Jack, however, did not go for three or four days, giving them plenty of
time, as he told himself, to get used to each other's excesses or lacks of
grief. And as he waited for Imogen in the long drawing-room that had been
the setting of so many of their communings, he wondered what adjustment the
mother and daughter had come to.

The aspect of the drawing-room was unchanged; changelessness had always
been for him its characteristic mark; in essentials, he felt sure, it had
not changed since the days of old Mrs. Upton, the present Mrs. Upton's long
deceased mother-in-law. Only a touch here and there showed the passage of
time. It was continuous with the dining-room, so that it was but one long
room that crossed all the depth of the house, tall windows at the back,
heavily draped, echoing dimly the windows of the front that looked out
upon the snowy, glittering street. The inner half could be shut away by
folding-doors, and its highly polished sideboard, chairs, table, a silver
epergne towering upon it, glimmered in a dusky element that relegated
it, when not illuminated for use, to a mere ghostly decorativeness.
By contrast, the drawing-room was vivid. Its fringed and buttoned
furniture,--crimson brocade set in a dark carved wood, the dangling lusters
of the huge chandelier, the elaborate Sevres vases on the mantelpiece,
flanking a bronze clock portentously gloomy, expressed old Mrs. Upton's
richly solid ideals; but these permanent uglinesses distressed Jack less
than the pompous and complacent taste of the later additions. A pretentious
cabinet of late Italian Renaissance work stood in a corner; the dark marble
mantelpiece, that looked like a sarcophagus, was incongruously draped with
an embroidered Italian cope, and a pseudo-Correggio Madonna, encompassed
with a wilderness of gilt frame, smiled a pseudo-smile from the embossed
paper of the walls. It was one of Jack's little trials to hear Imogen refer
to this trophy with placid conviction.