"Put up with it? Can I do anything else? What power have I over her? You don't seem to understand. I have passed beyond caring that she makes herself petty, ridiculous; as a woman of her age must in marrying again—the clutch of fading life at the happiness it has forfeited. Let her clutch if she chooses; let her marry if she chooses, whom she chooses, yes, when she chooses. But don't you see how it shatters my every hope of her,—my every ideal of her? And don't you see how my heart is pierced by the presence of that man in my father's house, the house that she abandoned and cast a shadow upon? How filled with bitter shame and anguish I am when I see him there, in that house, sacred to my grief and to my memories—making love to my mother?"
No, really, never, never had he heard Imogen so fluent and so dramatically telling; and never had he been so unmoved by the feeling under the fluency. It was as if he could believe in none.
He remained silent and Imogen continued: "When she came back, I believed that it was with an impulse of penitence; with the wish, shallow though I knew that it must be in such a nature, to atone to me for the ruin that she had made in his life. I was all tenderness and sympathy for her, all a longing to help and sustain her—as you must remember. But now! It fulfils all that I had feared and suspected in her—and more than all! She left England, she came here, that the conventions might be observed; and, considering them observed enough for her purpose, she receives her suitor, eight months after my father's lonely death,-in the house where my heart breaks and bleeds for him, where I mourn for him, where I—alone, it seems—feel him flouted and betrayed! And she talks of her love for me!"
Jack was wondering that her coherent passion did not beat him into helpless acquiescence; but, instead, he found himself at once replying, "You don't see fairly. You exaggerate it all. She was unhappy with your father. For years he made her unhappy. And now, if she can care for a man who can make her happy, she has a right, a perfect right, to take her happiness. As for her loving you, I don't believe that any one loves you more truly. It's your chance, now, to show your love for her."
Imogen stood still and looked at him from the black disk of her parasol.
"I think I've suspected this of you, too, Jack," she said. "Yes, I've suspected, in dreadful moments of revelation, how far your undermining has gone. And you say you are not changed!"
"Would you ask your mother never to marry again?"
"I would—if she were in any way to redeem her image in my eyes. But, granting to the full that one must make concessions to such creatures of the senses, I would ask her, at the very least, to have waited."
"Creatures of the senses!" Jack repeated in a helpless gasp; such words, in their austere vocabulary, were hardly credible. "Do you know what you are saying, you arrogant, you heartless girl?"
Her face seemed to flash at him like lightning from a black cloud, and with the lightning a reality that had lacked before to leap to her voice: