VI


When Jack went away, after tea, Imogen remained sitting on the sofa,
looking up from time to time at the two portraits, while thoughts, quiet
and mournful, but not distressing, passed through her mind. An interview
with Jack usually left her lapped about with a warm sense of security; she
couldn't feel desolate, even with the greatness of her loss so upon her,
when such devotion surrounded her. One deep need of her was gone, but
another was there. Life, as she felt it, would have little meaning for her
if it had not brought to her deep needs that she, and she alone, could
satisfy. With Jack's devotion and Jack's need to sustain her, it wasn't
difficult to bear with a butterfly. One had only to stand serenely in one's
place and watch it hover. It was, after all, as if she had strung herself
to an attitude of strength only to find that no weight was to come crushing
down upon her. The pain was that of feeling her mother so light.

"Poor papa," Imogen murmured more than once, as she gazed up into the
steady eyes; "what a fate it was for you--to be hurt all your life by a
butterfly." But he had been far, far too big to let it spoil anything. He
turned all pain to spiritual uses. What sorrow there was had always been,
most of all, for her.

And then--and here was the balm that had perfumed all her grief with
its sacred aroma--she, Imogen, had been there to fill the emptiness for
him. She had always been there, it seemed to her, as, in her quiet, sad
retrospect, she looked back, now, to the very beginnings of consciousness.