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."