made him think; and in her shadowed quietness, as of a tranquil mist at
evening or at dawn, he more and more came to feel a peace and sweetness.
But it was always in this sweetness and this peace that the contrasting
throb of restlessness stirred.

He saw her at the meals he frequently attended, meals where the
conversation, for the most part, was carried on by Imogen. Mrs. Wake, also
a frequent guest, was a very silent one, and Mary an earnest listener.

If Imogen's talk had ceased to be very interesting to Jack, that was only
because he knew it so well. He knew it so well that, while she talked,
quietly, fluently, dominatingly, he was able to remain the dispassionate
observer and to wonder how it impressed her mother. Jack watched Mrs.
Upton, while Imogen talked, leaning her head on her hand and raising
contemplative eyes to her daughter. Those soft, dark eyes, eyes almost
somnolent under their dusky brows and half-drooped lashes,--how different
they were from Imogen's, as different as dusk from daylight. And they
were not really sad, not really sleepy, eyes; that was the surprise of
them when, after the downcast mystery, they raised to one suddenly their
penetrating intelligence. The poetry of their aspect was constantly
contradicted by the prose of their glance. But she did more than turn her
own poetry into prose, so he told himself; she turned other people's into
prose, too. Her glance became to him a running translation into sane,
almost merry, commonplace, of Imogen's soarings. He knew that she made the
translation and he knew that it was a prose one, but its meaning she kept
for herself. It was when, now and then, he felt that he had hit upon a
word, a phrase, that the discomfort, the bewilderment, came; and he would
then turn resolutely to Imogen and grasp firmly his own conception of her
essential meaning, a meaning that could bear any amount of renderings.