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,
