so looking, she shared some triumph with him.

"I'll say you're suddenly ill, then?" had come her mother's voice, but with
a deadened note, as though she knew herself defeated.

"Lie? No. I must ask you, Valerie, never to lie for me. Say the truth, that
I must go to a friend who needs me; the truth won't hurt them."

"But it's unbelievable, your breaking a dinner engagement, at the last
hour, for such a reason," the wife had said.

"Unbelievable, I've no doubt, to the foolish, the selfish, the over-fed.
Social conventions and social ideals will always go down for me, Valerie,
before realities, such realities as brotherhood and the need of a lonely
human soul."

While he spoke he had lifted, gently, Imogen's long, fair curls, and
smoothed her head, his eyes still holding her eyes, and when her mother
turned sharply and swept out of the room, the sense of united triumph
had made him bend down to her and made her stretch her arms tip to him,
so that, in their long embrace, he seemed to consecrate her to those
"realities" that the pretty, foolish mother flouted. That had been her
initiation and her consecration.

After that, it could not have been many years after, though she had brought
to it a far more understanding observation, the next scene that came up for
her was a wrangle at lunch one day, over the Delancy Pottses--if wrangle it
could be called when one was so light and the other so softly stern. Imogen
by this time had been old enough to know for what the Pottses counted. They
were discoveries of her father's, Mr. Potts a valuable henchman in that