a loving listener, over her little complacencies and pomposities. He had
taken them as lightly as that, then. They had really counted for nothing.
Now they had come to count for so much, and all because of that clear,
soft light, that he really couldn't laugh at them. He couldn't laugh at
them, and since he couldn't do that he must keep silence over them, and
as a result the talks about Imogen with Imogen's mother were, for his
consciousness, a little random and at sea. Imogen's mother confidently
based their community on a shared vision, and that he kept back his real
impression of what he saw was made all the worse by his intuition that she,
too, kept back hers, that she talked from his supposed point of view, as
it were, and didn't give him a glimmer of her own. She loved Imogen, or,
perhaps, rather, she loved her daughter; but what did she think of Imogen?
That was the question that had grown so sharp.

* * * * *

On the day before he and Mrs. Upton went back together to New York, Jack
gave a little tea that was almost a family affair. Cambridge had been one
of their expeditions, in Rose Packer's motor-car, and there Eddy Upton had
given them tea in his room overlooking the elms of the "Yard" at Harvard.
Jack's tea was in some sort a return, for Eddy and Rose both were there and
that Rose, in Eddy's eyes, didn't count as an outsider was now an accepted
fact.

Eddy had taken the sudden revelation of his poverty with great coolness,
and Jack admired the grim resolution with which he had cut down expenses
while relaxing in no whit his hold on the nonchalant beauty. Poverty would,
to a certain extent, bar him out from Rose's sumptuous world, and Rose did
not seem to take him very seriously as a suitor; but it was evident that
Eddy did not intend to remain poor any longer than he could possibly help