make out that he
+looked at her from an affectionate, a paternal,--oh, yes, still a very
+lover-like,--height, not less watchful for being tender; not less steady
+for being, still, rather puzzled. Beyond that she couldn't pierce. It was
+indeed a limit denoting a silent revolution in their relationship. When she
+came to the realization, Imogen, starting back, indignant through all her
+being, promised herself that if he looked down she, at all events, would
+never lend herself to the preposterous topsy-turvydom by looking up. She
+would firmly ignore that shift of focus. She would look straight before
+her; she would look, as she spoke, the truth. She "followed her gleam." She
+stood beside her beacon. And she told herself that her truth, her holding
+to it, might cost her a great deal.
+
+It was not that she feared to lose him,--if she chose to keep him; but it
+might be that there were terms on which she would not care to keep him. If,
+it was still an almost unimaginable "if," he could not, would not come once
+more to see clearly, then, as lover, he must be put aside, and even as
+friend learn that she had little use for a friendship so warped from its
+old attitude.
+
+Under this stoic resolve there was growing in poor Imogen a tossing of
+confused pain and alarm. She could see change so clearly, but causes were
+untraceable, an impalpable tangle.
+
+Why was it so? What had happened? What, above all, had her mother done to
+Jack?
+
+It was all about her mother that change centered, from her that it came.
+It was a web, a complexity of airy filaments that met her scrutiny. Here
+hovered her mother's smile, here her thoughtful, observant silences. There
+Sir Basil's letter; Felkin's departure; all the blurred medley of the
+times when she had talked to Jack and Mary and her mother had listened. A
+dimness, a haze, was over all, and she only escaped it, broke through it,
+when, fighting her way out to her own secure air and sunlight, she told
+herself,--as, at all events, the nearest truth to hand,--that it was about
+Jack, over him, that the web had been spun: the web of a smile that claimed
+nothing, yet that chained men; the web of a vague, sweet silence, that
+judged nothing, yet softly blighted, through its own indifference, all
+other people's enthusiasms. And again and again, during these days of
+adjustment to the clear and the confused vision, Imogen felt the salt hot
+tears burning in her throat and eyes.
+
+When Jack and her mother were both back again and he and she united in the
+mechanical interests of the tableaux, now imminent, the strangest
+loneliness lay in the fact that she could no longer share her grief, her
+fear, her anger, with Jack, He was there, near her; but he was, far, far
+away; and she must control any impulse that would draw him near.
+
+She put him to the test; she measured his worth by his power of
+recognition, his power of discrimination between her mother's instinctive
+allurements and her own high demand. But while with her mind and soul, as
+she told herself, she thus held him away, she was conscious of the inner
+wail of loneliness and unconscious that, under the steady resolution, every
+faculty, every charm she possessed, was spinning and stretching itself out
+to surround and hold him.
+
+She made no appeal, but he would feel her quiet sadness weigh upon him;
+she made no reproach, but she knew that he could but be full of pity for
+her weariness, of love for her devotedness, when her pale profile bent by
+lamplight over all the tedious work of the tableaux; knew that her patient
+"Good-night, dear Jack,--I'm too tired to stay and talk," must smite him
+with compunction and uneasiness.
+
+It was no direct communication; she used symbols to convey to him the
+significance that he seemed to be forgetting. She took him to one of Miss
+Bocock's lectures, gently disowning praise for her part in their success.
+She took him to the hospital for cripple children, where the nurses smiled
+at her and the children clambered, crutches and all, into her lap,--she
+knew how lovely she must look, enfolding cripple children. She took both
+her mother and him to her Girls' Club on the East side, where they saw her
+surrounded by adoring gratitude and enthusiasm, where she sat hand in hand
+with her "girls," all sympathy, all tenderness, all interest,--all the
+things that Jack had loved her for and that he still, of course, loved her
+for. Here she must seem to him like a sister of charity, carrying high
+her lamp of love among these dark lives. And she was careful that their
+reflected light should shine back upon her. "I want you to know a dear
+friend of mine, Jack, Miss Mc-Ginty; and this, Evangeline, is my friend,
+Mr. Pennington,"--so she would lead him up to one of the girls, bold
+and gay of eye, highly decorated of person. She knew that she left her
+reputation in safe hands with Evangeline. "Are you a friend of Miss
+Upton's? She's _fine_. We're all just crazy about her." She had, as she
+went from them, the satisfaction of hearing so much of Evangeline's crude
+but sincere pæon; they were all "just crazy" about her.
+
+And a further shining of light suggested itself to her.
+
+"Mamma darling," she said, as they were going home in the clashing,
+clattering "elevated," "you mustn't think me naughty, but I had to ask
+them--my own particular girls--to go with us to the Philharmonic. They are
+becoming so interested in their music and it will be a treat for them, will
+really mean something in their lives, will really live for them, _in_
+them."
+
+Mrs. Upton leaned forward to listen in the mingled uproar of banging doors
+and vociferous announcements from the conductor. A look of uncertainty
+crossed her face and Imogen hastened to add: "No, it's not the extravagance
+you think. I had a splendid idea. I'm going to sell that old ring that
+Grandmamma Cray left me. Rose told me once that I could get a lot of money
+for it."
+
+Swiftly flushing, her brows knitted, the din about them evidently adding to
+her perturbation, Mrs. Upton, with a sharpness of utterance that Jack had
+never heard from her, said: "Your sapphire ring? Your grandmother's ring?
+Indeed, indeed, Imogen, I must ask you not to do that!"
+
+"Why, mama dear, why?" Imogen's surprise was genuine and an answering
+severity was checked by Jack's presence.
+
+"It was my mother's ring."
+
+"But what better use could I make of it, mama? I rarely wear any ring but
+the beautiful pearl that papa gave me."
+
+"I couldn't bear to have you sell it."
+
+"But, mama dear, why? I must ask it. How can I sacrifice so much for a mere
+whim?"
+
+"I must ask you to yield to a mere whim, then. Pray give up the thought. We
+will find the money in some other way."
+
+"Of course, mama, if you insist, I must yield," Imogen said, sinking
+back in her seat beside the attentive Jack, and hoping that her mournful
+acquiescence might show in its true light to him, even if her mother's
+sentimental selfishness didn't. And later, when he very prettily insisted
+on himself entertaining the club-girls at the Philharmonic, she felt that,
+after all, no one but her mother had lost in the encounter. The girls were
+to have their concert (though they might have had many such, had not her
+mother so robbed them, there was still that wound) and she was to keep her
+ring; and she was not sorry for that, for it did go well with the pearl.
+Above all, Jack must have appreciated both her generous intention and her
+relinquishing of it. Yet she had just to test his appreciation.
+
+"Indeed I do accept, Jack. I can't bear to have them disappointed for a
+childish fancy, like that of poor mama's, and we have no right to afford it
+by any other means. Isn't it strange that any one should care more for a
+colored bit of stone than for some high and shining hours in those girls'
+gray lives?"
+
+But Jack said: "Oh, I perfectly understand what she felt about it. It was
+her mother's ring. She probably remembers seeing it on her mother's hand."
+So Imogen had, again, to recognize the edge of the shadow.
+
+They, all of them, Jack, Mary, and her mother, went with her and her girls
+to the concert. Jack had taken two boxes in the semicircle that sweeps
+round Carnegie Hall, overhanging the level sea of heads below. Rose Packer,
+just come to town, was next them, with the friends she was visiting in New
+York, two pretty, elaborately dressed girls, frothing with youthful high
+spirits, and their mother, an abundant, skilfully-girthed matron. The
+Langleys were very fashionable and very wealthy; their houses in America,
+England, Italy, their yachts and motorcars, their dances and dinners,
+furnished matter for constant and uplifted discourse in the society columns
+of the English-speaking press all over the world. Every one of Imogen's
+factory girls knew them by name and a stir of whispers and nudges announced
+their recognition.
+
+Mrs. Langley leaned over the low partition to clasp Mrs. Upton's
+hand,--they had known each other since girlhood,--and to smile benignly
+upon Imogen, casting a glance upon the self-conscious, staring girls, whose
+clothing was a travesty of her own consummate modishness as their manners
+at once attempted to echo her sweetness and suavity.
+
+"What a nice idea," she murmured to Imogen; "and to have them hear it in
+the best way possible, too. Not crowded into cheap, stuffy seats."
+
+"That would hardly have been possible, since I do not myself care to hear
+music in cheap seats. What is not good enough for me is not good enough for
+my friends. To-day we all owe our pleasure to Mr. Pennington."
+
+Mrs. Langley, blandly interested in this creditable enlightenment, turned
+to Jack with questioning about the tableaux.
+
+"We are all so much interested in Imogen's interests, aren't we? It's such
+an excellent idea. My girls are so sorry that they can't be in them. Rose
+tells me, Imogen, that there was some idea of your doing Antigone."
+
+"None whatever," said Imogen, with no abatement of frigidity. She
+disapproved of leaders of fashion.
+
+"I only meant," Rose leaned forward, "that we wanted you to, so much,"
+
+"And can't you persuade her? You would look so well, my dear child. Talk
+her over, Valerie, you and Mr. Pennington." Mrs. Langley looked back at her
+friend.
+
+"It would hardly do just now, I think," Valerie answered.
+
+"But for a charity--" Mrs. Langley urged her mitigation with a smile that
+expressed, to Imogen's irritated sensibilities, all the trite conformity of
+the mammon-server.
+
+"I don't think it would do," Valerie repeated.
+
+"Pray don't think my motive in refusing a conventional one," said Imogen,
+with an irrepressible severity that included her mother as well as Rose and
+Mrs. Langley. These two sank back in their seats and the symphony began.
+
+Resting her cheek on her hand, her elbow on her knee, Imogen leaned
+forward, as if out of the perplexing, weary world into the sphere of
+the soul. She smiled deeply at one of her girls while she fell into the
+listening harmony of attitude, and her delicate face took on a look of rapt
+exaltation.
+
+Jack was watching her, she knew; though she did not know that her own
+consciousness of the fact effectually prevented her from receiving as more
+than a blurred sensation the sounds that fell upon her ear.
+
+She adjusted her face, her attitude, as a painter expresses an idea through
+the medium of form, and her idea was to look as though feeling the noblest
+things that one can feel. And at the end of the first movement, the vaguely
+heard harmony without responding to the harmony of this inner purpose, the
+music's tragic acceptance of doom echoing her own deep sense of loneliness,
+the strange new sorrow tangling her life, tears rose beautifully to her
+eyes; a tear slid down her cheek.
+
+She put up her handkerchief quietly and dried it, glancing now at Jack
+beside her. He was making a neat entry in a note-book, technically
+interested in the rendering by a new conductor. The sight struck through
+her and brought her soaring sadness to earth. Anger, deep and gnawing,
+filled her. He had not seen her tears, or, if he had, did not care that
+she was sad. It was little consolation for her hurt to see good Mary's
+eyes fixed on her with wide solicitude. She smiled, ever so gravely and
+tenderly, at Mary, and turned her eyes away.
+
+A babble of silly enthusiasm had begun in the Langley box and Rose had
+just effected a change of seat that brought her next to her adored Mrs.
+Upton and nearer her dear Mary. Imogen almost felt that hostile forces had
+clustered behind her back, especially as Jack turned in his chair to talk
+to Mary and her mother.
+
+"Just too lovely!" exclaimed one of the younger Miss Langleys, in much the
+same vernacular as that used by Imogen's _protégées_.
+
+She looked round at these to see one yawning cavernously, on the cessation
+of uncomprehended sound; while another's eyes, drowsed as if by some
+narcotic, sought the relief of visual interest in the late-comers who filed
+in below. A third sat in an attitude of sodden preoccupation, breathing
+heavily and gazing at the Langleys and at Rose, who wore to-day a wonderful
+dress. Only a rounded little Jewess, with eyes of black lacquer set in a
+fat, acquiline face, quite Imogen's least favorite of her girls, showed a
+proper appreciation. She was as intent and as preoccupied as Jack had been.
+
+The second movement began, a movement hurrying, dissatisfied, rising in
+appeal and aspiration, beaten back; turning upon itself continually,
+continually to rise again,--baffled, frustrated, yet indomitable. And as
+Imogen listened her features took on a mask-like look of gloom. How alone
+she was among them all.
+
+She was glad in the third movement, her mind in its knotted concentration
+catching but one passage, and that given with a new rendering, to emphasize
+her displeasure by a little shudder and frown. An uproar of enthusiasm
+arose after the movement and Imogen heard one of the factory girls behind
+her, in answer to a question from her mother, ejaculate "_Fine!_"
+
+When her mother leaned to her, with the same "Wasn't it splendid?" Imogen
+found relief in answering firmly, "I thought it insolent."
+
+"Insolent? That adagio bit?"--Jack, evidently, had seen her symptoms of
+distress.--"Why, I thought it a most exquisite interpretation."
+
+"So did I," said Mrs. Upton rather sadly from behind.
+
+"It hurt me, mama dear," said Imogen. "But then I know this symphony so
+well, love it so much, that I perhaps feel intolerantly toward new
+readings."
+
+As the next, and last, movement began, she heard Rose under her breath yet
+quite loud enough, murmur, "Bunkum!" The ejaculation was nicely modulated
+to reach her own ears alone.
+
+With a deepened sense of alienation, Imogen sat enveloped by the unheard
+thunders of the final movement. Yes, Rose would hide her impertinence from
+others' ears. Imogen had noted the growing tenderness, light and playful,
+between her mother and the girl. Behind her, presently, she rustled in all
+her silks as she leaned to whisper something to Mrs. Upton--"You will come
+and have tea with me,--at Sherry's,--all by ourselves?" Imogen caught.
+
+Her mother was not the initiator, but her acquiescence was an offense, and
+to Imogen, acutely conscious of the whispered colloquy, each murmur ran
+needles of anger into her stretched and vibrating nerves. At last she
+turned eyes portentously widened and a prolonged "Ss-s-s-h" upon them.
+
+"People _oughtn't_ to whisper," Jack smiled comprehendingly at her, when
+they reached the end of the symphony; the rest of the movement having been
+occupied, for Imogen, with a sense of indignant injury.
+
+She had caught his attention, then, with her reproof. There was sudden balm
+in his sympathy. The memory of the unnoticed tear still rankled in her, but
+she was able to smile back. "Some people will always be the money-lenders
+in the temple."
+
+At once the balm was embittered. She had trusted too much to his sympathy.
+He flushed his quick, facile flush, and she was again at the confines of
+the shadow. Really, it was coming to a pass when she could venture no least
+criticism, even by implication, of her mother.
+
+But, keeping up her smile, she went on: "You don't feel that? To me,
+music is a temple, the cathedral of my soul. And the chink of money, the
+bartering of social trivialities, jars on me like a sacrilege."
+
+He looked away, still with the flush. "Aren't we all, more or less,
+worshipers or money-lenders by turn? My mind often strays."
+
+"Not to the glitter of common coin," she insisted, urging with mildness his
+own better self upon him; for, yes, rather than judge her mother he would
+lower his own ideal. All the more reason, then, for her to hold fast to her
+own truth, and see its light place him where it must. If he now thought her
+priggish,--well, that _did_ place him.
+
+"Oh, yes, it does, often," he rejoined; but now he smiled at her as though
+her very solemnity, her very lack of humor, touched him; it was once more
+the looking down of the shifted focus. Then he appealed a little.
+
+"You mustn't be too hard on people for not feeling as you do--all the
+time."
+
+Consistency did not permit her an answer, for the next piece had begun.
+
+When the concert was over, Mrs. Langley offered the hospitality of her
+electric brougham to three of them. Rose and her girls were going to a tea
+close by. Imogen said that she preferred walking and Jack said that he
+would go with her; so Mary and Mrs. Upton departed with Mrs. Langley and,
+the factory girls dispatched to their distances by subway, the young couple
+started on their way down crowded Fifth Avenue.
+
+It was a bright, reverberating day, dry and cloudless, and, as they
+walked shoulder to shoulder, their heels rang metallically on the frosty
+pavements. Above the sloping canon of the avenue, the sky stretched, a long
+strip of scintillating blue. The "Flat-Iron" building towered appallingly
+into the middle distance like the ship prow of some giant invasion. The
+significance of the scene was of nothing nobly permanent, but it was
+exhilarating in its expression of inquisitive, adventurous life, shaping
+its facile ideals in vast, fluent forms.
+
+Imogen's face, bathed in the late sunlight, showed its usual calm;
+inwardly, she was drawn tight and tense as an arrow to the bow-head, in a
+tingling readiness to shoot far and free at any challenge.
+
+A surface constraint was manifested in Jack's nervous features, but she
+guessed that his consciousness had not reached the pitch of her own
+acuteness, and made him only aware of a difference as yet unadjusted
+between them. Indeed, with a quiet interest that she knew was not assumed,
+he presently commented to her on the odd disproportion between the
+streaming humanity and its enormous frame.
+
+"If one looks at it as a whole it's as inharmonious as a high, huge stage
+with its tiny figures before the footlights. It's quite out of scale as a
+setting for the human form. It's awfully ugly, and yet it's rather
+splendid, too."
+
+Imogen assented.
+
+"We are still juggling with our possibilities," said Jack, and he continued
+to talk on of the American people and their possibilities--his favorite
+topic--so quietly, so happily, even, that Imogen felt suddenly a relaxation
+of the miserable mood that had held her during all the afternoon.
+
+His comradely tone brought her the sensation of their old, their so recent,
+relation, complete, unflawed, once more. An impulse of recovery rose in
+her, and, her mind busy with the sweet imagination, she said presently,
+reflectively, "I think I will do your Antigone after all."
+
+Completely without coquetry, and sincerely innocent of feminine wiles,
+Imogen had always known, sub-consciously as it were, for the matter seldom
+assumed the least significance for her, that Jack delighted in her personal
+appearance. She saw herself, suddenly, in all the appealing youth and
+beauty of the Grecian heroine, stamping on his heart, by means of the outer
+manifestation, that inner reality to which he had become so strangely
+blind. It was to this revelation of reality that her thought clung, and an
+added impulse of mere tenderness had helped to bring the words to her lips.
+In her essential childishness where emotion and the drama of the senses
+were concerned, she could not have guessed that the impulse, with its
+tender mask, was the primitive one of conquest, the cruel female instinct
+for holding even where one might not care to keep. At the bottom of her
+heart, a realm never visited by her unspotted thoughts, was a yearning,
+strangely mingled, to be adored, and to wreak vengeance for the faltering
+in adoration that she had felt. Ah, to bind him!--to bind him, helpless, to
+her! That was the mingled cry.
+
+Jack looked round at her, as unconscious as she of these pathetic and
+tigerish depths, but though his eye lighted with the artist's delight in
+the vision that he had relinquished reluctantly, she saw, in another
+moment, that he hesitated.
+
+"That would be splendid, dear,--but, can you go back on what you said?"
+
+"Why not? If I have found reason to reconsider my first decision?"
+
+"What reason? You mustn't do it just to please me, you know; though it's
+sweet of you, if that is the reason. Your mother, you see, agreed with you.
+I hadn't realized that she would mind. You know what she said, just now."
+
+Jack had flushed in placing his objection, and Imogen, keeping grave,
+sunlit eyes upon him, felt a flush rise to her own cheeks.
+
+"Do you feel her minding, minding in such a way, any barrier?" She was able
+to control the pain, the anger, that his hesitation gave her, the quick
+humiliation, too, and she went on with only a deepening of voice:
+
+"Perhaps that minding of hers is part of my reason. I have no right, I see
+that clearly now, to withhold what I can do for our cause from any selfish
+shrinking. I felt, in that moment when she and Mrs. Langley debated on the
+conventional aspect of the matter, that I would be glad, yes, glad, to give
+myself, since my refusal is seen in the same category as any paltry, social
+scruple. It was as if a deep and sacred thing of one's heart were suddenly
+dragged out and exhibited like a thickness of black at the edge of one's
+note-paper.
+
+"Will you understand me, Jack, when I say that I feel that I can in no way
+so atone to that sacred memory for the interpretation that was an insult;
+in no way keep it so safe, as by making it this offering of myself. It is
+for papa that I shall do it. He would have wished it. I shall think of him
+as I stand there, of him and of the children that we are helping."
+
+She spoke with her deliberate volubility, neither hesitating nor hurrying,
+her meaning, for all its grandiloquence of setting, very definite, and Jack
+looked a little dazed, as though from the superabundance of meaning.
+
+"Yes, I see,--yes, you are quite right," he said. He paused for a moment,
+going over her chain of cause and effect, seeking the particular link that
+the new loyalty in him had resented. And then, after the pause, finding it:
+"But I don't believe your mother meant it like that," he added.
+
+His eyes met Imogen's as he said it, and he almost fancied that something
+swordlike clashed against his glance, something that she swiftly withdrew
+and sheathed. It was earnest gentleness alone that answered him.
+
+"What do you think she did mean then, Jack? Please help me to see if I'm
+unfair. I only long to be perfectly fair. How can I do for her, unless I
+am?"
+
+His smoldering resentment was quenched by a sense of compunction and a
+rising hope.
+
+"That's dear of you, Imogen," he said. "You _are_, I think, unfair at
+times. It's difficult to lay one's finger on it."
+
+"But please _do_ lay your finger on it--as heavily as you can, dear Jack."
+
+"Well, the simile will do for my impression. The finger you lay on _her_ is
+too heavy. You exaggerate things in her--over-emphasize things."
+
+She was holding herself, forcing herself to look calmly at this road he
+pointed out to her, the only road, perhaps, that would lead her back to her
+old place with him. "Admirable things, you think, if one saw them truly?"
+
+"I don't know about admirable; but warm, sweet--at the worst, harmless.
+I'm sure, to-day, that she only meant it for you, for what she felt must
+be your shrinking. Of course she had her sense of fitness, too, a fitness
+that we may, as you feel, overlook when we see the larger fitness. But
+her intention was perfectly,"--he paused, seeking an expression for the
+intention and repeated,--"Sweet, warm, harmless."
+
+Imogen felt that she was holding herself as she had never held herself.
+
+"Don't you think I see all that, Jack?"
+
+"Well, I only meant that I, since coming to know her, really know her, in
+Boston, see it most of all."
+
+"And you can't see, too, how it must stab me to have papa--papa--put,
+through her trivial words, into the category of black-edged paper?"
+
+Her voice had now the note of tears.
+
+"But she _doesn't_," he protested.
+
+"Can you deny that, for her, he counts for little more than the mere
+question of convention?"
+
+Jack at this was, perforce, silent. No, he couldn't altogether deny it, and
+though it did not seem to him a particularly relevant truth he could but
+own that to Imogen it might well appear so. He did not answer her, and
+there the incident seemed to end. But it left them both with the sense of
+frustrated hope, and over and above that Jack had felt, sharper than ever
+before, the old shoot of weariness for "papa" as the touchstone for such
+vexed questions.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+Mrs. Upton expressed no displeasure, although she could not control
+surprise, when she was informed of Imogen's change of decision, and Jack,
+watching her as usual, felt bound, after the little scene of her quiet
+acquiescence, to return with Imogen, for a moment, to the subject of their
+dispute. Imogen had asked him to help her to see and however hopeless he
+might feel of any fundamental seeing on her part, he mustn't abandon hope
+while there was a stone unturned.
+
+"That's what it really was," he said to her. "You _do_ see, don't you?--to
+respond to whatever she felt you wanted."
+
+Imogen stared a little. "Of what are you talking, Jack?"
+
+"Of your mother Antigone--the black edge. It wasn't the black edge."
+
+She had understood in a moment and was all there, as fully equipped with
+forbearing opposition as ever.
+
+"It wasn't _even_ the black edge, you mean? Even that homage to his memory
+was unreal?"
+
+"Of course not. I mean that she wanted to do what you wanted."
+
+"And does she think, do you think, it's _that_ I want,--a suave adaptation
+to ideals she doesn't even understand? No doubt she attributes my change
+to girlish vanity, the wish to shine among the others. If that was what I
+wanted, that would be what she would want, too."
+
+"Aren't you getting away from the point a little?" he asked, baffled and
+confused, as he often was, by her measured decisiveness.
+
+"It seems to me that I am _on_ the point.--The point is that she cared so
+little about _him_--in either way."
+
+This was what he had foreseen that she would think.
+
+"The point is that she cares so much for you," he ventured his conviction,
+fixing his eyes, oddly deepened with this, his deepest appeal, upon her.
+
+But Imogen, as though it were a bait thrown out and powerless to allure,
+slid past it.
+
+"To gain things we must _work_ for them. It's not by merely caring,
+yielding, that one wins one's rights. Mama is a very 'sweet, warm,
+harmless' person; I see that as well as you do, Jack." So she put him in
+his place and he could only wonder if he had any right to feel so angry.
+
+The preparations for the new tableau were at once begun and a few days
+after their last uncomfortable encounter, Jack and Imogen were again
+together, in happier circumstances it seemed, for Imogen, standing in
+the library while her mother adjusted her folds and draperies, could but
+delight a lover's eye. Mary, also on view, in her handmaiden array,--Mary's
+part was a small one in the picture of the restored Alcestis,--sat gazing
+in admiration, and Jack walked about mother and daughter with suggestion
+and comment.
+
+"It's perfect, quite perfect," he declared, "that warm, soft white; and
+you have done it most beautifully, Mrs. Upton. You are a wonderful
+_costumière_."
+
+"Isn't my chlamys a darling?" said Valerie happily from below, where she
+knelt to turn a hem.
+
+"Mama won't let us forget that chlamys," Imogen said, casting a look of
+amusement upon her mother. "She is so deliciously vain about it." Imogen
+was feeling a thrill of confidence and hope. Jack's eyes, as they rested
+upon her, had shown the fondest admiration. She was in the humor, so rare
+with her of late, of gaiety and light assurance. And she thirsted for words
+of praise and delight from Jack.
+
+"No wonder that she is vain," Jack returned. "It has just the look of that
+heavenly garment that blows back from the Victory of Samothrace. The hair,
+too, with those fillets, you did that, I suppose."
+
+"Yes, I did. I do think it's an achievement. It has the carven look that
+one wants. Imogen's hair lends itself wonderfully to those long, sweeping
+lines."
+
+But, Jack, once having expressed his admiration for Imogen, seemed
+tactlessly bent on emphasizing his admiration for the mere craftswoman of
+the occasion.
+
+"Well, it's as if you had formed the image into which I'm to blow the
+breath of life. I'm really uncertain, yet, as to the best attitude." Imogen
+was listening to this with some gravity of gaze. "Do take that last
+position we decided upon, Imogen. And do you, Mary, take the place of the
+faltering old Oedipus for a moment. Look down, Imogen; yes, a strong,
+brooding tenderness of look."
+
+"Ah, she gets it wonderfully," said Valerie, still at her hem.
+
+"Not quite deep or still enough," Jack objected. "Stand back, Mary, please,
+while we work at the expression. No, that's not it yet."
+
+"But it's lovely, so. You would have found fault with Antigone herself,
+Jack," Mrs. Upton protested.
+
+"Jack is quite right, mama, pray don't laugh at his suggestions. I
+understand perfectly what he means." Imogen glanced at herself in the
+mirror with a grave effort to assume the expression demanded of her. "Is
+this better, Jack?"
+
+"Yes--no;--no, you can't get at all what I mean," the young man returned,
+so almost pettishly that Valerie glanced up at him with a quick flush.
+
+Imogen's resentment, if she felt any, did not become apparent. She accepted
+condemnation with dignified patience.
+
+"I'm afraid that is the best I can do now, though I'll try. Perhaps on the
+day of the actual performance it will come more deeply to me. There, mama
+darling, that will do; it's quite right now. I can't put myself into
+it while you sew down there. I can hardly think that I'm brooding over
+my tragic father while I see your pins and needles. Now, Jack, is this
+better?" With perfect composure she once more took the suggested attitude
+and expression.
+
+Mrs. Upton, her dusky flush deepened, rose, stumbling a little from her
+long stooping, and, steadying herself with her hand on a table, looked at
+the new effort.
+
+"No,--it's worse. It's complacent--self-conscious," burst from Jack. "You
+look as if you were thinking far more about your own brooding than about
+your father. Antigone is self-forgetting; absolutely self-forgetting." So
+his rising irritation found impulsive, helpless expression. In the slight
+silence that followed his words he was aware of the discord that he had
+crashed into an apparent harmony. He glanced almost furtively at Mrs.
+Upton. Had she seen--did she guess--the anger, for her, that had broken
+into these peevish words? She met his eyes with her penetrating depth of
+gaze, and Imogen, turning to them, saw the interchange; saw Jack abashed
+and humble, not before her own forbearance but before her mother's wonder
+and severity.
+
+Resentment had been in her, keen and sharp, from his first criticism; nay,
+from his first ignoring of her claim to praise. It rose now to a flood of
+righteous indignation. Sweeping round upon them in her white draperies,
+casting aside--as in a flash she saw it--petty subterfuge and petty fear,
+coldly, firmly, she questioned him:
+
+"I must ask you whether this is mere ill-temper, Jack, or whether you
+intentionally wish to wound me. Pray let me have the truth."
+
+Speechless, confused, Jack gazed at her.
+
+She went on, gaining, as she spoke, her usual relentless fluency.
+
+"If you would rather that some one else did the Antigone, pray say so
+frankly. It will be a relief to me to give up my part. I am very tired.
+I have a great deal to do. You know why I took up the added burden. My
+motives make me quite indifferent to petty, personal considerations.
+All that, from the first, I have had in mind, was to help, to the best
+of my poor ability. Whom would you rather have? Rose?--Mary?--Clara
+Bartlett?--Why not mama? I will gladly help any one of them with all that I
+have learnt from you as to dress and pose. But I cannot, myself, go on with
+the part if such malignant dissatisfaction is to be wreaked upon me."
+
+Jack felt his head rise at last from the submerging flood.
+
+"But, Imogen, indeed,--I do beg your pardon. It was odious of me to speak
+so. No one can do the part but you."
+
+"Why say that, Jack, when you have just told me that I do it worse and
+worse?"
+
+"It was only a momentary impression. Really, I'm ashamed of myself."
+
+"But it's your impression that is the standard in those tableaux. How can I
+do the part if I contradict your conception?"
+
+"You can't. I was in a bad temper."
+
+"And why, may I ask, were you in a bad temper?"
+
+The gaze from her serene yet awful brows was bent upon him, but under it,
+in a sudden reaction from its very serenity, its very awfulness, a firm
+determination rose in him to meet it. Turning very red but eyeing Imogen
+very straight: "I thought you inconsiderate, ungrateful, to your mother, as
+you often are," he said.
+
+For a long moment Imogen was silent, glancing presently at Mary--scarlet
+with dismay, her hastily adjusted eye-glasses in odd contrast to her
+classic draperies--and then turning her eyes upon her mother who, still
+standing near the table, was frowning and looking down.
+
+"Well, mama dear," she asked, "what have you to say to this piece of
+information? Have I, all unconsciously, been unkind? Have I been
+ungrateful? Do you share Jack's sense of injury?"
+
+Mrs. Upton looked up as though from painful and puzzling reflection.
+"My dear Imogen," she said, "I think that you and Jack are rather
+self-righteous young people, far too prone to discussing yourselves. I
+think that you were a little inconsiderate; but Jack has no call to take up
+my defense or to express any opinion as to our relations. Of course you
+will do the Antigone, and of course, when he recovers his temper,--and I
+believe he has already,--he will be very glad that you should. And now
+let's have no more of this foolish affair."
+
+None of them had ever heard her make such a measured, and, as it were,
+such a considered speech before, and the unexpectedness of it so wrought
+upon them that it reduced not only Jack but even the voluble Antigone to
+silence. But in Jack's silence was an odd satisfaction, even an elation.
+He didn't mind his own humiliation--that of an officious little boy put in
+a corner--one bit; for there in the corner opposite was Imogen, actually
+Imogen, and the sight of it gave him a shameful pleasure.
+
+Meanwhile Mrs. Upton calmly resumed her work at the hem, finished it,
+turned her daughter about and pronounced it all quite right.
+
+"Now get into warmer clothes and come down to tea, which will be here
+directly," she said.
+
+Imogen, by now, was recovered from the torpor of her astonishment.
+
+"Mary, will you come with me, I'll want your help." And then, as Mary, whom
+alone she could count as an ally, joined her, she paused before departure,
+gathering her chlamys about her. "If I am silent, mama, pray don't imagine
+that it is you who have silenced me," she said. "I certainly could not
+think of defending myself to you. My character, with all its many faults,
+speaks for itself with those who understand me and what I aim at. All I ask
+of you, mama, is not to imagine, for a moment, that you are one of those."
+
+So Antigone, white, smiling, wrathful, swept away, Mary behind her,
+round-eyed and aghast, and Valerie was left confronting the overwhelmed
+Jack.
+
+He could find not one word to say, and for some moments Valerie, too, stood
+silent, slipping her needle back and forth in her fingers and looking hard
+at the carpet.
+
+"It's all my fault!" Jack burst out suddenly. "Blundering, silly fool that
+I am! Do say that you forgive me."
+
+She did not look at him, but, still slipping her needle with the minute,
+monotonous gesture back and forth, she nodded.
+
+"But say it," Jack protested. "Scold me as much as you please. It's all
+true; I'm a prig, I know. But say that you forgive me."
+
+A smile quivered on her cheek, and putting out her hand she answered:
+"There's nothing to forgive, Jack. I lost my temper, too. And it's all mere
+nonsense."
+
+He seized her hand, and then, only then, realized from something in the
+quiver of the smile, something muffled in the lightness of her voice, that
+she was crying.
+
+"Oh!" broke from him; "oh! what brutes we are!"
+
+She had drawn her hand from his in a moment, had turned from him while she
+swiftly put her handkerchief to her eyes, and after the passage of the
+scudding rain-cloud she confronted him clearly once more.
+
+"Why, it's all my fault,--don't you know,--from the beginning," she said.
+
+He understood her perfectly. She had never been so near him.
+
+"You _know_ that's not true," he said. And then, at last, his eyes, widely
+upon her, told her on which side his sympathies were enlisted in the
+long-drawn contest between,--not between poor Imogen and herself, that was
+a mere result--but between herself and her husband.
+
+And that she understood his understanding became at once apparent to him.
+He had never seen her blush as she blushed then, and when the deep glow had
+passed she became very white and looked very weary, almost old.
+
+"No, I don't know it, Jack," she said. "And you, certainly, do not. And
+now, dear Jack, don't let us speak of this any more. Will you help me to
+clear this table for the tea-things."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So this, for Imogen, was the result of her loving impulse during the frosty
+walk down Fifth Avenue. All her sweet, wordless appeals had been in vain.
+Jack had admired her as he might have admired a marionette; her beauty had
+meant less to him than her mother's dressmaking; and as she sat alone in
+her room on that afternoon, having gently and firmly sent Mary down to tea
+with the ominous message that she cared for none, she saw that the shadow
+between her and Jack loomed close upon them now, the shadow that would blot
+out all their future, as a future together. And Imogen was frightened,
+badly frightened, at the prospect of that empty future.
+
+Her fragrant branch of life that had bloomed so fully and freshly in her
+hand, a scepter and a fairy wand of beneficence, had withered to a thorny
+scourge for her own shoulders. She looked about her, before her. She
+realized with a new, a cutting keenness, that Jack was very rich and she
+very poor. The chill of poverty had hardly reached her as yet, the warm
+certainty of its cessation had wrapped her round too closely; but it
+reached her now, and the thought of that poverty, unrelieved, perhaps, for
+all her life, the thought of the comparative obscurity to which it would
+consign her, filled her with a real panic; and, as before, the worst part
+of the panic was that she should feel it, she, the scorner of material
+things. Suppose, just suppose, that no one else came. Everything grew gray
+at the thought. Charities, friends, admiration, these were poor substitutes
+for the happy power and pride that as a rich man's adored wife would have
+been hers. And the fact that had transformed her blossoming branch into the
+thorny scourge was that Jack's adored wife she would never be. His humbled,
+his submissive, his chastened and penitent wife,--yes, on those terms; yes,
+she could see it, the future, like a sunny garden which one could only
+reach by squeezing oneself through some painfully narrow aperture. The
+fountains, the flowers, the lawns were still hers--if she would stoop and
+crawl; and for Imogen the mere imagining of herself in such a posture
+brought a hot blush to her forehead. Not only would she have scorned such
+means of reaching the life of ample ease and rich benevolence, but they
+were impossible to her nature. A garden that one must crouch to enter was
+a prison. Better, far better, her barren, dusty, lonely life than such
+humiliation; such apostasy.
+
+She faced it all often, the future, the panic, during the last days of
+preparation for the tableaux, days during which, with a still magnanimity,
+she fulfilled the tasks that she had undertaken. She would not throw up her
+part because her mother and Jack had so cruelly injured her; it was now for
+her father and for the crippled children alone that she did it.
+
+Sitting in her bedroom with its many books and photographs, the big framed
+one of her father over her bed, she promised him, her eyes on his, that
+she would have strength to face it all, for all her life if necessary. "It
+was too easy, I see that now," she whispered to him. "I had made no real
+sacrifices for _our_ thing. The drop of black blood had never yet been
+crushed out of my heart,--for when you died, it was submission that was
+asked of me, not sacrifice. It was easy, dear, to give myself to the work
+we believed in--to be tired, and strong, and glad for it--to live out
+bravely into the world--when you were beside me and when all the means of
+work were in my hand. But now I must relinquish something that I could
+only keep by being false to myself--to you--to the right. And I must go
+uphill--'yes, uphill to the very end'--accepting poverty, loneliness, the
+great need of love, unanswered. But I won't falter or forget, darling
+father. As long as I live I will fight our fight. Even if the way is
+through great darkness, I carry the light in my heart."
+
+The noble pathos of such soliloquies brought her to tears, but the tears,
+she felt, were strengthening and purifying. After drying them, after
+reading some of the deeply marked passages in the poets that he and
+she,--and, oh, alas! alas! she and Jack, lost Jack--had so often read
+together, she would go down-stairs, descend into the dusty, thorny arena
+again, feeling herself uplifted, feeling a halo of sorrowful benignity
+about her head. And this feeling was so assured that those who saw her at
+these moments were forced, to some extent, to share it.
+
+Toward her mother, toward Jack, she showed a gentle, a distant courtesy;
+to Mary a heartbreaking sweetness. Mary, perhaps, needed to have pettier
+impressions effaced, and certain memories could but fade before Imogen's
+august head and unfaltering eyes.
+
+If she had been wrong in that strange little scene of the Antigone, Mary
+was convinced that her intention had been high. Jack had hurt her too much;
+that was it; and, besides, how could she know what had gone on behind
+the scenes, passages between mother and daughter that had made Imogen's
+attitude inevitable. So Mary argued with herself, sadly troubled. "Oh,
+Imogen, please tell me," she burst forth one day, the day before the
+tableaux, when she was sitting with Imogen in the latter's room; "what is
+it that makes you so sad? Why are you so displeased with Jack? You haven't
+given him up, Imogen!"
+
+Imogen passed her hand softly over Mary's hair, recalling, as she did so,
+that the gesture was a favorite one with her father.
+
+"Won't you, can't you tell me?" Mary pleaded.
+
+"It is so difficult, dear. Given him up? No, I never do that with people I
+have cared for; but he is no longer the Jack I cared for. He is changed,
+Mary."
