"You are changed, indeed, Jack, when you can suspect me of eavesdropping! I was asleep on the sofa in the library, worn out with work, and I woke to hear them talking in the next room, with the door ajar. I did not realize, for some moments, what was being said. And then they went out."
"Of course I don't suspect you; of course I don't think that you would eavesdrop; though I do hate—hearing," Jack muttered.
"I hope you realize that I share your hatred," said Imogen. "But your opinion of me is not, here, to the point. I only wish to put before you what I have now to bear, Mrs. Pakenham said that she wagered that before the year was out Sir Basil would have married mama." Imogen paused, breathing deeply.
Jack walked on beside her, not knowing what to say. "I think so, too, and wish her joy," would have been the truest rendering of his feeling.
He curbed it to ask cautiously, "And you mind so much?"
"Mind!" she repeated, a thunderous echo.
"You dislike it so?"
"Dislike? You use strangely inapt words."
He had another parenthetic shoot of impatience with her dreadful articulateness; had Imogen always talked so much like the heroine of a novel with a purpose?
"I only meant—can't you put up with it?"