toward life. She must really, by this time, have enough accepted him as
one of themselves to feel his right to hear all sorts of impressions. He
was used to talking things over, talking them, indeed, over and over;
turning them, surveying them, making the very most of all their possible
significance, with men and women to whom his relationship was half
brotherly and wholly comradely, and whom, in the small, fresh, clear world,
where he had spent his life, he had known since boyhood. It was a very
ethical and intellectual little world, this of Jack's, where impressions
passed from each to each, as if by right, where some suspicion was felt for
those that could not be shared, and where to keep anything so worth while
to oneself was almost to rob a whole circle. Reticence had the distinct
flavor of selfishness and uncertainty of mind, the flavor of laxity. If one
were earnest and ardent and disciplined one either knew what one thought,
and shared it, or one knew what one wanted to think, and one sought it.
Jack suspected Mrs. Upton of being neither earnest, nor ardent, nor
disciplined; but he found it difficult to believe that, as a new inmate of
his world, she couldn't be, if only she would make the effort, as clear as
the rest of it, and that she wasn't as ready, if manipulated with tact and
sympathy, to give and to receive.

Wandering about the drawing-room, while, as usual in her leisure moments,
she crocheted a small jacket, Tison in her lap, he wondered, for instance,
what she thought of the drawing-room. He knew that it was very different
from the drawing-room in her Surrey cottage, and very different from the
drawing-rooms with which, as he had heard from Imogen, she was familiar in
the capitals of Europe. Mrs. Upton was, to-day, crocheting a blue border as
peacefully as though she had faced pseudo-Correggios and crimson brocade
and embossed wall-paper all her life, so that either her tastes shared the
indifference of her intelligence or else her power of self-control was
commendably complete.