drew back quickly and went away without a word. Whatever the cause of
contest, Imogen knew that in this silent confrontation of each other in her
presence was the final severance. After that her mother had acquiesced.

She acquiesced, but she yielded nothing, confessed nothing. One couldn't
tell whether she, too, judged, but one suspected it, and the dim sense
of an alien standard placed over against them more and more closely drew
Imogen and her father together for mutual sustainment. If, however, her
mother judged, she never expressed judgment; and if she felt the need of
sustainment, she never claimed it. It would, indeed, have been rather
fruitless to claim it from the fourth member of the family group. Eddy
seemed so little to belong to the group. As far as he went, to be sure,
he went always with her and against his father, but then Eddy never went
far enough to form any sort of a bulwark. A cheerful, smiling, hard young
pagan, Eddy, frankly bored by his father, coolly fond of his mother,
avoiding the one, but capable of little effective demonstration toward the
other. Eddy liked achievement, exactitude, a serene, smiling outlook, and
was happily absorbed in his own interests.

So it had all gone on,--Imogen traced it, sitting there in her quiet
corner, holding balances in fair, firm hands,--her mother drifting into a
place of mere conventionality in the family life; and Imogen, even now,
could not see quite clearly whether it had been she who had judged and
abandoned her husband, or he who had judged and put her aside. In either
case she could sum it up, her eyes lifted once more to the portrait's
steady eyes, with, "Poor, wonderful papa."

He was gone, the dear, the wonderful one, and she was left single-handed
to carry on his work. What this work was loomed largely, though vaguely,
for her. The three slender volumes, literary and ethical, were the only