It was Jack who felt it most. After his swiftly averted glance at Mrs.
Upton his own cheeks had flamed in ignorant sympathy. He was able, in a moment, to see that it might have been the fire, or the tea, or the mere suddenness of an unexpected question that had caused the look of helpless girlishness, but the memory stayed with him, a tenderness and a solicitude in it.
Imogen had apparently seen nothing. She went on, pulling off her gloves, taking off her hat, glancing at her radiant white and rose in the gla.s.s while she questioned. "I remember him in your letters, but remember him so little--a dull, kind old country squire, the impression, I think. But what does a dull, kind old country squire find to write about so often?"
If Mrs. Upton couldn"t control her cheeks she could perfectly control her manner, and though Jack"s sympathy guessed at some pretty decisive irritation under it, he could but feel that its calm disposed of any absurd interpretations that the blush might have aroused.
"Yes, I have often, I think, mentioned him in my letters, Imogen, though not in those terms. He is a neighbor of mine in Surrey and a friend."
"Is he clever?" Imogen asked, ignoring the coolness in her mother"s voice.
"Not particularly."
"What does he do, mama?"
"He takes care of his property."
"Sport and feudal philanthropy, I suppose," Imogen smiled.
"Very much just that," Mrs. Upton answered, pouring out her daughter"s tea.
Jack, who almost expected to see Imogen"s brow darken with reprobation for the type of existence so described, was relieved, and at the same time perturbed, to observe that the humorous kindliness of her manner remained unclouded. No doubt she found the subject too trivial and too remote for gravity. Jack himself had a general idea that serious friendships between man and woman were adapted only to the young and the unmated. After marriage, according to this conception, the s.e.xes became, even in social intercourse, monogamous, and he couldn"t feel the bond between Mrs. Upton and a feudal country squire as a matter of much importance. But, on the other hand, Mrs. Upton had said "friend" with decision, and though the word, for her, could not mean what it meant to people like himself and Imogen--a grave, a beautiful bond of mutual help, mutual endeavor, mutual rejoicing in the wonder and splendor of life--even a trivial relationship was not a fit subject for playful patronage. It was with sharp disapprobation that he heard Imogen go on to say, "I should like to meet a man like that--really to know. One imagines that they are as extinct as the dodo, and suddenly, if one goes to England, one finds them swarming. Happy, decorative, empty people; perfectly kind, perfectly contented, perfectly useless. Oh, I don"t mean your Sir Basil a bit, mama darling. I"m quite sure, since you like him, that he is a more interesting variation of the type. Only I can"t help wondering what he _does_ find to write about."
"I think, as I am wondering myself, I will ask you all to excuse me if I open my letter," said Mrs. Upton, and, making no offer of satisfying Imogen"s curiosity, she unfolded two stout sheets of paper and proceeded to read them.
Imogen did not lose her look of lightness, but Jack fancied in the steadiness of the gaze that she bent upon her mother a controlled anger.
"One may be useful, Imogen, without wearing any badge of usefulness," Mrs.
Wake now observed. Her bonnet, as usual, on one side, and her hair much disarranged, she had listened to the colloquy in silence.
Imogen was always very sweet with Mrs. Wake. She had the air of a full, deep river benignly willing to receive without a ripple any number of such tossed pebbles, to engulf and flow over them. She had told Jack that Mrs.
Wake"s dry aggressiveness did not blind her for a moment to Mrs. Wake"s n.o.ble qualities. Mrs. Wake was a brave, a splendid person, and she had the greatest admiration for her; but, beneath these appreciations, a complete indifference as to Mrs. Wake"s opinions and personality showed always in her demeanor toward her. She was a splendid person, but she was of no importance to Imogen whatever.
"I don"t think that one can be useful unless one is actively helping on the world"s work, dear Mrs. Wake," she now said. "Mary, we have tickets for Carnegie Hall to-morrow night; won"t that be a treat? I long for a deep draft of music."
"One does help it on," said Mrs. Wake, skipping, as it were, another pebble, "if one fills one"s place in life and does one"s duty."
Imogen now gave her a more undivided attention. "Precisely. And one must grow all the time to do that. One"s place in life is a growing thing, It doesn"t remain fixed and changeless--as English conservatism usually implies. Are you a friend of Sir Basil"s, too?"
"I met him while I was with your mother, and I thought it a pity we didn"t produce more men like him over here--simple, unselfconscious men, contented to be themselves and to do the duty that is nearest them."
"Anglomaniac!" Imogen smiled, sugaring her second cup of tea.
Mrs. Wake flushed slightly. "Because I see the good qualities of another country?"
