fight for realities to which her father's life was dedicated. Mr. Potts
wrote articles in ethical reviews about her father's books--they never
seemed to be noticed anywhere else--and about his many projects for reform
and philanthropy. Both he and Mrs. Potts adored her father. He lent them,
indeed, all their significance; they were there, as it were, only for
the purpose of crystallizing around his magnetic center. And of these
good people her mother had said, in her crisp, merry voice, "I hate
'em,"--disposing of the whole question of value, flipping the Pottses away
into space, as it were, and separating herself from any interest in them.
Even then little Imogen had comprehendingly shared her father's still
indignation for such levity. Hate the excellent Pottses, who wrote so
beautifully of her father's books, so worshiped all that he was and did,
so tenderly cherished her small self? Imogen felt the old reprobation as
sharply as ever, though the Pottses had become, to her mature insight,
rather burdensome, the poor, good, dull, pretentious dears, and would be
more so, now that their only brilliant function, that of punctually,
coruscatingly, and in the public press, adoring her father, had been taken
from them. One need have no illusion as to the quality of their note;
it lacked distinction, serving only, in its unmodulated vehemence, the
drum-like purpose of calling attention to great matters, of reverberating,
so one hoped, through lethargic consciousness.

But Imogen loved the Pottses, so she told herself. To be sure of loving
the Pottses was a sort of pulse by which one tested one's moral health.
She still went religiously at least twice in every winter to their
receptions--funny, funny affairs, she had to own it--with a kindly smile
and a pleasant sense of benign onlooking at oddity. One met there young
girls dressed in the strangest ways and affecting the manners of budding
Margaret Fullers--young writers or musicians or social workers, and funny
frowsy, solemn young men who talked, usually with defective accents, about