+
+"He adores you as much as ever,--of course I've always known how he adored
+you; it made me so happy, loving you both as I do; and he still adores you
+I'm sure. He is always watching you. He changes color when you come into
+the room."
+
+"He, too, knows and feels what ominous destinies are hanging over us,
+Mary." The deeply marked passages had been in Maeterlinck that day. "We are
+parted, perhaps forever, because he sees at last that I will not stoop.
+When one has grown up, all one's life, straight, facing the sunrise, one
+cannot bend and look down."
+
+"_You_ stoop! Why it's that that he would never let you do!"
+
+"No? You think that, after the other day? _He_ has stooped, Mary, to other
+levels. He breathes a different air from mine now. I cannot follow him into
+his new world."
+
+"You mean?--you mean?--" Mary faltered.
+
+Imogen's clear eyes told her what she meant; it did not need the slow
+acquiescence of her head nor the articulated, "Yes, I mean mama.--Poor
+mama. A little person can make great sorrows, Mary."
+
+But now Mary's good, limpid eyes, unfaltering and candid as a child's,
+dwelt on her with a new hope. "But, Imogen, it's just that: _is_ she so
+little? She isn't like you, of course. She can't lift and sustain, as you
+can. She doesn't stand for great things, as you do and as your father did.
+But I seem to feel more and more how much she could be to you.--It only
+needs-more _understanding_; and, if that's all, I really believe, Imogen
+darling, that you and Jack will be all right again. Perhaps," Mary went
+on with a terrible unconsciousness, "perhaps he has come to understand,
+already, better than you do,--I thought that, really, the other day,--and
+it's that that makes the sense of division. You are at different places of
+understanding. And he hasn't to remember, and get over, all the mistakes,
+the faults in her past; and perhaps it's because of that that he sees the
+present reality more clearly than you do. Jack is such a wonderful person
+for seeing the _real_ self of people."
+
+Imogen's steady gaze, during this speech, continued to rest unwaveringly
+upon her; Mary felt no warning in it and, when she had done, waited eagerly
+for some echo to her faith.
+
+But when Imogen spoke, it was in a voice that revealed to her her profound
+miscalculation.
+
+"_You_ do not understand, Mary. _You_ see nothing. Her present self is her
+past self, unchanged, unashamed, unatoned for. It is her mistakes, her
+faults, that Jack now stands for. It is her mistakes and faults that _I_
+must stand for, if I am to be beside him again. That would be the stooping
+that I meant. I fear that not only Jack but you are blinded, Mary. I fear
+that it is not only Jack but you that she is taking from me." Her voice was
+calm, but the steely edge of an accusation was in it.
+
+Mary sat aghast. "Taking me from you! Oh, Imogen, you don't mean that you
+won't care for me if I get fond of her!"
+
+The crudely simple interpretation brought the blood to Imogen's cheeks. "I
+mean that you can hardly be fond of us both. It is not _I_ who will cease
+to care." Under the accusation was now an added note of pain and of appeal.
+All Mary's faiths rallied to that appeal.
+
+"Imogen!" she said, timidly, like the wrong-doer she felt herself to
+be, taking the other's hand; "dear, brave, wonderful Imogen,--how _can_
+you--how _can_ you say it! Why there is hardly any one in the world who has
+counted to me as you have. Why, your mother is like a sweet child beside
+you! She hasn't faiths; she hasn't that healing, strengthening thing that
+I've always so felt in you. She could never _mean_ what you do. Oh, Imogen!
+you won't think such dreadful things, will you? You do forgive me if I have
+blundered and hurt you?"
+
+Imogen drew in the fragrant incense with long breaths; it revived her,
+filled her veins with new courage, new hope. The two girls kissed solemnly.
+They were going out together and they presently went down-stairs hand in
+hand. But as an after-flavor there lingered for Imogen, like a faint, flat
+bitterness after the incense, a suspicion that Mary, in wafting her censer
+with such energy, had been seeking to fill her own nostrils, also, with the
+sacred old aroma, to find, as well as give, the intoxication of faith.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+"Sir Basil!" Valeria exclaimed.
+
+She rose from the tea-table, where she and Jack and Mrs. Wake were sitting,
+to meet the unexpected new-comer.
+
+A gladness that Jack had never seen in her seemed to inundate her face,
+her figure, her outstretched hands; she looked young, she looked almost
+childlike, as she smiled at her friend over their clasp, and Jack saw, by
+the light of that transfiguration, how gray these last months must have
+been to her, how strangely bereft of response and admiration, how without
+savor or sweetness. He saw, and with the insight came a sharp stir of
+bitterness against the new-comer, who threw them all like this into a dull
+background, and, at the same time, a real echo of her gladness, that she
+should have it.
+
+He actually, in the sharp, swift twist of feeling, hardly remembered
+Imogen's forecasts and warnings, hardly remembered that Mrs. Upton's
+gladness and Sir Basil's beaming gaze put Imogen quite dreadfully in the
+right. He did not think of Imogen at all, nor of the desecration of the
+house of mourning by this gladness, so absorbed was he in watching it, in
+sharing it, and in being hurt by it.
+
+"Mrs. Wake, of course, is an old friend," Valerie said, leading Sir Basil
+up to the tea-table; "and here is a new one--Jack Pennington, whom you must
+quite know already, I've written so much about him. Sit down here. Tell me
+all about everything. Why this sudden appearance? Why no hint of it? Is it
+meant as a surprise for us?"
+
+"Well, Frances and Tom were coming over, you knew that--"
+
+"Of course. I wrote Frances a steamer letter the day before yesterday. You
+got in this morning with them then? They said not a word of your coming
+when I last heard from them."
+
+"I only decided to join them at the last minute. I thought that it would be
+good fun to drop upon you like this, so I didn't write. It _is_ good to see
+you again." Sir Basil, while his beam seemed to include the room and its
+inmates, included them unseeingly; he had eyes, it was evident, only for
+her. He went on to give her messages from the Pakenhams, in New York but
+for a week on their way to Canada and eager to see her at once. They would
+have come with him had they not been rather knocked up by the early rise on
+the steamer and by the long wait at the custom-house.
+
+"You must all come with me to-morrow to our tableaux," said Valerie.
+"Imogen is in them. She is out this afternoon, so you will see her for the
+first time at her loveliest. She is to be Antigone."
+
+"Oh, so I sha'n't see her till to-morrow. I've always been a bit afraid of
+Miss Upton, you know," said Sir Basil, with a smile at Jack.
+
+"Well, the first impression will be a reassuring one," said Valerie.
+"Antigone is the least alarming of heroines."
+
+"I don't know about that," Sir Basil objected, folding a slice of bread and
+butter, "A bit gruesome, don't you think?"
+
+"Gruesome?"
+
+"She stuck so to her own ideas, didn't she? Awfully rough on the poor
+fellow who wanted to marry her, insisting like that on burying her
+brothers."
+
+Valerie laughed. "Well, but that sense of duty is hardly gruesome; it would
+have been horridly gruesome to have left her brothers unburied."
+
+"You'll worst me in an argument, of course," Sir Basil replied, looking
+fondly at her; "but I maintain that she's a dreary young lady. Of course I
+don't mean to say that she wasn't an exceedingly good girl, and all that
+sort of thing, but a bit of a prig, you must allow."
+
+Jack listened to the bantering colloquy. This man, so hard, yet so kindly,
+so innocent, yet so mature, was making him feel by every tone, gesture,
+glance, oddly boyish and unformed. He was quite sure that he himself was a
+great deal cleverer, a great deal more conscious, than Sir Basil; but these
+advantages somehow assumed the aspect of schoolboy badges of good conduct
+beside a grown-up standard. And, as he listened, he began to understand far
+more deeply all sorts of things about Valerie; to see what vacancies she
+had had to put up with, to see what fullness she must have missed. And he
+began to understand what Imogen, Cassandra-like, had declared, that the
+unseasonable fragrance of devotions hovered about her widowed mother; to
+remember the ominous "Wait and see."
+
+It showed how far he had traveled when he could recall these words with
+impatience: could answer them with: "Well, what of it? Doesn't she deserve
+some compensation?"--could quietly place Sir Basil as a no longer hopeless
+adorer and feel a thrill of satisfaction, in the realization. Yes, sitting
+here here in the house of mourning he could think these things.
+
+But if he was so wide, so tolerant, the very expansion of his sympathies
+brought them a finer sensitiveness. Only a tendril-like fineness could
+penetrate the complexities of that deeper vision. He began to think of
+Imogen, and with a new pity, a new tenderness. How she would be hurt,
+and how, more than all, she would be hurt by seeing that he, while
+understanding, while sympathizing, should, helplessly, inevitably, be glad
+that Sir Basil had come. Poor Imogen,--and poor himself; for where did he
+stand among all these shiftings of the scene? He, too, knew the drifting
+loneliness and desolation, and though his heart ached for the old nearness
+he could not put out his hand to her nor take a step toward her. In
+himself, in her, was the change, or the mere fate, that held them parted.
+The wrench had come slowly upon them, but, while he ached with the pain
+of it, he could already look upon it as accomplished. Only one question
+remained to be asked:--Would nothing, no change, no fate, draw them again
+together?
+
+For all answer a deep, settled sadness descended upon him.
+
+Sir Basil took himself off before Mrs. Wake seemed to think it tactful to
+depart, and since, soon after, she too went, Jack and Valerie were left
+alone together.
+
+She turned her bright, soft eyes upon the young man and he recognized in
+them the unseeing quality that he had found in Sir Basil's--that happy
+preoccupation with inner gladness. She made him think of the bird alighted
+to sing on the swaying blade; and she made him think of a fountain released
+from winter and springing through sunlight in a murmur and sparkle of
+ecstasy. She was young, very young; he almost felt her as young in her
+gladness as he in his loneliness and pain. Smiling a trifle nervously, he
+said that he was glad, at last, to see something of her old life. "Of your
+real life," he added.
+
+"My real life?" she repeated, and her look became more aware of him.
+
+"Yes. Of course, in a sense, all this is something outlived, cast aside,
+for you. You've only taken it up for a bit while you felt that it had a
+claim upon you; but, once you have settled things, you would,--you would
+leave us, of course," said Jack, still smiling.
+
+She was thinking of him now, no longer of herself and of Sir Basil, and
+perhaps, as she looked at him, at the thin brown face, the light, deep
+eyes, she guessed at a stir of tears under the smile. It was then as if the
+fountain sank from its own happy solitude and became a running brook of
+sweetness, sad, yet merry. She didn't contradict him. She was sorry that
+she couldn't, yet glad that his statement should be so obviously true.
+
+"You mean that I'll go back to my little Surrey cottage, when I settle
+things?" she said. "Perhaps, yes. And you will miss me? I will miss you
+too, dear Jack. But we will often see each other. And then it may take a
+long time to settle all you young people."
+
+Her confidence so startled him, so touched him with pity for its blindness,
+that, swiftly, he took refuge in ambiguity.
+
+"Oh, you'll settle us!" he said, wondering in what that settling would
+consist, wondering what would happen if Imogen, definitely casting him off,
+to put the final settling in that form, were left on her mother's hands.
+She would have to settle Imogen in America and what, in the meanwhile,
+would become of her "real" life?
+
+But from the mother's confidence, her radiance, that accepted his speech
+in its happiest meaning, he guessed that she didn't foresee such a
+contingency; he even guessed that, were she brought face to face with it,
+she wouldn't accept its unsettling of her own joy as final. The fountain
+was too strong to heed such obstacles. It would find its way to the
+sunlight. Imogen, in time, would have to accept a step-father.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+
+Jack did not witness the revelation to Imogen of the ominous arrival, but
+from her demeanor at lunch next day he could guess at how it had impressed
+her. He felt in her an intense, a guarded, excitement, and knew that the
+news had fallen upon her with a tingling concussion. The sound of the
+thunder-bolt must reverberate all the louder in Imogen's ears from her
+consciousness that to Mary's it was soundless, Mary, who had been the
+only spectator of its falling. Her mother, too, was unconscious of such
+reverberations, so that it must seem to her a ghost-like subjective
+warning, putting into audible form all her old hauntings.
+
+That she at once sought in him evidences of the same experience, Jack
+felt, and all through the early lunch, where they assembled prior to his
+departure with the two girls for the theater, he avoided meeting Imogen's
+eyes. He was too sure that she felt their mutual knowledge as a bond over
+the recent chasm. The knowledge in his own eyes was far too deep for him to
+allow her to wade into it; she would simply drown. He was rather ashamed of
+himself, but he resolutely feigned a cheerful unconsciousness.
+
+"You are going with your friends, later?" he asked Valerie, who, he was
+quite sure, also feigning something, said that since Imogen and Mary
+dressed each other so well, and since he would be there to see that every
+detail was right, she, with the Pakenhams and Sir Basil, would get her
+impression from the stalls. Afterward, they would all meet here for tea.
+
+"It was a surprise, you know, their coming," Imogen put in suddenly, from
+her end of the table, fixing strangely sparkling eyes upon Jack.
+
+"No," said her mother, in tones of leisurely correction, "I expected the
+Pakenhams, as I told you."
+
+"Oh, yes; it was only Sir Basil's surprise. You didn't expect him. Does he
+like playing surprises on people, mama?"
+
+"I don't know that he does."
+
+"He only plays them on you."
+
+"I knew that he was coming, at some time."
+
+"Ah, but you didn't tell me that; it was, in the main, _my_ surprise, then;
+but not so soon, I suppose."
+
+"So soon? So soon for what?"
+
+Imogen, at this, allowed her badly adjusted mask of lightness to fall and a
+sudden solemnity overspread her features.
+
+"Don't you feel it rather soon for friends to play pranks, mama?"
+
+The words seemed to erect a catafalque before their eyes, but, facing the
+nodding blackness with a calm in which Jack detected the glint of steel,
+Valerie answered: "I am not aware that they have been playing pranks."
+
+For all the way to the theater Imogen again assumed the mask, talking
+exclusively to Mary. She talked of these friends of her mother's, of Sir
+Basil, Mr. and Mrs. Pakenham, what she had heard of them; holding up, as if
+for poor, frightened Mary's delectation, an impartial gaily sketched little
+portrait of their oddities. It was as if she felt it her duty to atone
+to Mary by her lightness and gaiety for the gloom that had overspread the
+lunch; as if she wished to assure Mary that she wouldn't allow her to
+suffer for other people's ill-temper,--Mrs. Upton had certainly been very
+silent for the rest of that uncomfortable meal,--as if it were for Mary's
+sake that she were assuming the mask, behind which, as Jack must know, she
+was in torture.
+
+"I'm glad you're to see them, Mary darling; they will amuse you. From your
+standpoint of reality, the standpoint of Puritan civilization--the deepest
+civilization the world has yet produced; the civilization that judges by
+the soul--you will be able to judge and place them as few of our people
+are, as yet, developed enough to do. They are of that funny English type,
+Mary, the leisured; their business in life that of pleasure seeking; their
+social service consisting in benevolent domination over the servile classes
+beneath them. Oh, they have their political business, too; we mustn't be
+unfair; though that consists, in the main, for people of their type, in
+maintaining their own place as donors and in keeping other people in the
+place of recipients. In their own eyes, I'm quite sure, they are useful,
+as upholding the structure of English civilization. You'll find them
+absolutely simple, absolutely self-assured, absolutely indifferent, quite
+charming,--there's no reason why they shouldn't be; but their good manners
+are for themselves, not for you,--one must never forget that with the
+English. Do study them, Mary. We need to keep the fact of them clearly
+before us, for what they represent is a menace to us and to what we mean.
+I sometimes think that the future of the world depends upon which ideal
+is to win, ours or the English. We must arm ourselves with complete
+comprehension. Already they have infected the cruder types among us."
+
+These were all sentiments that in the past, Mary felt sure, Jack must have
+acquiesced in and approved of, and yet she felt surer that Imogen's manner
+of enunciating them was making Jack very angry. She herself did not find
+them as inspiring as she might have expected, and looking very much
+frightened and flurried she murmured that as she was to go back to Boston
+next day she would not have much opportunity for all this observation.
+"Besides--I don't believe that I'm so--so wise--so civilized, you know, as
+to be able to see it all."
+
+"Oh, Imogen will tell you what to see!" said Jack.
+
+"It's very kind of her, I'm sure," poor Mary faltered. She could have burst
+into tears. These two!--these beloved two!
+
+Meanwhile, at a little later hour, Valerie and Mrs. Wake made their way to
+the theater, there to meet the group of friends from whom they had parted
+in England six months before.
+
+The Pakenhams, full of question and comment, were intelligently amassing
+well-assorted impressions of the country that was new to them. Sir Basil,
+though cheerfully pleased with all to which his attention was drawn, showed
+no particular interest in his surroundings. His concentration was entirely
+for his regained friend.
+
+After her welcoming radiance of the day before, Valerie looked pale and
+weary, and when, with solicitude, he asked her whether she were not tired,
+she confessed to having slept badly.
+
+"She's changed, you know," Sir Basil said to Mrs. Pakenham, when they were
+settled in their seats, and Valerie, beside him, was engaged in pointing
+out people to Tom Pakenham. "It's been frightfully hard on her, all this,
+I'm sure."
+
+"She's as charming as ever," said Mrs. Pakenham.
+
+"Oh, well, that could never change. But what a shame that she should have
+had, all along, such a lot to go through." Sir Basil, as a matter of
+course, had the deepest antipathy for the late Mr. Upton.
+
+The tableaux struck at once the note of success. Saved by Jack's skill from
+any hint of waxwork or pantomime, their subtle color and tranquil light
+made each picture a vision of past time, an evocation of Hellenic beauty
+and dignity.
+
+Cassandra in her car--her face (oh, artful Jack!) turned away,--awful
+before the door of Agamemnon; Iphigenia, sleeping, on her way to the
+sacrifice; Helen, before her husband and Hecuba; Alcestis, returning from
+the grave, and Deianira with the robe. The old world of beauty and sorrow,
+austere and lovely in its doom, passed before modern eyes against its
+background of sky, grove, and palace steps.
+
+"And now," said Valerie, when the lights sprang out for the interval, "now
+for your introduction to Imogen. They have made her the climax, you see."
+
+"He did, you mean. The young man."
+
+"Yes, Jack arranged it all."
+
+"He's the one you wrote of, of course, who admires her so tremendously."
+
+"He is the one."
+
+"In fact he'll carry her off from you some day, soon, eh?" Sir Basil
+ventured with satisfaction in his own assurance. He, too, felt that Imogen
+must be "settled."
+
+"I suppose so," said Valerie. "I couldn't trust her to any one more
+happily. He understands her and cares for her absolutely."
+
+Sir Basil at this ventured a little further, voicing both satisfaction and
+anxiety with: "So, then, you'll come back--to--to Surrey."
+
+"Yes, then, I think, I can come back to Surrey," Valerie replied.
+
+The heart of her feeling had always remained for him a mystery, and her
+acquiescence now might mean a great deal, everything, in fact, or it might
+mean only her gliding composure before a situation that she had power to
+form as she would. He could observe that her color rose. He knew that she
+blushed easily. He knew, too, that his own feeling was not hidden from her
+and that the blush might be for her recognition only; yet he was occupied
+with the most hopeful interpretations when the curtain rose. A moment after
+its rising Valerie heard him softly ejaculate, "I say!" She could have
+echoed the helplessly rudimentary, phrase. She, too, gazed, in a stupor
+of delight; a primitive emotion in it. The white creature standing there
+before them, with her forward poise, her downcast yet upgazing face, was
+her child. Valerie, since her return to her home, had given little time
+to analysis of her own feeling, the stress of her situation had been too
+intense for leisurely self-observation. But in the upwelling of a strange,
+a selfless, joy she knew, now, how often she had feared that all the joy of
+maternity was dead in her; killed, killed by Imogen.
+
+The joy now was a passing ray. The happy confusion of admiration, wonder,
+and pride was blotted out by the falling gloom of reality. It was her
+child who stood there, but the bond between them seemed, but for the ache
+of rejected maternity at her heart, a pictorial one merely. Tears of
+bitterness involuntarily filled her eyes as she looked, and Imogen's form
+seemed to waver in a dim, an alien atmosphere.
+
+When the curtain fell on the Antigone who kept her pose without a tremor,
+the uproar of applause was so great that it had to rise, not only twice,
+but three times. At the last, a faint wavering shook slightly the
+Antigone's sculptured stillness and poor old Oedipus rocked obviously upon
+his feet.
+
+"What a shame to make her keep it up for so long!" murmured Sir Basil, his
+face suffused with sympathy. The symptom of human weakness was a final
+touch to the enchantment.
+
+"Well, it makes one selfish, such loveliness!" said Mrs. Pakenham, flushed
+with her clapping. "Valerie, dear, she is quite too lovely!"
+
+"Extraordinarily Greek, the whole thing," said Tom Pakenham; "the
+comparative insignificance of facial expression and the immense
+significance of attitude and outline."
+
+"But the face!" Sir Basil turned an unseeing eye upon him, still wrapped,
+it was evident, in the vision that, at last, had disappeared. "The figure
+is perfect; but the face,--I never saw anything so heavenly."
+
+Indeed, in its slightly downcast pose, the trivial lines of Imogen's nose
+and chin had been lost; the up-gazing eyes, the sweep of brow and hair, had
+dominated and transfigured her somewhat tamely perfect countenance.
+
+"Do you know, I'm more afraid of her than ever," said Sir Basil to Valerie
+on their way home to tea, in the cab. "I wasn't really afraid before. I
+could have borne up very well; but now--it's like knowing that one is to
+have tea with a seraph."
+
+Jack, Imogen, and Mary were not yet arrived when they reached the house;
+but by the time the tea was on the table and Valerie in her place behind
+the urn, they heard the cab drive up and the feet of the young people on
+the stairs.
+
+Jack entered alone, saying that Mary and Imogen were gone to take off their
+wraps. Yes, he assured Valerie, they had promised to keep on their Grecian
+robes for tea.
+
+Valerie introduced him to the Pakenhams and led the congratulations on his
+triumph. "For it really is yours, Jack, as much as if you had painted the
+whole series of pictures."
+
+Jack, looking shy, turned from one to the other as they seconded her
+enthusiasm,--Mrs. Pakenham, with her elaborately formal head and china-blue
+eyes; her husband, robust and heavy; Sir Basil, still with his benignant,
+unseeing quality. Among them all, in spite of Mrs. Wake's keen, familiar
+visage, in spite of Valerie's soft glow, he felt himself a stranger. He
+even felt, with a little stab of ill-temper, that there had been truth
+in Imogen's diagnosis. They were kindly, but they were tremendously
+indifferent. They didn't at all expect you to be interested in them; but
+that hardly atoned for the fact that they weren't interested in you. For
+Jack, life was made up of vigilant, unceasing interest, in himself and in
+everybody else.
+
+"Ah, were they all taken from your pictures?" Sir Basil asked him,
+strolling up to the mantelpiece to examine a photograph of Imogen that
+stood there.
+
+Jack explained that he could claim no such gallery of achievement. He had
+made a few sketches for each tableau; his work had been, in the main, that
+of stage-manager.
+
+"Oh, I see," said Sir Basil, not at all abashed by his blunder. "Nicer than
+lay figures to work with, eh? all those pretty young women."
+
+"I don't use lay figures, at any time. I'm a landscape painter," Jack
+explained, somewhat stiffly. He surmised that had he been introduced as
+Velasquez Sir Basil would have been quite as unmoved, just as he would have
+been quite as genially inclined had he been introduced as a scene-painter.
+
+"I used to think I'd go in for something of that sort in my young days,"
+said Sir Basil, holding Imogen's photograph; "and I dabbled a bit in
+water-color for a time. Do you remember that little sketch of the Hall,
+done from the beech avenue, Mrs. Upton? Not so bad, was it?"
+
+"Not at all bad," said Valerie; "but we can't use such negatives for Jack's
+work. It's very seriously good, you know. It's anything but dabbling."
+
+"Oh, yes; I know that you are a real artist," Sir Basil smiled at Jack from
+the photograph. "This doesn't do her justice, does it?"
+
+"Imogen? No; it's a frightful thing," said Jack over-emphatically.
+
+Mrs. Pakenham asked to see it and pronounced that, for her part, she
+thought it excellent.
+
+"You ought to paint her portrait," Sir Basil continued, looking at Jack,
+who had, once more, to explain that landscape was his only subject. He
+guessed from the something at once benign and faintly quizzical in Sir
+Basil's regard, that to all these people he was significant, in the main,
+as Imogen's lover, and the intuition vexed him still further.
+
+Imogen's entrance, startling in its splendid incongruity, put an end to his
+self-consciousness and absorbed him in contemplation.
+
+Imogen revealed herself newly, even to him, to-day. It wasn't the old
+Imogen of stateliness, graciousness, placidity, nor the later one of gloom
+and anger. This Imogen, lovely, with her flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes,
+was deeply excited, deeply self-forgetful. She, too, was absorbed in her
+intense curiosity, her feverish watchfulness.
+
+She said nothing while her mother introduced her to the new-comers, who all
+looked a little taken aback, as though the resuscitated Grecian heroine
+were indeed among them, and stood silently alert near the tea-table,
+handing the cups of tea, the cakes and scones, for Jack and Sir Basil
+to pass round. Her arms were bare and her slender bare feet, laced with
+gold-clasped fastenings, showed on her white sandals. Jack saw that Sir
+Basil's eyes were fixed on her with an expression of wonder.
+
+He asked her, as he took the last cup from her, if she were not cold, and,
+gentle, though unsmiling, Imogen replied, "Oh, no!" glancing at the roaring
+wood fire, that illuminated her whiteness as if with a sacrificial glow.
+
+"Do sit down and have your tea, Imogen; you must be very tired," her mother
+said, with something of the chill that the scene at the lunch-table had
+diffused still in her voice.
+
+"Not very, thanks, mama dear," said Imogen; and, more incongruous in
+loveliness than before, she sat down in a high-backed chair at some little
+distance from the tea-table. Sir Basil, as if with a sort of helplessness,
+remained beside her.
+
+"Yes, it was a great success, wasn't it?" Jack heard her replying
+presently, while she drank the tea with which Sir Basil had eagerly
+supplied her. "I'm so glad."
+
+"You liked doing it, didn't you? You couldn't have done it, like
+that--looked like that, if you hadn't cared a lot about it," Sir Basil
+pursued.
+
+Imogen smiled a little and said that she didn't know that she had liked
+doing her part particularly,--it was of her crippled children that she was
+thinking. "We'll be able to get the Home now," she said.
+
+"It was for cripple children?"
+
+"Didn't you know? I should have thought mama would have told you. Yes, it
+all meant that, only that, to me. We gave the tableaux to get enough money
+to buy a country home for them."
+
+"You go in a lot for good works, I know," said Sir Basil, and Imogen,
+smiling again, with the lightness rooted in excitement, answered: "They go
+in for me, rather. All the appeals of suffering seem to come to one and
+seize one, don't they? One never needs to seek causes."
+
+Jack watched them talk, Imogen, the daughter of the dead, rejected husband,
+and Sir Basil, her mother's suitor.
+
+Mary had come in now, late from changing her dress, which at the last
+moment she had felt too shy to appear in. She was talking to Mrs. Wake and
+the Pakenhams.
+
+Standing, a somewhat brooding onlooker, becoming conscious, indeed, of the
+sense, stronger than ever, of loneliness and bereavement, he heard Mrs.
+Upton near him say, "Sit down here, Jack."
+
+She showed him a chair beside her, in the corner, between her tea-table,
+the window, and the fire. She, too, was for the moment isolated; she, too,
+no doubt, had been watching; and now she talked to him, not at all as if
+she had felt that he were lonely and were making it up to him, but, once
+more, like the child happily gathering and holding out nosegays to another
+child.
+
+A controlled excitement was in her, too; and he felt still that slight
+strain of the lunch-table, as if Imogen's catafalque had marred some
+too-trustful assurance; but a growing warmth was diffused through it, and,
+as her eyes turned once or twice on Imogen and Sir Basil, he saw the cause.
+
+The possibility that her daughter might make friends with her suitor, the
+solvent, soothing possibility that, if realized, would so smooth her path,
+had come to her. And in their quiet fire-lit corner, shut the closer into
+their isolation by the talk that made only a confused murmur about them, he
+felt a new frankness in her, as though the hope of the hour effaced ominous
+memories and melted her reserves and discretions, making it wholly natural
+to draw near him in the implied avowal of shared outlooks.
+
+"I believe that Imogen and Sir Basil are going to get on together," she
+said; "I believe that she likes him already. I so want them to be friends.
+He is such a friend of mine."
+
+"They look friendly," said Jack; "I think I can always tell when Imogen is
+going to like people." He did not add that, with his new insight about
+Imogen, he had observed that it was people over whom she had power that
+Imogen liked. And already he seemed to see that Imogen would have some sort
+of power over Sir Basil.
+
+"And I can always tell when he is going to like people. He thinks her
+wonderful," said Valerie. She exchanged her knowledge with him; it was
+touching, the way in which, blind to deep change in him, she took for
+granted his greater claim to the interpretation of Imogen. She added: "It
+is a very propitious beginning, I think."
+
+"How long is Sir Basil going to stay here?" Jack asked.
+
+"All summer. He goes to Canada with the Pakenhams, and out to the West, for
+a glimpse of the changes since he was here years and years ago; and then I
+want him to come to Vermont, to us. You and Imogen will both get to know
+him well there. Of course you are coming; Imogen told me that she asked you
+long ago."
+
+"Yes; I shall enjoy that immensely," the young man answered, with, for his
+own consciousness, a touch of irrepressible gloom. He didn't look forward
+to the continuation of the drama, to his own lame and merely negative part
+in it, at the close quarters of a house-party among the Vermont hills.
+
+And as if Valerie bad felt the inner doubt she added suddenly, on a
+different key, "You really will enjoy it, won't you?"
+
+He looked up at her. Her face, illuminated by the firelight, though dimmed
+against the evening blue outside, was turned on him with its sudden
+intentness and penetration of gaze.
+
+"Why, of course," he almost stammered, confused by the unexpected scrutiny.
+
+"I shall love having you, you know," she said.
+
+"I shall love being with you," he answered, now without a single inner
+reserve.
+
+Her intentness seemed to soften, there was solicitude and a sort of
+persuasiveness in it. "And you will have a much better chance of really
+adjusting things there--your friendship with Imogen, I mean. The country
+smoothes things out. Things get sweet and simple."
+
+He didn't know what to say. Her mistake, if it were one, was so inevitable.
+
+"Imogen will have taken her bearings by then," she went on. "She has had so
+much to get accustomed to, to bear with, poor child; her great bereavement,
+and--and a mother who, in some ways, must always be a trial to her."
+
+"Oh, a trial!"--Jack lamely murmured.
+
+"I recognize it, Jack. I think that you do. But when she makes up her mind
+to me, and discovers that, at all events, I don't interfere with anything
+that she really cares about, she will be able to take up all her old
+threads again."
+
+"I--I suppose so," Jack murmured.
+
+He had dropped his eyes, for he knew that hers were on him. And now, in a
+lowered voice, he heard her say, "Jack, I hope that you will help me with
+Imogen."
+
+"Help you? How do you mean?" startled, he looked up.
+
+"You know. Interpret me to her now and then, when you can, with kindliness.
+You understand me so much more kindly than she does."
+
+His eyes fixed on hers, deeply flushing--"Oh, but,"--he breathed out with
+almost a long sigh,--"that's what I have done, you see, ever since--"
+
+"Ever since what?"
+
+"Since I came to understand you so much better than she does."
+
+There was a long pause now and, the firelight flickering low, he could
+hardly see her face. But he recognized change in her voice as she said:
+"You have? I don't mean, you know, taking my side in disputes."
+
+"I know; I don't mean that, either, though, perhaps, I can't help doing it;
+for," said Jack, "it's on your side that I am, you know."
+
+The change in her voice, but controlled, kept down, she answered quickly,
+
+"Ah, but, dear Jack, I don't want to have a side. It's that that I want her
+to realize. I want her to feel that my side is hers. I want you to help me
+in making her feel it."
+
+"But she'll never feel it!" Jack breathed out again. Behind the barrier
+of the tea-table, in the flickering dimness, they were speaking suddenly
+with a murmuring, yet so sharp a confidence; a confidence that in broad
+daylight, or in complete solitude, might have seemed impossible. All sorts
+of things must steal out in that persuasive, that peopled yet solitary,
+twilight.
+
+He knew that Valerie's eyes dwelt on him with anxiety and that it was with
+a faint, forced smile that she asked him: "She doesn't think that I'll ever
+reach her side?"
+
+"_I_ don't believe you ever will," said Jack. Then, for he couldn't bear
+that she should misunderstand him for another moment, misunderstanding
+when they had come so far was too unendurable, he went on in a hurried
+undertone: "You aren't on her side, really. You can never be on her side.
+You can never be like her, or see like her. And I don't want you to. It's
+you who see clearly, not she. It's you who are all right."
+
+Her long silence, after this, seemed to him like the hovering of hands upon
+him; as though, in darkness, she sought by touch to recognize some strange
+object put before her.
+
+"But then,--" she, too, only breathed it out at last,--"but then,--you are
+not on _her_ side."
+
+"That's just it," said Jack. He did not look at her and she was silent once
+more before his confession.
+
+
+"But," she again took up the search, "that is terrible for her, if she
+feels it."
+
+"And for me, too, isn't it?" he questioned, as if he turned the surfaces of
+the object beneath her fingers.
+
+The soft, frightened hover seemed to go all over it, to recognize it
+finally, and to draw back, terrified, from recognition.
+
+"Most terrible of all for me, if I have come between you," she said.
+
+Her pain pierced him so, that he put out his hand and took hers. Don't
+think that; you mustn't think that, not for a moment. It's not that you
+came between us. It's only that, because of you, I began to see things--as
+I hadn't seen them. It was just,--well, just like seeing one color change
+when another is put beside it. Imogen's blue, now that your gold has come,
+is turned to green; that's all that has happened."
+
+"All that has happened! Do you know what you are saying, Jack! If my gold
+were gone, would the blue come back again?"
+
+"The blue will never come back," said Jack.
+
+He felt, as her hand tightened on his, that he would have liked to put his
+head down on her knees and sob like a little boy; but when she said, "And
+the green you cannot care for?" his own hand tightened as if they clutched
+some secret together, some secret that neither must dare look at. "You
+mustn't think that--you mustn't. And I mustn't." He said it with all the
+revolt and all the strength of his will and loyalty; with all his longing,
+too. "The real truth is that the green can't care for me unless I will see
+it back to blue again--and as I can't do that, and as it won't accept my
+present vision, there is a sort of dead-lock."
+
+For a long moment her hand continued to grasp his, before, as if taking in
+the ambiguous comfort of his final definiteness, it relaxed and she drew it
+away.
+
+"Perhaps she will care enough," she said.
+
+"To accept my vision? To forego blue? To consent that I shall see her as
+green?"
+
+"Yes, when she has taken up all the threads."
+
+"Perhaps she will," said Jack.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+
+It was a few days after this, just before Jack's return to Boston--and the
+parting now was to be until they met in Vermont--that he and Imogen had
+another walk, another talk together.
+
+The mid-May had become seasonably mild and, at Jack's suggestion, they had
+taken the elevated cars up to Central Park for the purpose of there seeing
+the wistaria in its full bloom.
+
+They strolled in the sunlight under arbors rippling all over with the
+exquisite purple, dark and pale, the thin fine leaves of a strange
+olive-green, the delicate tendrils; they passed into open spaces where,
+on gray rocks, it streamed like the tresses of a cascade; it climbed and
+heaped itself on wayside trellises and ran nimbly, in a shower of fragile
+color, up the trunks, along the branches, of the trees. Jack always
+afterward associated the soft, falling purple, the soft, languorous
+fragrance, the almost uncanny beauty of the wistaria, with melancholy and
+presage.
+
+Imogen, for the first time since her father's death, showed a concession to
+the year's revival in a transparent band of white at her neck and wrists.
+Her little hat, too, was of transparent black, its crape put aside. But,
+though she and the day shared in bloom and youthfulness, Jack had never
+seen her look more heavily bodeful; had never seen her eyes more fixed, her
+lips more cold and stern. The excitement that he had felt in her was gone.
+Her curiosity, her watchfulness, had been satisfied, and grimly rewarded.
+She faced sinister facts. Jack felt himself ready to face them, too.
+
+They had spoken little in the clattering car, and for a long time after
+they reached the park and walked hither and thither among its paths,
+following at random the beckoning purple of the wistaria, neither spoke
+of anything but commonplaces; indicating points of view, or assenting to
+appreciations. But Imogen said at last, and he knew that with the words she
+led him up to those facts: "Do you remember, Jack, the day we met mama, you
+and I, on the docks?"
+
+Jack replied that he did.
+
+"What a different day from this," said Imogen, "with its frosty glory, its
+challenge, its strength."
+
+"Very different."
+
+"And how different our lives are," said Imogen.
+
+He did not reply for some moments, and it was then to say gently that he
+hoped they were not so different as, perhaps, they seemed.
+
+"It is not I who have changed, Jack," said Imogen, looking before her. And
+going on, as though she wished to hear no reply to this: "Do you remember
+how we felt as the steamer came in? We determined that _she_ should change
+nothing, that we wouldn't yield to any menace of the things we were then
+united in holding dear. It's strange, isn't it, to see how subtly she has
+changed everything? It's as if our frosty, sparkling landscape, all wind
+and vigor and discipline, were suddenly transformed to this,--" Imogen
+looked about her at the limpid day,--"to soft yielding, soft color, soft
+perfume,--it's like mama, that fragrance of the wistaria,--to something
+smiling, languid, alluring. This is the sort of day on which one drifts.
+Our past day was a day of steering."
+
+As much as for the meaning of her careful words, Jack felt rising in him an
+anger against the sense of a readiness prepared beforehand. "You describe
+it all very prettily, Imogen," he answered, mastering the anger. "But I
+don't agree with you."
+
+"You seldom do now, Jack. Perhaps it's because I've remained in my own
+climate while you have been borne by the 'warm, sweet, harmless' current
+into this one."
+
+"I am not conscious of any tendency to drift, Imogen. I still steer. I
+intend, very firmly, always to steer."
+
+"To what, may I ask?"
+
+He was silent for a moment; then said, lifting eyes in which she read
+all that new steeliness of opposition, with, yet, in it, through it, the
+sadness of hopeless appeal: "I believe in all our ideals--just as I used
+to."
+
+To this Imogen made no rejoinder.
+
+"Do you like Sir Basil?" she asked presently, after, for some time, they
+had turned along the windings of a long path in a heavy silence.
+
+"I've hardly seen him." Jack's voice had a forced lightness, as though for
+relief at the change of subject; but he guessed that the change was only
+apparent. "He is very nice; very delightful looking."
+
+"Yes; very delightful looking. Do you happen to remember what I said to you
+about him, long ago, in the winter? About him and mama?"
+
+"Yes"; Jack flushed; "I remember."
+
+"I told you to wait."
+
+"Yes; you told me to wait."
+
+"You will own now, I hope, that I was right."
+
+"Right in thinking that he--that they were more than friends?"
+
+"Right in thinking that he was in love with her; that she allowed it."
+
+"I suppose you were right."
+
+"I was right. And it's more than that now. I have every reason to believe
+that she intends to marry him."
+
+He ignored her portentous pause and drop of the voice, walking on with
+downcast eyes. "You mean, it's an accepted thing?"
