"You liked doing it, didn't you? You couldn't have done it, like that—looked like that, if you hadn't cared a lot about it," Sir Basil pursued.
Imogen smiled a little and said that she didn't know that she had liked doing her part particularly,—it was of her crippled children that she was thinking. "We'll be able to get the Home now," she said.
"It was for cripple children?"
"Didn't you know? I should have thought mama would have told you. Yes, it all meant that, only that, to me. We gave the tableaux to get enough money to buy a country home for them."
"You go in a lot for good works, I know," said Sir Basil, and Imogen, smiling again, with the lightness rooted in excitement, answered: "They go in for me, rather. All the appeals of suffering seem to come to one and seize one, don't they? One never needs to seek causes."
Jack watched them talk, Imogen, the daughter of the dead, rejected husband, and Sir Basil, her mother's suitor.
Mary had come in now, late from changing her dress, which at the last moment she had felt too shy to appear in. She was talking to Mrs. Wake and the Pakenhams.
Standing, a somewhat brooding onlooker, becoming conscious, indeed, of the sense, stronger than ever, of loneliness and bereavement, he heard Mrs. Upton near him say, "Sit down here, Jack."
She showed him a chair beside her, in the corner, between her tea-table, the window, and the fire. She, too, was for the moment isolated; she, too, no doubt, had been watching; and now she talked to him, not at all as if she had felt that he were lonely and were making it up to him, but, once more, like the child happily gathering and holding out nosegays to another child.
A controlled excitement was in her, too; and he felt still that slight strain of the lunch-table, as if Imogen's catafalque had marred some too-trustful assurance; but a growing warmth was diffused through it, and, as her eyes turned once or twice on Imogen and Sir Basil, he saw the cause.