socialism and the larger life over ample platefuls of ice-cream. Sweetness
and light, as Mrs. Potts told Imogen, was the note she tried for in her
reunions, and high endeavor and brotherly love.

Mrs. Potts was a small, stout woman, who held herself very straight indeed;
her hands, on festive occasions, folded on a lace handkerchief before her.
She had smooth, black hair, parted and coiled behind, and a fat face, pale
fawn-color in tint, encompassing with waste of cheek and chin such a small
group of features--the small, straight nose, the small, sharp eyes, the
small, smiling mouth--all placed too high, and spanned, held together, as
it were, by a _pince-nez_ firmly planted, like a bow-shaped ornament
pinning a cluster of minute trinkets on a large cushion.

Mr. Delancy Potts was tall, limp, blond, and, from years of only dubious
recognition, rather querulous. He had a solemn eye under a fringe of
whitened eyebrow, a long nose, that his wife often fondly alluded to as
"aristocratic" (they were keen on "blood," the Delancy Pottses), and a very
retreating chin that one saw sometimes in disastrous silhouette against the
light. Draped in the flowing fullness of hair and beard, his face showed a
pseudo-dignity.

Imogen saw the Pottses with a very candid eye, and her mind drifted from
that distant disposal of them to the contrast of the recent meeting,
recalling their gestures and postures as they sat, with an uneasy
assumption of ease, before her mother, of whom, for so many years, they had
disapproved more, almost, than they disapproved of municipal corruption and
"the smart set." As onlooker she had been forced to own that her mother's
manner toward them had been quite perfect. She had accepted them as her
husband's mourners; had accepted them as Imogen's friends; had, indeed, so
thoroughly accepted them, in whatever capacity they were offered to her,