+
+"Oh, no! not yet accepted. Mama respects the black edge, you know. But I
+heard Mrs. Wake and Mrs. Pakenham talking about it."
+
+"Heard? How could you have heard?" Jack's eyes, stern with accusation, were
+now upon her.
+
+It was impossible for Imogen to lie consciously, and though she had not,
+in her eagerness that he should own her right and share her reprobation,
+foreseen this confrontation, she held, before it, all the dignity of full
+sincerity.
+
+"You are changed, indeed, Jack, when you can suspect me of eavesdropping! I
+was asleep on the sofa in the library, worn out with work, and I woke to
+hear them talking in the next room, with the door ajar. I did not realize,
+for some moments, what was being said. And then they went out."
+
+"Of course I don't suspect you; of course I don't think that you would
+eavesdrop; though I do hate--hearing," Jack muttered.
+
+"I hope you realize that I share your hatred," said Imogen. "But your
+opinion of me is not, here, to the point. I only wish to put before you
+what I have now to bear, Mrs. Pakenham said that she wagered that before
+the year was out Sir Basil would have married mama." Imogen paused,
+breathing deeply.
+
+Jack walked on beside her, not knowing what to say. "I think so, too, and
+wish her joy," would have been the truest rendering of his feeling.
+
+He curbed it to ask cautiously, "And you mind so much?"
+
+"Mind!" she repeated, a thunderous echo.
+
+"You dislike it so?"
+
+"Dislike? You use strangely inapt words."
+
+He had another parenthetic shoot of impatience with her dreadful
+articulateness; had Imogen always talked so much like the heroine of a
+novel with a purpose?
+
+"I only meant--can't you put up with it?"
+
+"Put up with it? Can I do anything else? What power have I over her?
+You don't seem to understand. I have passed beyond caring that she
+makes herself petty, ridiculous; as a woman of her age must in marrying
+again--the clutch of fading life at the happiness it has forfeited. Let
+her clutch if she chooses; let her marry if she chooses, whom she chooses,
+yes, when she chooses. But don't you see how it shatters my every hope of
+her,--my every ideal of her? And don't you see how my heart is pierced by
+the presence of that man in my father's house, the house that she abandoned
+and cast a shadow upon? How filled with bitter shame and anguish I am when
+I see him there, in that house, sacred to my grief and to my
+memories--making love to my mother?"
+
+No, really, never, never had he heard Imogen so fluent and so dramatically
+telling; and never had he been so unmoved by the feeling under the fluency.
+It was as if he could believe in none.
+
+He remained silent and Imogen continued: "When she came back, I believed
+that it was with an impulse of penitence; with the wish, shallow though I
+knew that it must be in such a nature, to atone to me for the ruin that she
+had made in his life. I was all tenderness and sympathy for her, all a
+longing to help and sustain her--as you must remember. But now! It fulfils
+all that I had feared and suspected in her--and more than all! She left
+England, she came here, that the conventions might be observed; and,
+considering them observed enough for her purpose, she receives her suitor,
+eight months after my father's lonely death,-in the house where _my_ heart
+breaks and bleeds for him, where _I_ mourn for him, where _I_--alone, it
+seems--feel him flouted and betrayed! And she talks of her love for me!"
+
+Jack was wondering that her coherent passion did not beat him into helpless
+acquiescence; but, instead, he found himself at once replying, "You don't
+see fairly. You exaggerate it all. She was unhappy with your father. For
+years he made her unhappy. And now, if she can care for a man who can make
+her happy, she has a right, a perfect right, to take her happiness. As for
+her loving you, I don't believe that any one loves you more truly. It's
+your chance, now, to show your love for her."
+
+Imogen stood still and looked at him from the black disk of her parasol.
+
+"I think I've suspected this of you, too, Jack," she said. "Yes, I've
+suspected, in dreadful moments of revelation, how far your undermining has
+gone. And you say you are not changed!"
+
+"Would you ask your mother never to marry again?"
+
+"I would--if she were in any way to redeem her image in my eyes. But,
+granting to the full that one must make concessions to such creatures of
+the senses, I would ask her, at the very least, to have waited."
+
+"Creatures of the senses!" Jack repeated in a helpless gasp; such words, in
+their austere vocabulary, were hardly credible. "Do you know what you are
+saying, you arrogant, you heartless girl?"
+
+Her face seemed to flash at him like lightning from a black cloud, and with
+the lightning a reality that had lacked before to leap to her voice:
+
+"Ah! At last--at last you are saying what you have felt for a long time!
+At last I know what you think of me! So be it! I don't retract one jot or
+tittle of what I say. Mama is a perfectly moral woman, if you actually
+imagine some base imputation; but she lives for the pleasant, the pretty,
+the easy. She doesn't love this man's soul--nor care if he has one.
+Her love for him is a parody of the love that my father taught me to
+understand and to hold sacred. She loves his love for her; his 'delightful'
+appearance. She loves his place and name and all the power and leisure of
+the life he can give her. She loves the world--in him; and in that I mean
+and repeat that she is a creature of the senses. And if, for this, you
+think me arrogant and heartless, you do not trouble in one whit my vision
+of myself, but you do, forever, mar my vision of you."
+
+They stood face to face in the soft sweet air under an arch of wistaria; it
+seemed a place to plight a troth, not to break one; but Jack knew that, if
+he would, he could not have kept the truth from her. It held him, looked
+from him; he was, at last, inevitably, to speak it.
+
+"Imogen," he said, "I don't want to talk to you about your mother; I don't
+want to defend her to you; I'm past that. I'll say nothing of your summing
+up of her character,--it's grotesque, it's piteous, such assurance! But
+I do tell you straight what I've come to feel of you--that you are a
+cold-blooded, self-righteous, self-centered girl. And I'll say more: I
+think that your bringing-up, the artificiality, the complacent theory of
+it, is your best excuse; and I think that you'll never find any one so
+generous and so understanding of you as your mother. If this mars me in
+your eyes, I can't help it."
+
+For a moment, in her deep anger,--horror running through it, too, as though
+the very bottom had dropped out of things and she saw emptiness beneath
+her,--she thought that she would tell him to leave her there, forever. But
+Imogen's intelligence was at times a fairly efficacious substitute for
+deeper promptings; and humiliation, instead of enwrapping her mind in a
+flare of passionate vanity, seemed, when such intellectual apprehension
+accompanied it, to clarify, to steady her thoughts. She saw, now, in the
+sudden uncanny illumination, that in all her vehemence of this afternoon
+there had been something fictitious. The sorrow, the resentment on her
+father's account, she had, indeed, long felt; too long to feel keenly.
+Her disapproval of the second marriage was already tinctured by a certain
+satisfaction; it would free her of a thorn in the flesh, for such her
+mother's presence in her life had become, and it would justify forever her
+sense of superiority. It was all the clearest cause for indignation that
+her mother had given her, and, seeing it as such, she had longed to make
+Jack share her secure reprobation; but she hadn't, really, been able to
+feel it as she saw it. It solved too many problems and salved too many
+hurts. So now, standing there under the arch of wistaria, she saw through
+herself; saw, at the very basis of her impulse, the dislocation that
+had made its demonstration dramatic and unconvincing. Dreadful as the
+humiliation was, her lips growing parched, her throat hot and dry with it,
+her intelligence saw its cause too clearly for her to resent it as she
+would have resented one less justified. There was, perhaps, something to
+be said for Jack, disastrously wrong though he was; and, with all her
+essential Tightness, there was, perhaps, something to be said against her.
+She could not break, without further reflection, the threads that still
+held them together.
+
+So, at the moment of their deepest hostility, Jack was to have his sweetest
+impression of her. She didn't order him away in tragic tones, as he almost
+expected; she didn't overwhelm him with an icy torrent of reproach and
+argument. Instead, as she stood there against her halo of black, the long
+regard of her white face fixed on him, her eyes suddenly filled with tears.
+She didn't acquiesce for a moment, or, for a moment, imply him anything but
+miserably, pitiably wrong; but in a voice from which every trace of anger
+had faded she said: "Oh Jack, how you hurt me!"
+
+The shock of his surprise was so great that his cheeks flamed as though she
+had struck him. Answering tears sprang to his eyes. He stammered, could not
+speak at first, then got out: "Forgive me. I'd no business to say it. It's
+lovely of you, Imogen, not just to send me off."
+
+She felt her triumph, her half-triumph, at once. "Why, Jack, if you think
+it, why should I forgive you for saying what, to you, seems the truth? You
+have forgotten me, Jack, almost altogether; but don't forget that truth is
+the thing that I care most for. If you must think these things of me--and
+not only of me, of a dearer self, for I understand all that you meant--I
+must accept the sorrow and pain of it. When we care for people we must
+accept suffering because of them. Perhaps, in time, you may come to see
+differently."
+
+He knew, though she made him feel so abashed, that he could take back none
+of the "things" he thought; but as she had smiled faintly at him he
+answered with a wavering smile, putting out his hand to hers and holding it
+while he said: "Shall we agree, then, to say nothing more about it! To be
+as good friends--as the truth will let us?"
+
+He had never hurt her as at that moment of gentleness, compunction, and
+inflexibility, and thought, for a moment, was obscured by a rush of bitter
+pain that could almost have cast her upon his breast, weeping and suppliant
+for all that his words shut the door on--perhaps forever.
+
+But such impulses were swiftly mastered in poor Imogen. Gravely pressing
+his hand, she accepted the cutting compact, and, over her breathless sense
+of loss, held firm to the spiritual advantage of magnanimity and courage.
+He judged himself, not her, in letting her go, if he was really letting
+her go; and she must see him wander away into the darkness, alone, leaving
+her alone. It was tragic; it was nearly unendurable; but this was one of
+life's hard lessons; her father had so often told her that they must be
+unflinchingly faced, unflinchingly conquered. So she triumphed over the
+weak crying out of human need.
+
+They walked on slowly again, both feeling a little "done." Neither spoke
+until, at the entrance of the park, and just before leaving its poetry for
+the screaming prose of the great city, Imogen said: "One thing I want to
+tell you, Jack, and that is that you may trust mama to me. Whatever I may
+think of this happiness that she is reaching out for, I shall not make it
+difficult or painful for her to take it. My pain shall cast no shadow on
+her gladness."
+
+Jack's face still showed its flush and his voice had all the steadiness of
+his own interpretation, the steadiness of his refusal to accept hers, as he
+answered, "Thanks, Imogen; that's very right of you."
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+
+Imogen and Sir Basil were walking down a woodland path under the sky of
+American summer, a vast, high, cloudless dome of blue. Trees, tall and
+delicate, in early June foliage, grew closely on the hillside; the grass of
+the open glades was thick with wild Solomon's-seal, and fragile clusters of
+wild columbine grew in the niches and crannies of the rocks, their pale-red
+chalices filled with fantastically fretted gold.
+
+Imogen, dressed in thin black lawn, fine plaitings of white at throat and
+wrists, her golden head uncovered, walked a little before Sir Basil with
+her long, light, deliberate step. She had an errand in the village two
+miles away, and her mother had suggested that Sir Basil should go with her
+and have some first impressions of rural New England. He had only arrived
+the night before. Miss Bocock and the Pottses were expected this afternoon,
+and Mrs. Wake had been for a fortnight established in her tiny cottage on
+the opposite hillside.
+
+"Tell me about your village here," Sir Basil had said, and Imogen, with
+punctual courtesy and kindness, the carrying out of her promise to Jack,
+had rejoined: "It would be rather uneventful annals that I should have to
+tell you. The people are palely prosperous. They lead monotonous lives.
+They look forward for variety and interest, I think, to the summer, when
+all of us are here. One does all one can, then, to make some color for
+them. I have organized a kindergarten for the tiny children, and a girls'
+club for debates and reading; it will help to an awakening I believe. I'm
+going to the club this afternoon. I'm very grateful to my girls for helping
+me as they do to be of use to them. It's quite wonderful what they have
+done already. Our village life is in no sense like yours in England, you
+know; these people are all very proud and independent. It's as a friend,
+not as a Lady Bountiful, that I go among them."
+
+"I see," said Sir Basil, with interest, "that's awfully nice all round.
+I wish we could get rid of a lot of stupid ways of thought at home. I'll
+see something of these friends of yours at the house, then. I'm immensely
+interested in all these differences, you know."
+
+"You won't see them at the house. Our relation is friendly, not social.
+That is a froth that doesn't count."
+
+"Oh! and they don't mind that--not having the social relation, I mean--if
+they are friends?"
+
+"Why should they? I am not hurt because they do not ask me to their picnics
+and parties, nor are they because I don't ask them to my dinners and teas.
+We both understand that all that is a matter of manner and accident; that
+in essentials we are equal."
+
+"I see; but," Sir Basil still queried, "you wouldn't care about their
+parties, I suppose, and don't you think they might like your dinners? At
+least that's the way it would work out, I'm afraid, at home."
+
+"Ah, it doesn't here. They are too civilized for that. Neither of us would
+feel fitted to the superficial aspects of the others' lives."
+
+"We have that sort of thing in England, too, you know; only perhaps we
+look at it more from the other side, and recognize difference rather than
+sameness."
+
+"Very much more, I think," said Imogen with a slight smile. "I should
+think that there was very little resemblance. Your social structure is
+a wholesome, natural growth, embodying ideals that, in the main, are
+unconscious. We started from that and have been building ever since toward
+conscious ideals."
+
+"Well,"--Sir Basil passed over this simile, a little perplexed,--"it's very
+wonderful that they shouldn't feel--inferior, you know, in our ugly sense
+of the word, if they only get one side of friendship and not the other. Now
+that's how we manage in England, you see; but then I'm afraid it doesn't
+work out as you say it does here; I'm afraid they do feel inferior, after a
+fashion."
+
+"Only the truly inferior could feel inferiority, since they get the real
+side of friendship," said Imogen, with gentle authority. "And I can't think
+that, in our sense of the word, the real side is given with you. There is
+conscious condescension, conscious adaptation to a standard supposed
+lower."
+
+"I see; I see"; Sir Basil murmured, looking, while still perplexed, rather
+conscience-stricken; "yes, I suppose you're right."
+
+Imogen looked as though she more than supposed it, and, feeling himself
+quite worsted, Sir Basil went on to ask her further questions about the
+club and kindergarten.
+
+"What a lot of work it must all mean for you," he said.
+
+"That, I think, is one's only right to the advantages one has--education,
+taste, inherited traditions," said Imogen, willing to enlighten this
+charmingly civilized, yet spiritually barbarous, interlocutor who followed
+her, tall, in his delightfully outdoor-looking garments, his tie and the
+tilt of his Panama hat answering her nicest sense of fitness, and his
+handsome brown face, quizzical, yet very attentive, meeting her eyes on
+its leafy background whenever she turned her head. "If they are not made
+instruments to use for others they rust in our hands and poison us," she
+said. "That's the only real significance of an aristocracy, a class fitted
+to serve, with the highest service, the needs of all. Of course, much of
+our best and deepest thought about these things is English; don't imagine
+me ungrateful to the noble thinkers of your--of my--race,--they have
+moulded and inspired us; but, there is the strange paradox of your
+civilization, your thought reacts so little on your life. Your idealists
+and seers count only for your culture, and even in your culture affect so
+little the automatic existence of your people. They form a little isolated
+class, a leaven that lies outside the lump. Now, with us, thought rises,
+works, ferments through every section of our common life."
+
+Quite without fire, almost indolently, she spoke; very simply, too,
+glancing round at him, as though she could not expect much understanding
+from such an alien listener.
+
+"I'm awfully glad, you know, to get you to talk to me like this," said Sir
+Basil, after a meditative pause; "I saw a good bit of you in New York, but
+you never talked much with me."
+
+"You had mama to talk to."
+
+"But I want to talk to you, too. You do a lot of thinking, I can see that."
+
+"I try to"; she smiled a little at his _naïveté_.
+
+"Your mother told me so much about you that I'm tremendously eager to know
+you for myself."
+
+"Well, I hope that you may come to, for mama's pictures of me are not
+likely to be accurate," said Imogen mildly. "We don't think in the same way
+or see things in the same way and, though we are so fond of each other, we
+are not interested in the same things. Perhaps that is why I don't interest
+her particular friends. They would not find much in common between mama and
+me"; but her smile was now a little humorous and she was quite prepared for
+his "Oh, but, I assure you, I am interested in you."
+
+Already, with her unerring instinct for power, Imogen knew that Sir Basil
+was interested in her. There was only, to be sure, a languid pleasure in
+the sense of power over a person already, as it were, so bespoken, so in
+bondage to other altars; but, though without a trace of coquetry, the smile
+quietly claimed him as a partial, a damaged convert. Imogen always knew
+when people were capable of being, as she expressed it to herself, "Hers."
+She made small effort for those who were without the capacity. She never
+misdirected such smiles upon Rose, or Miss Bocock, or Mrs. Wake. And now,
+as Sir Basil went on to asseverate, just behind her shoulder, his pleasant
+tones quite touched with eagerness, that the more he saw of her the more
+interested he became, she allowed him to draw her into a playful argument
+on the subject.
+
+"Yes, I quite believe that you would like me--if you came to know me"--she
+was willing to concede at last; "but, no, indeed no, I don't think that you
+would ever feel much interest in me."
+
+"You mean because I'm not sufficiently interesting myself? Is that it, eh?"
+Sir Basil acutely asked, reflecting that he had never seen a girl walk so
+beautifully or dress so exquisitely. The sunlight glittered in her hair.
+
+"I don't mean that at all," said Imogen; "although I don't fancy that you
+are interested so deeply, and in so many things, as I am."
+
+"Now, really! Why not? You haven't given me a chance to show you. Of course
+I'm not clever."
+
+"I meant nothing petty, like cleverness."
+
+"You mean that I don't take life seriously enough to please you?"
+
+"Not that, exactly. It's that we face in opposite directions, as it were.
+Life isn't to you what it is to me, it isn't to you such a big, beautiful
+thing, with so many wonderful vistas in it--such far, high peaks."
+
+She was very grave now, and the gravity, the assurance, and, with them, the
+sweetness, of this young girl were charming and perplexing to Sir Basil.
+Girls so assured he had found harsh, disagreeable and, almost always, ugly;
+they had been the sort of girl one avoided. And girls so lovely had usually
+been coy and foolish. This girl walked like a queen, looked at one like a
+philosopher, smiled at one like an angel. He fixed his mind on her last
+words, rallying his sense of quizzical paternity to meet such disconcerting
+statements.
+
+"Well, but you are very young; life looks like that--peaks, you know, and
+vistas, and all the rest--when one is young. You've not had time to find it
+out, to be disappointed," said Sir Basil.
+
+Imogen's calm eye rested upon him, and even before she spoke he knew that
+he had made a very false step. It was as if, sunken to the knees in his
+foolish bog, he stood before her while she replied:
+
+"Ah, it's that that is shallow in you, or, let us say, undeveloped, still
+to be able to think of life in those terms. They are the thoughts of an
+unawakened person, and some people, I know, go all through life without
+awaking. You imagine, I suppose, that I think of life as something that
+is going to give me happiness, to fulfil sentimental, girlish dreams. You
+are mistaken. I have known bitter disappointments, bitter losses, bitter
+shatterings of hope. But life is wonderful and beautiful to me because
+we can be our best and do our best in it, and for it, if we try. It's an
+immense adventure of the soul, an adventure that can disappoint only in the
+frivolous sense you were thinking of. Such joys are not the objects of our
+quest. One is disappointed with oneself, often, for falling so short of
+one's vision, and people whom we love and trust may fail us and give us
+piercing pain; but life, in all its oneness, is good and beautiful if we
+wake to its deepest reality and give our hearts to the highest that we
+know."
+
+She spoke sadly, softly, surely, thinking of her own deep wounds, and to
+speak such words was almost like repeating a familiar lesson,--how often
+she had heard them on her father's lips,--and Sir Basil listened, while he
+looked at the golden head, at the white hand stretched out now and then to
+put aside a branch or sapling--listened with an amazement half baffled and
+wholly admiring. He had never heard a girl talk like that. He had heard
+such words before, often, of course, but they had never sounded like this;
+they seemed fresh, and sparkling with a heavenly dew, spoken so quietly,
+with such indifference to their effect, such calmness of conviction. The
+first impression of her, that always hovered near, grew more strongly upon
+him. There was something heavenly about this girl. It was as though he had
+heard an angel singing in the woods, and a feeling of humility stole over
+him. It was usual for Sir Basil, who rarely thought about himself, to feel
+modest, but very unusual for him to feel humble.
+
+"You make me believe it, when you say it," he murmured. "I'm afraid you
+think me a dreadfully earthy, commonplace person."
+
+Imogen, at the change of note in his voice, looked round at him, more
+really aware of him than she had been at all, and when she met his glance
+the prophet's calm fervor rose in her to answer the faith that she felt in
+him. She paused, letting him come abreast of her in the narrow path, and
+they both stood still, looking at each other.
+
+"You are not earthy; you are not commonplace," said Imogen, then, as a
+result of her contemplation. "I believe that you are a very big person, Sir
+Basil."
+
+"A big person? How do you mean?" He absolutely flushed, half abashed, half
+delighted.
+
+Imogen continued to gaze, clearly and deeply. "There are all sorts of
+possibilities in you."
+
+"Oh, come now! At my age! Why, any possibilities are over, except for a
+cheerful kind of vegetating."
+
+"You have vegetated all your life, I can see that. No one has ever waked
+you. You have hardly _used_ your soul at all. It's with you as it is with
+your country, whose life is built strongly and sanely with body and brain
+but who has not felt nationally, as a whole, its spirit. Like it, you have
+a spirit; like it, you are full of possibilities."
+
+"Miss Upton, you aren't like anybody I've ever known. What sort of
+possibilities?"
+
+She walked on now, feeling his thrill echo in herself, symptomatic of the
+passing forth of power and its return as enrichment of life and inspiration
+to helpfulness. "Of service," she said. "Of devotion to great needs;
+courage in great causes. I don't think that you have ever had a chance."
+
+Sir Basil, keeping his eyes on her straight, pale profile, groping and
+confused in this new flood of light, wondered if he had.
+
+"You are an extraordinary young woman," he said at last. "You make me
+believe in everything you say, though it's so awfully queer, you know, to
+think in that way about myself. If you talk to me often like this, about
+needs and causes, will it give me more of a chance, do you think?"
+
+"We must all win to the light for ourselves," said Imogen very gently, "but
+we can help one another."
+
+They had come now to the edge of the wood and out upon the white road that
+curved from the village up to the blue of the hills they had descended. A
+tiny brook ran with a sharp, silvery tinkle on its farther edge and it was
+bordered by a light barrier of white railing. Beyond were spacious,
+half-cultivated meadows, stretched out for miles in the lap of low-lying
+hills.
+
+Serene yet inhuman the landscape looked, a background to the thinnest of
+histories, significant only of its own dreaming solitude; and the village,
+among its elms, a little farther on, suggested the barest past, the most
+barren future. The road led on into its main street, where the elms made
+a stately avenue, arching over scattered frame houses of buff and gray
+and white. Imogen told Sir Basil that some of these houses were old, and
+pointed out an austere classic façade with pediment and pillars; explained
+to him, too, the pathetic condition of so much of abandoned New England.
+Sir Basil was thinking more of her last words in the woods than of local
+color, but he had, while he listened, a fairly definite impression of
+pinchbeck shops; of shabby awnings slanting in the sunlight over heaps of
+tumbled fruit and vegetables; of "buggies," slip-shod, with dust-whitened
+wheels, the long-tailed, long-maned, slightly harnessed horses hitched to
+posts along the pavements. The faces that passed were indolent yet eager.
+The jaws of many worked mechanically at some unappeasing task of
+mastication.
+
+Sir Basil had traveled since his arrival in America, had seen the luxuries
+of the Atlantic seacoast, the purposeful energy of Chicago, California's
+Eden-like abundance, and had seen other New England villages where beauty
+was cherished and made permanent. He hardly needed Imogen's further
+comments to establish his sense of contrast.
+
+"This was always a poor enough little place. Any people who made it count
+left it long ago. But even here," she went on, "even in its stagnation, one
+can find some of the things we care for in our country, some of the things
+we live for."
+
+Some of these things seemed personified in the figure of the young woman
+who met them in the girls' club, among the shelves of books and the
+numerous framed photographs from the old masters. Imogen introduced
+Sir Basil to her and he watched her with interest while she and Imogen
+discussed some business matters. She was slender and upright, perhaps too
+upright; she was, in manner, unaffected and assured, perhaps too assured,
+but that Sir Basil did not observe. He found her voice unpleasant and her
+pronunciation faulty, but thought that she expressed herself with great
+force and fluency. Her eyes were bright, her skin sallow, she smiled
+gravely, and her calmness and her smile reminded Sir Basil a little of
+Imogen; perhaps they were racial. She was dressed in a simple gray cotton
+frock with neat lawn collar and cuffs, and her hair was raised in a
+lustrous "pompadour," a wide comb traversing it behind and combs at the
+sides of her head upholding it in front. Toward Sir Basil she behaved with
+gracious stateliness of demeanor, so that he wondered anew at the anomalies
+of a country of ideals where a young person so well-appearing should not be
+asked to dinner.
+
+Several other girls came in while they were there, and they all surrounded
+Imogen with eager familiarity of manner; all displayed toward himself, as
+he was introduced, variations of Miss Hickson's stateliness. He thought
+it most delightful and interesting and the young women very remarkable
+persons. One discordant note, only, was struck in the harmony, and
+that discord was barely discerned by his untrained ear. While Imogen
+was talking, a girl appeared in the doorway, hesitated, then, with an
+indifferent and forbidding manner, strolled across the room to the
+book-shelves, where she selected a book, strolling out again with the
+barest nod of sullen recognition. She was a swarthy girl, robust and ample
+of form, with black eyes and dusky cheeks. Her torn red blouse and untidy
+hair marked her out from the sleek and social group. Sir Basil thought her
+very interesting looking. He asked Imogen, as they walked away under the
+elms, who she was. "That artistic young person, with the dark hair."
+
+"Artistic? Do you mean Mattie Smith?--the girl with the bad manners?" asked
+Imogen, smiling tolerantly.
+
+"Yes, she looked like a clever young person. She belongs to the club?"
+
+"She hardly counts as one of its members, though we welcome everyone, and,
+like all the girls of the village, she enjoys the use of our library. She
+is not clever, however. She is an envious and a rather ill-tempered girl,
+with very little of the spirit of sisterhood in her. And she nurses her
+defect of isolation and self-sufficiency. I hope that we may win her over
+to wider, sweeter outlooks some day."
+
+Mattie Smith, however, was one of the people upon whom Imogen wasted no
+smiles. On the Uptons first coming to spend their summers near Hamborough,
+Imogen had found this indolent yet forcible personality barring her path
+of benignant activity. Mattie Smith, unaided, undirected, ignorant of the
+Time Spirit's high demands upon the individual, had already formed a club
+of sorts, a tawdry little room hung with bright bunting and adorned with
+colored pictures from the cheaper magazines, pictures of over-elegant,
+amorously inclined young couples in ball-rooms or on yachts and beaches.
+Here the girls read poor literature, played games, made candy over the
+stove and gossiped about their young men. Imogen deeply disapproved of the
+place; its ventilation was atrocious and its moral influence harmful; it
+relaxed and did not discipline,--so she had expressed it to her father. It
+soon withered under her rival beams. Mattie Smith's members drifted by
+degrees into the more advantageous alliance. Mattie Smith had resented this
+triumphant placing of the higher standard and took pains, as Imogen, with
+the calm displeasure of the successful, observed, to make difficulties
+for her and to treat her with ostentatious disregard. Imogen guessed very
+accurately at the seething of anger and jealousy that bubbled in Mattie
+Smith's breast; it was typical of so much of the lamentable spirit
+displayed by rudimentary natures when feeling the pressure of an ideal they
+did not share or when brought into contact with a more finished manner of
+life from which they were excluded. Imogen, too, could not have borne a
+rival ascendancy; but she was ascendant through right divine, and, while so
+acutely understanding Mattie Smith's state of mind, she could not recognize
+a certain sameness of nature. She hoped that Mattie Smith would "grow," but
+she felt that, essentially, she was not of the sort from which "hers" were
+made.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+
+It was almost four o'clock by the time that Imogen and Sir Basil reached
+the summit of one of the lower hills, and, among the trees, came upon the
+white glimmer of the Upton's summer home. It stood in a wide clearing
+surrounded on three sides by the woods, the higher ranges rising about it,
+its lawn running down to slopes of long grass, thick with tall daisies
+and buttercups. Farther on was an orchard, and then, beyond the dip of a
+valley, the blue, undulating distance, bathed in a crystalline quivering.
+The house, of rough white stucco, had lintels and window-frames of dark
+wood, a roof of gray shingles, and bright green shutters. A wide veranda
+ran around it, wreathed in vines and creepers, and borders of flowers
+grew to the edges of the woods. Sir Basil thought that he had never seen
+anything prettier. Valerie, dressed in thin black, was sitting on the
+veranda, and beside her Miss Bocock, still in traveling dress, looked
+incongruously ungraceful. She had arrived an hour before with the Pottses,
+who had gone to their rooms, and said, in answer to Imogen's kindly
+queries, that the journey hadn't been bad, though the train was very
+stuffy. Then it appeared that Miss Bocock and Sir Basil were acquainted;
+they recollected each other, shook hands heartily, and asked and answered
+local questions. Miss Bocock's people lived not so many miles from Thremdon
+Hall, and, though she had been little at home of late years, she and Sir
+Basil had country memories in common. She said presently that she, too,
+would like to tidy for the tea, and Imogen, taking her to her room, sat
+with her while she smoothed out one section of her hair and tonged the
+other, and while she put on a very stiff holland skirt and a blouse
+distressing to Imogen's sensitive taste, a crude pink blouse, irrelevantly
+adorned about the shoulders with a deep frill of imitation lace. While she
+dressed she talked, in her high-pitched, cheerful voice, of the recent very
+successful lectures she had given in Boston and the acquaintances she had
+made there.
+
+"I hope that my letters of introduction proved useful," said Imogen. She
+considered Miss Bocock her _protégée_, but Miss Bocock, very vexatiously,
+seemed always oblivious of that fact; so that Imogen, though feeling that
+she had secured a guest who conferred luster, couldn't resist, now and
+then, trying to bring her to a slightly clearer sense of obligation.
+
+Miss Bocock said that, yes, they had been very useful, and Imogen watched
+her select from the graceful nosegay on her dressing-table two red roses
+which she pinned to her pink blouse with a heavy silver brooch
+representing, in an encircling bough, a mother bird hovering with
+outstretched wings over a precariously placed nest.
+
+"Let me get you a white rose," Imogen suggested; but Miss Bocock said, no,
+thanks, she was very fond of that shade of red.
+
+"So you know Sir Basil," said Imogen, repressing her sense of irritation.
+
+"Know him? Yes, of course. Everybody in the county knows him. He is the big
+man thereabouts, you see. The old squire, his father, was very fond of my
+father, and we go to a garden-party at the hall once a year or so. It's a
+nice old place."
+
+Imogen felt some perplexity. "But if your father and his were such friends
+why don't you see more of each other?"
+
+Miss Bocock looked cheerfully at her. "Why, because he is big and we
+aren't. We are middle-class and he very much upper; it's a very old family,
+the Thremdons,--I forget for how many generations they have been in Surrey.
+Now my dear old dad was only a country doctor," Miss Bocock went on, seated
+in a rocking-chair--she liked rocking-chairs--with her knees crossed, her
+horribly shaped patent-leather shoes displayed and her clear eyes, through
+their glasses, fixed on Imogen while she made these unshrinking statements;
+"and a country doctor's family hasn't much to do with county people."
+
+"What an ugly thing," said Imogen, while, swiftly, her mind adjusted itself
+to this new seeing of Miss Bocock. By its illumination Miss Bocock's
+assurance toward herself grew more irritating than before, and the fact
+that Miss Bocock's flavor was very different from Sir Basil's became
+apparent.
+
+"Not at all," said Miss Bocock. "It's a natural crystallization. You are
+working toward the same sort of thing over here--only not in such a
+wholesome way, I think."
+
+Imogen flushed a little. "Our crystallizations, when they aren't
+artificially brought about by apings of your civilization, take place
+through real superiority and fitness. A woman of your intellectual ability
+is anybody's equal in America."
+
+"Oh, as far as that goes, in that sense, I'm anybody's equal in England,
+too," said Miss Bocock, unperturbed and unimpressed.
+
+Imogen rather wished she could make her feel that, since crystallizations
+were a fact, the Uptons, in that sense, were as much above her as the
+Thremdons. Idealist democrat as she counted herself, she had these quick
+glances at a standard kept, as it were, for private use; as if, from under
+an altar in the temple of humanity, its priest were to draw out for some
+personal reassurance a hidden yard-measure.
+
+Tea, when they went down again, was served on the veranda and Imogen could
+observe, during its progress, that Miss Bocock showed none of the
+disposition to fawn on Sir Basil that one might have expected from a person
+of the middle-class. She contradicted him as cheerfully as she did Imogen
+herself.
+
+Mr. and Mrs. Potts had gone for a little ramble in the lower woods,
+but they soon appeared, Mr. Potts seating himself limply on the steps
+and fanning himself with his broad straw hat--a hat that in its very
+largeness and looseness seemed to express the inflexible ideals of
+non-conformity--while Mrs. Potts, very firmly busked and bridled, her head
+very sleek, her smile very tight, took a chair between Mrs. Upton and Sir
+Basil, and soon showed, in her whole demeanor, a consciousness of the
+latter's small titular decoration that placed her more definitely for
+Imogen's eye than she had ever been placed before. The Pottses were
+middle-class with a vengeance. Imogen's irritation grew as she watched
+these limpet-like friends, one sprawling and ill-at-ease for all his
+careful languor, the other quite dreadfully well-mannered, sipping her
+tea, arching her brows and assuming all sorts of perilous elegancies of
+pronunciation that Imogen had never before heard her attempt. It was an
+additional vexation to have them display toward herself, with even more
+exaggeration than usual, their tenacious tenderness; listening, with a
+grave turning of head and eye when she spoke, and receiving each remark
+with an over-emphasis of feeling on their over-mobile features.
+
+There was, indeed, an odd irony in the Pottses being there at all. They
+had, in her father's lifetime, only been asked with a horde of their kind,
+the whole uplifted batch thus worked off together, and Imogen had really
+not expected her mother to agree to her suggestion that they should be
+invited to pay the annual visit during Sir Basil's stay. She would not own
+to herself that her suggestion had been made from a vague wish to put her
+mother to a test, to force her into a definite declaration against the
+incongruous guests; she had thought of the suggestion, rather, as an
+upholding of her father's banner before the oncoming betrayal; but, instead
+of refusal, she had met with an instant, happy acquiescence, and it was now
+surely the climax of irony to see how her mother, for her sake, bore with
+them. More than for her sake, perhaps. Imogen detected in those seemingly
+indolent, yet so observant, eyes a keen reading of the Pottses' perturbed
+condition, and in her manner, so easy and so apt, the sweetest, lightest
+kindness. She turned corners and drew veils for them, spread a warm haze
+of interest and serenity about their clumsy and obtruding personalities.
+Imogen could even see that the Pottses were reconsidering, with some
+confusion of mind, their old verdict on her mother.
+
+This realization brought to her brooding thoughts a sudden pang of
+self-reproach. It wouldn't do for the Pottses to find in her mother the
+cordiality they might miss in herself. She confessed that, for a moment,
+she had allowed the banner to trail in the dust of worldly thoughts, the
+banner to which the Pottses, poor dears, had rallied for so many loyal
+years. She summoned once more all her funds of spiritual appreciation and
+patience. As for Miss Bocock, she made not the slightest attempt to talk
+to the Pottses. She had come up with them from the station,--they had not
+found each other on the train,--and she had probably had her fill of them
+in that time. Once or twice, in the act of helping herself plentifully to
+cake, she paused to listen to them, and after that looked away, over their
+heads or through them, as if she finally dismissed them from the field of
+her attention. Mrs. Potts was questioning Sir Basil about his possible
+knowledge of her own English ancestry. "We came over in the _Mayflower_,
+you know," she said.
+
+"Really," said Sir Basil, all courteous interest.
+
+"The Claremonts, you know," said Mrs. Potts, modestly, yet firmly, too. "My
+father was in direct descent; we have it all worked out in our family
+tree."
+
+"Oh, really," said Sir Basil again.
+
+"I've no doubt," said Mrs. Potts, "that your forebears and mine, Sir Basil,
+were friends and comrades in the spacious times of good Queen Bess."
+
+Imogen, at this, glanced swiftly at her mother; but she caught no trace of
+wavering on that mild countenance.
+
+"Oh, well, no," Sir Basil answered. "My people were very little country
+squires in those days; we didn't have much to do with the Dukes of
+Claremont. We only began to go up, you see, a good bit after you were on
+the top."
+
+Imogen fixed a calm but a very cold eye upon Mrs. Potts. She had heard
+of the Dukes of Claremont for many years; so had everybody who knew Mrs.
+Potts; they were an innocent, an ingrained illusion of the good lady's, but
+to-day they seemed less innocent and more irritating than usual. Imogen
+felt that she could have boxed Mrs. Potts's silly ears. In Sir Basil's
+pleasant disclaimers, too, there was an echo of Miss Bocock's
+matter-of-fact acknowledgments that seemed to set them both leagues away
+from the Pottses and to make their likeness greater than their difference.
+
+"Well, of course," Mrs. Potts was going on, her _pince-nez_ and all her
+small features mingled, as it were, in the vividest glitter, "for me, I
+confess, it's blood, above all and beyond all, that counts; and you and I,
+Sir Basil, know that it is in the squirearchy that some of the best blood
+in England is found. We don't recognize an aristocracy in our country, Sir
+Basil, but, though not recognized, it rules,--blood must rule; one often,
+in a democracy, feels that as one's problem."
+
+"It's only through service that it rules," Mr. Potts suddenly ejaculated
+from where he sat doubled on the steps looking with a gloomy gaze into the
+distance. "Service; service--that's our watchword. Lend a hand."
+
+Imogen saw a latent boredom piercing Sir Basil's affability. Great truths
+uttered by some lips might be made to seem very unefficacious. She proposed
+to him that she should show him the wonderful display of mountain-laurel
+that grew higher up among the pine-woods. He rose with alacrity, but Mrs.
+Potts rose too. Imogen could hardly control her vexation when, nipping the
+crumbs from her lap and smoothing the folds at her waist, she declared that
+she was just in the humor for a walk and must see the laurel with them.
+
+"You mustn't tire yourself. Wouldn't you rather stay and have another cup
+of tea and talk to me?" Mrs. Upton interposed, so that Imogen felt a dart
+of keen gratitude for such comprehension; but Mrs. Potts was not to be
+turned aside from her purpose. "Thank you so much, dear Mrs. Upton," she
+answered; "we must have many, many talks indeed; but I do want to see my
+precious Imogen, and to see the laurel with her. You are one of those rare
+beings, darling Imogen, with whom one can _share_ nature. Will you come,
+too, Delancy, dear?" she asked her husband, "or will you stay and talk to
+Mrs. Upton and Miss Bocock? I'm sure that they will be eager to hear of
+this new peace committee of ours and zestful to help on the cause."
