Imogen understood; Imogen rejoiced; Imogen was bound on that adventure--not
only with him, but, and it was this that gave those wide wings to his
feeling for her, with _them_--with all the vast brotherhood of humanity.
Now and then, to be sure, faint echoes in her of her father, touches of
youthful assurance, youthful grandiloquence, stirred the young man's sense
of humor; but it was quickly quelled by an irradiating tenderness that
showed her limitations as symptoms of an influence that, in its foolish
aspects, he would not have had her too clearly recognize; her beautiful,
filial devotion more than compensated for her filial blindness--nay,
sanctified it; and her heavenly face had but to turn on him for him to
envelop all her little solemnities and importances in a comprehending
reverence. Jack thought Imogen's face very heavenly. He was an artist by
profession, as we have said, taking himself rather seriously, too, but the
artistic perception was so strongly colored by ethical and intellectual
preoccupations that the spontaneous satisfaction in the Eternal Now of mere
beauty was rarely his. Certainly he saw the flower-like texture of Imogen's
skin; the way in which the light azured its whiteness and slid upon its
child-like surfaces. He saw the long oval of the face, the firm and gentle
lips, drawn with a delicate amplitude, the broad hazel eyes set under
a level sweep of dark eyebrow and outlined, not shadowed, so clear, so
wide they were, by the dark lashes. But all the fresh loveliness of line,
surface, color, remained an intellectual appreciation; while what touched,
what penetrated, were the analogies she suggested, the lovely soul that the
lovely face vouched for. The oval of her face and the charming squaring
of her eyes, so candid, so unmysterious, made him think of a Botticelli
Madonna; and her long, narrow hands, with their square finger-tips, might
have been the hands of a Botticelli angel holding a votive offering of
fruit and flowers. His mind seldom rested in her beauty, passing at once
through it to what it expressed of purity, strength and serenity. It
expressed so much of these that he had never paused at the portals, as it