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
