sensitive, and one felt that, conscious of these weaknesses, he tried to
master or to hide them.

These three had known one another since childhood. Jack's family was old
and rich; Mary's old and poor; Rose Packer's new and of fantastic wealth.
Rose was a young woman of fashion and her whole aspect seemed to repudiate
any closeness of tie between herself and Mary, who passed her time in
caring for General Colton, her invalid father, attending committees, and,
as a diversion, going to "sewing-circles" and symphony concerts; but she
was fonder of Mary than of any one else in the world. Rose, who had, as
it were, been brought up all over the world, divided her time now between
two continents and quaintly diversified her dancing, hunting, yachting
existence by the arduous study of biology. Jack, in appearance more
ambiguous than either, looked neither useful nor ornamental; but, in point
of fact, he was a much occupied person. He painted very seriously, was
something of a scholar and devoted much of his time and most of his large
fortune to intricate benevolences. His shabby clothes were assumed, like
the air of indolence; his wealth irked him and, full of a democratic
transcendentalism, he longed to efface all the signs that separated him
from the average toiler. While Rose was quite ignorant of her own country
west of the Atlantic seaboard, Jack had wandered North, South, West. As
for Mary, she had hardly left Boston in her life, except to go to the
Massachusetts coast in summer and to pay a rare visit now and then to New
York. It was of such a visit that she had been talking to them and of the
friend who, since her own return home only a few days before, had suffered
a sudden bereavement in the death of her father. Jack Pennington, also a
near friend of Imogen Upton's, had just come from New York, where he had
been with her during the mournful ceremonies of death, and Mary Colton,
after a little pause, had said, "I suppose she was very wonderful through
it all."