She was so beautiful, sitting there, the girl he loved, her pearly face
and throat, her coronet of pale, bright gold, rising from the pathetic
blackness, that it might well be that the mother felt only his own joy in
her loveliness and could spare no margin of consciousness for critical
comment. She was so lovely, so young, so good; so jaded, too, with all
the labor, the giving of herself, the long thoughts for others; why
shouldn't she be dominant and assured? Why shouldn't she even be didactic
and slightly complacent? If there was sometimes a triteness in her
pronouncements, a lack of humor, of spontaneity, in her enthusiasms, surely
no one who loved her could recognize them with any but the tenderest of
smiles. He felt quite sure that Mrs. Upton recognized them with nothing
else. He felt quite sure that the "deepest" thing in Mrs. Upton was the
most intense interest in Imogen; but he felt sure, too, that the thing
above it, the thing that gazed so quietly, so dispassionately, was complete
indifference as to what Imogen might be saying. Didn't her prose, with its
unemphatic evenness, imply that some enthusiasms went quite without saying
and that some questions were quite disposed of for talk just because they
were so firmly established for action? When he had reached this point
of query, Jack felt rising within him that former sense of irritation
on Imogen's behalf, and on his own. After all, youthful triteness and
enthusiasm were preferable to indifference. In the stress of this
irritation he felt, at moments, a shock of keen sympathy for the departed
Mr. Upton, who had, no doubt, often felt that disconcerting mingling of
interest and indifference weigh upon his dithyrambic ardors. He often felt
very sorry for Mr. Upton as he looked at his widow. It was better to feel
that than to feel sorry for her while he listened to Imogen. It did not do
to realize too keenly, through Imogen's echo, what it must have been to
listen to Mr. Upton for a lifetime. When, on rare occasions, he had Mrs.
Upton to himself, his impulse always was to "draw her out," to extract from
her what were her impressions of things in general and what her attitude