+
+Mr. Potts rather sulkily said that he would stay and talk to Mrs. Upton and
+Miss Bocock about the committee, and Imogen felt that it was in a manner of
+atonement to him for her monopolization of a lustrous past that Mrs. Potts
+presently, as they began the steep ascent along a winding, mossy path, told
+Sir Basil that her husband, too, knew the responsibility and burden of
+"blood." And as, for a moment, they went before her, Imogen fancied that
+she heard the murmur of quite a new great name casting its ægis about Mr.
+Potts. Very spiritual people could, she reflected, become strangely
+mendacious when borne along on the wings of ardor and exaltation.
+
+Mrs. Potts's presence was really quite intolerable, and, as she walked
+behind her and listened to her murmur, Imogen bethought her of an amusing,
+though rather ruthless, plan of elimination. Imogen was very capable of
+ruthlessness when circumstances demanded it. Turning, therefore, suddenly
+to the right, she led them into a steep and rocky path that, as she well
+knew, would eventually prove impassable to Mrs. Potts's short legs and
+stiff, fat person. Indeed, Mrs. Potts soon began to pant and sigh. Her
+recital of the family annals became disconnected; she paused to take off
+and rub her eyeglasses and presently asked, in extenuated tones, if this
+were the usual path to the laurel.
+
+"It's the one I always take, dear Mrs. Potts; it's the one I wanted Sir
+Basil to see, it's so far the lovelier. One gets the most wonderful, steep
+views down into far depths of blue," Imogen, perched like a slender
+Valkyrie on the summit of a crag above, thus addressed her perturbed
+friend.
+
+She couldn't really but be amused by Mrs. Potts's pertinacity, for, not
+yet relinquishing her purpose, she continued, in silence now, her lips
+compressed, her forehead beaded with moisture, to scale the difficult way,
+showing a resolute nimbleness amazing in one so ill-formed for feats of
+agility. Sir Basil gave her a succoring hand while Imogen soared ahead,
+confident of the moment when Mrs. Potts, perforce, must fall back.
+
+"Tiresome woman!" she thought, but she couldn't help smiling while she
+thought it, and heard Mrs. Potts's deep breath laboring up behind her. It
+was, perhaps, rather a shame to balk her in this way; but, after all, she
+was to have a full fortnight of Sir Basil and she, Imogen, felt that
+on this day, the day of a new friendship, Sir Basil's claim on her was
+paramount. She had something for him, a light, a strengthening, and she
+must keep the hour sacred to that stir of awakening. Among the pines and
+laurels she would say a few more words of help to him. So that Mrs. Potts
+must be made to go.
+
+The moment came. A shoulder of rock overhung the way and the only passage
+was over its almost perpendicular surface. Imogen, as if unconscious of
+difficulty, with a stride, a leap, a swift clutch of her firm white hand,
+was at the top, smiling down at them and saying: "Now here the view is our
+very loveliest. One looks down for miles."
+
+"But--my dear Imogen--is there no other way, round it, perhaps?" Mrs. Potts
+looked desperately into the thick underbrush on either side.
+
+"No other way," said Imogen. "But you can manage it. This is only the
+beginning,--there's some real climbing farther on. Put your foot where I
+did--no, higher--near the little fern--your hand here, look, do you see?
+Take a firm hold of that--then a good spring--and here you are."
+
+Poor Mrs. Potts laid a faltering hand on the high ledge that was only a
+first stage in the chamois-like feat, and Imogen saw unwilling
+relinquishment in her eye.
+
+"I don't see as I can do it," she murmured, relapsing, in her distress,
+into a helpless vernacular.
+
+"Oh, yes, this is nothing. Sir Basil will give you a push. I'll pull you
+and he will push you," Imogen, with kindest solicitude, suggested.
+
+"Oh, I don't see as I _can_," Mrs. Potts repeated, looking rather wild at
+the vision of such a push. She didn't at all lend herself to pushes, and
+yet, facing even the indignities of that method, she did, though faltering,
+place herself in position; did lay a desperate hold of the high ledge,
+place her small, fat, tightly buttoned foot high beside the fern; allow Sir
+Basil, with a hand under each armpit, to kindly count "One-two-three--now
+for it!"--did even, at the word of command, make a passionate jump, only to
+lose hold, scrape lamentably down the surface of the rock, and collapse
+into his arms.
+
+"Oh, I'm so sorry!" said Imogen, looking down upon them while Sir Basil
+placed Mrs. Potts upon her feet, and while Mrs. Potts, angered almost to
+tears, rubbed with her handkerchief at the damage done to her dress. "I'm
+so _very_ sorry, dear Mrs. Potts. I see that it is a little too steep for
+you. And I did so want you to see this view."
+
+"I shall have to go back. I am very tired, quite exhausted," said Mrs.
+Potts, in a voice that slightly shook. "I wish you had taken the usual
+path. I never dreamed that we were setting out on such a--such a violent
+expedition."
+
+"But this is my usual path," said Imogen, opening her eyes. "I've never
+found it hard. And I wanted you and Sir Basil to see my view. But, dear
+Mrs. Potts, let me go back with you. Sir Basil won't mind finding his way
+alone, I'm sure."
+
+"Oh, no, thanks! No, I couldn't think of spoiling your walk. No, I will go
+back," and Mrs. Potts, turning away, began to retrace her steps.
+
+"Be sure and lie down and rest; take a little nap before dinner," Imogen
+called after her.
+
+Mrs. Potts disappeared, and Imogen, when she and Sir Basil stood together
+on the fortunate obstacle, said: "Poor, excellent creature. I _am_ sorry.
+She is displeased with me. I ought to have remembered that this was too
+rough for her and taken the other path." Indeed, she had felt rather guilty
+as Mrs. Potts's back, the ridge of its high stays strongly marked by the
+slanting sunlight, descended among the sylvan scenery.
+
+"Yes, and she did so want to come, awfully keen on it," said Sir Basil;
+"but I hope you won't think me very brutal if I confess that _I'm_ not
+sorry. I want to talk to you, you see," Sir Basil beamed.
+
+"I would rather talk to you, too," Imogen smiled. "My good old friend can
+be very wearisome. But it was thoughtless of me to have brought her on this
+way."
+
+They rested for a little while on their rock, looking down into the
+distance that was, indeed, worth any amount of climbing. And afterward,
+when they reached the fairyland where the laurel drifted through the pine
+woods, and as she quoted "Wood-Notes" to him and pointed out to him the
+delicate splendors of the polished green, the clear, cold pink, on a
+background of gray rock, Imogen could but feel her little naughtiness well
+justified. It was delightful to be there in solitude with Sir Basil, and
+the sense of sympathy that grew between her and this supplanter of her
+father's was strange, but not unsweet. It wasn't only that she could help
+him, and that that was always a claim to which one must respond, but she
+liked helping him.
+
+On the downward way, a little tired from the rapidity of her ascent, she
+often gave her hand to Sir Basil as she leaped from rock to rock, and they
+smiled at each other without speaking, already like the best of friends.
+
+That evening, as she was going down to dinner, Imogen met her mother on the
+stairs. They spoke little to each other during these days. Imogen felt that
+her neutrality of attitude could best be maintained by silence.
+
+"Mrs. Potts came back," her mother said, smiling a little, and, Imogen
+fancied, with the old touch of timidity that she remembered in her. "She
+said that you took her on a most fearful climb."
+
+"What foolishness, poor dear Mrs. Potts! I took her along the upper path."
+
+"The upper path! Is there an upper path?" Mrs. Upton descended beside her
+daughter. "I thought that it was the usual path that had proved too much
+for her."
+
+"I wanted them to see the view from the rock," said Imogen; "I forgot that
+poor Mrs. Potts would find it too difficult a climb."
+
+"Oh, I remember, now, the rock! That is a difficult climb," said Mrs.
+Upton.
+
+Imogen wondered if her mother guessed at why Mrs. Potts had been taken on
+it. She must feel it of good augury, if she did, that her daughter should
+already like Sir Basil enough to indulge in such an uncharitable freak.
+Imogen felt her color rise a little as she suspected herself and her
+motives revealed. It was not that she wasn't quite ready to own to a
+friendship with Sir Basil; but she didn't want friendship to be confused
+with condonation, and she didn't like her mother to guess that she could
+use Mrs. Potts uncharitably.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+
+Her magnanimity toward Jack--so Imogen more and more clearly saw it to have
+been--at the time of their parting, had made it inevitable that he should
+hold to his engagement to visit them that summer, and even because of that
+magnanimity, she felt, in thinking over again and again the things that
+Jack had said of her and to her, a deepening of the cold indignation that
+the magnanimity had quelled at the moment of his speaking them. Mingling
+with the sense of snapped and bleeding ties was a longing, irrepressible,
+profound, violent, that he might be humiliated, punished, brought to his
+knees in penitence and abasement.
+
+Her friendship with Sir Basil, his devotion to her, must be, though by no
+means humiliating, something of a coal of fire laid on Jack's traitorous
+head; and she saw at once that he was pleased, touched, but perplexed, by
+what must seem to him an unforeseen smoothing of her mother's path. He was
+there, she guessed, far more to see that her mother's path was made smooth
+than to try and straighten out their own twisted and separate ways. He had
+come for her mother, not for her; and Imogen did not know whether it was
+more pain or anger that the realization gave her.
+
+What puzzled him, what must have puzzled her mother, must puzzle, indeed,
+anyone who perceived it,--except, no doubt, the innocent Sir Basil
+himself,--was that this friendship took up most of Sir Basil's time.
+
+To Sir Basil she stood for something lofty and exquisite that did not,
+of course, clash with more rudimentary, if deeper, affections, but that,
+perforce, made them stand aside for the little interlude where it soared
+and sang. There was, for Imogen, a sharp sweetness in this fact and in
+Jack's bewildered appreciation of it, though for her own consciousness
+the triumph was no satisfying one. After all, of what use was it to soar
+and sing if Sir Basil were to drop to earth so inevitably and so soon?
+Outwardly, at all events, this unforeseen change in the situation gave her
+all the advantage in her meeting with Jack. She was not the reproved and
+isolated creature that he might have expected to find. She was not the
+helpless girl, subjugated by an alien mother and cast off by a faithless
+lover. No; calm, benignant, lovely, she had turned to other needs; one was
+not helpless while one helped; not small when others looked up to one.
+
+Under her calm was the lament; under her unfaltering smile, the loneliness
+and the burning of that bitter indignation; but Jack could not guess at
+that, and if both felt difficulty in the neatly balanced friendship pledged
+under the wisteria, if there was a breathlessness for both in the
+tight-rope performance,--where one false step might topple one over into
+open hostility, or else, who knew, into complete surrender,--it was Imogen
+who gained composure from Jack's nervousness, and while he walked the rope
+with a fluttering breath and an anxious eye she herself could show the most
+graceful slides and posturings in midair.
+
+It was evident enough to everybody that the relation was a changed, a
+precarious one, but all the seeming danger was Jack's alone.
+
+Imogen, while she swung and balanced, often found her mother's eye fixed
+on her with a deep preoccupation, and guessed that it was owing to her
+mother's tactics that most of her _tête-à-têtes_ with Jack were due. Her
+poor mother might imagine that she thus secured the solid foundation of
+the earth for their footsteps, but Imogen knew that never was the rope so
+dizzily swung as when she and Jack were thus gently coerced into solitude
+together.
+
+It was, however, a few days after Jack's arrival, and a few days before
+the Pottses' departure, that an interest came to her of such an absorbing
+nature that it wrapped her mind away from the chill or scorching sense
+of her own wrongs. It was with the Pottses that the plan originated, and
+though the Pottses were proving more trying than they had ever been, they
+caught some of the radiance of their own proposal. As instruments in a
+great purpose, she could look upon them more patiently, though, more than
+ever, it would need tact to prevent them from shadowing the brightness that
+they offered. The plan, apparently, had been with them for some time, its
+disclosure delayed until the moment suited to its seriousness and sanctity,
+and it was then, between the three, mapped out and discussed carefully
+before they felt it ripe for further publicity. Then it was Imogen who told
+them that the time had come for the unfolding to her mother, and Imogen who
+led them, on a sunny afternoon, into her mother's little sitting-room where
+she sat writing at her desk.
+
+Jack was there, reading near the window that opened upon the veranda, but
+his presence was not one to make the occasion less intimate, and Imogen was
+glad of it. It was well that he should be a witness to what she felt to be
+a confession of faith, a confession that needed explicit defining, and of a
+faith that he and all the others, by common consent, seemed banded together
+to ignore.
+
+So, with something of the air of a lovely verger, she led her primed pair
+into the room and pointed out two chairs to them.
+
+Valerie, in her thin black draperies, looked pale and jaded. She turned
+from her desk, keeping her pen in her hand, and Imogen detected in her eye,
+as it rested upon the Pottses, a certain impatience.
+
+Tison, suddenly awakening, broke into passionate barking; he had from the
+moment of Mr. Potts's arrival shown toward him a pronounced aversion, and,
+backed under the safe refuge of his mistress's chair, his sharp hostility
+disturbed the ceremonious entrance.
+
+"Please put the dog out, Jack," said Imogen; "we have a very serious matter
+to talk over with mama." But Valerie, stooping, caught him up, keeping a
+soothing hand on his still defiant head, while Mr. Potts unfolded the plan
+before her.
+
+The wonderful purpose, the wonderful project, was that Mr. Potts, aided by
+Imogen, should write the life of the late Mr. Upton; and as the curtain was
+drawn from before the shrined intention, Imogen saw that her mother flushed
+deeply.
+
+"His name must not be allowed to die from among us, Mrs. Upton. His ideals
+must become more widely the ideals of his countrymen." Mr. Potts, crossing
+his knees and throwing back his shoulders, wrapped one hand, while he
+spoke, in a turn of his flowing beard. "They are in crying need of such a
+message, now, when the tides of social materialism and political corruption
+are at their height. We may well say, to paraphrase the great poet's
+words: 'Upton! thou shouldst be living at this hour; New York hath need of
+thee.' And this need is one that it is our duty, and our high privilege,
+to satisfy." Mr. Potts's eye, heavy with its responsibility, dwelt on
+Valerie's downcast face. "No one, I may say it frankly, Mrs. Upton, is
+more fitted than I to satisfy that need and to hand on that message. No
+one had more opportunity than I for understanding that radiant personality
+in its public aspects. No one can feel more deeply than I that duty and
+that privilege. Every American child should know the name of Upton;
+every American man and woman should count him among the prophets of his
+generation. He did not ask for fame, and we, his followers, ask none for
+him. No marble temple, no effulgent light of stained glass;--no. But the
+violets and lilies of childhood laid upon his grave; the tearful, yet
+joyous whisper of those who come to share his spirit:--'I, too, am of his
+race. I, too, can with him strive and with him achieve.'" Mr. Potts's voice
+had risen, and Tison, once more, gave a couple of hoarse, smothered barks.
+
+Imogen, though reared on verbal bombast, had found some difficulty in
+maintaining her expression of uplifted approbation while Mr. Potts's
+rhetoric rolled; her willingness that Mr. Potts should serve the cause did
+not blind her to his inadequacy unless kept under the most careful control;
+and now, though incensed by Tison's interjection, she felt it as something
+of a relief, seizing the opportunity of Mr. Potts's momentary confusion
+to suggest, in a gentle and guarded voice:--"You might tell mama now, Mr.
+Potts, how we want her to help us."
+
+"I am coming to that, Miss Imogen," said Mr. Potts, with a drop from
+sonority to dryness;--"I was approaching that point when the dog
+interrupted me"; and Mr. Potts cast a very venomous glance upon Tison.
+
+"Had not the dog better be removed, Mrs. Upton?" Mrs. Potts, under her
+breath, murmured, leaning, as if in a pew and above prayer books, forward
+in her chair. But Mrs. Upton seemed deaf to the suggestion.
+
+Mr. Potts cleared his throat and resumed somewhat tersely:--"This is our
+project, Mrs. Upton, and we have come this afternoon to ask you for your
+furtherance of it. You, of course, can provide me and Miss Imogen with
+many materials, inaccessible otherwise, for this our work of love. Early
+letters, to you;--early photographs;--reminiscences of his younger days,
+and so on. Any suggestion as to the form and scope of the book we will be
+glad, very glad, to consider."
+
+Valerie had listened without a word or gesture, her pen still held in one
+hand, Tison pressed to her by the other, as she sat sideways to the
+writing-table. Imogen read in her face a mingled embarrassment and
+displeasure.
+
+"I am sure we must all be very grateful to Mr. Potts for this great idea of
+his, mama dear," she said. "I thought of it, of course, as soon as papa
+died; I knew that we all owed it to him, and to the country that he loved
+and served so well; but I did not see my way, and have not seen it till
+now. I've so little technical knowledge. But now I shall contribute a
+little memoir to the biography and, in any other way, give Mr. Potts all
+the aid I can. And we hope that you will, too. Papa's name is one that must
+not be allowed to fade."
+
+"I would rather talk of this at some other time, and with Mr. Potts alone,"
+Valerie now said, not raising her eyes.
+
+"But mama, this is my work, too. I must be present when it is talked of."
+
+"No, Jack, don't go," said Valerie, looking up at the young man, who had
+made a gesture of rising. "You and I, Imogen, will speak of this together,
+and I will find an hour, later, when I will be free to talk to Mr. Potts."
+
+"Mama darling," said Imogen, masking her rising anger in patient
+playfulness, "you are a lazy, postponing person. You are not a bit busy,
+and this is just the time to talk it over with us all. Of course Jack must
+stay; we want his advice, too, severe critic as we know him to be. Come,
+dear, put down that pen." She bent over her and drew the pen from her hand
+while Mr. Potts watched the little scene, old suspicions clouding his
+countenance.
+
+"My time is limited, Mrs. Upton," he observed; "Mrs. Potts and I take our
+departure to-morrow and, if I have heard aright, you expect acquaintances
+to dinner. Therefore, if you will pardon me, I must ask you to let us have
+the benefit, here and now, of your suggestions."
+
+Valerie had not responded by any smile to Imogen's rather baleful
+lightness, nor did she, by any penitence of look, respond to Mr. Potts's
+urgency. She sat silent for a moment, and when she spoke it was in a
+changed voice, dulled, monotonous. "If you insist on my speaking, now--and
+openly,--I must say to you that I altogether disapprove of your project.
+You will never," said Valerie, with a rising color, "gain my consent to
+it."
+
+A heavy silence followed her words, the only sound that of Tison's faint
+sniffings, as, his nose outstretched and moving from side to side, he
+cautiously savored the air in Mr. Potts's direction. Mrs. Potts stirred
+slightly, and uttered a sharp, "Tht--tht." Mr. Potts, his hand still stayed
+in his beard, gazed from under the fringed penthouse of his brows with an
+arrested, bovine look.
+
+It was Imogen who broke the silence. Standing beside her mother she had
+felt the shock of a curious fulfilment go through her, as if she had almost
+expected to hear what she now heard. She mastered her voice to ask:--"We
+must demand your reasons for this--this very strange attitude, mama."
+
+Her mother did not raise her eyes. "I don't think that your father was a
+man of sufficient distinction to justify the publishing of his biography."
+
+At this Mr. Potts breathed a deep, indignant volume of sound, louder than a
+sigh, less articulate than a groan, through the forests of his beard.
+
+"Sufficient distinction, Mrs. Upton! Sufficient distinction! You evidently
+are quite ignorant of how great was the distinction of your late husband.
+Ask us what that distinction was--ask any of his large circle of friends.
+It was a distinction not of mind only, nor of birth and breeding--though
+that was of the highest that this country has fostered--but it was a
+distinction also of soul and spirit. Your husband, Mrs. Upton, fought with
+speech and pen the iniquities of his country, the country that, as Miss
+Imogen has said, he loved and served. He served, he loved, with mind and
+heart and hand. He was the moving spirit in all the great causes of his
+day, the vitalizing influence that poured faith and will-power into them.
+He founded the cooperative community of Clackville; he organized the
+society of the 'Doers' among our young men;--he was a patron of the arts;
+talent was fostered, cheered on its way by him;--I can speak personally
+of three young friends of mine--noble boys--whom he sent to Paris at his
+own expense for the study of music and painting; when the great American
+picture is painted, the great American symphony composed, it will be, in
+all probability, to your husband that the country will owe the unveiling
+of its power. And above all, Mrs. Upton, above all,"--Mr. Potts's voice
+dropped to a thunderous solemnity,--"his character, his personality, his
+spirit, were as a light shining in darkness to all who had the good fortune
+to know him, and that light cannot, shall not, be cribbed, cabined and
+confined to a merely private capacity. It is a public possession and
+belongs to his country and to his age."
+
+Tison, all unheeded now, had leapt to the floor and, during this address,
+had stood directly in front of the speaker, barking furiously until Imogen,
+her lips compressed, her forehead flushed, stooped, picked him up, and
+flung him out of the room.
+
+Mrs. Upton had sat quite motionless, only lifting her glance now and then
+to Mr. Potts's shaking beard and flashing eye. And, after another pause,
+in which only Mr. Potts's deep breathing was heard,--and the desperate
+scratching at the door of the banished Tison,--she said in somber
+tones:--"I think you forget, Mr. Potts, that I was never one of my
+husband's appreciators. I am sorry to be forced to recall this fact to your
+memory."
+
+It had been in all their memories, of course, a vague, hovering
+uncertainty, a dark suspicion that one put aside and would not look at. But
+to have it now placed before them, and in these cold, these somber tones,
+was to receive an icy douche of reality, to be convicted of over-ready
+hope, over-generous confidence.
+
+It was Imogen, again, who found words for the indignant deputation: "Is
+that lamentable fact any reason why those who do appreciate him should not
+share their knowledge with others?"
+
+"I think it is;--I hope so, Imogen," her mother replied, not raising her
+eyes to her.
+
+"You tell us that your own ignorance and blindness is to prevent us from
+writing my father's life?"
+
+"My opinion of your father's relative insignificance is, I think, a
+sufficient reason."
+
+"Do you quite realize the arrogance of that attitude?"
+
+"I accept all its responsibility, Imogen."
+
+"But _we_ cannot accept it in you," said Imogen, her voice sinking to the
+hard quiver of reality that Jack well knew;--"_we_ can't fail in our duty
+to him because you have always failed in yours. _We_ are in no way bound to
+consider you-who never considered him."
+
+"Imogen," said her mother, raising her eyes with a look of command; "you
+forget yourself. Be still."
+
+Imogen's face froze to stone. Such words, such a look, she had never met
+before. She stood silent, helpless, rage and despair at her heart.
+
+But Mr. Potts did not lag behind his duty. His hand still wrapped,
+Moses-like, in his beard, his eyes bent in holy wrath upon his hostess, he
+rose to his feet, and Mrs. Potts, in recounting the scene--one of the most
+thrilling of her life--always said that never had she seen Delancy so
+superbly _true_, never had she seen blood so _tell_.
+
+"I must say to you, Mrs. Upton, with the deepest pain," he said, "that I
+agree with Miss Imogen. I must inform you, Mrs. Upton, that you have no
+right, legal or moral, to bind us by your own shortcoming. Miss Imogen and
+I may do our duty without your help or consent."
+
+"I have nothing more to say to you, Mr. Potts," Valerie replied. She had,
+unseeingly, taken up her pen again and, with a gesture habitual to her, was
+drawing squares and crosses on the blotter under her hand. The lines
+trembled. The angles of the squares would not meet.
+
+"But I have still something to say to you, Mrs. Upton," said Mr. Potts; "I
+have still to say to you that, much as you have shocked and pained us in
+the past, you have never so shocked and pained us as now. We had hoped for
+better things in you,--wider lights, deeper insights, the unsealing of your
+eyes to error and wrong in yourself; we had hoped that sorrow would work
+its sacred discipline and that, with your daughter's hand to guide you, you
+were preparing to follow, from however far a distance, in the footsteps
+of him who is gone. This must count for us, always, as a dark day of
+life, when we have seen a human soul turn wilfully from the good held out
+to it and choose deliberately the evil. I speak for myself and for Mrs.
+Potts--and in sorrow rather than in wrath, Mrs. Upton. I say nothing of
+your daughter; I bow my head before that sacred filial grief. I--"
+
+But here, suddenly, quiet, swift, irresistible as a flame, Jack rose from
+his place. It seemed one suave, unbroken motion, that by which he laid a
+hand on Mr. Potts's shoulder, a hand on Mrs. Potts's shoulder--she had
+risen in wonder and alarm at the menacing descent upon her lord--laid a
+hand on each, swept them to the door, opened it, swept them out, and shut
+the door upon them. Then he turned and leaned upon it, his arms folded.
+
+"Perhaps, Jack, you wish to put me out, too," said Imogen in a voice of ice
+and fire. "Your arguments are conclusive. I hope that mama approves her
+champion."
+
+Valerie now seemed to lean heavily on the table; she rested her forehead on
+her hand, covering her eyes.
+
+"Have you anything to say to me, mama, before Jack executes his justice on
+me?" Imogen asked.
+
+"Spare me, Imogen," her mother answered.
+
+"Have you spared _me_?" said Imogen. "Have you spared my father? What right
+have you to ask for mercy? You are a cruel, a shallow, a selfish woman, and
+you break my heart as you broke his. Now Jack, you need not put me out. I
+will go of myself."
+
+When Jack had closed the door on her, he still stood leaning against it at
+a distance from Valerie. He saw that she wept, bitterly and uncontrollably;
+but, at first, awed by her grief, he did not dare approach her. It was only
+when the sobs were quieted that he went and stood near her.
+
+"You were right, right," he almost whispered.
+
+She did not answer, and wept on as if there could be no consolation for her
+in such rightness.
+
+"It had to come," said Jack; "she had to be made to understand. And--you
+are right."
+
+She was not thinking of herself. "Oh, Jack Jack," she spoke at last,
+putting out her hand to his and grasping it tightly "How I have hurt her.
+Poor Imogen;--my poor, poor child."
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+
+Imogen hardly knew where she went, or how, when she left her mother--her
+mother and Jack--and darted from the house on the wings of a supreme
+indignation, a supreme despair. Her sense of fitness was not that of Mr.
+Potts, and she knew that her father's biography was doomed. Against her
+mother's wish it could not, with any grace, any dignity, be published. Mr.
+Potts would put forth appreciation of his departed chief in the small,
+grandiloquent review to which he contributed--he had only delayed because
+of the greater project--but such a tribute would be a sealing of public
+failure rather than the kindling of public recognition. Already her father,
+by that larger public, was forgotten--forgotten; Mr. Potts would not make
+him remembered.
+
+The word "forgotten" seemed like the beat of dark, tragic wings, bearing
+her on and on. The fire of a bitter wrong burned in her. And it was not the
+sense of personal wrong--though that was fierce,--that made her flight so
+blind and headlong--not her mother's cruelty nor Jack's sinister espousal
+of the cause he saw as evil; it was this final, this culminating wrong to
+her father. His face rose before her, while she fled, the deep, dark eyes
+dwelling with persistence on her as though they asked,--she seemed to hear
+the very words and in his very voice:--"What have they done to me, little
+daughter? Did I deserve this heaping of dust upon my name;--and from her
+hands?"
+
+For it was that. Dust, the dust of indifferent time, of cold-hearted
+oblivion, was drifting over him, hiding his smile, his eyes, his tears.
+It seemed to mount, to suffocate her, as she ran, this dust, strewn by
+her mother's hand. Even in her own heart she had known the parching of
+its drifting fall, known that crouching doubts--not of him, never of
+him--but of his greatness, had lurked in ambush since her mother had come
+home;--known that the Pottses and their fitness had never before been so
+clearly seen for the little that they were since her mother--and all that
+her mother had brought--had come into her life. And, before this drifting
+of dust upon her faith in her father's greatness, her heart, all that was
+deepest in it, broke into a greater trust, a greater love, sobs beneath it.
+He was not great, perhaps, as the world counted greatness; but he was good,
+good,--he was sorrowful and patient. He loved her as no one had ever loved
+her. His ideals were hers and her love was his. Dust might lie on his tomb;
+but never, never, in her heart.
+
+"Ah, it's cruel! cruel! cruel!" she panted, as she ran, ran, up the rocky,
+woodland path, leaping from ledge to ledge, slipping on the silky moss,
+falling now and then on hands and knees, but not pausing or faltering until
+she reached the murmuring pine-woods, the grassy, aromatic glades where the
+mountain-laurel grew.
+
+Pallid, disheveled, with tragic, unseeing eyes and parted lips--the
+hollowed eyes, the sorrowful lips of a classic mask--she rushed from the
+shadows of the mountain--path into this place of sunlight and solitude. A
+doomed, distraught Antigone.
+
+And so she looked to Sir Basil, who, his back against a warm rock, a
+cigarette in one lazy hand, was outstretched there before her on the moss,
+a bush of flowering laurel at his head, and, at his feet, beyond tree-tops,
+the steep, far blue of the lower world. He was gazing placidly at this
+view, empty of thought and even of conscious appreciation, wrapped in a
+balmy contentment, when, with the long, deep breath of a hunted deer,
+Imogen leaped from darkness into light, and her face announced such
+disaster that, casting aside the cigarette, springing to his feet, he
+seized her by the arms, thinking that she might fall before him. And
+indeed she would have cast herself face downward on the grass had he not
+been there; and she leaned forward on his supporting hands, speechless,
+breathing heavily, borne down by the impetus of her headlong run. Then, her
+face hidden from him as she leaned, she burst into sobs.
+
+"Miss Upton!--Imogen!--My dear child!--" said Sir Basil, in a crescendo of
+distress and solicitude.
+
+She leaned there on his hands weeping so bitterly and so helplessly that he
+finished his phrase by putting an arm around her, and so more effectually
+supporting her, so satisfying, also, his own desire to comfort and caress
+her.
+
+The human touch, the human tenderness--though him she hardly realized--drew
+her grief to articulateness. "Oh--my father!--my father!--Oh--what have
+they done to you!" she gasped, leaning her forehead against Sir Basil's
+shoulder.
+
+"Your father?" Sir Basil repeated soothingly, since this departed
+personality seemed a menace that might easily be dealt with, "What is it?
+What have they done? How can I help you? My dear child, do treat me as a
+friend. Do tell me what is the matter."
+
+"It's mama! mama!--she has broken my heart--as she broke his," sobbed
+Imogen, finding her former words. Already, such was the amazing irony of
+events, Sir Basil seemed, more than anyone in the world, to take that
+dead father's place, to help her in her grief over him. The puzzle of it
+inflicted a deeper pang. "I can't tell you," she sobbed. "But I can never,
+never forgive her!"
+
+"Forgive your mother?" Sir Basil repeated, shocked. "Don't, I beg of you,
+speak so. It's some misunderstanding."
+
+"No!--No!--It is understanding--it is the whole understanding! It has come
+out at last--the truth--the dreadful truth."
+
+"But can't you tell me? can't you explain?"
+
+She lifted her face and drew away from him as she said, pressing her
+handkerchief to her eyes: "You never knew him. You cannot care for him--no
+one who cares, as much as you do, for her,--can ever care for him."
+
+Sir Basil had deeply flushed. He led her to the sunny rock and made her
+sit down on a low ledge, where she leaned forward, her face in her hands,
+long sighs of exhaustion succeeding her tears. "I know nothing about your
+father, as you say, and I do care, very much, for your mother," said Sir
+Basil after a little while. "But I care for you, very much, too."
+
+"Ah, but you could never care for me so much as to think her wrong."
+
+"I don't know about that. Why not?--if she is wrong. One often thinks
+people one is fond of very wrong. Do you know," and Sir Basil now sat down
+beside her, a little lower, on the moss, "do you know you'll make me quite
+wretched if you won't have confidence in me. I really can't stand seeing
+you suffer and not know what it's about. I don't--I can't feel myself such
+a stranger as that. Won't you think of me," he took one of her hands and
+held it as he said this, "won't you think of me as, well, as a sort of
+affectionate old brother, you know? I want to be trusted, and to see if I
+can't help you. Don't be afraid," he added, "of being disloyal--of making
+me care less, you know, for your mother, by anything you say; for you
+wouldn't."
+
+Leaning there, her face hidden, while she half heard him, it struck her
+suddenly, a shaft of light in darkness, that, indeed, he might help her.
+She dropped her hand to look at him and, with all its tear-stained
+disfigurement, he thought that he had never seen anything more heavenly
+than that look. It sought, it sounded him, pleaded with and caressed him.
+And, with all its solemnity, there dawned in it a tenderness deeper than
+any that he had ever seen in her.
+
+"I do trust you," she said. "I think of you as a near, a dear friend. And,
+since you promise me that it will change you in nothing, I will tell you. I
+believe that perhaps you can help us,--my father and me. You must count me
+with him, you know, always. We want to write a life of him, Mr. Potts and
+I. Mr. Potts--you may have seen it--is an ordinary person, ordinary but
+for one thing, one great and beautiful thing that papa and I always felt
+in him,--and that beautiful thing is his depth of unselfish devotion to
+great causes and to good people. He worked for my father like a faithful,
+loving dog. He had an accurate knowledge of all the activities that papa's
+life was given to--all the ideals it aimed at and attained--yes, yes,
+attained,--whatever they may say. He has a very skilful pen, and is in
+touch with the public press. So, though I would, of course, have wished for
+a more adequate biographer, I was glad and proud to accept his offer; and I
+would have overlooked, revised, everything. We felt,--and by we, I mean not
+only Mr. and Mrs. Potts, but all his many, many friends, all those whose
+lives he loved and helped and lifted--that we owed it to the world he
+served not to let his name fade from among us. You cannot dream, Sir Basil,
+of what sort of man my father was. His life was one long devotion to the
+highest things, one long service of the weak and oppressed, one long battle
+with the wrong. Those who are incapable of following him to the heights can
+give you no true picture of him. I will say nothing, in this respect, of
+mama, except that she could not follow him,--and that she made him very,
+very unhappy, and with him, me. For I shared all his griefs. She left us;
+she laughed at all the things we cared and worked for. My father never
+spoke bitterly of her; his last words, almost, were for her, words of
+tenderness and pity and forgiveness. He had the capacity that only great
+souls have, of love for littler natures. I say this much so that you may
+know that any idea that you may have gathered of my father is, perforce, a
+garbled, a false one. He was a noble, a wonderful man. Everything I am I
+owe to him."
+
+Imogen had straightened herself, the traces of weeping almost gone, her own
+fluency, as was usual with her, quieting her emotion, even while her own
+and her father's wrongs, thus objectivized in careful phrases, made
+indignation at once colder and deeper. Her very effort to quell
+indignation, to command her voice to an even justice of tone before this
+lover of her mother's, gave it a resonant quality, curiously impressive.
+And, as she looked before her, down into the blue profundities, the sense
+of her own sincerity seemed to pulse back to her from her silent listener,
+and filled her with a growing consciousness of power over him.
+
+"This morning," she took up her theme on that resonant note, deepened to a
+tragic pitch, "we went to mama--Mr. Potts and I--to tell her of our project
+of commemoration, to ask her coöperation. We wanted to be very generous
+with her, to take her help and her sympathy for granted. I should have
+felt it an insult to my mother had I told Mr. Potts that we must carry on
+our work without consulting her. She received us with cold indifference.
+She tried not to listen, when she heard what our errand was. And her
+indifference became hostility, when she understood. All her old hatred for
+what he was and meant, all her fundamental antagonism to the purpose of his
+life--and to him--came at last, openly, to the light. She was forced to
+reveal herself. Not only has she no love, no reverence for him, but she
+cannot bear that others should learn to love him and to reverence him.
+She sneered at his claim to distinction; she refused her consent to our
+project. It is a terrible thing for me to say--but I must--and you will
+understand me--you who will not care less for her because she is so
+wrong--what I feel most of all in her attitude is a childish, yet a cruel,
+jealousy. She cannot endure that she should be so put into the dark by the
+spreading of his light. The greater his radiance is shown to be, the more
+in the wrong will all her life be proved;--it is that that she will not
+hear of. She _wants_ him to be obscure, undistinguished, negligible,
+because it's that that she has always thought him."
+
+Sir Basil, while she spoke, had kept his eyes fixed on the hand he
+held, a beautiful hand, white, curiously narrow, with pointed, upturned
+finger-tips. Once or twice a dull color rose to his sunburned cheek, but in
+his well-balanced mind was a steady perception of what the filial grief and
+pain must be from which certain words came. He could not resent them; it
+was inevitable that a child who had so loved her father should so think and
+feel. And her self-control, her accurate fluency, answered with him for her
+sincerity as emotion could not have done. Passion would never carry this
+noble girl into overstatement. Fairness constrained him to admit, while he
+listened, that dark color in his cheek, that her view of her father was
+more likely to be right than her mother's view. An unhappily married woman
+was seldom fair. Mrs. Upton had never mentioned her husband to him, never
+alluded to him except in most formal terms; but the facts of her flight
+from the marital hearth, the fact that he had made her so unhappy, had been
+to him sufficient evidence of Mr. Upton's general unworthiness. Now, though
+Imogen's tragic ardor did not communicate any of her faith in her father's
+wonder or nobility, it did convince him of past unfairness toward, no
+doubt, a most worthy man. Incompatibility, that had been the trouble; he
+one of these reformer people, very much in earnest; and Mrs. Upton, dear
+and lovely though she was, with not a trace of such enthusiasm in her moral
+make-up.
+
+So, when Imogen had finished, though he sat silent for a little while,
+though beneath the steady survey of what she put before him was a stirring
+of trouble, it was in a tone of quiet acceptance that he at last said,
+looking up at her, "Yes; I quite see what you feel about it. To you, of
+course, they must look like that, your mother's reasons. They must look
+very differently to her, that goes without saying. We can't really make out
+these things, you know, these fundamental antagonisms; I never knew it went
+as far as that. But I quite see. Poor child. I'm very sorry. It is most
+awfully hard on you."
+
+"Don't think of me!" Imogen breathed out on a note of pain. "It's not of
+myself I'm thinking, not of my humiliation and despair--but of him!--of
+him!--Is it _right_ that I should submit? _Ought_ a project like ours to be
+abandoned for such a reason?"
+
+Again Sir Basil was silent for some moments, considering the narrow white
+hands. "Perhaps she'll come round,--think better of it."
+
+"Ah!--" it was now on a note of deep, of tremulous hope that she breathed
+it out, looking into his eyes with the profound, searching look so moving
+to him; "Ah!--it's there, it's there, that you could help me. She would
+never yield to me. She might to you."
+
+"Oh, I don't think that likely," Sir Basil protested, the flush darkening.
+
+"Yes, yes," said Imogen, leaning toward him above his clasp of her hand.
+"Yes, if anything is likely that is so. If hope is anywhere, it's there.
+Don't you see, in her eyes I stand for _him_. To yield to me would be like
+yielding to him, would be his triumph. That's what she can't forgive in
+me--that I do stand for him, that I live by all that she rejected. She
+would never yield to me,--but she might yield _for_ you."
+
+"Shall I speak to her about it?" Sir Basil asked abruptly, after another
+moment in which Imogen's hand grasped his tightly, its soft, warm fingers
+more potent in appeal than even her eyes had been. And now, again,
+she leaned toward him, her eyes inundating him with radiant trust and
+gratitude, her hands drawing his hand to her breast and holding it there,
+so clasped.
+
+"Will you?--Oh, will you?--dear Sir Basil."
+
+Sir Basil stammered a little. "I'll have a try--It's hard on you, I think.
+I don't see why you shouldn't have your heart's desire. It's an awfully
+queer thing to do,--but, for your sake, I'll have a try--put it to her, you
+know."
