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
