"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.