+
+"Ah, I _knew_ that you were big," said Imogen.
+
+He looked at her, his hand between her hands. The flowering laurel was
+behind her head. The pine-forest murmured about them. The sky was blue
+above them, and the deep blue of the distance lay at their feet. Suddenly,
+as they looked into each other's eyes, it dawned in the consciousness of
+both that something was happening.
+
+It was to Sir Basil that it was happening. Imogen's was but the
+consciousness of his experience. Such a thing could hardly happen to
+Imogen. Neither her senses, nor her emotions, nor her imagination played
+any dominant part in her nature. She was incapable of falling in love in
+the helpless, headlong, human fashion that the term implies. But though
+such feeling lacked, the perception of it in others was swift, and while
+she leaned to Sir Basil in the sunlight, while she clasped his hand to her
+breast, while their eyes dwelt deeply on each other, she seemed to hear,
+like a rising chime of wonder and delight, the ringing of herald bells that
+sang: "Mine--mine--mine--if I choose to take him."
+
+Wonderful indeed it was to feel this influx of certain power. Sunlight,
+like that about them, seemed to rise, slowly, softly, within her, like the
+upwelling of a spring of joy.
+
+It was happening, it had happened to him, his eyes told her that; but
+whether he knew as she did she doubted and, for the beautiful moment, it
+added a last touch of charm to her exultation to know that, while she was
+sure, she could leave that light veil of his wonder shimmering between
+them.
+
+With the vision of the unveiling her mind leaped to the thought of her
+mother and of Jack, and with that thought came a swift pulse of vengeful
+gladness. So she would make answer to them both--the scorner--the rejector.
+Not for a moment must she listen to the voices of petty doubts and pities.
+This love, that lay like a bauble in her mother's hand--an unfit ornament
+for her years--would shine on her own head like a diadem. Unasked,
+undreamed of, it had turned to her; it was her highest duty to keep and
+wear it. It was far, far more than her duty to herself; it was her duty to
+this man, finished, mature, yet full of unawakened possibility; it was her
+duty to that large, vague world that his life touched, a world where her
+young faiths and vigors would bring a light such as her mother's gay little
+taper could never spread. These thoughts, and others, flashed through
+Imogen's mind, with the swiftness and exactitude of a drowning vision. Yet,
+after the long moment of vivid realization, it was at its height that a
+qualm, a sinking overtook her. The gift had come; of that she was sure. But
+its triumphant displayal might be delayed--nay, might be jeopardized. Some
+perverse loyalty in his nature, some terrified decisiveness of action on
+her mother's part, and the golden reality might even be made to crumble.
+For one moment, as the qualm seized her, she saw herself--and the thought
+was like a flying flame that scorched her lips as it passed--she saw
+herself sweeping aside the veil, sinking upon his breast, with tears that
+would reveal him to himself and her to him.
+
+But it was impossible for Imogen to yield open-eyed to temptation that
+could not be sanctified. Her strong sense of personal dignity held her from
+the impulse, and a quick recognition, too, that it might lower her starry
+altitude in his eyes. She must stand still, stand perfectly still, and he
+would come to her. She could protect him from her mother's clinging--this
+she recognized as a strange yet an insistent duty--but between him and her
+there must not be a shadow, an ambiguity.
+
+The radiance of the renunciation, the resolve, was in her face as she
+gently released his hand, gently rose, standing smiling, with a strange,
+rapt smile, above him.
+
+Sir Basil rose, too, silent, and looking hard at her. She guessed at the
+turmoil, the wonder of his honest soul, his fear lest she did guess it,
+and, with the fear, the irrepressible hope that, in some sense, it was
+echoed.
+
+"My dear, dear friend," she said, putting her hand on his shoulder,
+as though with the gesture she dubbed him her knight, "my more than
+friend--shall it be elder brother?--I believe that you will be able to
+help me and my father. And if you fail--my gratitude to you will be none
+the less great. I can't tell you how I trust you, how I care for you."
+
+From his face she looked up at the sky above them; and in the sunlight
+her innocent, uplifted smile made her like a heavenly child. "Isn't it
+wonderful?--beautiful?--" she said, almost conquering her inner fear by
+the seeming what she wished to be. "Look up, Sir Basil!--Doesn't it seem
+to heal everything,--to glorify everything,--to promise everything?"
+
+He looked up at the sky, still speechless. Her face, her smile--the sky
+above it--did it not heal, glorify, promise in its innocence? If a great
+thing claims one suddenly, must not the lesser things inevitably go?--Could
+one hold them?--Ought one to try to hold them? There was tumult in poor Sir
+Basil's soul, the tumult of partings and meetings.
+
+But when everything culminated in the longing to seize this heavenly
+child--this heavenly woman--to seize and kiss her--a sturdy sense of
+honesty warned him that not so could he, with honor, go forward. He must
+see his way more clearly than that. Strange that he had been so blind, till
+now, of where all ways, since his coming to Vermont, had been leading him.
+He could see them now, plainly enough.
+
+Taking Imogen's hand once more, he pressed it, dropped it, looked into her
+eyes and said, as they turned to the descent: "That was swearing eternal
+friendship, wasn't it!"
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+
+Violent emotions, in highly civilized surroundings, may wonderfully be
+effaced by the common effort of those who have learned how to live. Of
+these there were, perhaps, not many in our little group; but the guidance
+of such a past mistress of the art as Imogen's mother steered the social
+craft, on this occasion, past the reefs and breakers into a tolerably
+smooth sea.
+
+With an ally as facile, despite his personal perturbations, as Sir Basil,
+a friend like Mrs. Wake at hand--a friend to whom one had never to make
+explanations, yet who always understood what was wanted of her,--with
+a presence so propitious as the calm and unconscious Miss Bocock, the
+sickening plunges of explanation and recrimination that accompany unwary
+seafaring and unskilful seamanship were quite avoided in the time that
+passed between Valerie's appearance at the tea-table--where she dispensed
+refreshment to Mrs. Wake, Miss Bocock, and Jack only--and the meeting of
+all the ship's crew at dinner.
+
+Valerie, in that ominous interlude, even when Sir Basil appeared on the
+veranda, alone, but saying that he had been for a walk with Miss Upton, who
+was tired and had gone to her room to rest, even when she observed that
+the Pottses had decided upon maintaining a splendid isolation in their
+own chambers, did not permit the ship to turn for one moment in such a
+direction. She had tea sent up to Imogen and tea sent up to the Pottses;
+but no messages of any sort accompanied either perfectly appointed tray,
+and when the dinner hour arrived she faced the Pottses' speechless dignity
+and Imogen's _mater dolorosa_ eyelids with perfect composure. She seemed,
+on meeting the Pottses, neither to ignore nor to recall.
+
+She seemed to understand speechlessness, yet to take it lightly, as if on
+their account. She talked at them, through them, with them, really, in such
+a manner that they were drawn helplessly into her shuttle and woven into
+the gracefully gliding pattern of social convention in spite of themselves.
+In fact, she preserved appearances with such success that everyone, to each
+one's surprise, was able to make an excellent dinner.
+
+After high emotions, as after high seas, the appetite is capricious,
+shrinking to the shudder of repulsion or rising to whetted keenness.
+Valerie had the satisfaction of seeing that her crew, as they assured
+themselves--or, rather, as she assured them--that the waters were silken
+in their calm, showed the reaction from moral stress in wholesome sensuous
+gratification. Even Mrs. and Mr. Potts, even Imogen, were hungry.
+
+She herself had still too strongly upon her the qualm of imminent shipwreck
+to do more than seem to join them; but it was only natural that the
+captain, who alone was conscious of just how near the reefs were and of
+just how threatening the horizon loomed, should lack the appetite that his
+reassuring presence evoked. Jack noticed that she ate nothing, but he alone
+noticed it.
+
+It was perhaps Jack who noticed most universally at that wonderful little
+dinner, where the shaded candle-light seemed to isolate them in its soft,
+diffused circle of radiance and the windows, with their faintly stirring
+muslin curtains, to open on a warm, mysterious ocean of darkness. The
+others were too much occupied with their own particular miseries and in
+their own particular reliefs to notice how the captain fared.
+
+Mrs. Wake must, no doubt, guess that something was up, but she couldn't
+in the least guess how much. She watched, but her observation, her
+watchfulness, could be in no sense like his own. Miss Bocock, in a low-cut
+blouse of guipure and pale-blue satin, her favorite red roses pinned on
+her shoulder, her fringe freshly and crisply curled above her eyeglasses,
+was the only quite unconscious presence, and so innocent was her
+unconsciousness that it could not well be observant. Indeed, in one sinking
+moment, she leaned forward, with unwonted kindliness, to ask the stony Mrs.
+Potts if her headache was better, a question received with a sphinx-like
+bow. Apart, however, from the one or two blunders of unconsciousness, Jack
+saw that Miss Bocock was very useful to Valerie; more useful than himself,
+on whom, he felt, her eye did not venture to rest for any length of time.
+Too tragic a consciousness would rise between them if their glances too
+deeply intermingled.
+
+Miss Bocock's gaze, behind its crystal medium, was a smooth surface from
+which the light balls of dialogue rebounded easily. Miss Bocock thought
+that she had never talked so well upon her own topics as on this occasion,
+and from the intentness of the glances turned upon her she might well have
+been misled as to her effectiveness. The company seemed to thirst for every
+detail as to her theory of the rise of the Mycenean civilization. Mrs.
+Wake, for all her tact, was too wary, too observant, to fill so perfectly
+the part of buffer-state as was Miss Bocock.
+
+If one wanted pure amusement, with but the faintest tincture of pity to
+color it, the countenances of the Pottses were worth close study. That
+their silence was not for one moment allowed to become awkward, to
+themselves, or to others, Jack recognized as one of Valerie's miracles that
+night, and when he considered that the Pottses might not guess to whom they
+owed their ease, he could hardly pity them. That their eyes should not meet
+his, except for a heavy stare or two, was natural. After this meeting in
+the mirage-like oasis that Valerie made bloom for them all, he knew that
+for the Pottses he would be relegated to the sightless, soundless Saharas
+of a burning remembrance. It was but a small part of his attention that was
+spared to the consciousness that Mr. Potts was very uplifted, that Mrs.
+Potts was very tense, and that Mrs. Potts's dress, as if in protest against
+any form of relaxation and condonation, was very, very high and tight.
+Indeed, Mrs. Potts, in her room, before the descent, had said to her
+husband, in the mutual tones of their great situation, laying aside with
+resolution the half-high bodice that, till then, had marked her concession
+to fashionable standards, "Never, never again, in her house. Let her bare
+her bosom if she will. I shall protest against her by every symbol."
+
+Mr. Potts, with somber justice, as though he exonerated an Agrippina from
+one of many crimes, had remarked that the bosom, as far as he had observed
+it, had been slightly veiled; but:--"I understand those tuckers," Mrs.
+Potts had replied with a withering smile, presenting her back for her
+husband to hook, a marital office that usually left Mr. Potts in an
+exhausted condition.
+
+So Mrs. Potts this evening seemed at once to mourn, to protest and to
+accuse, covered to her chin with a relentless black.
+
+But, though Jack saw all this, he was not in the humor for more than a
+superficial sense of amusement. With his excited sense of mirth was a
+deeper sense of disaster, and the poor Pottses were at once too grotesque
+and too insignificant to satisfy it.
+
+It was upon Imogen and Sir Basil that his eye most frequently turned.
+Valerie had put them together, separated from herself by the whole length
+of the table; Mr. Potts was on Imogen's other hand; Miss Bocock sat between
+Mr. Potts and Valerie, and Jack, Mrs. Wake and Mrs. Potts brought the
+circle round to Sir Basil, a neat gradation of affinities.
+
+Jack, in a glance, had seen that Imogen had been passionately weeping; he
+could well imagine that grief. But before her pallid face and sunken eyes
+he knew that his heart was hardened. Never, judged from a dispassionate
+standard, had Imogen been so right, and her rightness left him indifferent.
+If she had been wrong; if she had been, in some sense guilty, if her
+consciousness had not been so supremely spotless, he would have been
+sorrier for her. It was the woman beside him whose motives he could not
+penetrate, whose action to-day had seemed to him mistaken, it was for her
+that his heart ached. Imogen he seemed to survey from across a far, wide
+chasm of alienation.
+
+Sir Basil was evidently as bent on helping her as was her mother. He talked
+very gaily, tossing back all Valerie's balls. He rallied Miss Bocock on
+her radical tendencies, and engaged in a humorous dispute with Mrs. Wake
+in defense of racing. Imogen, when he spoke, turned her eyes on him and
+listened gravely. When her mother spoke, she looked down at her plate. But
+once or twice Jack caught her eye, while her mother's attention was engaged
+elsewhere, resting upon her with a curious, a piercing intentness. Such a
+cold glitter, as of steel, was in the glance, that, instinctively, his own
+turned on Valerie, as if he had felt her threatened.
+
+This instinct of protection was oddly on the watch to-night. Under
+the sense of mirth and disaster a deeper thing throbbed in him, some
+inarticulate sorrow, greater than the apparent causes warranted, that
+mourned with and for her. In the illumination of this intuition Valerie, he
+thought, had never been so lovely as to-night. It seemed to him that her
+body, with its indolence of aspect, expressed an almost superhuman courage.
+She was soft and fragile and weary, leaning there in her transparent black,
+her cheek in her hand, her elbow, in, its loose sleeve, resting on the
+table; but she made him think of a reed: that the tempest could not break.
+
+Her face was pale, he had never seen it so drained of its dusky rose. There
+was something inexpressibly touching in the flicker of her smile on the
+white, white cheek, in the innocent gaiety of the dimple placed high and
+recalling Japanese suggestions, vague as the scent of sandal-wood. She,
+too, had wept, as he well knew; and his heart ached, dully, as he thought
+of that bitter weeping, those tears, of humility and pain. Her eyelids,
+strangely discolored, were like the petals of a melancholy flower, and her
+eyes were heavy and gentle.
+
+A vague, absurdly alarming sense of presage grew upon him as his eyes went
+from this face to Imogen's--so still, so cold, so unanswering, lightened,
+as if from a vail of heavy cloud, by that stealthy, baleful, illuminating
+glance. In Imogen's whole bearing he read renouncement, but renouncement,
+in her hand, would assuredly prove a scourge for her mother's shoulders.
+For the time that they must be together, she and her mother, her sense of
+her own proved rightness would be relentless, as inflexible as and as
+relentless as her sense of bitter wrong.
+
+Valerie's shoulders were bared and bowed. She was ready to take it all. But
+it was here, for Jack, that the deep instinct of protection centered at
+last in a clear decision; it was here that he felt himself rush in with the
+only solution, the only salvation. At the thought of it, that one solution,
+his heart ached more sharply, but it ached for himself alone. For she must
+go away; yes, that was the only escape; she must go away at once, with Sir
+Basil. She had failed. She had said it to him that morning in a few broken
+sentences before relinquishing the hand she grasped.
+
+"I've done more than fail. I've wrecked things"; and she had smiled
+piteously upon him and left him.
+
+He knew of what she spoke, of the disaster that, as she had seen, finally
+and irrevocably had overtaken his love for her child.
+
+And it was true, of course. She had failed. She had wrecked things; but in
+his eyes, the failure she bore, the destruction she brought, made others
+dark, not her. She must accept the irony of things,--it was not on her that
+its shadow rested, and she must go, back to her own place, back to her own
+serene, if saddened, sunlight, where she could breathe again and be safe
+from scourgings. Thank heaven for Sir Basil, was Jack's thought, over that
+sharpened ache. And it was with this thought that, for Jack, came the first
+sinister whisper, the whisper that, as suddenly as the hiss of a viper
+trodden upon in the grass, warned him of the fulfilment, clear, startling,
+unimaginable, of all dim presages.
+
+He always remembered, ludicrously, that they had reached the sweet when the
+whisper came, and with his recollection of its import there mingled for him
+always the incongruous association of sliced peaches and iced cream. He had
+just helped himself to this dish when, raising his eyes, he saw Sir Basil
+looking at Imogen.
+
+It was, apparently, a calm, a thoughtful look, and as Imogen's eyes were
+downcast to her fruit and cream, which she was eating with much appetite,
+she did not then meet it. But it was a look a little off guard;--his
+perception of that was the first low sibilant that reached him;--it was a
+look full of gentle solicitude, full of brooding, absorbed intentness; and
+presently, when Imogen, as if aware of it, glanced up and met it, Sir Basil
+deeply flushed and turned his eyes away.
+
+This passage was a small enough cause to make one suddenly grow very
+chilly; Jack tried to tell himself that, as he mechanically went on eating.
+Perhaps Imogen had confided in Sir Basil; perhaps he agreed with her, was
+sorry, sympathetic, and embarrassed by a sympathy that set him against the
+woman he loved; perhaps he already felt a protecting, paternal affection
+for Imogen, just as he himself, in the absurd inversions of their
+situation, felt a protecting filial affection for Valerie. But at that
+thought--as if the weak links of his chain of possibilities had snapped and
+left him at the verge of a chasm, a sudden echo in himself revealed depths
+of disastrous analogy. It was revelation that came to Jack, rather than
+self-revelation; the instinct that flamed up in him at this moment was like
+a torch in a twilit cavern. He might have seen the looming shapes fairly
+well without it, but, by its illumination, every uncertainty started out
+into vivid light and dark. The fact that his own feeling was so far other
+than filial did not detain him. His light was not turned upon himself; of
+himself he only knew, in that dazzling moment, that he was armed as her
+knight, armed for her battle as a son could not have been; it was upon Sir
+Basil, upon Imogen, that the torch-light rested.
+
+He looked presently from them to Valerie. Did she know at all what was her
+peril? Had she seen at all what threatened her? Her face told him nothing.
+She was talking to Miss Bocock, and her serenity, as of mellow moonlight,
+cooled and calmed him a little so that he could wonder whether the peril
+was very imminent. Even if the unbelievable had happened;--even if Imogen
+had ensnared Sir Basil--Jack's thoughts, in dealing with poor Imogen,
+passed in their ruthlessness beyond the facts--even if she had ensnared
+him, surely, surely, she could not keep him. The glamour would pass from
+him. He would be the first to fight clear of it were he fully aware of what
+it signified. For Imogen knew,--the torch-light had revealed that to
+Jack,--Imogen knew, he and Imogen, alone, knew. Sir Basil didn't and
+Valerie didn't. Single-handed he might save them both. Save them both from
+Imogen.
+
+To this strange landing-place had his long voyage, away from old ports, old
+landmarks, brought him; and on its rocks he stepped to-night, bound on a
+perilous quest in an unknown country. It seemed almost like the coast of
+another planet, so desolate, so lonely. But beyond the frowning headlines
+he imagined that he would find, far inland, quiet green stretches where he
+would rest, and think of her. The landing was bathed in a light sadder, but
+sweeter far than the sunlight of other countries. Here he was to fight, not
+for himself, but for her.
+
+The first move of strategy was made directly after dinner. He asked Imogen
+to come out and see the moonlight with him.
+
+A word to the wise was a word to Mrs. Wake, who safely cornered Miss Bocock
+and the Pottses over a game of cards. Jack saw Valerie and Sir Basil
+established on the veranda, and then led Imogen away, drew her from her
+quarry, along the winding path in the woods.
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+
+Valerie, on sinking into the low wicker chair, and drawing her chuddah
+about her shoulders, drawing it closely, although the evening was not cool
+had expected to find Jack, or Mrs. Wake, or Miss Bocock presently beside
+her.
+
+She had watched, as they wandered, all of them, into the drawing-room, the
+hovering, long since familiar to her, of Sir Basil. She had seen that his
+eye was as much on Imogen as on herself. She had seen Imogen's eye meet his
+with a deep insistence. What it commanded, this eye, Valerie did not know,
+but she had grown accustomed to seeing such glances obeyed and she expected
+to watch, presently, Imogen's and Sir Basil's departure into the moonlit
+woods.
+
+It was, therefore, with surprise that she looked up to see Sir Basil's form
+darken against the sky. He asked if he might smoke his cigar beside her,
+and the intelligent smile he knew so well rested upon him as he took the
+chair next hers.
+
+In the slight pause that followed, both were thinking that, since their
+parting in England they had really been very seldom alone together, and in
+Sir Basil's mind was a wonder, very disquieting, as to what, really, had
+been the understanding under the parting.
+
+He was well aware that any vagueness as to understanding had been owing
+entirely to Valerie, well aware that had she not always kept about them the
+atmosphere of sunny frankness and gay friendship, he would without doubt
+have entangled himself and her in the complications of an avowed devotion,
+and that long before her husband's death. For how she had charmed him, this
+gay, this deep-hearted friend, descending suddenly on his monotonous life
+with a flutter of wings, a flash of color, a liquid pulse of song, like
+some strange, bright bird. Charm had grown to affection and to trustful
+need, and then to the restlessness and pain and sadness of his hidden
+passion. He would have spoken, he knew it very well, were it not that she
+had never given him the faintest chance to speak, the faintest excuse for
+speaking. She had kept him from any avowal so completely that he might
+well, now, wonder if his self-control had not been owing far more to the
+intuition of hopelessness than to mere submission. Could she have kept him
+so silent, had she been the least little bit in love with him? He had, of
+course, been tremendously in love with her--it was bewildering to use the
+past tense, indeed--and she, of course, clever creature that she was, must
+have known it; but hadn't he been very fatuous in imagining that beneath
+her fond, playful friendship lay the possibility of a deeper response?
+
+Since seeing her again, in her effaced, maternal rôle, he had realized that
+she was more middle-aged than he had ever thought her, and since coming
+to Vermont there had been a new emphasis in this cool, gray quality that
+removed her the more from associations with youth and passion. So was he
+brought, by the dizzy turn of events, to hoping that loyalty to his own
+past love was, for him, the only question, since loyalty to her, in that
+respect, had never been expected of him.
+
+Yet, as he took his place beside her and looked at her sitting there in the
+golden light, wrapped round in white, very wan and pale, despite her smile,
+he felt the strangest, twisted pang of divided desire.
+
+She was wan and she was pale, but she was not cool, she was not gray; he
+felt in her, as strongly as in far-off days, the warmth and fragrance, and
+knew that it was Imogen who had so cast her into a shadow. Her image had
+grown dim on that very first time of seeing Imogen standing as Antigone in
+the rapt, hushed theater. That dawn had culminated to-day in the
+over-mastering, all-revealing burst of noon, and from its radiance the past
+had been hardly visible except as shadow. But now he sat in the moonlight,
+the past personified in the quiet presence beside him, and the memory of
+noonday itself became mirage-like and uncertain. He almost felt as if he
+had been having a wild dream, and that Valerie's glance was the awakening
+from it.
+
+To think of Imogen's filial grief and of his promise to her,--a promise
+deeply recalled to him by the message of her tear-worn eyes,--to steady his
+mind to the task of friendly helpfulness, was to put aside the accompanying
+memory of eyes, lips, gold hair on a background of flowering laurel,
+was to re-enter, through sane, kind altruism, his old, normal state of
+consciousness, and to shut the door on something very sweet and wonderful,
+to shut the door--in Imogen's phraseology--on his soul, but, in doing that,
+to be loyal to the older hope.
+
+Perhaps, he reflected, looking at Valerie through the silvery circles of
+smoke, it depended on her as to whether the door should remain shut on
+all the high visions of the last weeks. After all, it had always depended
+on her, tremendously, as to where he should find himself. Certainly he
+couldn't regard her as the antithesis of soul, though he didn't associate
+her with its radiant demonstration, yet he felt that, if she so willed it,
+she could lock the door on visions and keep him sanely, safely, sweetly
+beside her for the future. If she really did care. Poor Sir Basil, sitting
+there in his faint cloud of smoke, while clouds of doubt and perplexity--as
+impalpable drifted through his mind, really couldn't for the life of him
+have told which solution he most hoped for.
+
+He plunged from the rather humiliating pause of self-contemplation into
+the more congenial field of action, with a last swift thought--most
+illuminating of all--as he plunged--that in the results of action he would
+find his test. If she cared for him--really cared--she would grant his
+request; and if she cared, why then, not only reawakened loyalty, but some
+very deep acquiescence in his own nature, would keep him beside her, and
+to-night would see them as affianced lovers. It would be a pity to have let
+one's new-found soul go; but, after all, it was so very new that the pang
+of parting would soon be over; that was a good point about middle-age, one
+soon got over pangs, soon forgot visions.
+
+"I want to talk to you about something. I'm going to ask you to be kinder
+to me, even, than you've ever been,"--so he approached the subject, while
+the mingled peace and bitterness of the last thoughts lingered with him.
+"I'm going to ask you to let me be very indiscreet, very intimate. It's
+about something very personal."
+
+Valerie no longer smiled, but she looked even more gentle and even more
+intelligent. "I will be as kind as you can possibly want me to be," she
+answered.
+
+"It's about--about Miss Upton."
+
+"About Imogen? Don't you call her Imogen yet? You must."
+
+"I will. I've just begun"; and with this avowal Sir Basil turned away his
+eyes for a moment, and even in the moonlight showed his flush. "I had a
+long talk with her this afternoon."
+
+"Yes. I supposed that you had. You may be perfectly frank with me," said
+Valerie, her eyes on his averted face.
+
+"She was most dreadfully cut up, you know. She came rushing up to the pine
+woods--I was smoking there--rushing up as if she were running for her
+life--crying,--exhausted,--in a dreadful state."
+
+"Yes. I know."
+
+"Yes, of course you do. What don't you know and what don't you understand,"
+said Sir Basil gratefully, his eyes coming back to hers. "So I needn't go
+over it all--what she feels about it. I realize very well that you feel for
+her as much as I do."
+
+"Oh, yes, you must realize that," said Valerie, a little faintly.
+
+"She was in such a state that one simply had to try to comfort her,--if one
+could,--and we have come to be such friends;--so she told me everything."
+
+"Yes. Of course."
+
+"Well that's just it. What I want to ask you is--can't you, for her sake,
+quite apart from your own feelings--give in about it?" So spoke Sir Basil,
+sitting in the moonlight, the spark of his cigar waning as, in the long
+pause that followed, he held it, forgotten, in an expectant, arrested
+hand. Her voice had helped and followed him with such gentleness, such
+understanding that, though the pause grew, he hardly thought that it needed
+the added, "I do beg it of you," that he brought out presently to make her
+acquiescence more sure; and his shock of disappointment was sharpened by
+surprise to a quick displeasure when, her eyes passing from his face and
+resting for long on the shadowy woods, she said in a deadened voice, a
+voice strangely lacking in feeling:--"I can't."
+
+He couldn't conceal the disappointment nor, quite, the displeasure. "You
+can't? Really you can't?--Forgive me, but don't you think she's a right to
+have it written, her father's life, you know, if she feels so deeply about
+it?"
+
+"I can't. I will never give my consent," Valerie repeated.
+
+"But, she's breaking her heart over it," Sir Basil deeply protested; and
+before the quality of the protestation she paused again, as though to give
+herself time to hide something.
+
+"I know that it is hard for her," was all she said at last.
+
+Protestation gave way to wonder, deep and sad. "And for her sake--for _my_
+sake, let me put it--you can't let bygones be bygones?--You can't give her
+her heart's desire?--My dear friend, it's such a little thing."
+
+"I know that. But it's for his sake that I can't," said Valerie.
+
+Sir Basil, at this, was silent, for a long time. Perplexity mingled with
+his displeasure, and the pain of failure, the strangely complex pain.
+
+She did not care for him enough; and she was wrong, and she was fantastic
+in her wrongness. For his sake?--the dead husband, whom, after all, she had
+abandoned and made unhappy?--Imogen's words came crowding upon him like
+a host of warning angel visages. She actually told him that this cruel
+thwarting of her child was for the sake of the child's father?
+
+It was strange and pitiful that a woman so sweet, so lovely, should so
+grotesquely deceive herself as to her motives for refusing to see bare
+justice done.
+
+"May I ask why for him?--I don't understand," he said.
+
+Valerie now turned her eyes once more on his face. With his words, with the
+tone, courteous yet cold, in which they were spoken, she recognized a
+reached landmark. For a long time she had caught glimpses of it, ominously
+glimmering ahead of her, through the sunny mists of hope, across the wide
+stretches of trust. And here it was at last, but so suddenly, for all her
+presages, that she almost lost her breath for a moment in looking at it and
+what it marked. Here, unless she grasped, paths might part. Here, unless
+she pleaded, something might be slain. Here, above all, something might
+turn its back on her for ever, unless she were disloyal to her own strange
+trust.
+
+A good many things had been happening to Valerie of late, but this was
+really the worst, and as she looked at the landmark it grew to be the
+headstone of a grave, and she saw that under it might lie her youth.
+
+"I don't believe that you could understand, ever," she said at last in an
+unaltered voice, a voice, to her own consciousness, like the wrapping of
+a shroud about her. "It's only I who could feel it, so deeply as to go so
+far. All that I can say to you is this; my husband was a mediocre man, and
+a pretentious one. I once loved him. I was always sorry for him. I must
+guard him now. I cannot have him exposed. I cannot have his mediocrity and
+pretentiousness displayed to the people there are in the world who would
+see him as he was, and whose opinion counts."
+
+She knew, as she said it, as she folded the shroud, that he would not be
+one of those. Her husband's pretentiousness and mediocrity would not be
+apparent to the ingenuous and uncomplex mind beside her. She knew that mind
+too well and had watched it, of late, receiving with wondering admiration
+from her daughter's lips, echoes of her husband's fatuities. She loved him
+for his incapacity to see sad and ugly and foolish facts as she saw them.
+She loved his manliness and his childishness. As she had guarded the other,
+once loved, man from revealment she would have guarded this one from ironic
+and complex visions. But the lack that endeared him to her might lose him
+to her. He could never see as she saw and her fidelity to her own light
+could in his eyes be but perversity. Besides, she could guess at the
+interpretations that loomed in his mind; could guess at what Imogen had
+told him; it hardly needed his next words to let her know.
+
+"But was he so mediocre, so pretentious?" he suggested, with the touch
+of timidity that comes from a deeper hostility than one can openly
+avow.--"Aren't you a little over-critical--through being disappointed in
+him--personally? Can you be so sure of your own verdict as all that? Other
+people, who loved him--who always loved him I mean--are sure the other way
+round," said Sir Basil.
+
+To prove herself faithful, not perverse, whom must she show to him as
+unfaithful in very ardor for rightness? In the midst of all the wrenching
+of her hidden passion came a pang of maternal pity. Imogen's figure,
+bereaved of her father, of her lover, desolate, amazed, rose before her
+and, behind it, the hovering, retributory gaze of her husband.
+
+This, then, was what she must pay for having failed, for having wrecked.
+The money that she handed out must be her love, her deep love, for this
+lover of her fading years, and she knew that she paid the price, for
+everything paid the price, above all, for her right to her own complex
+fidelity, when she said:
+
+"I am quite sure of my own verdict. I take all the responsibility. I think
+other people wrong. And you must think me wrong, if it looks to you like
+that."
+
+"But, it's almost impossible for me to think you wrong," said Sir Basil,
+feeling that a chill far frostier than the seeming situation warranted had
+crept upon them. "Even if you are--why we all are, of course, most of the
+time, I suppose. It's only--it's only that I can't see clear. That you
+should be so sure of an opinion, a mere opinion, when it hurts someone
+else, so abominably;--it's there I don't seem to _see_ you, you know."
+
+"Can't you trust me?" Valerie asked. It was her last chance, her last throw
+of the dice. She knew that her heart was suffocating her, with its heavy
+throbbing, but to Sir Basil's ear her voice was still the deadened, the
+unchanged voice. "Can't you believe in my sincerity when I give you my
+reasons? Can't you, knowing me as you do, for so long, believe that I am
+more likely to be right, in my judgment of my husband, than--other people?"
+
+Her eyes, dark and deep in the moonlight, were steadily upon him. And now,
+probed to the depths, he, too, was conscious of a parting of the ways It
+was a choice of loyalties, and he remembered those other eyes, sunlit,
+limpid, uplifted, that lifted him, too, with their heavenly, upward gaze.
+He stammered; he grew very red; but he, too, was faithful to his own light.
+
+"Of course I know, my dear friend, that you are sincere. But, as to your
+being right;--in these things, one can't help seeing crookedly, sometimes,
+when personal dislike has entered into a,--a near relationship. One really
+can hardly help it, can one?--" he almost pleaded.
+
+Valerie's eyes rested deeply and darkly upon him and, as they rested, he
+felt, strangely and irresistibly, that they let him go. Let him go to sink
+or to soar--that depended on which vision were the truer.
+
+He knew that after his flush he had become very pale. His cigar had gone
+out;--he looked at it with a nervous gesture. The moonlight was cold
+and Valerie had turned away her eyes. But as she suddenly rose, he saw,
+glancing from his dismal survey of the dead cigar, that she was smiling
+again. It was a smile that healed even while it made things hazy to him.
+Nothing was hazy to her, he was very sure of that; but she would make
+everything as easy as possible to him--even the pain of finding her so
+wrong, even the pain of seeing that she didn't care enough, the complex
+pain of being set free to seize the new happiness--he was surer of that
+than ever.
+
+He, too, got up, grateful, troubled, but warm once more.
+
+The moonlight was bright and golden, and the shadows of the vines that
+stirred against the sky wavered all over her as she stood before him. So
+strangely did the light and shade move upon her, that it seemed as if she
+glided through the ripples of some liquid, mysterious element, not air nor
+light nor water, but a magical mingling of the three. He had just time to
+feel, vaguely, for everything was blurred, this sense of strangeness and of
+sweetness, too, when she gave him her hand.
+
+"Friends, as ever, all the same--are we not?" she said.
+
+Sir Basil, knowing that if he glided it was only because she took him with
+her, grasped it tightly, the warm, tangible comfort. "Well _rather_!" he
+said with school-boy emphasis.
+
+Be she as wrong as she would, dear creature of light, of shade, of mystery,
+it was indeed "well _rather_." Never had he known how much till now.
+
+Holding the hand, he wondered, gazing at her, how much such a friendship,
+new yet old, counted for. In revealing it so fully, she had set wide the
+door, she had set him free to claim his soul; yet so wonderfully did
+they glide that no gross thought of escape touched him for a moment, so
+beautifully did she smile that he seemed rather to be gaining something
+than to be giving something up.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+
+Imogen always looked back to her moonlight walk with Jack as one of the few
+occurrences in her life that, at the time, she had not understood. She
+understood well enough afterward, with retrospective vexation for her so
+ludicrous, yet, after all, so natural innocence. At the time she hadn't
+even seen that Jack had jockeyed her out of a communing with Sir Basil.
+She had actually thought that Jack might have some word of penitence or
+exculpation to say to her after his behavior that morning. As a matter of
+fact she could easily have forgiven him had his lack of sympathy been for
+her instruments only and not rather for her project. Really, except for
+the triumph it had seemed to give to her mother, the humiliation that it
+had seemed, vicariously, to inflict upon herself, she hadn't been able to
+defend herself from a queer sense of pleasure in witnessing the ejection of
+the Pottses. With the tension that had come into the scene they had been in
+the way; she, as keenly as Jack, had felt the sense of unfitness, though
+she had been willing to endure it, and as keenly as Jack she had felt Mr.
+Potts as insufferably presuming. She had been glad that his presumption
+should wreak punishment upon her mother, but glad, too, that when the
+weapon had served its purpose, it should be removed.
+
+So her feelings toward Jack, as he led her down the woodland path, where,
+not so many days ago--but how far off they seemed--she had led Sir Basil,
+were not so bitter as they might have been. Bitterness was in abeyance. She
+waited to hear what he might have to say for himself and about her--about
+this new disaster that had befallen her, and with the thought of the
+retribution that she held, almost, within her grasp, came something of a
+softening to sadness and regret over Jack. In spite of that glorious moment
+of the pine woods, with its wide vistas into the future, some torn fiber of
+her heart would go on aching when she thought of Jack and his lost love;
+and when he led her away among the woods, thick with trembling lights and
+shadows, she really, for a little while, expected to hear him say that,
+sympathize as he might with her mother, reprobate as he might her own
+attitude toward her, there were needs in him deeper than sympathies or
+blame; she almost expected him to tell her that, above all, he loved her
+and couldn't get on without her. Else why had he asked her to come and see
+the moonlight in the woods?
+
+A vagueness hovered for her over her own attitude in case of such an
+avowal, a vagueness connected with the veil that still hung between her
+unavowed lover and herself, and even as she walked away with Jack she felt
+a mingled pang of eagerness for what he might have to say to her and of
+anxiety for what, more than his petition on her behalf, Sir Basil might be
+drawn into saying to her mother on the veranda. She didn't crudely tell
+herself that she would not quite abandon Jack until the veil were drawn
+aside and triumph securely attained; she only saw herself, as far as she
+saw herself at all, as pausing between two choices, pausing to weigh which
+was the greater of the appealing needs and which the deeper of the
+proffered loves. She knew that the balance inclined to Sir Basil's side,
+but she saw herself, for this evening, sadly listening, but withholding, in
+its full definiteness, the sad rejection of Jack's tardy appeal.
+
+With this background of interpretation it was, therefore, with a growing
+perplexity that she heard Jack, beside her, or a little before, so that
+he might hold back the dewy branches from her way, talk on persistently,
+fluently, cheerfully, in just the same manner, with the same alert voice
+and pleasant, though watchful, eye, that he had talked at dinner. Her
+mother might have been walking beside them for all the difference there
+was. Jack, the shy, the abrupt, the often awkward, seemed infected with her
+mother's social skill. The moonlit woods were as much a mere background for
+maneuvers as the candle-lit dinner-table had been. Not a word of the
+morning's disaster; not a word of sympathy or inquiry; not a word of
+self-defence or self-exposition; not even a word of expostulation or
+reproach.
+
+As for entreaty, tenderness, the drawing near once more, the drop to loving
+need after the climax of alienation, she saw, by degrees, how illusory
+had been any such imagining; she saw at last, with a sharpness that
+queerly chilled her blood, that Jack was abdicating the lover's rôle more
+decisively than even before. Verbal definiteness left hazes of possibility
+compared to this dreadfully competent reticence. It was more than evasion,
+more than reticence, more than abdication that she felt in Jack; it was a
+deep hostility, it was the steady burning of that flame that she had seen
+in his eye that morning when she had told her mother that she was cruel
+and shallow and selfish. This was an enemy who walked beside her and,
+after perplexity, after the folly of soft imaginings, the folly of having
+allowed her heart to yearn over him a little, and, perhaps, over herself,
+indignation rushed upon her, and humiliation, and then the passionate
+longing for vengeance.
+
+He thought himself very cool and competent, this skilful Jack, leading
+her down in the illumined, dewy woods, talking on and on, talking--the
+fool--for so, with a bitter smile, her inner commentary dubbed him--of
+Manet, of Monet, of Whistler, of the decomposition of light, the vibration
+of color.
+
+From the heat of fierce anger Imogen reached a contemptuous coolness. She
+made no attempt to stay his volubility; she answered, quietly, accurately,
+with chill interest, all he said. They might really have met for the first
+time at dinner that night, were it not that Jack's competence was a little
+feverish, were it not that her own courtesy was a little edged. But the
+swing from tender sadness to perplexity, to fury, to contempt, was so
+violent that not until they turned to retrace their steps did a very
+pertinent question begin to make itself felt. It made itself felt with the
+sudden leap to fear of that underlying anxiety as to what was happening on
+the veranda, and the fear lit the question with a lurid, though, as yet,
+not a revealing flicker. For why had he done it? That was what she asked
+herself as they faced the moonlight and saw the woods all dark on a
+background of mystic gold. What fatuous complacency had made him take so
+much trouble just to show her how little he cared for what she might be
+feeling, for what he had himself once felt?
