Yet, for all its solemn stupidity, the room was not altogether unpleasing;
it signified something, were it only an indifference to fashion, It was,
funnily, almost Spartan, for all the carving, the cushioning, the crimson,
so little concession did it make to other people's standards or to small,
happy minor uses. Mr. Upton and his daughter had not changed it because
they had other things to think of; and they thought of these things not in
the drawing-room but in the large library up-stairs. There one could find
the personal touches, that, but for the cope, the cabinet, the Correggio,
were lacking below. There the many photographs from the Italian primitives,
the many gracious Donatello and Delia Robbia bas-reliefs, expressed
something of Imogen, too, though Jack always felt that Imogen's esthetic;
side expressed what was not very essential in her.

While he waited now, he had paused at last before two portraits. He had
often so paused while waiting for Imogen. To-night it was with a new
curiosity.

They hung opposite the Correggio and on either side of the great mirror
that rose from the mantelpiece to the cornice. One was of a young man
dressed in the fashion of twenty-five years before, dressed with a rather
self-conscious negligence. He was pale, earnest, handsome, though his nose
was too small and his eyes too large. A touch of the histrionic was in
his attitude, in his dark hair, tossed carelessly, in the unnecessarily
weighty and steady look of his dark eyes, even in the slight smile of
his firm, full lips, a smile too well-adapted, as it were, to the needs
of any interlocutor. Beneath his arm was a book; a long, distinguished
hand hanging slackly. Jack turned away with a familiar impatience. In
twenty-five years Mr. Upton had changed very little. It was much the same
face that he had known; in especial, the slack, self-conscious hand, the