"Because you see its defects with a glamour over them."
"Is it a defect to do well by instinct what we have not yet learned to do without effort!"
"Ah,--but the danger there is--" Jack here broke in, much interested, "the danger there is that you merge the individual in the function. When function becomes instinctive it atrophies unless it can grow into higher forms of function. Imogen"s right, you know."
"In a sense, no doubt. But all the same our defect is that we have so little interest except as individuals."
"What more interest can any one have than that?"
"In older civilizations people may have all the acc.u.mulated interest of the deep background, the long past, that, quite unconsciously, they embody."
"We have the interest of the future."
"I don"t think so, quite; for the individual, the future doesn"t seem to count. The individual is sacrificed to the future, but the past is, in a sense, sacrificed for the individual; in the right sort it"s all there--summed up."
Imogen had listened, still with her steady smile, to these heresies and to Jack"s over-lenient dealing with them. She picked up a review, turning the pages and glancing through it while she said, ever so lightly and gently:
"I think that you would find most aristocrats against you in our country, dear Mrs. Wake. With all the depth of our background, the length of our past, you would find, in Jack and Mary and me, for instance, that it"s our sense of the future, of our own purposes for it, that makes our truest reality."
Jack was rather pleased with this apt summing-up, too pleased, in his masculine ingenuousness, to feel that for Mrs. Wake, with no ancestry at all to speak of, such a summing could not be very gratifying. He didn"t see this at all until Mrs. Upton, folding her letter, came into the slightly awkward silence that followed Imogen"s speech, with the decisiveness that had subtly animated her manner since Imogen"s entrance. She remarked that the past, in that sense of hereditary tradition handed on by hereditary power, didn"t exist at all in America; it was just that fact that made America so different and so interesting; its aristocrats so often had the shallowest of backgrounds. And in her gliding to a change of subject, in her addressing of an entirely foreign question to Mrs. Wake, Jack guessed at a little flare of resentment on her friend"s behalf.
Imogen kept her calm, and while her mother talked to Mrs. Wake she talked to Mary; but that the calm was a.s.sumed she showed him presently when they were left alone. She then showed him, indeed, that she was frankly angry.
"One doesn"t mind Mrs. Wake," she said; "it"s that type among us, the type without background, without traditions, that is so influenced by the European thing; you saw the little sop mama threw to her--she an aristocrat!--because of a generation of great wealth; that could be her only claim; but to have mama so dead to all we mean!"
Jack, rather embarra.s.sed by the pressure of his enlightenments, said that he hadn"t felt that; it seemed to him that she did see what they meant, it was their future that counted, in the main.
"A rootless future, according to her!"
"Why, we have our past; it"s the way we possess it that"s new in the world; that"s what she meant. Any little advantage that you or I may have in our half-dozen or so generations of respectability and responsibility, is ours only to share, to make us _tell_ more in the general uplifting,"
"You think that you need say that to _me_, Jack! As for respectability, that homespun word hardly applies; we do have lineage here, and in the European sense, even if without the European power. But that"s no matter.
It"s the pressing down on me of this alien standard, whether expressed or not, that stifles me. I could feel mama"s hostility in every word, every glance."
"Hardly hostility, Imogen. Perhaps a touch of vexation on Mrs. Wake"s account. You didn"t mean it, of course, but it might have hurt, what you said."
"That! That was a mere opportunity. Didn"t you feel and see that it was!"
Jack"s aspect now took on its air of serious and reasonable demonstration.
"Well, you know, Imogen, you were a little tactless about her friendship--about this Sir Basil."
He expected wonder and denial, but, on the contrary, after going to the window and looking out silently for some moments, Imogen, without turning, said, "It"s not a friendship I care about."
"Why not?" Jack asked, taken aback.
"I don"t like it," Imogen repeated.
"Why under the sun should you dislike it? What do you know about it, anyway?"
Imogen still gazed from the window. "Jack, I don"t believe that mama is at all the woman to have friends, as we understand the word. I don"t believe that it is simply a friendship. Yes, you may well look surprised,"--she had turned to him now--"I"ve never told you. It seemed unfair to her. But again and again I"ve caught her whispers, hints, about the sentimental attachments mama inspires. You may imagine how I"ve felt, living here with _him_, in his loneliness. I don"t say, I don"t believe, that mama was ever a flirt; she is too dignified, too distinguished a woman for that; but the fact remains that whispers of this sort do attach themselves to her name, and a woman is always to blame, in some sense, for that."
Jack, looking as startled as she had hoped he would, gazed now with frowning intentness on the ground and made no reply.