+
+Imogen pondered, striding before him with her long, light step, urged now
+by the inner pressure of fear as to the exchange that her absence had made
+possible between her mother and Sir Basil. It had been foolish of her
+to leave him for so long, exposed and helpless. Instinctively her step
+hastened as she went and, Jack following closely, they almost ran at last,
+silent and breathing quickly. Imogen had, indeed, the uncanny sensation of
+being pursued, tracked, kept in sight by her follower. From the last thin
+screen of branches she emerged, finally, into the grassy clearing.
+
+There was a flicker of white on the veranda. In the shadow of the creepers
+stood two figures, clasping hands. Her mother and Sir Basil.
+
+Fear beat suddenly, suffocatingly, in Imogen's throat. A tide of
+humiliation, like the towering of a gigantic wave above her head, seemed to
+rise and encompass her round about. She had counted too soon upon gladness,
+upon vengeance. Everything was stripped from her, if--if Jack and her
+mother had succeeded. With lightning-like rapidity her mind grasped its
+suspicion. She looked back at Jack. His eyes, too, were fixed on the
+veranda, and suspicion was struck to certainty by what she read in them. He
+was tense; he was white; he was triumphant. Too soon triumphant! In another
+moment the imminence of her terror passed by. The clasp was not that of a
+plighting. It was over; it denoted some lesser compact, one that meant,
+perhaps, success for her almost forgotten hope. But in Jack's eye she had
+read what was her danger.
+
+Imogen paused but for a moment to draw the breath of a mingled relief
+and realization. Her knowledge was the only weapon left in her hand, and
+strength, safety, the mere semblance of dignity, lay in its concealment. If
+he guessed that Sir Basil needed guarding, he should never guess that she
+did. Already her headlong speed might have jeopardized her secret.
+
+"What a pretty setting for our elderly lovers, isn't it?" she said.
+
+That her voice should slightly tremble was only natural; he must know that
+even from full unconsciousness such a speech must be for her a forced and
+painful one.
+
+Jack looked her full in the eye, as steadily as she looked at him.
+
+"Isn't it?" he said.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+
+She had seen through him and she continued to see through him.
+
+She had little opportunity for more than this passive part on the next day,
+a day of goings and comings, when the Pottses went, and Rose, Mary, and
+Eddy, arrived.
+
+He was guarding her mother's lover for her, guarding him from the
+allurement of her own young loveliness; that was the way Jack saw it. He
+was very skilful, very competent, she had to own that as she watched him;
+but he was not quite so omniscient as he imagined himself to be, for he
+did not know that she saw. That was Imogen's one clue in those two or
+three days of fear and confusion, days when, actually, Jack did succeed in
+keeping her and Sir Basil apart. And she must make no endeavor to thwart
+his watchfulness; she must yield with apparent unconsciousness to his
+combinations, combinations that always separated her and Sir Basil; she
+must see him drive off with Sir Basil to meet the new-comers; must see him
+lead Sir Basil away with himself and Eddy for a masculine smoke and talk;
+must see him, after dinner, fix them all, irrevocably, at bridge for the
+rest of the evening,--and not stir a finger;--for he did not know that she
+saw and he did not know that she, as well as Sir Basil, needed guarding. It
+was here that Imogen's intuition failed her, and that her blindness made
+Jack's task the easier.
+
+Imogen, in these days, had little time for self-observation. She seemed
+living in some dark, fierce region of her nature, unknown to her till now,
+where she found only fear and fury and the deep determination not to be
+defeated and bereft. So supremely real were will and instinct, that, seen
+from their dominion, conscience, reason, all the spiritual tests she had
+lived by, looked like far, pale clouds floating over some somber, burning
+landscape, where, among flames and darkness, she was running for her
+life. Reason, conscience, were still with her, but turned to the task of
+self-preservation. "He is mine. I know it. I felt it. They shall not take
+him from me. It is my right, my duty, to keep him, for he is all that I
+have left in life." The last veil descended upon her soul when, her frosty
+young nature fired by the fierceness of her resolution, she felt herself to
+be passionately in love with Sir Basil.
+
+On the third day, the third day of her _vita nuova_--so she named it--Jack
+had organized a picnic. They were to drive ten miles to a mountain lake
+among pine woods, and, thrilling all through with rage, Imogen saw Sir
+Basil safely maneuvered into the carriage with her mother, Rose, and Eddy,
+while she was assigned to Jack, Miss Bocock, and Mary.
+
+She heard herself talk sweetly and fluently during the long, sunny, breezy
+drive, heard Jack answering and assenting with a fluency, a sweetness as
+apt. Mary was very silent, but Miss Bocock, no doubt, found nothing amiss
+in the tone of their interchange. Arrived at the beautiful spot fixed on,
+sunlight drifting over glades of fern, the shadowy woods encircling a lake
+of blue and silver, she could say, with just the right emphasis of helpless
+admiration: "Wonderful--wonderful;"--could quote a line of Wordsworth,
+while her eye passed over the figure of Sir Basil, talking to Rose at a
+little distance, and over Jack's figure, near at hand.
+
+Jack and Eddy had driven, and the moment came when they were occupied with
+their horses. She joined the others, and, presently, she was able to draw
+Sir Basil a little aside, and then still a little further, until, among the
+rosy aisles, she had him to herself. Stooping to gather a tiny cone she
+said to him in a low voice:--"Well?--well?--What did she say?"
+
+Sir Basil, too, lowered his voice:--"I've wanted a chance to tell you about
+it. My dear child, I'm so very sorry, but I've been a failure. She won't
+hear of it. You'll have to give it up."
+
+"She utterly refused?" How far this matter of her father was from her
+thoughts--as far as the pale clouds above the fierce, dark landscape.
+
+"Utterly."
+
+"You asked for your sake, as well as for mine?"
+
+"I asked for both our sakes."
+
+"And," still stooping, her face hidden from him, she pierced to find the
+significance of that moonlight hand-clasp,--"and--she made you agree with
+her?"
+
+"Agree with, her?--I was most dreadfully disappointed, and I had to tell
+her so.--How could I agree with her?"
+
+"She might have made you."
+
+"She didn't make me;--didn't try to, I'm bound to say."
+
+"But,"--her voice breathed up to him now with a new gentleness,--a
+gentleness that, he well might think, covered heart-brokenness,--"but--you
+haven't quarreled with her,--on my account? I couldn't bear her to
+lose things, on my account. She thinks of you as a friend--values your
+friendship;--I know it,--I am sure of it,--even though she would not do
+this for you. Some hatreds are too deep to yield to any appeal; but it is
+friendship I know;--and I love her--in spite of everything."
+
+She had murmured on and on, parting the ferns with her delicate hand,
+finding here and there a little cone, and as Sir Basil looked down at the
+golden hair, the pure line of the cheek, a great wave of thanksgiving for
+the surety of his freedom rose in him.
+
+"Dear, sweet child," he said, "this is just what I would expect of you. But
+don't let that thought trouble you for one moment. I do think her wrong,
+but we are perhaps better friends than ever. You and I will always care for
+her"--Sir Basil's voice faltered a little as, to himself, the significance
+of these last words was borne in upon him, and Imogen, hearing the falter,
+rose, feeling that she must see as well as hear.
+
+And as she faced him they heard Jack's cheery call:
+
+"Sir Basil--I say, Sir Basil!--You are wanted. You must help with the
+hampers."
+
+Imogen controlled every least sign of exasperation; it was the easier,
+since she had gained something from this snatched interview. Her mother had
+in no way harmed her in Sir Basil's eyes, and this avowal of friendship
+might include an abdication of nearer claims. And so she walked back beside
+him--telling him that her cones were for her little cripples. "You are
+always thinking about some one else's happiness," said Sir Basil--with
+a tranquillity less feigned than it had been of late. Nothing was lost,
+nothing really desperate yet. But, during the rest of the afternoon, while
+they made tea, spread viands, sat about on the moss and rocks laughing,
+talking, eating, the sense of risk did not leave her. Nothing was lost,
+yet, but it was just possible that what she had, in her folly, expected to
+happen the other night to her and Jack, might really happen to Sir Basil
+and her mother; in the extremity of alienation they might find the depths
+of need. He thought her wrong, but he also thought her charming.
+
+Sitting a little above them all, on a higher rock, watching them while
+seeming not to watch, she felt that her sense of peril strangely isolated
+her from the thoughtless group. She could guess at nothing from her
+mother's face. She had not spoken with her mother since the day of
+the disaster--and of the dawn. It was probable that, like her own sad
+benignity, her mother's placidity was nothing but a veil, but she could not
+believe that it veiled a sense of peril. Under her white straw hat, with
+broad black ribbons tying beneath the chin, it was very pale--but that was
+usual of late--and very worn, too, as it should be; but it was more full
+of charm than it had any right to be. Her mother--oh! despite pallor and
+fading--was a woman to be loved; and that she believed herself a woman
+loved, Imogen, with a deep stirring of indignation and antagonism,
+suspected. Yes, she counted upon Sir Basil, of that Imogen was sure,
+but what she couldn't make out was whether her mother guessed that her
+confidence was threatened. Did she at all see where Sir Basil's heart had
+turned, as Jack had seen? Was her mother, too, capable of Jack's maneuvers?
+
+From her mother she looked at Sir Basil, looked with eyes marvelously
+serene. He lounged delightfully. His clothes were delightfully right; they
+seemed as much a part of his personality as the cones were of the pines,
+the ferns of the long glades. Rightness--exquisite, unconscious rightness,
+was what he expressed. Not the rightness of warfare and effort that Imogen
+believed in and stood for, but a rightness that had come to him as a gift,
+not as a conquest, just as the cones had come to the pine-trees. The way
+he tilted his Panama hat over his eyes so that only his chin and crisply
+twisted mustache were unshadowed, the way in which he held his cigarette in
+a hand so brown that the gold of the seal ring upon it looked pale, even
+the way in which he wagged, now and then, his foot in its shapely tan
+shoe,--were all as delightful as his limpid smile up at her mother, as his
+voice, deep, decisive, and limpid, too.
+
+Imogen was not aware of these appreciations in herself as she watched him
+with that serene covertness, not at all aware that her senses were lending
+her a hand in her struggle for possession and ascendancy, and giving to
+her hold on the new and threatened belonging a peculiar tenacity. But she
+did tell herself, again and again, with pride and pain, that this at last
+was love, a love that justified anything, and that cast all lesser things
+aside. And, with this thought of rejection, Imogen found her eyes turning
+to Jack. She looked at Jack as serenely as she had at Sir Basil, and at him
+she could trust herself to look more fixedly.
+
+Jack's rightnesses were not a bit like those of nature. He was hesitant,
+unfinished, beside Sir Basil. His voice was meager, his form was meager,
+his very glance lacked the full, untroubled assurance of the other's. As
+for his clothes, with a sly little pleasure Imogen noted, point by point,
+how they just missed easy perfection. Very certainly this man who had
+failed her was a trophy not comparable to the man who now cared. She
+told herself that very often, emphasizing the unfavorable contrast. For,
+strangely enough, it was now, at the full distance of her separation
+from Jack, an irrevocable separation, that she needed the support of
+such emphasis. In Jack's absent stare at the lake, his nervous features
+composed to momentary unconsciousness, she could but feel a quality that,
+helplessly, she must appreciate. There was in the young man's face a
+purity, a bravery, a capacity of subtle spiritual choice that made it,
+essentially, one of the most civilized she had ever known. Sir Basil's
+brain, if it came to comparison, lacked one or two convolutions that Jack's
+undoubtedly possessed.
+
+And, appreciating the lost lover, as, through her own sharpness of
+intelligence she was bound to do, poor Imogen knew again the twisted pang
+of divided desire. Was it the higher that she had lost, or the higher
+that she so strangely struggled for? Her eyes, turning again on Sir
+Basil, stayed themselves on the assurances of his charm, his ease,
+his rightnesses; but the worst bitterness of all lurked under these
+consolations; for, though one was lost, the other was not securely gained.
+
+Imogen, that night, made another dash for the open, only, again, to be
+foiled. Her mother and Miss Bocock were safely on the veranda in the
+moonlight, the others safely talking in the drawing-room; Sir Basil, only,
+was not to be seen, and Imogen presently detected the spark of his cigar
+wandering among the flower-borders. She could venture on boldness, though
+she skirted about the house to join him. What if Jack did see them
+together? It was only natural that, if she were unconscious, she should now
+and then seek out her paternal friend. But hardly had she emerged from the
+shadow of the house, hardly had Sir Basil become aware of her approach,
+when, with laughter and chattering outcries the whole intolerable horde
+was upon her. It was Rose who voiced the associated proposal, a moonlight
+ramble; it was Rose who seized upon Sir Basil with her hateful air of
+indifferent yet assured coquetry; but Imogen guessed that she was a tool,
+even if an ignorant one, in the hands of Jack. Miss Bocock and her mother
+had not joined them and, in a last desperate hope, Imogen said,--"Mama,
+too, and Miss Bocock,--we mustn't leave them. Sir Basil, won't you go and
+fetch them?" And then, Sir Basil detached from Rose, on his way, she
+murmured,--"I must see that she doesn't forget her shawl," and darted after
+him. Once more get him to herself and, in the obscurity of the woods, they
+might elude the others yet. But, as they approached the veranda, she found
+that Jack was beside them.
+
+Neither Valerie nor Miss Bocock cared to join the expedition; and Valerie,
+cryptically, for her daughter's understanding, said: "Do you really want
+more scenery, Sir Basil? You and Imogen had much better keep us company
+here. We have earned a lazy evening."
+
+"Oh, no, but Rose has claimed Sir Basil as her cavalier," Jack,
+astonishingly, cut in. "It's all her idea, so that she could have a talk
+with him. Do you come, too," Jack urged. "It's only a little walk and the
+moonlight is wonderful among the woods."
+
+Mrs. Upton's eye rested fixedly upon him for a moment. Imogen saw that, but
+could not know whether her mother shared her own astonishment for Jack's
+development or whether the look were of the nature of an interchange. She
+shook her head, however.
+
+"No, thanks, I am too tired. Be sure and show Sir Basil the view from the
+rustic seat, Imogen. And, oh, Imogen, do you and Sir Basil go to the pantry
+and ask Selma for some cakes. You will like something to eat."
+
+"I'll come, too," said Jack cheerfully. "I must get my stick."
+
+And thus it was that Sir Basil remained standing beside Mrs. Upton, while
+the young couple, in absolute silence, accomplished their mission.
+
+Imogen only wondered, as they went, side by side, swiftly, round to the
+pantry, if Jack did not hear the deep, indignant breaths she vainly
+tried to master. The rest of the evening repeated the indignities of the
+afternoon. She was watched, guarded, baffled. Proudly she relinquished
+every attempt to checkmate; and her mother was not there; for the moment
+there was no anxiety on that score. But the sense of deep breathing did not
+leave her. What _wouldn't_ Jack do? She was quite sure that he would lie,
+if, technically, he had not lied already. The stick had been in the hall
+near the pantry. If it hadn't;--well, with her consciousness of whistling
+speed, of a neck-to-neck race, she really would not have had time for a
+pause of wonder and condemnation.
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+
+She woke next morning to that fierce consciousness of a race. And the goal
+must now be near, defeat or victory imminent.
+
+It was early and she dressed quickly. She couldn't boldly rap at Sir
+Basil's door and call him to join her in the garden for a dewy walk before
+breakfast, for Jack's was the room next his; but, outside, as she drifted
+back and forth over the lawn, in full view of his window, she sang to
+herself, so that he could hear, sang sweetly, loudly, sadly, a strain of
+Wagner. It happened, indeed, to be the Pilgrim's March from Tannhäuser that
+she fixed upon for her _aubade_. Jack would never suspect such singing, and
+Sir Basil must surely seize its opportunity. But he did not appear. She
+surmised that he was not yet up and that it might be wiser to wait for him
+in the dining-room.
+
+As she crossed the veranda she heard voices around the corner, a snatch of
+talk from two other early risers sitting outside the drawing-room windows.
+Mary and Rose; she placed them, as she paused.
+
+"But Jack himself often talks in just that way," Mary was saying, pained it
+was evident, and puzzled, too, by some imputation, that she hadn't been
+able to deny.
+
+"Yes, dear old Jack," Rose rejoined; "he does talk in a very tiresome way
+sometimes; so do you, Mary my darling;--you are all tarred with the same
+solemn brush; but, you see, it's just that; one may talk like a prig and
+yet not be one. Jack, behind the big words, means them all, is them all,
+really. Whereas Imogen;--why she's little--little--little. Even Jack has
+found that out at last."
+
+"Rose! Rose! Don't--It's not true. I can't believe it! I won't believe it!"
+broke from Mary. Her chair was pushed back impetuously, and Imogen darted
+into the dining-room and from there into the hall to find herself, at last,
+face to face with Sir Basil.
+
+"I hoped I'd find you. I heard you singing in the garden. What is that
+thing,--Gounod, isn't it? Do let's have a turn in the garden."
+
+But even as he said it, holding her hand, the fatal chink of the
+approaching breakfast tray told them that the opportunity had come too
+late. Rose and Mary already were greeting them, Jack and Miss Bocock called
+morning wishes from above.
+
+Valerie was a late riser; and Imogen, behind the tea-pot and coffee,
+was always conscious of offering a crisp and charming contrast to lax
+self-indulgence. But this morning, as they all hemmed her in, fixed her
+in her rightful place, her cheeks irrepressibly burned with vexation and
+disappointment. The overheard insolence, too, had been like a sudden slap.
+She mastered herself sufficiently to kiss Mary's cheek and to take Rose's
+hand with a gaze of pure unconsciousness, a gaze that should have been as a
+coal of fire laid upon her venomous head.
+
+But Rose showed no symptom of scorching. She trailed to her place, in a
+morning-gown all lace and ribbons, smiling nonchalantly at Jack and saucily
+at Sir Basil, with whom she had established relations of chaffing coquetry;
+she told Imogen to remember that she liked her coffee half-and-half with a
+lot of cream and three lumps of sugar. She looked as guiltless as poor Mary
+looked guilty.
+
+"Eddy's late as usual, I suppose," she said.
+
+"He inherits laziness from mama," Imogen smiled, putting in four lumps, a
+trivial vengeance she could not resist.
+
+"Some of her charms he has inherited, it's true." Rose, in the absence of
+her worshiped hostess gave herself extreme license in guileless prods and
+thrusts. "I only wish he had inherited more. Here you are, Eddy, after
+all, falsifying my hopes of you. We are talking about your hereditary good
+points, Eddy;--in what others, except morning laziness, do you resemble
+your mother?"
+
+"Well, I hate strings of milk in my coffee," said Eddy, bending over his
+sister to put a perfunctory kiss upon her brow, "and as I observe one in
+that cup I hope it's not intended for me. Imogen, why won't you use the
+strainer?"
+
+With admirable patience, as if humoring two spoiled children, Imogen filled
+another cup with greater care.
+
+"Mama feels just as I do about strings in coffee," said Eddy, bearing away
+his cup. "We are both of us very highly organized."
+
+"You mustn't be over-sensitive, you know," said Imogen, "else you will
+unfit yourself for life. There are so many strings in one's coffee in
+life."
+
+"The fit avoid them," said Eddy, "as I do."
+
+"You inherit that, too, from mama," said Imogen, "the avoidance of
+difficulties. Do try some of our pop-overs, Miss Bocock; it's a national
+dish."
+
+"What are you going to do this morning, Imogen?" Jack asked, and she felt
+that his eye braved hers. "It's your Girls' Club morning, isn't it? That
+will do beautifully for you, Miss Bocock. I've been telling Miss Bocock
+about it; she is very much interested."
+
+"Very much indeed. I am on the committee of such a club in England," said
+Miss Bocock; "I should like to go over it with you."
+
+Imogen smiled assent, while inwardly she muttered "Snake!" Her morning,
+already, was done for, unless, indeed, she could annex Sir Basil as a third
+to the party and, with him, evade Miss Bocock for a few brief moments. But
+brief moments could do nothing for them. They needed long sunny or moonlit
+solitudes.
+
+"We must be alone together, under the stars, for our souls to _see_,"
+Imogen said to herself, while she poured the coffee, while she met Jack's
+eye, while, beneath this highest thought, the lesser comment of "Snake!"
+made itself heard.
+
+"What's become of that interesting girl who had the rival club, Imogen?"
+Rose asked. "The one you squashed."
+
+"We make her very welcome when she comes to ours." Imogen did not descend
+to self-exculpation. She spoke gently and gravely, casting only a glance at
+Sir Basil, as if calling him to witness her pained magnanimity.
+
+"It would be fun, you know, to help her to start a new one," said
+Rose;--"something rebellious and anarchic. Will you help me if I do, Eddy?
+Come, let's sow discord in Imogen's Eden, like a couple of serpents."
+
+Reptilian analogies seemed uppermost this morning; Imogen felt their
+fitness while, smiling on, she answered: "I don't think that mere
+rebellion--not only against Eden but against the Tree of Knowledge as
+well--would carry you far, Rose. Your membership would be of three--Mattie
+and the two serpents."
+
+Sir Basil laughed out at the retort.
+
+"You evidently don't know the club and all those delightful young women,"
+he said to Rose.
+
+"Oh, yes, indeed I do. Every one sees Imogen's clubs. I don't think them
+delightful. Women in crowds are always horrid. We are only tolerable in
+isolation."
+
+"You hand over to us, then,"--it was Jack who spoke, and with his usual
+impatience when bending to Rose's folly,--"all the civic virtues, all the
+virtues of fraternity?"
+
+"With pleasure; they are becoming to nobody, for that matter. But I'm quite
+sure that men are brothers. Women never are sisters, however, unless,
+sometimes, we are sisters to you," Rose added demurely, at which Sir Basil
+gave a loud laugh.
+
+Imogen, though incensed, was willing that on this low ground of silly
+flippancy Rose should make her little triumphs. She kept her smile. "I
+don't think that those of us who are capable of another sisterhood will
+agree with you," and her smile turned on Mary another coal of fire, for
+she suspected Mary of apostasy. "I don't think that the women whose aim
+in life is--well--to make brothers of men in Rose's sense, can understand
+sisterhood at all, as, for instance, Mary and I do."
+
+"Oh, you and Mary!"--Rose tapped her eggshell and salted her egg. "That's
+not sisterhood;--that's prophetess and proselyte. You're an anarchist
+to the bone, Imogen, like the rest of us;--you couldn't bear to share
+anything--It's like children playing games:--If I can't be the driver, I
+won't play horses."
+
+"Oh, Rose!" came in distressed tones from Mary; but Imogen did not flinch
+from her serenity.
+
+Outside on the veranda, where they all wandered after breakfast, her
+moment came at last. Jack had walked away with Mary; Miss Bocock, with a
+newspaper, stood in the shade at a little distance. Rose and Eddy were
+wandering among the flowers.
+
+Imogen knew, as she found herself alone with Sir Basil, that the impulse
+that rose in her was the crude one of simply snatching. She controlled its
+demonstration so that only a certain breathlessness was in her voice, a
+certain brilliancy in her eye, as she said to him, rapidly:--
+
+"He will never let you see me! Never!"
+
+"He? Who?--What do you mean?" Sir Basil, startled, stared at her.
+
+"Jack! Jack! Haven't you noticed?"
+
+"Oh, I see. Yes, I see." His glance became illuminated. In a voice as low
+as her own he asked: "What does it mean?--I never can get a word with
+you. He's always there. He's very devoted to you, I know; but, I supposed
+that--well, that his chance was over."
+
+His hesitation, the appeal of his glance, were lightning-flashes of
+assurance for Imogen, opening her path for her.
+
+"It is over;--it is over;--but it's false that he is devoted to me," she
+whispered. "He hates me. He is my enemy."
+
+"Oh, I say!" gasped Sir Basil.
+
+"And since he failed to win me--Don't you see--It's through sheer
+spite--sheer hatred."
+
+Her brilliant eyes were on him and a further "Oh!" came from Sir Basil as
+he received this long ray of illumination. And it was so dazzling, although
+Imogen, after her speech, had cast down her eyes, revealing nothing more,
+that he murmured hastily:--"Can't I see you, Imogen, alone;--can't you
+arrange it in some way?"
+
+Imogen's eyes were still cast down, while, the purpose that was like a
+possession, once attained, her thoughts rushed in, accused, exculpated, a
+wild confusion that, in another moment had built for her self-respect the
+shelter of a theory that, really, quite solidly sustained the statement so
+astounding to herself when it had risen to her lips. Hatred, spite; yes,
+these were motives, too, in Jack's treachery; she hadn't spoken falsely,
+though it had been with the blindness of the overmastering purpose. And her
+dignity was untarnished in Sir Basil's eyes, for, she had seen it at last,
+her path was open; she had only to enter it.
+
+Her heart seemed to flutter in her throat as she said on the lowest,
+most incisive note: "Yes,--I, too, want to see you, Sir Basil. I am so
+lonely;--you are the only one who cares, who understands, who is near me.
+There must be real truth between us. This morning--he has prevented that.
+But to-night, after we have all gone up-stairs, come out again, by the
+little door at the back, and meet me--meet me--" her voice wavered
+a little, "at the rustic bench, up in the woods, where we went last
+night. There we can talk." And catching suddenly at all the nobility, so
+threatened in her own eyes, remembering her love for him, her great love,
+and his need, his great need, of her, she smiled deeply, proudly at him and
+said:
+
+"We will see each other, at last, and each other's truth, under God's
+stars."
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+
+Jack had drawn Mary aside, around the sunny veranda, and, out of ear-shot
+of everybody, a curious intentness in his demeanor, he asked her to run
+up to Mrs. Upton's room and ask her if she wouldn't take a drive with him
+that morning. Since the Uptons' impoverishment their little stable was,
+perforce, empty; and it was Jack who ordered the buggy from the village and
+treated the company in turn to daily drives.
+
+Mary departed on her errand, hearing Jack telephoning to the livery-stable
+as she went up-stairs.
+
+She had to own to herself that the charm had grown on her, and the fact of
+her increasing fondness for Imogen's mother made the clearer to her all the
+new, vague pain in regard to Imogen. Imogen, to Mary's delicate perception
+of moral atmosphere, was different; she had felt it from the moment of her
+arrival. No one had as yet enlightened her as to the Potts's catastrophe,
+but even by its interpretation she would have found the change hard to
+understand. Perhaps it was merely that she, Mary, was selfish and felt
+herself to be of less importance to Imogen. Mary was always conscious
+of relief when she could fix responsibility upon herself, and she was
+adjusting all sorts of burdens on her conscience as she knocked at Mrs.
+Upton's door.
+
+The post had just arrived, and Valerie, standing near her dressing-table,
+was reading her letters as Mary came in. Mary had never so helplessly felt
+the sense of charm as this morning.
+
+She wore a long white dressing-gown, of frilled lawn, tied with black
+ribbons at throat and wrists. Her abundant chestnut hair, delicately veined
+with white, was braided into two broad plaits that hung below her waist,
+and her face, curiously childlike so seen, was framed in the banded masses.
+Mary could suddenly see what she had looked like as a little girl. So
+moved was she by the charm that, Puritan as she was, she found herself
+involuntarily saying:--"Oh, Mrs. Upton, what beautiful hair you have."
+
+"It is nice, isn't it?" said Valerie, looking more than ever like a child,
+a pleased child; "I love my hair."
+
+Mary had taken one braid and was crunching it softly, like spun silk, in
+her hand. She couldn't help laughing out at the happy acceptance of her
+admiring speech; the charm was about her; she understood; it wasn't vanity,
+but something flower-like.
+
+"You have heaps, too," said Valerie.
+
+"Oh, but it's sand-colored. And I do it so horribly. It is so heavy and
+pulls back so."
+
+"I know; that's the difficulty with heaps of hair. But I had a very clever
+maid, and she taught me how to manage it. Sand-color is a lovely color as a
+background to the face, you know."
+
+Valerie rarely made personal remarks and rarely paid compliments. She had
+none of the winning allurements of the siren; Mary had realized that and
+was now realizing that genuine interest, even if reticent, may be the most
+fragrant of compliments.
+
+"I wish you would let me show you how to do it," Valerie added.
+
+Mary blushed. There had always been to her, in her ruthless hair-dressing,
+an element of severe candor, the recognition of charmlessness, a sort
+of homage paid to wholesome if bitter fact. Mrs. Upton was not, in her
+flower-like satisfaction, one bit vain; but Mary suspected herself of
+feeling a real thrill of tempted vanity. The form of the temptation was,
+however, too sweet to be rejected, and Mrs. Upton's hair was so simply
+done, too, though, she suspected, done with a guileful simplicity. It
+wouldn't look vain to do it like that; but, on the other hand, it would
+probably take three times as long to do; there was always the question of
+one's right to employ precious moments in personal adornment. "How kind
+of you," she murmured. "I am so stupid though. Could I really learn? And
+wouldn't it take up a good deal of my time every morning?"
+
+Valerie smiled. "Well, it's a nice way of spending one's time, don't you
+think?"
+
+This was, somehow, quite unanswerable, and Mary had never thought of it in
+that light. She sat down before Valerie's pretty, tipped mirror and looked
+with some excitement at the rows of glittering toilet utensils set out
+before her. She was sure that Mrs. Upton found it nice to spend a great
+deal of time before her mirror.
+
+"It is so kind of you," she repeated. "And it will be so interesting to see
+how you do it. And, oh, I am forgetting the thing I came for--how stupid,
+how wrong of me. It's a message from Jack. He wants to know if you will
+drive with him."
+
+"And what are all the plans for to-day?" Mrs. Upton asked irrelevantly,
+unpinning the clustered knobs at the back of Mary's head and softly shaking
+out the stringently twisted locks as she uncoiled them.
+
+"It is _so_ kind of you;--but oughtn't I to take Jack his answer first?"
+
+"The answer will wait. He has his letters to see to now. What are they all
+doing?"
+
+"Well, let me see; Rose is in the hammock and Eddy is talking to her.
+Imogen is going to take Miss Bocock to see her club."
+
+"Oh, it is Imogen's club day, is it? She asked Miss Bocock?"
+
+"Miss Bocock asked her, or, rather, Jack told her that he had been telling
+Miss Bocock about it; it was Jack who asked. He knew, of course, that she
+would be interested in it;--a big, fine person like Miss Bocock would be
+bound to be."
+
+"Um," Valerie seemed vaguely to consider as she passed the comb down the
+long tresses. "I don't think that I can let Imogen carry off Miss
+Bocock;--Miss Bocock can go to the club another day; I want to do some
+gardening with her this morning; she's a very clever gardener, did you
+know?--So I shall be selfish. Imogen can take Sir Basil; he likes walks."
+
+Mrs. Upton was now brushing, and very dexterously; but Mary, glancing at
+her with a little anxiety for the avowed selfishness, fancied that she was
+not thinking much about the hair. Mary could not quite interpret the change
+she felt in the lovely face. Something hard, something controlled was
+there.
+
+"But Jack?"--she questioned.
+
+"Well, Jack can take you on the drive. You and he have seen very little of
+each other since you've come; such old friends as you are, too."
+
+"Yes, we are," said Mary, gazing abstractedly at her own face, now, in the
+mirror, and forgetting both her own transformation and the face that bent
+above her. A familiar cloud of pain gathered within her and, suddenly, she
+found herself bursting out with:--"Oh, Mrs. Upton--I am so unhappy about
+Jack!"
+
+Valerie, in the mirror, gave her a keen, quick glance. "I am, too, Mary,"
+she said.
+
+Mary, at this, turned in her chair to look up at her:--"You see, you feel
+it, too!"
+
+"That _he_ is unhappy? Yes, I see and feel it."
+
+"And you care;--I am sure that you care."
+
+"I care very much. I love Jack very much."
+
+Mary seized her hand and tears filled her eyes. "Oh, you _are_ a dear!--One
+must love him when one really knows him, mustn't one?--Mrs. Upton, I've
+known Jack all my life and he is simply one of the noblest, deepest,
+realest people in the whole world."
+
+"I am sure of that."
+
+"Well, then, can't you help him?" Mary cried.
+
+"How can I help him?--In what way?" Valerie asked, her grave smile fading.
+
+"With Imogen. It's that, you see, their alienation, that's breaking his
+heart.
+
+"Of course you've seen it all more clearly than I have," Mary went on,
+her hair about her face, her hand clasping Valerie's;--"Of course you
+understand it, and everything that has happened to them. I love Imogen,
+too--please don't doubt that;--but, but, I can't but feel that it's _her_
+mistake, _her_ blindness that has been the cause. She couldn't accept it,
+you see, that he should--stand for a new thing, and be loyal to the old
+thing at the same time."
+
+Valerie, now, had sunken into a chair near Mary's, and one hand was still
+in Mary's hand, and in the other she still held a tress of Mary's hair. She
+looked down at this tress while she said:--"But Imogen was right, quite
+right. He couldn't stand for the new thing and be loyal to the old."
+
+Mary's eyes widened: "You mean,--Mrs. Upton?--"
+
+"Just what you do. That _I_ am the cause."
+
+She raised her eyes to Mary's and the girl became scarlet.
+
+"Oh,--you do see it all," she breathed.
+
+"All, all, Mary. To Imogen I stand, I must stand, for the wrong; to
+Jack--though he can't think of me very well as 'standing' for anything,
+I'm not altogether in that category. So that his championship of me judges
+him in Imogen's eyes. Imogen has had a great deal to bear. Have you heard
+of the last thing? She has not told you? I have refused my consent to her
+having a biography of her father written. She had set her heart on it."
+
+"Oh, I hadn't heard anything. You wouldn't consent? Oh, poor Imogen!"
+
+"It is, poor Imogen. In this, too, she has found no sympathy in Jack. All
+his sympathy is with me. It has been the end, for both of them. And it is
+inevitable, Mary."
+
+"Oh, Mrs. Upton, what can I say--what can I think?--I don't seem to be able
+to see who is right and who is wrong!" Mary covered the confusion of her
+thoughts by burying her face in her hands.
+
+"No; one can't see. That's what one finds out."
+
+"Of course, I have always thought Mr. Upton a very wonderful person," Mary
+murmured from behind her hands, her Puritan instinct warning her that
+now, when it gave her such pain, was the time above all others for a
+"testifying," a "bearing witness."--"But I know that Jack never felt about
+that as I did. Of course I, too, think that the biography ought to be
+written."
+
+Valerie was silent, and her silence, Mary felt, was definitive.
+
+She wouldn't explain herself; she wouldn't seek self-exculpation; and
+while, with all her humility, Mary felt that as a little stinging, she felt
+it, also, as something of a relief. Mrs. Upton, no doubt, was indifferent
+as to her opinion of her rightness and her wrongness, and Mrs. Upton--there
+was the comfort of it,--was a person whom one must put on one side when
+it came to judgments. She didn't seem to belong to any of the usual
+categories. One didn't want to judge her. One was thankful for the haze she
+made about herself and her motives. That Jack understood her was, Mary felt
+sure, the result of some peculiar perspicacity of Jack's, for she didn't
+believe that Mrs. Upton had ever explained or exculpated herself to Jack,
+either. It even dawned on her that his perspicacity perhaps consisted
+mainly in the sense of trust that she herself was experiencing. She trusted
+Mrs. Upton, were she right, or were she wrong, and there was an end of it.
+With that final realization she uncovered her eyes and met her hostess's
+eyes again, eyes so soft, so clear, but with, in them, a look of suffering.
+Childlike, her hair folding behind her cheek and neck, she was faded,
+touched with age; Mary had never seen it so clearly. Somehow it made her
+even sorrier than the suffering she recognized.
+
+"Oh, but it's been hard for you, too," she exclaimed, shyly but
+irrepressibly, "everything, all of it. Just let me say that."
+
+Valerie had blushed her infrequent, vivid blush. She rose and came behind
+Mary's chair again, gathering up the abandoned tresses. But before she
+began to comb and coil she said, "Thanks," leaning forward and, very
+lightly, kissing the girl's forehead.
+
+After that there was silence between them while the work of hair-dressing
+went on. Valerie did not speak again until, softly forming the contour of
+the transfigured head, she said, looking at Mary's reflection with an air
+of quiet triumph;--"Now, is not that charming?"
+
+"Charming; perfectly charming," Mary replied, vaguely; the tears were near
+her eyes.
+
+"You must come again, to-morrow, and do it under my supervision. It only
+needs this, now." She thrust two heavy tortoise-shell pins into the coils
+on either side of Mary's head.
+
+"Those beautiful pins! I am afraid I shall lose them!"
+
+"But they are yours,--mementoes of the new era in hair-dressing. I have
+several of them. There, you are quite as I would have you,--as far as your
+head goes."
+
+"Not as far as the rest of me goes, I'm afraid," said Mary, laughing in
+spite of herself, and lured from sadness.
+
+"I wish you'd let me make the rest of you to match," said Valerie. "I've
+always loved dressing people up. I loved dressing my dolls when I was a
+child. That stiff shirt doesn't go with your head."
+
+"No, it doesn't. I really don't see," said Mary tentatively, "why one
+shouldn't regard dressing as a form of art; I mean, of course, as long as
+one keeps it in its proper place, as it were."
+
+"To get it in its proper place is to dress well, don't you think. I found
+such a pretty lawn dress of mine in a trunkful of things put away here;
+it's a little too juvenile for me, now, and, besides, I'm in mourning. May
+I put you into it?"
+
+"But I should feel so odd, so frivolous. I'm such a staid, solemn person."
+
+"But the dress is staid, too,--a dear little austerity of a dress;--it's
+just as much you as that way of doing your hair is. Don't imagine that I
+would commit such a solecism as to dress you frivolously. Look; will you
+put this on at once,--to please me?"
+
+She had drawn the delicate thing, all falls and plaitings of palest blue,
+from a closet, and, shaking it out, looked up with quite serious eyes
+of supplication. It was impossible not to yield. Laughing, frightened,
+charmed, Mary allowed Mrs. Upton to dress her, and then surveyed herself
+in the long mirror with astonishment. She couldn't but own that it was
+herself, though such a transfigured self. She didn't feel out of place,
+though she felt new and strange.
+
+"Now, Mary, go down to them and see to it that they all do as I say,"
+Valerie insisted. "Imogen is to take Sir Basil to the club;--Miss Bocock
+is to garden with me--tell her particularly that I count upon her. Jack is
+to take you for a drive. And, Mary," she put her hand for a moment on the
+girl's shoulder, grave for all her recovered lightness;--"you are not to
+talk of sad things to Jack. You must help me about Jack. You must cheer
+him;--make him forget. You must talk of all the things you used to talk of
+before--before either I or Imogen came."
+
+They were all on the veranda when Mary went down; all, that is, but Rose
+and Eddy. Sir Basil and Miss Bocock were deep in letters. Imogen, seated
+on a step, the sunlight playing over her fluttering black, endured--it was
+evident that enjoyment made no part of her feeling--a vivid and emphatic
+account from Jack of some recent political occurrence. He was even reading,
+here and there, bits from the newspaper he held, and Mary fancied that
+there was an unnatural excitement in his voice, an unusual eagerness in his
+eye, with neither of which had he in the least infected Imogen.
