new life. The old life was with them both. Her black armed her in it, as it
were, made her valiant to meet the new. And for him that old life, the life
menaced, though so trivially, by the arriving presence, seemed embodied in
the free spaces of the great harbor, the soaring sky of frosty rose, the
grotesque splendor of the giant city, the glory, the ugliness of the
country he loved, the country that made giant-like, grotesque cities, and
that made Imogens.

She was the flower of it all--the flower and the so much more than flower.
He didn't care a fig, so he told himself, about the mere fact of her being
beautiful, finished, in her long black furs, her face so white, her hair so
gold under her little hat. She wasn't to be picked and placed high, above
the swarming ugliness. No, and that was why he cared for her when he had
ceased to care for so many pretty girls--her roots were deep; she shared
her loveliness; she gave; she opened; she did not shut away. She was the
promise for many rather than the guerdon of the few. Jack's democracy was
the ripe fruit of an ancestry of high endeavor and high responsibility. The
service of impersonal ends was in his blood, and no meaner task had ever
been asked of him or of a long line of forebears. He had never in his own
person experienced ugliness; it remained a picture, seen but not felt by
him, so that it was not difficult for him to see it with the eyes of faith
as glorified and uplifted. It constituted a splendid burden, an ennobling
duty, for those who possessed beauty, and without that grave and happy
right to serve, beauty itself would lose all meaning. He often talked about
democracy to Imogen. She understood what he felt about it more firmly, more
surely, than he himself did; for, where he sometimes suspected himself of
theory, she acted. She, too, rejoiced in the fundamental sameness of the
human family that banded it together in, essentially, the same great
adventure--the adventure of the soul.