"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 assumed 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!"