+
+On seeing Mary appear he dropped the newspaper and joined her in the hall,
+drawing her from there into the little library. "Well?--Well?--" he
+questioned keenly.
+
+He had no eyes for her transformation, Mary noted that, although Imogen, in
+the instant of her appearance, had fixed grave and astonished eyes upon
+her. She repeated her message.
+
+"Well, do you know," said Jack, "we can't obey her. I'm so sorry;--I should
+have liked the drive with you, Mary, of all things; but it turns out that
+I can't take anybody this morning, I've some letters, just come, that must
+be answered by return. But, Mary, see here," his voice dropped and his
+keenness became more acute;--"help me about it. See that she goes. She
+needs it."
+
+"Needs it?"
+
+"Don't you see that she's worn out?"
+
+"Jack, only this morning, I've begun to suspect it;--what is the matter?"
+
+"Everything. Everything is the matter. So, she mustn't be allowed to take
+all the drudgery on her hands. Miss Bocock may go to the club with Imogen;
+she's just ready to go, she wants to go;--and Mrs. Upton must have the
+drive with Sir Basil. He'd far rather drive with her than walk with
+Imogen," said Jack brazenly.
+
+"I suppose so, they are such great friends;--only;--drudgery?--She likes
+Miss Bocock. She likes gardening,"--Mary's breath was almost taken away by
+his tense decisiveness.
+
+"She likes Sir Basil better"; Jack said it in the freest manner, a manner
+that left untouched any deeper knowledge that they might both be in
+possession of. "Imogen likes him better, too. It's for that, so that Imogen
+may have the best of it, that she's taking Miss Bocock off Imogen's
+hands;--you see, I see that you do. So, you just stay here and keep still
+about your counter-demands, while I manage it."
+
+"But Jack,--you bewilder me!--I ought to give my message. I hate managing."
+
+"I'll see that your message is given."
+
+"But how can you?--Jack--what _are_ you planning?"
+
+He was going and, with almost an impatience of her Puritan scruples, he
+paused at the door to reply:--"Don't bother. I'm all right. I won't manage
+it. I'll simply _have_ it so."
+
+Half an hour later Valerie came down-stairs wearing her white hat with its
+black ribbons and drawing on her gardening gloves. And in the large, cool
+hall, holding his serviceable letters, Jack awaited her.
+
+"I hope you won't mind," he announced, but in the easiest tones; "we can't
+obey you this morning. Miss Bocock's gone off to the club with Imogen, and
+Sir Basil is going to take you for a drive."
+
+Valerie, standing on the last step of the stair, a little above him, paused
+in the act of adjusting her glove, to stare at him. Easy as his tone was he
+couldn't hide from her that he wore a mask.
+
+"Was Mary too late to give my message?"
+
+"Yes;--that is, no, not exactly; but the club had been arranged and Miss
+Bocock was eager about it and knew you wouldn't mind, especially as Sir
+Basil set his heart on the drive with you, when he heard that I couldn't
+go."
+
+"That you couldn't go?--but you sent Mary to ask me."
+
+"I had to waive my claim,--I've just had these letters"; he held them up.
+"Very important; they must be answered at once; it will take all my
+morning, and, of course, when Sir Basil heard that, he jumped at his
+chance."
+
+Valerie was still on the step above him, fully illuminated, and, as, with
+that careful ease, he urged Sir Basil's eagerness upon her, he saw--with
+what a throb of the heart, for her, for himself--that her deep flush rose.
+
+Oh, she loved him. She couldn't conceal it, not from the eyes that watched
+her now. And was she glad of an unasked-for help, or did her pride suspect
+help and resent it? Above all did she know how in need of help she was?
+
+He hadn't been able to prevent his eyes from turning from the blush; they
+avowed, he feared, the consciousness that he would hide; but, after a
+little moment, in the same voice of determined, though cautious
+penetration, Valerie questioned: "Is Imogen just gone?"
+
+"She has been gone these fifteen minutes," said Jack, striving to conceal
+triumph.
+
+"And Mary?"
+
+"Mary?"
+
+"Yes; where is Mary? Is she left out of all your combinations?"
+
+She did probe, then, though her voice was so mild, the voice, only, of the
+slightly severe, slightly displeased hostess who finds her looms entangled.
+
+"Mary always has a lot to do."
+
+"Sir Basil shall take Mary," said Valerie cheerfully, as though she picked
+up the thread and found a way out of the silly chaos of his making.
+
+And at this crisis, this check from the goddess who wouldn't be served,
+Jack's new skill rose to an almost sinister height. Without a flaw in their
+apparent candor, his eyes met hers while he said:--"Please don't upset my
+little personal combination. It's very selfish of me, I know;--but I wanted
+to keep Mary for myself this morning. I've seen so little of her of late;
+and I need her to talk over my letters with; they're about things we are
+both interested in."
+
+Valerie looked fixedly at him while he made this statement, and he
+couldn't tell what her look meant. But, evidently, she yielded to his
+counter-stratagem, feeling it, no doubt, unavoidable, for the buggy just
+then drew up before the door, and the figure of Sir Basil appeared above.
+
+"I _am_ in luck!" said Sir Basil. Excitement as well as eagerness was
+visible in him. Valerie did not look up at him, though she smiled vaguely,
+coming down from her step and selecting a parasol on her way to the door.
+Jack was beside her, and he saw that the flush still stayed. He seemed to
+see, too, that she was excited and eager, but, more than all, that she was
+frightened. Yet she kept, for him, her quiet voice.
+
+Before Sir Basil joined them she had time to say:--"You are rather
+mysterious, Jack. If you have deep-laid plans, I would rather you paid me
+the compliment of showing me the deepest one at once. I am not being nasty
+to you," she smiled faintly. "Find Mary at once, you must have wasted a lot
+of time already in getting to those letters."
+
+Jack stood in the doorway while they drove off. Valerie, though now very
+pale, in the shadow of her hat, showed all her gay tranquillity, and she
+was very lovely. Sir Basil must see that. He must see that, and all the
+other things, that, perhaps, he had forgotten for a foolish moment.
+
+Jack felt himself, this morning, in a category where he had never thought
+it possible that he should find himself. It was difficult to avoid the
+conviction that he had, simply, lied two or three times in order to send
+Mrs. Upton and Sir Basil off together in their long, swaying, sunny
+solitude. Jack had never imagined it possible that he should lie. But,
+observing, as he was forced to, the blot on his neat, clean conscience, he
+found himself considering it without a qualm. His only qualm was for its
+success. The drive would justify him. He almost swore it to himself, as
+Valerie's parasol disappeared among the trees. The drive would justify him,
+and reinstate Sir Basil. Unless Sir Basil were a fool, what he had done was
+well done.
+
+Yet, when they had disappeared, it was with the saddest drop to anxious, to
+gnawing uncertainty, that Jack turned back into the house. An echo of the
+fear that he had felt in Valerie seemed to float back to him. It was as if,
+in some strange way, he had handed her over to pain rather than to joy, to
+sacrifice rather than to attainment.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+
+Jack's morning was not a happy one. It was bad enough to have told so many
+fibs, or, at all events, to have invented so many opportune truths, and it
+was worse to have to go on inventing more of them to Mary, now that his
+dexterities had linked him to her.
+
+Mary looked, as was only too natural, much surprised, when he told her that
+his letters required her help. She looked still more so when she found how
+inadequate were their contents to account for such a claim.
+
+Indeed there was, apparently, but one letter upon which her advice could be
+of the least significance, and after she had given him all the information
+she had to give in regard to the charity for which it appealed, there was
+really nothing more for them to do.
+
+"But--the letters that required the immediate answers?" she asked.
+
+Jack's excited, plausible manner had dropped from him. Mary felt it
+difficult to be severe when his look of dejection was piercing her heart;
+still, she felt that she owed it to him as well as to herself, she must see
+a little more clearly into how he had "had things so."
+
+He replied, his eye neither braving nor evading hers, that he had already
+answered them; and Mary, after a little pause, in which she studied her
+friend's face, said:--"I don't understand you this morning, Jack."
+
+"I'm afraid you'll understand me less when I make you a confession. I
+didn't give your message this morning, Mary."
+
+"Didn't give Mrs. Upton's message, to Miss Bocock, to Sir Basil?"
+
+"No," said Jack, but with more mildness and sadness than compunction;--"I
+want to be straight with you, at all events. So I'd rather tell you. All I
+did was to say to Sir Basil that I found I couldn't take Mrs. Upton for the
+drive I'd promised, so that if he wanted to take my place, he was welcome
+to the buggy. He wanted to, of course. That went without saying."
+
+"Why, Jack Pennington!"
+
+"Miss Bocock, luckily, was on the other side of the veranda, so that I
+had only to go round to her afterward and tell her that Mrs. Upton had
+suggested their gardening, but that since she was going to drive with Sir
+Basil she could go off to the club, at once, too, with Imogen."
+
+"But, Jack!--what did you mean by it?"--Mary, quite aghast, stared at her
+Machiavellian friend.
+
+"Why, that Sir Basil should take her. That's all I meant from the
+beginning, when I proposed going myself. Do forgive me, you dear old brick.
+You see, I'm so awfully set on her not being done out of things."
+
+"Done out of things?"
+
+"Oh, little things, if you like, young things. She's young, and she ought
+to have them. Say you forgive me."
+
+"Of course, Jack dear, I forgive you, though I don't understand you. But
+that's not the point. Everything seems so queer, so twisted; every one
+seems different. And to find _you_ not straight is worst of all."
+
+"I promise you, it's my last sin," said Jack.
+
+Mary, though shaking her bewildered head, had to smile a little, and, the
+smile encouraging him to lightness, he remarked on her changed aspect.
+
+"So do forgive and forget. I had to confess, when I'd not been true to you.
+Really, my nature isn't warped. What an extremely becoming dress that is
+Mary;--and what have you done to your hair?"
+
+"It's _she_," said Mary, flushing with pleasure.
+
+"Mrs. Upton?"
+
+"Yes, she did my hair and gave me the dress. She was so sweet and dear."
+
+Jack lightly touched a plaited ruffle of the wide sleeve, and Mary felt
+that he had never less thought of her than when he so touched her dress.
+She put aside the deep little pang that gave her to say: "It's true, Jack,
+she ought to have young things, just because they are going from her; one
+feels that: She oughtn't to be standing back, and giving up things, yet. I
+see a little what you mean. _Isn't_ it pretty?" Still, with an absent hand,
+he lightly touched, here and there, a ruffle of her sleeve. "But it's like
+her. I hardly feel myself in it."
+
+"You've never so looked yourself," said Jack. "That's what she does, brings
+out people's real selves."
+
+Mrs. Upton and Sir Basil did not come back to lunch, and Imogen's face was
+somber indeed as she faced her guests at the table. Jack, vigilant and
+pitiless, guessed at the turmoil of her soul.
+
+She asked him, with an icy sweetness, how his letters had prospered. "Did
+you get them all off?"
+
+Jack said that he had, and Mary, casting a wavering glance at him, saw
+that if he intended to sin no more, he showed, at all events, a sinful
+guilelessness of demeanor. She herself began to blush so helplessly and
+so furiously that Imogen's attention was drawn to her. Imogen, also, was
+vigilant.
+
+"And what have you been doing, Mary dear?" she asked.
+
+"I--oh"--poor Mary looked the sinful one;--"I--helped Jack a little."
+
+"Helped Jack?--Oh, yes, he had heaps of letters, hadn't he? What were they
+all about, Mary?"
+
+"Oh, charities."
+
+"Charities?--What charities? How many charities?--I'm interested in that,
+you know--I'm rather hurt that you didn't ask my advice, too," and Imogen
+smiled her ominous smile. "What were the charities?"
+
+Mary, crimson to the brow, her eyes on her plate, now did her duty.
+
+"There was only one."
+
+"One--and that of such consequence that Jack had to give up his drive
+because of it?--what an interesting letter."
+
+"There were other letters, of course," Jack, in aid of his innocent
+accomplice, struck in. "None that would have particularly interested you,
+Imogen. I only needed advice about the one, a local Boston affair."
+
+"There were others, Mary," said Imogen, laughing a little, "You needn't
+look so guilty on Jack's account." Mary gave her a wide, startled stare.
+
+"You see, Mary," said Rose, after lunch in the drawing-room, "saints can
+sting."
+
+"What was the matter!" Mary murmured, her head still seemed to buzz, as
+though from a violent box on the ear. "I never heard Imogen speak like
+that. To _hurt_ one!"
+
+"I fancy she'd been getting thwarted in some way," said Rose comfortably;
+"saints do sting, then, sometimes, the first thing that happens to be at
+hand. How Jack and she hate each other!"
+
+Mary went away to her room and cried.
+
+Meanwhile Jack wandered about in the woods until, quite late in the
+afternoon, he saw from the rustic bench, where, finally, he had cast
+himself, the returning buggy climbing up through the lower woodlands.
+
+He felt that his heart throbbed heavily as he watched it, just catching
+glimpses, among the trees, of the white bubble of Valerie's parasol
+slanting against the sun. Yet there was a dullness in his excitement. It
+was over, at all events. He was sure that the last die was cast. And his
+own trivial and somewhat indecorous part, of shifter of scenes and puller
+of strings, was, he felt sure, a thing put by forever. He could help her
+no longer. And in a sort of apathy, he sat out there in the sunny green,
+hardly thinking, hardly wondering, conscious only of a hope that had become
+a mere physical sense of oppression and of an underlying sadness that had
+become, almost, a physical sense of pain.
+
+He had just consulted his watch and, seeing it wanted but ten minutes to
+tea-time, had got up and was moving away, when a sudden rustle near him, a
+pause, a quick, evasive footstep, warned him of some presence as anxious
+for solitude as himself.
+
+He stood still for a moment, uncertain as to his own best means of retreat,
+but his stillness misled, for, in another moment, Valerie appeared before
+him from among the branches of a narrow side path.
+
+She had come up to the woods directly; he saw that, for she still wore her
+hat; she had come to be alone and to weep; and, as she saw Jack, her pale
+face was convulsed, with the effort to control her weeping, into a strange
+rigor of pain and confusion.
+
+"Oh"--he stammered. "Forgive me. I didn't know you were here." He was
+turning to flee, as if from a sacrilege, when she recalled him.
+
+"Don't--without me. I must go back, too," she said.
+
+She stepped on to the broader path and joined him, and he guessed that she
+tested, on him, her power to face the others. But, after they had gone a
+few steps together, she stopped suddenly and put her hands before her face,
+standing quite still.
+
+And Jack understood that she was helpless and that he must say nothing. She
+stood so for a long moment, not trusting herself to move or speak. Then,
+uncovering her face, she showed him strange eyes from which the tears had
+been crushed back.
+
+"And--I can do nothing?--" he said at last, on the lowest breath, as they
+walked on.
+
+"Nothing, dear Jack."
+
+"When you are suffering like that!"
+
+"I have no right to such suffering. I must hide it. Help me to hide it,
+Jack. Do I look fairly decent?" She turned her face to him, with, he
+thought, the most valorous smile he had ever seen.
+
+Only a thin screen of leaves was between them and the open.
+
+"You look--beautiful," said Jack. She smiled on, as though that satisfied
+her, and he added, "Can I know nothing?--See nothing?"
+
+"I think already," said Valerie, "that you see more than I ever meant any
+one to see."
+
+"I?--I see nothing, now," he almost moaned.
+
+"You shall. I'll talk to you later."
+
+"You will? If only you knew how I cared!"
+
+"I do, dear Jack."
+
+"Not how much, not how much. You can't know that. It almost gives me my
+right, you know, to see. When will you talk to me?"
+
+"Some time to-night, when we can have a quiet moment. I'll tell you about
+the things that have happened--nothing to make you sad, I hope. And I'll
+ask you some questions, too, Jack, about your very odd behavior!"
+
+Really she was wonderful; it was almost her own gaiety, flickering like
+pale sunlight upon her face, that she had regained, and, as they went
+together over the lawn to where the tea-table was laid in the shade, he saw
+that she could face them all. No one would know. And her last words had
+given him heart, had lifted, a little, the heavy weight of foreboding.
+Perhaps, perhaps, her grief wasn't for herself. "Oh, but I can't be candid
+till you are," he said, the new hope shining in his eyes.
+
+"Oh, yes, you will be," she returned. "You won't ask me to be candid.
+You'll give and not ask to get back. I know you, Jack."
+
+No one could guess; Sir Basil least of all. That was apparent to Jack as
+he watched them all sitting at tea under the apple-trees. Sir Basil had
+never looked so radiant, so innocent of any connection with suffering. He
+exclaimed over the beauties of their long drive. They had crossed hill and
+dale; they had lost their way; they had had lunch at a village hotel, an
+amusing lunch, ending with ice-cream and pie, and, from the undiminished
+reflection of his contentment on Valerie's features, Jack knew that any
+faintest hint of the pale, stricken anguish of the woodlands had never for
+an instant hovered during the drive. This was the face that Sir Basil had
+seen for all the happy, sunny, picnic day, this face of gay tranquillity.
+
+Sir Basil and Mrs. Upton, indeed, expressed what gaiety there was among
+the group. Mary, in her blue lawn, looked very dreary. Rose and Eddy were
+ill-tempered, their day, plainly, having ended in a quarrel. As for Imogen,
+Jack had felt her heavy eye rest upon him and her mother as they came
+together over the lawn, and felt it rest upon her mother and Sir Basil
+steadily and somberly, while they sat about the tea-table. The long drive,
+Sir Basil's radiance, her mother's serenity, how must they look to Imogen?
+Jack could conjecture, though knowing, for his own bitter mystification,
+that what they looked like was perhaps not what they meant. Imogen must
+be truly at bay, and he felt a cruel satisfaction in the thought of her
+hidden, her gnawing anxiety. He was aware of every ring of falsity in her
+placid voice and of every flash of fierceness under the steeled calmness
+of her eye. He noticed, too, for the rest of the day, that, whatever
+Imogen's desperation, she made no effort to see Sir Basil alone. Almost
+ostentatiously she went away to her room after tea, saying that she had had
+bad news of an invalid _protégé_ and must write to her. She paused, as she
+went, to lean over Mary, a caressing hand upon her shoulder, and to speak
+to her in a low tone. Mary grew very red, stammered, and said nothing.
+
+"Miss Upton overworks, I think," observed Miss Bocock. "I've thought that
+she seemed overstrained all day."
+
+Mary had risen too, and as she wandered away into the flower garden, Jack
+followed her.
+
+"See here," he said, "has Imogen been hurting you again?"
+
+"No, Jack, oh no;--I'm sure she doesn't mean to hurt."
+
+"What did she say to you just now?"
+
+"Well, Jack, you did bring it upon yourself, and upon me"--
+
+"What was it?"
+
+"She said that she couldn't bear to see her white flower--that's I, you
+know,"--Mary blushed even deeper in repeating the metaphor--"used for
+unworthy ends. She meant, of course, I see that,--she meant that what she
+said at lunch was for you and not for me. I'm sure that Imogen _means_ to
+be kind--always."
+
+"I believe she does."
+
+"I'm glad that you feel that, too, Jack. It is so horrible to see oneself
+as--oh, really disloyal sometimes."
+
+"You need never feel that, Mary."
+
+"Oh, but I do. And now, when everything, every one, seems turning against
+Imogen! And she has seemed different;--yet for two years she has been a
+revelation of everything noble to me."
+
+"You only saw her in noble circumstances."
+
+"Oh, Jack," Mary's eyes were full of tears as she looked at him now,
+"that's the worst of all; that you have come to speak of her like that."
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+
+Even Valerie couldn't dispel the encompassing cloud of gloom at dinner. One
+couldn't do much in such a fog but drift with it. And Jack saw that she was
+fit for no more decisive action.
+
+Imogen, pale, and almost altogether silent, said that she was very tired,
+and went up-stairs early. Rose and Eddy, in a shaded corner of the
+drawing-room, engaged in a long altercation. The others talked, in
+desultory fashion, till bedtime. No one seemed fit for more than drifting.
+
+It was hardly eleven when Jack was left alone with Mrs. Upton.
+
+"You are tired, too," he said to her; "dreadfully tired. I mustn't ask for
+our talk."
+
+"I should like a little stroll in the moonlight." Valerie, at the open
+window, was looking out. "In a night or two it will be too late for us to
+see. We'll have our walk and our talk, Jack."
+
+She rang for her white chuddah, told the maid to put out the lamps, and
+that she and Mr. Pennington would shut the house when they came in. From
+the darkened house they stepped into the warm, pale night. They went in
+silence over the lawn and, with no sense of choice, took the mossy path
+that led to the rustic bench where they had met that afternoon.
+
+It was not until they were lost in the obscurity of the woods that Valerie
+said, very quietly: "Do you remember our talk, Jack, on that evening in New
+York, after the tableaux?"
+
+He had followed along the path just behind her; but now he came to her side
+so that he could see her shadowy face. "Yes;--the evening in which we saw
+that Imogen and Sir Basil were going to be friends."
+
+"And the evening," said Valerie, "when you showed me plainly, at last, that
+because I seemed gold to you, Imogen's blue had turned to green."
+
+"Yes;--I remember."
+
+"It has faded further and further away, her blue, hasn't it?"
+
+"Yes," he confessed.
+
+"So that you are hardly friends, Jack?"
+
+He paused for a moment, and then completed his confession:--"We are not
+friends."
+
+Valerie stood still, breathing as if with a little difficulty after the
+gradual ascent. The tall trees about them were dark and full of mystery on
+the pale mysterious sky. Through the branches they could see the glint of
+the moon's diminished disk.
+
+"That is terrible, you know," said Valerie, after they had stood in silence
+for some moments.
+
+"I know it."
+
+"For both of you."
+
+"Worse for me, because I cared more, really cared more."
+
+"No, worse for her, for it is you who have judged and rejected her."
+
+"She thinks that it is she who has judged and rejected me."
+
+"She tries to think it; she does not always succeed. It has been bitter, it
+has been cruel for her."
+
+"Oh, yes, bitter and cruel," he assented.
+
+"Don't try to minimize her pain, Jack."
+
+"You feel that I can't care, much?"
+
+"It is horrible for me to feel it. Think of her when I came, so secure, so
+calm, so surrounded by love and appreciation. And now"--Valerie walked on,
+as if urged to motion by the controlled force of her own insistence. Was it
+an appeal to him that Imogen, dispossessed of the new love, might find
+again the old love opening to her? He clung to the hope, though with a
+sickening suspicion of its folly.
+
+"By my coming, I have robbed her of everything," Valerie was saying,
+walking swiftly up the path and breathing as if with that slight
+difficulty--the sound of her breaths affected him with an almost
+intolerable sense of expectancy. "She isn't secure;--she isn't calm. She is
+warped;--her faiths are warped. Her friends are changed to her. She has
+lost you. It's as if I had shattered her life."
+
+"Everything that wasn't real you have shattered."
+
+The rustic bench was reached and they paused there, though with no eyes for
+the shaft of mystic distance that opened before them. Jack's eyes were on
+her and he was conscious of a rising insistence in himself that matched and
+opposed her own.
+
+"But you must be sorry for her pain," said Valerie, and now, with eyes
+almost stern in their demand, she gazed at him;--"you must be sorry that
+she has had to lose so much. And you would be glad, would you not, to think
+that real things, a new life, were to come to her?"
+
+He understood; even before the words, his fear, his presage, leaped forward
+to this crashing together of all his hopes. And it seemed to him that a
+flame passed through him, shriveling in its ardent wrath all trite
+reticences and decorums.
+
+"No; no, I should not be glad," he answered. His voice was violent; the
+eyes he fixed on her were violent. His words struck Imogen out of his life
+for ever.
+
+"Why are you so cruel?" she faltered.
+
+"I am cruel for _you_. I know what you want to do. You are going to give
+her _your_ life."
+
+Quick as a flash she answered--it was like a rapier parrying his
+stroke:--"Give?--what have I to do with it, if it comes to her?"
+
+"Everything! Everything!" he cried.
+
+"Nothing. You are mistaken."
+
+"Ah,--you could keep it, you could keep it--if you tried." And now his eyes
+pleaded--pleaded with her, for her own life's sake, to keep what was hers.
+"You have only to _show_ her to him, as you did to me."
+
+"You think--I could do that!--to my child!"--Through the darkness her white
+face looked a wild reproach at him.
+
+He seized her hands:--"It's to do her no wrong!--It's only to be true,
+consciously, to him, as you were true, unconsciously, to me. It's only, not
+to let her rob you--not to let her rob him."
+
+"Jack," she breathed heavily, "these are things that cannot be said."
+
+"They must--they must--now, between us. I have my right. I've cared
+enough--to do anything, so that she should not rob you!" Jack groaned.
+
+"She has not robbed me. It left me;--it went to her;--I saw it all. Even if
+I had been base enough, even if I had tried to keep it by showing her to
+him--as you say so horribly,--even then I should not have kept it. He would
+not have seen. Don't you understand;--he is not that sort of man. She will
+always be blue to him, and I will always be gold--though perhaps, now, a
+little tarnished. That's what is so beautiful in him--and so stupid. He
+doesn't see colors, as you and I do, Jack. That's what makes me sure that
+this is the happiest of fortunes for them both."
+
+He had held her hands, gazing at her downcast face, its strength speaking
+from the shadow, its pain hidden from him, and now, before her resolution
+and her gentleness, he bent his head upon the hands he held. "Oh, but _you,
+you, you_!--It's _you_ whose life is shattered!" broke from him with a sob.
+
+For a long while she stood silent above him, her hands enfolding his, as
+though she comforted his grief. He found himself at length kissing the
+gentle hands, with tears, and then, caressing his bent head with a light
+touch, she said: "Don't you see that the time has come for me to accept
+shatterings as in the order of things, dear Jack?--My mistake has been to
+believe that life can begin over again. It can't. One uses it up--merely by
+waiting. I've been an incurable girl till now;--and now, I've crashed from
+girlhood to middle-age in a week! It's been a crash, of course; the sort of
+crash one never mends of; but after to-day, after you sent me off with him,
+Jack, and I allowed myself, in spite of all my dread, my pride, my
+relinquishment, just one flicker of girlish hope,--after all this, I think
+that I must put on caps to show that I am really old at last."
+
+He lifted his head and looked at her. Her face was lovely, with the silver
+disk of the moon above it and, about it, the mystery and sadness of the
+tranquil woods. So lovely, so young, with almost the trembling touch of a
+tender mockery, like the trembling of moonlit water, upon it. And all that
+he found to say at last was:--"What a fool he is."
+
+She really smiled then, though tears sprang to her eyes with her
+comprehension of all that the helpless, boyish words struggled to subdue.
+
+"Thanks for that, dear Jack,--and for all the other mistakes," she said.
+
+There seemed nothing more to say, no questions to ask, or to answer. He
+must accept from her that her plight was irrevocable. It was as if he had
+seen a great stone rolled over the quivering, springing, shining fountain,
+sealing it, stilling it for ever. And, for his part, her word covered all.
+His "mistakes" needed no further revealing.
+
+They had turned and, in silence, were moving down the path again, when they
+heard, suddenly, the sound of light, swift footsteps approaching them. They
+paused, exchanging a glance of wonder; and Jack thought that he saw fear in
+Valerie's eyes. The day, already, had held overmuch of endurance for her,
+and it was not yet ended. In another moment, tall and illumined, Imogen
+appeared before them in the path.
+
+Jack knew, in thinking it over afterward, that Imogen at her most baleful
+had been Imogen at her most beautiful. She had looked, as she emerged from
+shadow into light, like a virgin saint bent on some wild errand through the
+night, an errand brought to a proud pause, in which was no fear and no
+hesitancy, as her path was crossed by the spirits of an evil world. That
+was really just what she looked like, standing there before them, bathed in
+light, her eyes profound and stern, her hair crowning her with a glory of
+transmuted gold, her head uplifted with a high, unfaltering purpose. That
+the shock of finding them there before her was great, one saw at once; and
+one could gage the strength of her purpose from her instantaneous
+surmounting of the shock.
+
+And it was strange, in looking back, to remember how the time of colorless
+light and colorless shadow had seemed to divest them all of daily
+conventions and daily seemings. They might have been three disembodied
+souls met there in the moonlit woods and speaking the direct, unimpeded
+language of souls, for whom all concealments are useless.
+
+"Oh--it is _you_," was what Imogen said; much as the virgin saint might
+have greeted the familiar demons who opposed her quest. _You_, meant both
+of them. She put them together into one category of evil, saw them as one
+in their enmity to her and to good. And she seemed to accept them as very
+much what a saint might expect to find on such a nocturnal errand.
+
+Involuntarily Valerie had fallen back, and she had put her hand on Jack's
+shoulder in confusion more than in fear. Yet, feeling a menace in the
+white, shining presence, her voice faltered as she asked: "Imogen, what are
+you doing here?"
+
+And it was at this point that Imogen reached, really, her own culmination.
+Whatever shame, whatever hesitation, whatever impulsion to deceive when
+deception was so easy, she may have felt; to lie, when a lie would be so
+easily convincing, she rejected and triumphed over. Jack knew from her
+uplifted look that the moment would count with her always as one of her
+great ones one of the moments in which--as she had used to say to him
+sometimes in the days that were gone forever--one knew that one had "beat
+down Satan under one's feet."
+
+"You have no right to ask me that," she said, "but I choose to answer you.
+I have come here to meet Sir Basil."
+
+"Meet him?" It was in pure bewilderment that Valerie questioned,
+helplessly, without reproach.
+
+"Meet him. Yes. What have you to say to it?"
+
+"But why meet him?--Why now?" The wonder on Valerie's face had broken to
+almost merriment. "Did he ask you to?--Really, really, he oughtn't to.
+Really, my child, I can't have you meeting Sir Basil in the woods at
+midnight."
+
+"You can't have me meeting him in the woods at midnight?" Imogen repeated,
+an ominous cadence, holding her head high and taking long breaths. "You say
+that, dare say it, when you well know that I can meet him nowhere else and
+in no other way. It was _I_ who asked him to meet me here and it is here,
+confronted with you, if you so choose; it is here, before you and under
+God's stars, that I shall know the truth from him. I am not ashamed; I am
+proud to say it;--I love him. And though you scheme, and stoop and strive
+to take him from me--you, with Jack to help you--Jack to lie for you--as he
+did this morning,--I know, I know in my heart and soul that he loves me,
+that he is mine."
+
+"Jack!--Jack!" Valerie cried. She caught him back, for he started forward
+to seize, to gag her daughter; "Jack--remember, remember!--She doesn't
+understand!"
+
+"Oh, he may strike me if he wills." Imogen had stood quite still, not
+flinching.
+
+"I don't want to strike you--you--you idiot!"--Jack was gasping. "I want to
+force you to your knees, before your mother--who loves you--as no one else
+who knows you will ever love you!" And, helplessly, his old words, so
+trite, so inadequate, came back to him. "You self-centered, you
+self-righteous, you cold-hearted girl!"
+
+Valerie still held his arm with both hands, leaning upon him.
+
+"Imogen," she said, speaking quickly, "you needn't meet Sir Basil in this
+way;--there is nothing to prevent you from seeing him where and when you
+will. You are right in believing that he loves you. He asked me this
+morning for your hand. And I gave him my consent."
+
+From a virgin saint Imogen, as if with the wave of a wand, saw herself
+turned into a rather foolish genie, so transformed and then, ever so
+swiftly, run into a bottle;--it was surely the graceful seal firmly affixed
+thereto when she heard these words of conformity to the traditions of
+dignified betrothal. And for once in her life, so bottled and so sealed,
+she looked, as if through the magic crystal of her mother's words,
+absolutely, helplessly foolish. It is difficult for a genie in a bottle to
+look contrite or stricken with anything deeper than astonishment; nor is it
+practicable in such a situation to fall upon one's knees,--if a genie were
+to feel such an impulse of self-abasement. It was perhaps a comfort to all
+concerned, including a new-comer, that Imogen should be reduced to the
+silence of sheer stupefaction; and as Sir Basil appeared among them it was
+not at him, after her first wide glance, that she looked, but, still as if
+through the crystal bottle, at her mother, and the look was, at all events,
+a confession of utter inadequacy to deal with the situation in which she
+found herself.
+
+It was Valerie, once more, who steered them all past the giddy whirlpool.
+Jack, beside her, his heart and brain turning in dizzy circles, marveled at
+her steadiness of eye, her clearness of voice. He would have liked to lean
+against a tree and get his breath; but this delicate creature, rising from
+her rack, could move forward to her place beside the helm, and smile!
+
+"Sir Basil," she said, and she put out her hand to him so mildly that Sir
+Basil may well have thought his rather uncomfortable _rendezvous_ redeemed
+into happiest convention, "here we all are waiting for you, and here we are
+going to leave you, you and Imogen, to take a walk and to say some of all
+the things you will have to say to each other. Give me your hand, Imogen.
+There, dear friend, I think that it is yours, and I trust her life to you
+with, my blessing. Now take your walk, I will wait for you, as late as you
+like, in the drawing-room."
+
+So was the bottled genie released, so did it resume once more the figure of
+a girl, hardly humbled, yet, it must be granted, deeply confused. In
+perfect silence Imogen walked away beside her suitor, and it may be said
+that she never told him of the little episode that had preceded his
+arrival. Jack and Valerie went slowly on toward the house. Now that she had
+grasped the helm through the whirlpool he almost expected that she would
+fall upon the deck. But, silently, she walked beside him, not taking his
+arm, wrapped closely in her shawl, and, once more inside the dark
+drawing-room, she proceeded to light the candles on the mantel-piece,
+saying that she would wait there until the others came in, smiling very
+faintly as she added:--"That everything may be done properly and in order."
+Jack walked up and down the room, his hands deeply thrust into the pockets
+of his dining-jacket.
+
+"As for you, you had better go to bed," Valerie went on after a moment. She
+had placed the candles on a table, taken a chair near them and chosen a
+review. She turned the pages while she spoke.
+
+At this, he, too, being disposed of, he stopped before her. "And you wanted
+me to be glad!"
+
+Her eyes on the unseen print, she turned her pages, and now that they were
+out of the woods and surrounded by walls and furniture and everyday
+symbols, he saw that the pressure of his presence was heavier, and that she
+blushed a deep, weary blush. But she was able and willing quite to dispose
+of him. "I want you to be glad," she answered.
+
+"For her!"--For that creature!--his words implied.
+
+"It was natural, what she thought," said Valerie after a moment, though not
+looking up.
+
+"Natural!--To suspect you!"--
+
+"Of what you wanted me to do?" Valerie asked. "Yes, it was quite natural, I
+think, and partly because of your manoeuvers, my poor Jack. I understand it
+all now. But the cause you espoused was already a doomed one, you see."
+
+"Oh!" he almost groaned. "_You_ doomed it! Don't you feel any pity for
+_him_?"
+
+Valerie continued to look at her page, silently, for a moment, and it was
+now indeed as though his question found some reverberating echo in herself.
+But, in the silent moment, she thought it out swiftly and surely, grasping
+old clues.
+
+"No, Jack," she said, and she was giving herself, as well as him, the final
+answer, "I don't pity him. He will never see Imogen baffled, warped, at
+bay,--as we have. He will always see her crowned, successful, radiant. She
+will count tremendously over there, far more than I ever would, because
+she's so different, because she cares such a lot. And Imogen must count to
+be radiant. She will help him in all sorts of ways, give him a new life;
+she will help everybody. Do you remember what Eddy said of her, that if it
+weren't for people of the Imogen type the cripples would die off like
+anything!--That was true. She is one of the people who make the wheels of
+the world go round. And it's a revival for a man like Sir Basil to live
+with such a person. With me he would have faded back into the onlooker at
+life; with Imogen he will live. And then, above all, quite above all, he is
+in love with her. I think that he fell in love with her at first sight, as
+Antigone, at her loveliest, except for to-night; to-night was her very
+loveliest--because it was so real;--she would have claimed him from
+me--before me--if he had come then; and her belief in herself, didn't you
+see, Jack, how it illumined her?--And then, Jack, and this I'm afraid you
+are forgetting, Imogen is a good girl, a very good girl. I can trust him to
+her, you know. Her object in life will be to love him in the most
+magnificent way possible. His happiness will be as much of an end to her as
+her own."
+
+It was, perhaps, the culminating symptom of his initiation, of his
+transformation, when Jack, who had considered her while she spoke, standing
+perfectly still, his hands in his pockets, his head bent, his eyes steadily
+on her, now, finding nothing better to do than obey her first suggestion
+and go to bed, took her hand before going, put it to his lips--and his
+glance, as he kissed her hand, brought the tears, again, to Valerie's
+eyes--and said: "Damn goodness."
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+
+Imogen was, indeed, crowned and radiant. And, safe on her eminence,
+recovered from the breathlessness of her rather unbecoming vigorous ascent,
+she found her old serenity, her old benignity, safely enfolded her once
+more. In looking down upon the dusty lowlands, where she had been blind and
+bitter, she could afford to smile over herself, even to shake her head a
+little over the vehemence of her own fear and courage. It was to have
+lacked faith, to have lacked wisdom, the showing of such vehemence; yet,
+who knew, without it, perhaps, she might not have escaped the nets that had
+been laid for her feet, for Basil's feet, too, his strong and simple nature
+making him helpless before sly ambushes. Jack, in declaring himself her
+enemy, had effectually killed the last faint wailing that had so piteously,
+so magnanimously, sounded on for him in her heart. He had, by his
+trickster's dexterity, proved to her, if she needed proof, that she had
+chosen the higher. A man who could so stoop--to lies--was not the man for
+her. To say nothing of his iniquity, his folly was apparent. For Jack had
+behaved like a fool, he must see that himself, in his espousal of a lost
+cause.
+
+Jack as delinquent stood plain, and she would accuse no one else. In the
+bottom of Imogen's heart lingered, however, the suspicion that only when
+her mother had seen the cause as lost, the contest as useless, had she
+hastily assumed the dignified attitude that, for the dizzy, moonlit moment,
+had, so humiliatingly, sealed her, Imogen, into the magic bottle. Imogen
+suspected that she hadn't been so wrong, nor her mother so magnanimous as
+had then appeared, and this secret suspicion made it the easier for her to
+accept the seeming, since to do that was to show herself anybody's equal in
+magnanimity. She was quite sure that her mother, in her shallow way, had
+cared for Basil, and not at all sure that she had relinquished her hope at
+the first symptom of his change of heart. But, though one couldn't but feel
+stern at the thought, one couldn't, also, repress something of pity for the
+miscalculation of the defeated love. To feel pity, moreover, was to show
+herself anybody's equal in heart;--Jack's accusations rankled.
+
+Yes; considering all things, and in spite of the things that, she must
+always suspect, were hidden, her mother had behaved extremely well.
+
+"And above all," Imogen thought, summing it up in terms at once generous
+and apt, "she has behaved like the gentlewoman that she is. With all her
+littlenesses, all her lacks, mama is essentially that." And the sweetest
+moments of self-justification were those in which her heart really ached a
+little for "poor mama," moments in which she wondered whether the love that
+had come to her, in her great sorrow, high among the pine woods, had ever
+been her mother's to lose. The wonder made her doubly secure and her mother
+really piteous.
+
+It was easy, her heart stayed on such heights, to suffer very tolerantly
+the little stings that flew up to her from the buzzing, startled world.
+Jack she did not see again, until the day of her wedding, only a month
+later, and then his face, showing vaguely among the shimmering crowd,
+seemed but an empty mask of the past. Jack departed early on the morning
+after her betrothal, and it was only lesser wonders that she had to face.
+Mary's was the one that teased most, and Imogen might have felt some
+irritation had that not now been so inappropriate a sensation, before
+Mary's stare, a stare that seemed to resume and take in, in the moment of
+stupefaction, a world of new impressions. The memory of Mary staring, with
+her hair done in a new and becoming way, was to remain for Imogen as a
+symbol of the vexatious and altered, perhaps the corrupted life, that she
+was, after all, leaving for good in leaving her native land.
+
+"Sir Basil!--You are going to marry Sir Basil, Imogen!" said Mary.
+
+"Yes, dear. Does that surprise you? Haven't you, really, seen it
+coming?--We fancied that everyone must be guessing, while we were finding
+it out for ourselves," Imogen answered, ever so gently.
+
+"No, I never saw it, never dreamed of it."
+
+"It seemed so impossible? Why, Mary dear?"
+
+"I don't know;--he is so much older;--he isn't an American;--you won't live
+in your own country;--I never imagined you marrying anyone but an
+American."
+
+The deepest wonder, Imogen knew it very well, was the one she could not
+express:--I thought that he was in love with your mother.
+
+Imogen smiled over the simplicity of the spoken surprises. "I don't think
+that the question of years separates people so at one as Basil and I," she
+said. "You would find how little such things meant, Mary mine, if your calm
+little New England heart ever came to know what a great love is. As for my
+country, my country will be my husband's country, but that will not make me
+love my old home the less, nor make me forget all the things that life has
+taught me here, any more than I shall be the less myself for being a bigger
+and better self as his wife." And Imogen looked so uplifted in saying it
+that poor, bewildered Mary felt that Mrs. Upton, after all, was right, one
+couldn't tell where rightness was. Such love as Imogen's couldn't be wrong.
+All the same, she was not sorry that Imogen, all transfigured as she
+undoubtedly was, should be going very far away. Mary did not feel happy
+with Imogen any longer.
+
+Rose took the tidings in a very unpleasant manner; but then Rose didn't
+count; in any circumstances her effrontery went without saying. One simply
+looked over it, as in this case, when it took the form of an absolute
+silence, a white, smiling silence.
+
+Oddly enough, from the extreme of Rose's anger, came Eddy's chance. She
+didn't tell Eddy that she saw his mother as robbed and that, in silence,
+her heart bled for her; but she did say to him, several days after Imogen's
+announcement, that, yes, she would.
+
+"I know that I should be bound to take you some day, and I'd rather do it
+just now when your mother has quite enough bothers to see to without having
+your anxieties on her mind! I'll never understand anyone so well as I do
+you, or quarrel with anyone so comfortably;--and besides," Rose added with
+characteristic impertinence, "the truth is, my dear, that I want to be your
+mother's daughter. It's that that has done it. I want to show her how nice
+a daughter can be to her. I want to take Imogen's place. I'll be an
+extremely bad wife, Eddy, but a good daughter-in-law. I adore your mother
+so much that for her sake I'll put up with you."
+
+Eddy said that she might adore any one as much as she liked so long as she
+allowed him to put up with her for a lifetime. They did understand each
+other, these two, and Valerie, though a little troubled by the something
+hard and bright in their warring courtship, something that, she feared,
+would make their path, though always illuminated, often rough, could
+welcome her new daughter with real gladness.
+
+"I know that you'll never care for me, as I do for you," said Rose, "and
+that you will often scold me; but your scoldings will be my religion. Don't
+spare them. You are my ideal, you know."
+
+This speech, made in her presence, was, Imogen knew, intended as a cut at
+herself. She heard it serenely. But Rose was more vexatious than Mary in
+that she wasn't leaving her behind. Rose was already sparring with Eddy as
+to when he would take her over to England for a season of hunting. Eddy
+firmly held himself before her as a poor man, and when Rose dangled her own
+wealth before him remarked that she could, of course, go without him, if
+she liked. It was evident, in spite of sparring and hardness, that Rose
+wouldn't like at all; and evident, too, that Eddy would often be wheedled
+into a costly holiday. Imogen had to foresee a future of tolerance toward
+Rose. Their worlds would not do more than merge here and there.
+
+Imogen had, already, very distinct ideas as to her new world. It hovered as
+important and political; the business of Rose's world would be its
+relaxation only. For Imogen would never change colors, and her frown for
+mere fashion would be as sad as ever. She was not to change, she was only
+to intensify, to become "bigger and better." And this essential stability
+was not contradicted by the fact that, in one or two instances, she found
+herself developing. She was glad, and in the presence of Mrs. Wake, gravely
+to renounce past errors as to the English people. Since coming to know
+Basil, typical of his race, its flower, as he was, she had come to see how
+far deeper in many respects, how far more evolved that English character
+was than their own,--"their," now, signifying "your." "You really saw that
+before I did, dear Mrs. Wake," said Imogen.
+
+Already Imogen identified herself with her future husband so that the
+defects of the younger civilization seemed no longer her affair, except in
+so far as her understanding of them, her love of her dear country, and her
+new enlightenments, made her the more eager to help. And then they were all
+of the same race; she was very insistent on that; it was merely that the
+branch to which she now belonged was a "bigger and better branch." Imogen
+was none the less a good American for becoming so devoutly English. From
+her knowledge of the younger, more ardent, civilization, her long training
+in its noblest school, she could help the old in many ways. England, in
+these respects, was like her Basil, before she had wakened him. Imogen felt
+that England, too, needed her. And there was undoubtedly a satisfaction in
+flashing that new world of hers, so large, so in need of her,--in flashing
+it, like a bright, and, it was to be hoped, a somewhat dazzling object,
+before the vexatiously imperturbable eyes of Mrs. Wake. Mrs. Wake's dry
+smile of congratulation had been almost as unpleasant as Rose's silence.
+
+From Miss Bocock there was neither smile, nor sting, nor silence to endure.
+Miss Bocock had suspected nothing, either on the mother's side or on the
+daughter's, and took the announcement very placidly. "Indeed. Really. How
+very nice. Accept my congratulations," were her comments. Imogen at once
+asked her to spend a week-end at Thremdon Hall next Spring, and Miss Bocock
+in the same way said: "Thanks. That will be very nice. I've never stayed
+there." There was still a subtle irritation in the fact that while Miss
+Bocock now accepted her, in the order of things, as one of the "county
+people," as the gracious mistress of Thremdon Hall, as very much above a
+country doctor's family, she didn't seem to regard her with any more
+interest or respect as an individual.
+
+These, after all, were the superficialities of the situation; its deeper
+aspects were, Imogen felt, as yet unfaced. Her mother seemed quite content
+to let Imogen's silence stand for apology and retractation, quite willing
+to go on, for the little further that they had to go together, in an
+ambiguous relation. This was, indeed, Imogen felt, her mother's strength;
+she could, apparently, put up with any amount of ambiguity and probably
+looked upon it as an essential part of life. Perhaps, and here Imogen was
+conscious of a twinge of anxiety, she put up with it so quietly because she
+didn't recognize it in herself, in her own motives and actions; and this
+thought teased at Imogen until she determined that she must stand forth in
+the light and show her mother that she, too, was self-assured and she, too,
+magnanimous.
+
+She armed herself for the task by a little talk with Sir Basil, the nearest
+approach they ever allowed themselves to the delicate complexities in which
+they had come to recognize each other and out of which, to a certain
+extent, they had had to fight their way to the present harmony. She was
+with him, again, among the laurels, a favorite place with them, and Imogen
+sat on her former ledge of sunny rock and Sir Basil was extended beside her
+on the moss. She had been reading Emerson to him, and when the essay was
+finished and she had talked to him a little about the "over-soul,"--dear
+Basil's recollections of metaphysics were very confused,--she presently
+said to him, letting her hand slide into his while she spoke:--"Basil,
+dearest,--I want to ask you something, and you must answer very truly, for
+you need never fear that I would flinch from any truth. Tell me,--did you
+ever,--ever care for mama?"
+
+Sir Basil, his hat tilted over his eyes, grew very red and looked down at
+the moss for some moments without replying.
+
+"Of course I know that, in some sense, you did care," said Imogen, a faint
+tremble in her voice, a tremble that, in its sweet acquiescence to
+something that was hurting her, touched him infinitely. "I know, too, that
+there are loves and loves. I know that anything you may have felt for mama
+is as different from what you feel for me as lamplight is from daylight. I
+won't speak of it, ever, again, dear Basil; but for this once let me see
+clearly what was in your past."
+
+"I did care for her," Sir Basil jerked out at that;--"quite tremendously,
+until I saw you. She will always be a dear friend, one of the dearest, most
+charming people I've ever known. And, no, it wasn't like lamplight, you
+know";--something in that analogy was so hurting Sir Basil that it made
+him, for a moment, forget his darling's hurt;--"that wasn't it. Though,
+it's quite true, you're like daylight."
+
+"And--and--she?"--Imogen accepted the restatement, though her voice
+trembled a little more.
+
+He now looked up at her, a clear, blue ray from his honest eyes. "Well,
+there, you know, it _has_ been a relief. I could never tell, in the past;
+she showed me nothing, except that friendship; but since she has been free,
+since I've seen her over here, she has shown me quite clearly, that it was,
+on her side, only that."
+
+Imogen was silent for a long time. She didn't "know" at all. And there was
+a great deal to accept; more, oddly enough, than she had ever faced. She
+had always believed that it had been like lamplight to daylight. But,
+whatever it had been, the day had conquered it. And how dear, how noble of
+her lover to show, so unfalteringly, his loyalty to the past. It was with a
+sigh made up of many satisfactions that she said at last:--"Dear mama;--I
+am so glad that I took nothing she cared for from her."
+
+It was on that afternoon that she found her time for "standing forth in the
+light" before her mother.
+
+She didn't want it to be indoors; she felt, vaguely, that four walls would
+make them too intimate, as it were; shut them into their mutual
+consciousness too closely. So that when she saw her mother, after tea,
+watering and gathering her flowers at the edge of the wood, she went out to
+her, across the grass, sweet and mild in the long white dress that she had
+worn since joy had come to her.
+
+She wished to be very direct, very simple, very sweet.
+
+"Mama, darling," she said, standing there beside her while Valerie, after a
+quiet glance up at her, continued to cut her roses;--"I want to say
+something to you. This seems such a beautiful time to say deep, grave
+things in, doesn't it, this late afternoon hour? I've wanted to say it
+since the other night when, through poor Jack's folly of revenge and
+blindness, we were all put into such an ugly muddle, at such ugly
+cross-purposes." She paused here and Valerie, giving neither assent nor
+negation, said: "Yes, Imogen?"
+
+"I want to say to you that I am sorry, mama dear";--Imogen spoke gravely
+and with emphasis;--"sorry, in the first place, that I should so have
+misjudged you as to imagine that--at your time of life and after your
+sobering experience of life--you were involved in a love affair. I see,
+now, what a wrong that was to do to you--to your dignity, your sense of
+right and fitness. And I'm sorrier that I should have thought you capable
+of seconding Jack's attempts to keep from me a love that had drawn to me as
+a magnet to the north. The first mistake led to the second. I had heard
+your friends conjecturing as to your feeling for Basil, and the pain of
+suspecting that of you--my father's new-made widow--led me astray. I think
+that in any great new experience one's whole nature is perhaps a little
+off-balance, confused. I had suffered so much, in so many ways;--_his_
+death;--Jack's unworthiness;--this fear for you;--and then, in these last
+days, for what you know, mama, for _him_, because of _him_--my father, a
+suffering that no joy will ever efface, that I was made, I think, for a
+little time, a stranger to myself. And then came love--wonderful love--and
+it shook my nature to its depths. I was dazzled, torn, tempest-tossed;--I
+did not see clearly. Let that be my excuse."
+
+Valerie still stopped over her roses, her fingers delicately, accurately
+busy, and her face, under the broad brim of her hat, hidden.
+
+Again Imogen paused, the rhythm of her words, like an echo of his voice in
+her own, bringing a sudden sharp, sweet, reminiscence of her father, so
+that the tears had risen to her eyes in hearing herself. And again, for all
+reply, her mother once more said only: "Yes, Imogen."
+
+It was not the reply she had expected, not the reply that she had a right
+to expect, and, even out there, with the flowers, so impersonally lovely,
+about them, the late radiance softly bathing them, as if in rays of
+forgiveness and mild pity, even with the tears, evidences of sorrow and
+magnanimity, in her eyes, Imogen felt a little at a loss, a little
+confused.
+
+"That is, all, mama," she said;--"just that I am sorry, and that I want you
+to feel, in spite of all the sad, the tragic things that there have been
+between us, that my deep love for you is there, and that you must trust it
+always."
+
+And now there was another silence. Valerie stooping to her flowers,
+mysterious, ambiguous indeed, in her shadow, her silence.
+
+Imogen, for all the glory of her mood, felt a thrill of anger, and the
+reminiscence that came to her now was of her father's pain, his familiar
+pain, for such shadows, such silences, such blights cast upon his highest
+impulses. "I hope, mama, that you will always trust my love," she said,
+mastering the rising of her resentment.
+
+And once more came the monotonous answer, but given this time with a new
+note:--"Yes, Imogen," her mother replied, "you may always trust my love."
+
+She rose at that, and her eyes passed swiftly across her daughter's face,
+swiftly and calmly. She was a little flushed, but that might have been from
+the long bending over the flowers, and if it was a juggling dexterity that
+she used, she had used it indeed so dexterously that it seemed impossible
+to say anything more. Imogen could find no words in which to set the turned
+tables straight.
+
+She had imagined their little scene ending very beautifully in a grave
+embrace and kiss; but no opportunity was given her for this final
+demonstration of her spirit of charity. Her mother gathered up her
+scissors, her watering-pot, her trowel, and handing Imogen the filled
+basket of roses said, "Will you carry these for me, my dear?"
+
+The tone of quiet, everyday kindness dispelled all glory, and set a lower
+standard. Here, at this place, very much on the earth, Imogen would always
+find her, it seemed to say. It said nothing else.
+
+Yet Imogen knew, as she walked back beside her mother, knew quite as well
+as if her mother had spoken the words, that her proffered love had not been
+trusted, that she had been penetrated, judged, and, in some irresistible
+way, a way that brought no punishment and no reproof, nor even any
+lessening of affection, condemned. Her mother still loved her, that was the
+helpless conviction that settled upon her; but it was as a child, not as a
+personality, that she was loved,--very much as Miss Bocock respected her as
+the mistress of Thremdon Hall and not at all on her own account; but her
+mother, too, for all her quiet, and all her kindness, thought her
+"self-centered, self-righteous, cold-hearted," and--Imogen, in a sharp pang
+of insight, saw it all--because of that would not attempt any soul-stirring
+appeal or arraignment. She knew too well with what arms of spiritual
+assurance she would be met.
+
+It was in silence, while they walked side by side, the basket of roses
+between them, that Imogen fiercely seized these arms, fiercely parried the
+unuttered arraignment, and, more fiercely, the unuttered love.
+
+She could claim no verbal victory, she had had to endure no verbal defeat;
+it was she herself who had forced this issue upon a situation that her
+mother would have been content to leave undefined. Her mother would never
+fix blame; her mother would never humiliate; but, she had found it to her
+own cost,--though the cost was as light as her mother could make it--she
+would not consent to be placed where Imogen had wished to place her. Let it
+be so, then, let it end on this note of seeming harmony and of silent
+discord; it was her mother's act, not her own. Truth was in her and had
+made once more its appeal; once more deep had called to deep only to find
+shallowness. For spiritual shallowness there must be where an appeal such
+as hers could be so misunderstood and so rejected.
+
+She was angry, sore, vindictive, though her sharp insight did not reach so
+far as to tell her this; it did, however, tell her that she was wounded to
+the quick. But the final refuge was in the thought that she was soon to
+leave such judgments and such loves behind her for ever.
+
+
+
+
+XXX
+
+
+It was on a late October day that Jack Pennington rode over the hills to
+Valerie's summer home.
+
+Two months were gone since Imogen's reporter-haunted nuptials had been
+celebrated in the bland little country church that raised its white steeple
+from the woodlands. Jack had been present at them; decency had made that
+necessary, and a certain grimness in his aspect was easily to be
+interpreted in a dismal, defeated rival. It was as such, he knew, that he
+was seen there.
+
+It had been a funny wedding,--to apply none of the other terms that lay
+deeper in him. In watching it from the white-wreathed chancel he had
+thought of Valerie's summing-up: "Imogen is one of the people who make the
+world go round." The world in every phase had been there, from the British
+ambassador and the Langleys to the East Side club girls--brought up from
+New York in the special train--and a flourishing consignment of cripples
+and nurses. Here and there in her path Imogen might meet the blankness of a
+Miss Bocock, the irony of a Mrs. Wake, a disillusion like Mary's, an
+insight like his own; but the great world, in its aspect of power and
+simplicity, would be with her always. He had realized as never before
+Imogen's capacity, when he saw the cohorts of her friends and followers
+overflow the church.
+
+She had been a fitting center to it all; though the center, for Jack, was
+Valerie, exquisite, mildly radiant, not a hint on her of dispossession or
+of doom; but Imogen, white and rapt and grave, had looked almost as
+wonderful as on the day when she had first dawned upon Sir Basil's vision.
+
+Jack, watching her uplifted profile as she stood at the altar-rail, found
+himself trivially, spitefully, irrelevantly murmuring:--"Her nose _is_ too
+small." And yet she looked more than ever like a Botticelli Madonna.
+
+Rose and Eddy were to be married that winter in New York, a gigantic
+opportunity for the newspapers, for already half the world seemed trooping
+to the festivities. Afterward, with old-fashioned Americanism, they would
+live in quite a little house and try to forget about Rose's fortune until
+Eddy made his.
+
+Valerie was to have none of the bother of this wedding. Mrs. Packer, a
+mournful, jeweled, faded little beauty, was well fitted to cope with such
+emergencies. Her secretaries sat already with pens poised.
+
+Imogen's wedding had kept her mother working like a galley-slave, so Rose
+told Jack, with the familiarity that was now justifiable in one who was
+almost of the family, and that Eddy had told her, with much disgust of
+demeanor, that its financing had eaten pretty deeply into his mother's
+shrunken means. Rose made no open denunciation; she, no more than anyone
+else, could guess from Jack's silence what his feeling about Imogen might
+really be. But she was sure that he was well _over_ her, and that, above
+all, he was one of the elect who _saw_ Mrs. Upton; she could allow herself
+a musing survey of all that the mother had done for the daughter, adding,
+and it was really with a wish for strict justice: "Of course Imogen never
+had any idea of money, and she'll never realize what she cost." In another
+and a deeper sense it might be that that was the kindest as well as the
+truest thing to say of Imogen.
+
+Since the wedding he knew that Valerie had been quietly at the little house
+among the hills, alone for the most part, though Mrs. Wake was often with
+her and the Pakenhams had paid her a visit on their way back to England.
+Now Mrs. Wake was gone back to New York, and her own departure was to take
+place in a few days. Jack, spending a week-end with friends not beyond
+riding distance, felt that he must see her again in the surroundings where
+he had come to know her so well and to know himself as so changed.
+
+He rode over the crests of hills in the flaming, aromatic woods. The fallen
+leaves paved his way with gold. In the deep distances, before him a still,
+blue haze, like the bloom on ripe grape-clusters, lay over the purples of
+the lower ranges. Above, about, before him was the blue sky of the
+wonderful American "fall," high, clear, crystalline. The air was like an
+elixir. Jack's eyes were for all this beauty,--"the vast, unconscious
+scenery of my land," the line that drifted in his thoughts,--his own
+consciousness, taken up into his contemplation, seeming as vast and as
+unperplexed. But under his calm, his happy sadness, that, too, seemed a
+part of the day, ran, like the inner echo to the air's intoxication, a
+stream of deep, still excitement.
+
+He did not think directly of Valerie, but vague pictures passed,
+phantom-like, before his mind. He saw her in her garden, gathering late
+flowers; he saw her reading under the fringe of vine-leaves and tendrils;
+he saw her again in the wintry New York of snow, sunlight, white, gold and
+blue, or smiling down from the high-decked steamer against a sky of frosty
+rose; he saw her on all possible and adequate backgrounds of the land he so
+loved. But,--oh, it was here that the under-current, the stream of
+excitement seemed to rise, foaming, circling, submerging him, choking him,
+with tides of grief and desolation,--seeing her, too, in that land she
+loved;--not in the Surrey garden, no, no,--that was shut to her for
+ever;--but in some other, some distant garden, high-walled, the pale gold
+and gray of an autumnal sunset over its purpling bricks, or on a
+flower-dappled common in spring, or in spring woods filled with wild
+hyacinths and primroses. How he could see her, place her, over there, far,
+far away, from his country--and from him.
+
+It was, after the last sharp trot, the last leisurely uphill canter, on the
+bordering, leaf-strewn grass of the winding road, where the white walls and
+gray roof of the little house showed among the trees, that all the
+undercurrent seemed to center in a knot of suffocating expectancy and pain.
+
+And Valerie, while Jack so rode, so approached her, was fulfilling one of
+his visions. She had spent the afternoon in her garden, digging, planting,
+"messing" as she expressed it, very happily among her borders, where late
+flowers, purple and white and gold, still bloomed. She was planning all
+sorts of things for her garden, a row of double-cherry-trees to stand at
+the edges of the woods and be symbols of paradise in spring, with their
+deep upon deep of miraculous white. Little almond-trees, too, frail sprays
+of pink on a spring sky, and quince-trees that would show in autumn among
+ample foliage the pale gold of their softly-furred fruit. She wanted spring
+flowers to run back far into the woods, the climbing roses and honeysuckle
+to make summer delicious among the vines of the veranda. The afternoon,
+full of such projects, passed pleasantly, and when she came in and dressed
+for her solitary tea, she felt pleasantly tired. She walked up and down the
+drawing-room, its white walls warm with the reflections of outer sunlight,
+listening vaguely to the long trail of her black tea-gown behind her,
+looking vaguely from the open windows at the purple distances set in their
+nearer waves of flame.
+
+At the end of the room, before the austere little mantelpiece, she paused
+presently to look at herself in the austere little mirror with its
+compartments of old gilt; at herself, the illuminated white of the room
+behind her reflection. A narrow crystal vase mirrored itself beside her
+leaning arm, and its one tall rose, set among green leaves and russet stems
+and thorns, spread depths of color near her cheek. Valerie's eyes went from
+her face to the rose. The rose was fresh, glowing, perfect. Her face,
+lovely still, was faded.
+
+She stood there, leaning beside the flower, the fingers of her supporting
+hand sunken deep in the chestnut masses of her hair, and noted, gravely,
+earnestly, the delicate signs and seals of stealing age.
+
+Never, never again would her face be like the rose, young, fresh, perfect.
+And she herself was no longer young; in her heart she knew the stillness,
+the droop, the peace--almost the peace--of softly-falling petals.
+
+How young she had been, how lovely, how full of sweetness. That was the
+thought that pierced her suddenly, the thought of wasted sweetness,
+unrecorded beauty, unnoted, unloved, all to go, to pass away for ever. It
+seemed hardly for herself she grieved, but for the doom of all youth and
+loveliness; for the fleeting, the impermanence of all life. The vision of
+herself passed to a vision of the other roses, the drooping, the doomed,
+scattering their petals in the chill breeze of coming winter.
+
+"Poor things," was her thought,--her own self-pity had part only in its
+inclusiveness,--"summer is over for all of us."
+
+And with the thought, girlishly, still girlishly, she hid her face upon her
+arms as she stood there, murmuring:--"Ah, I hate, I hate getting old."
+
+A step at the door roused her. She turned to see Jack entering.
+
+Jack looked very nice in the tans and russets of his riding-tweeds and
+gaiters. The chill air had brought a clear color to his cheeks; the pale
+gold of his hair,--one unruly lock, as usual, over-long, lying across his
+forehead,--shone like sunlight; his gray eyes looked as deep and limpid as
+a mountain pool.
+
+Valerie was very, very glad to see him. He embodied the elixir, the color,
+the freshness of the world to-day: and oh how young--how young--how
+fortunately, beautifully young he looked;--that was the thought that met
+him from the contrast of the mirror.
+
+She gave him her hands in welcome, and they sat down near a window where
+the sunlight fell upon them and the breeze blew in upon them, she on a
+little sofa, among chintz cushions, he on a low chair beside her; and while
+they talked, that excitement, that pain and expectancy grew in Jack.
+
+The summer was over and, soon, it must be, she would go. With a wave of
+sadness that sucked him back and swept him forward in a long, sure ache,
+came the knowledge, deeper than before, of his own desolation. But, sitting
+there beside her in the October sunlight; feeling, with the instinct, so
+quick, so sensitive in him, that it was in sadness he had found her, the
+desolation wasn't so much for himself as for her, what she represented and
+stood for. He, too, seeing her face with the blooming rose beside it, had
+known her piercing thought.
+
+She was going; but in other senses, too. She had begun to go; and all the
+sacrifices, the relinquishments, the acceptances of the summer, were the
+first steps of departure. She had done with things and he, who had not yet
+done with them, was left behind. Already the signs of distance were upon
+her--he saw them as she had seen them--her distance from the world of
+youth, of hope, of effort.
+
+A thin veil, like the sad-sweet haze over the purpling hills, seemed to
+waver between them; the veil that, for all its melting elusiveness, parts
+implacably one generation from another. Its dimness seemed to rest on her
+bright hair and to hover in her bright eyes; to soften, as with a faint
+melancholy, the brightness of her smile. And it was as if he saw her, with
+a little sigh, unclasp her hands, that had clung to what she fancied to be
+still her share of life,--unclasp her hands, look round her with a slight
+amaze at the changed season where she found herself, and, after the
+soundless pause of recognition, bend her head consentingly to the quiet,
+obliterating snows of age. And once more his own change, his own initiation
+to subtler standards, was marked by the fact that when the old, ethical
+self, still over-glib with its assurances, tried to urge upon him that all
+was for the best in a wonderful world, ventured to murmur an axiom or so as
+to the grace, the dignity, the added spiritual significance of old age, the
+new self, awakened to tragedy, turned angry eyes upon that vision of the
+rose in the devastated garden, and once more muttered, in silence:--"Damn!"
+
+They had talked of the past and of the coming marriage, very superficially,
+in their outer aspects; they had talked of his summer wanderings and of the
+Pakenhams' visit to Vermont. She had given him tea and she had told him of
+her plans for the winter;--she had given up the New York house, and had
+taken a little flat near Mrs. Wake's, that she was going to move to in a
+few days from now. And Jack said at last, feeling that with the words he
+dived from shallows into deeps:--"And--when are you going back?--back to
+England?"
+
+"Going back?"--She repeated his words with vagueness.
+
+"Yes; to where you've always liked to live."
+
+"Yes; I liked living there," said Valerie, still with vagueness in her
+contemplative "yes."
+
+"And still like it."
+
+She seemed to consider. "Things have changed, you know. It was change I
+used to want, I looked for it, perhaps mistakenly. Now it has come of
+itself. And I feel a great unwillingness to move on again."
+
+The poignant vision of something bruised, dimmed, listless, was with him,
+and it was odd to hear himself urging:--"But in the meantime, you, too,
+have changed. The whole thing over here, the thing we so care for, isn't
+yours. You don't really care about it much, if at all. It doesn't really
+please you. It gives you with effort what you can get with ease, over
+there, and it must jar on you, often. We are young; crude; all the
+over-obvious things that are always said of us; our enthusiasms are too
+facile; our standards of achievement, in the things you care for, rather
+second-rate; oh, you know well enough what I mean. We are not crystallized
+yet into a shape that's really comfortable for a person like you:--perhaps
+we never shall be; perhaps I hope that we never shall be. So why shouldn't
+you go to a place where you can have all the things you like?"
+
+She listened to him in silence, with, at the end, a slight smile for the
+exactitude of his: "Perhaps I hope that we never shall be;"--and she paused
+now as if his portrayal of her own wants required consideration. "Perhaps,"
+she said at length, "perhaps I never cared so much about all those things."
+
+"Oh, but you do," said Jack with conviction.
+
+"You mean, I suppose, all the things people over here go away so much to
+get. No, I don't think so. It was never really that. I don't think"--and
+she seemed to be thinking it out for herself as well as for him--"that I've
+ever been so conscious of standards--crystallizations--the relative values
+and forms of things. What I wanted was freedom. Not that I was ever
+oppressed or ill-treated, far from it;--but I was too--uncomfortable. I was
+like a bird forced to live like a fish, or perhaps we had better say, like
+a fish forced to live like a bird. That was why I went. I couldn't breathe.
+And, yes, I like the life over there. It's very easy and gliding; it
+protects you from jars; it gives you beauty for the asking;--here we have
+to make it as a rule. I like the people, too, and their unconsciousness.
+One likes us, you know, Jack, for what is conscious in us--and it's so much
+that there's hardly a bit of us that isn't conscious. We know our way all
+over ourselves, as it were, and can put all of ourselves into the window if
+we want someone else to know us. One often likes them for their
+unconsciousness, for all the things behind the window, all the things they
+know nothing at all about, the things that are instinctive, background
+things. It makes a more peaceful feeling. One can wander about dim rooms,
+as it were, and rest in them; one doesn't have to recognize, and respond so
+much. Yes, I shall miss it all, in a great many ways. But I like it here,
+too. For one thing, there is a great deal more to do."
+
+Jack, in some bewilderment, was grasping at clues. One was that, as he had
+long ago learned of her, she was incapable of phrases, even when they were
+sincere, incapable of dramatizing herself, even if her situation lent
+itself to tragic interpretations. Uncomfortable?--was that all that she
+found to say of her life, her suffocating life, among the fishes? She could
+put it aside with that. And as for the rest, he realized suddenly, with a
+new illumination--at what a late date it was for him to reach it; he, who
+had thought that he knew her so well!--that she cared less, in reality, for
+all those "things" lacking in the life of her native land than the bulk of
+her conscious, anxious countrymen. Cared not enough, his old self of
+judgment and moral appraisement would have pronounced. She wasn't
+intellectual, nor was she esthetic; that was the funny part of it, about a
+person whose whole being diffused a sense of completeness that was like a
+perfume. Art, culture, a complicated social life, being on the top of
+things, as it were, were not the objects of her concentration. It was
+indeed her indifference to them, her independence of them, that made her,
+for his wider consciousness, oddly un-American.
+
+In the midst of bewilderment and illumination one thing stood clear, a
+trembling joy; he had to make assurance doubly sure. "If you are not going
+away, what _will_ you do?"
+
+"I don't know";--he would, once, have rebuked the smile with which she said
+it as indolent;--"I wasn't thinking of anything definite, for myself. I'll
+watch other people do--you, for instance, Jack. I shall spend most of my
+time here in the country; New York is so expensive; I shall garden--wait
+till you see what I make of this in a few years' time; I shall look after
+Rose and Eddy--at a tactful distance."
+
+"But your wider life? Your many friends, over there?" Jack still protested,
+fearing that he saw more clearly than she to what a widow with a tiny,
+crippled fortune was consigning herself in this country of the young and
+striving. "You need gaiety, brilliancy, big, bright vistas." It was strange
+to hear himself urging his thought for her against that inner throb. Again
+she gave him her grave, brief smile. "You forget, Jack, that I'm--cured.
+I'm quite old enough not to mind giving up."
+
+The warm, consoling assurance was with him, of her presence near his life;
+but under it the excitement, the pain, had so risen that he wondered if she
+did not read them in his eyes.
+
+The evening was growing late; the sky had turned to a pale, translucent
+gold, streaked, over the horizon, by thin, cold, lilac-colored clouds. He
+must go, leaving her there, alone, and, in so doing, he would leave
+something else behind him forever. For it was now, as the veil fell upon
+her, as the evening fell over the wide earth, it was now or never that he
+could receive the last illumination. He hardly saw clearly what that might
+be; it wavered like a hovering light behind the mist.
+
+He rose and walked up and down the room a little; pausing to look from the
+windows at the golden sky; pausing to look, now and then, at her, sitting
+there in her long, black dress, vaguely shadowed on the outer light,
+smiling, tranquil, yet sad, so sad.
+
+"So, our summer is at an end," he said, turning at last from the window.
+"The air has a frosty tang already. I suppose I must be off. I shall not
+see you again until New York. I'm glad--I'm glad that you are to be there";
+and now he stammered suddenly, a little--"more glad than I can say."
+
+"Thanks, Jack," she answered, her eyes fondly dwelling on him. "You are one
+of the things I would not like to leave."
+
+Again he walked up and down, and seemed to hear the steady flow of that
+still, deep excitement. Why, above it, should he say silly, meaningless
+words, that were like a bridge thrown over it to lead him from her?
+
+"I want to tell you one thing, just one, before I go," he said. He knew
+that, with his sudden resolution, his voice had changed and, to quiet
+himself, he stood before her and put both hands on the back of a chair that
+was between them. He couldn't go on building that bridge. He must dare
+something, even if something else he must not dare--unless, unless she let
+him. "I must tell you that you are the most enchanting person I have ever
+known."
+
+She looked at him quietly, though she was startled, not quite
+understanding, and she said a little sadly: "Only that, Jack?"
+
+"Yes, only that, for you, because you don't need the trite, obvious labels
+that one affixes to other people. You don't need me to say that you are
+good or true or brave;--it's like a delicate seal that comprises and
+expresses everything,--the trite things and the strange, lovely
+things--when I say that you are enchanting." He held his mind, so
+conscious, under the words, of what he must not say, to the intellectual
+preoccupation of making her see, at all events, just what the words he
+could say meant.
+
+But as his voice rang, tense, vibrant as a tightened cord in the still
+room, as his eyes sank into hers, Valerie felt in her own dying youth the
+sudden echo to all he dared not say.
+
+She had never seen, quick as she was to see the meaning behind words and
+looks. She suspected that he, also, had never seen it clearly till now.
+
+Other claims had dropped from them; the world was gone; they were alone,
+his eyes on hers; and between them was the magic of life.
+
+Yes, she had it still, the gift, the compelling charm. His eyes in their
+young strength and fear and adoration called to her life, and with a touch,
+a look, she could bring to it this renewal and this solace. And, behind her
+sorrow, her veil, her relinquishment, Valerie was deeply thrilled.
+
+The thrill went through her, but even while she knew it, it hardly moved
+her. No; the relinquishment had been too deep. She had lost forever, in
+losing the other. That had been to turn her back on life, or, rather, to
+see it turn its back on her, forever. Not without an ugly crash of inner,
+twisted discord could she step once more from the place of snow, or hold
+out her hand to love.
+
+All his life was before him, but for her--; for her it was finished. And as
+she mastered the thrill, as she turned from the vision of what his eyes
+besought and promised, a flow of pity, pity for his youth and pain and for
+all the long way he was yet to go, filled her, bringing peace, even while
+the sweetness of the unsought, undreamed of offering made her smile again,
+a trembling smile.
+
+"Dear Jack, thank you," she said.
+
+Suddenly, before her smile, her look, he flushed deeply, taking from her
+eyes what his own full meaning had been. Already it was in the past, the
+still-born hope; it was dead before he gazed upon it; but he must hear the
+death-warrant from her lips, it was not enough to see it, so gentle, so
+pitiful, so loving, in her eyes, and he heard himself stammering:--"You--
+you haven't anything else you can say to me?"
+
+She had found her answer in a moment, and now indeed she was at the helm,
+steering them both past white shores, set in such depths of magical blue,
+white shores where sirens sang. Never could they land there, never listen
+to the song. And already she seemed to hear it, as if from a far distance,
+ringing, sharp and strange with the swiftness of their flight, as she
+replied: "Nothing else, dear Jack, except that I wish you were my son."
+
+The enchanted island had sunk below the horizon. They were landed, and on
+the safest, sanest, shores. She knew that she had achieved her own place,
+and that from it, secure, above him, the veil between them, her smile was
+the smile of motherhood. To smile so was to put before him finally the fact
+that her enchantment contradicted and helplessly lured him to forget. She
+would never forget it now, nor could he. She was Imogen's mother, and she
+was old enough to be his.
+
+From her smile, her eyes, common-sense flooded Jack, kind, yet stinging,
+too, savoring of a rescue from some hidden danger,--not his--not his--his
+was none of the common-sense,--but hers. He might had she let him, have so
+dislocated her life.
+
+He was scarlet, stammering. He knew that he hid nothing from her now, that
+he didn't want or need to hide anything. Those benign, maternal eyes would
+understand. And he smiled, too, but also with a trembling smile, as he
+reached out to her hand, holding it tightly and saying, gazing at her:--"I
+love you so."
+
+Her hand held his, in farewell now, but her look up at him promised
+everything, everything for the future,--except the one now shrouded thing.
+"And I love you, dear Jack," she said. "You have taken the place of--almost
+everything."
+
+And then, for she saw the tears in his eyes, and knew that his heart was
+bleeding, not for himself alone, she rose and took his head between her
+hands, and, like a mother, kissed him above his eyes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When he had left her,--and they said no further word,--Valerie did not
+again relapse into a despondent attitude.
+
+The sky was like a deep rose, soft, dim, dying, and the color of the
+afterglow filled the room.
+
+Standing at the window she breathed in the keen, sweet air, and looked from
+the dying day down to her garden.
+
+She had watched Jack disappear among the trees, waving to him, and her
+heart followed his aching heart with comprehending pity. But, from her
+conquest of the thrill, a clear, contemplative insight was left with her,
+so that, looking out over the lives she was to watch, she felt herself, for
+all her sadness, a merry, if a serious fate, mingling the threads of
+others' fortunes with a benignant hand.
+
+Imogen's threads had snapped off very sharply. Imogen would be the better
+pleased that the Surrey cottage should know her no more. The pang for the
+wrecking of all maternal hope passed strangely into a deeper pang for all
+that the Surrey cottage stood for in her life, all the things that she had
+left to come to Imogen. She remembered. And, for a moment, the old vortex
+of whirling anguish almost engulfed her. Only long years could deaden the
+pang of that parting. She would not dwell on that. Eddy and Rose; to turn
+to them was to feel almost gay. Jack and Mary;--yes, on these last names
+her thoughts lingered and her gaze for them held tender presages. That must
+be.
+
+Jack would not know how her maternal solicitude was to encompass him and
+mold his way. If the benignant fate saw clearly, Jack and Mary were to
+marry. Strange that it should not be from anything of her own that the
+deepest call upon her fostering tenderness came. She wasn't needed by
+anything of her own. This was the tragedy of her life that, more than youth
+passed and love renounced, seemed to drift snows upon her.
+
+But, beyond the personal pang and failure, she could look down at her
+garden and out at the quiet, evening vistas. The very flowers seemed to
+smile gentle promises to her, and to murmur that, after all, rather than
+bitterness, failure was to bring humble peace.
+
+Leaning her head against the window, where in the breeze the curtain softly
+flapped, she looked out at the tranquil twilight, contented to be sad.
+
+"I will have friends with me," she said to herself; "I will garden and
+learn a new language. I will read a great many books." And, with a sense of
+happy daring, not rebuked by reason, she could add, thinking of the mingled
+threads:--"I will have them often here to stay with me, and, perhaps, they
+will let me spoil the babies."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's A Fountain Sealed, by Anne Douglas Sedgwick
+
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