They walked on slowly again, both feeling a little "done." Neither spoke until, at the entrance of the park, and just before leaving its poetry for the screaming prose of the great city, Imogen said: "One thing I want to tell you, Jack, and that is that you may trust mama to me. Whatever I may think of this happiness that she is reaching out for, I shall not make it difficult or painful for her to take it. My pain shall cast no shadow on her gladness."
Jack's face still showed its flush and his voice had all the steadiness of his own interpretation, the steadiness of his refusal to accept hers, as he answered, "Thanks, Imogen; that's very right of you."
XVII
Imogen and Sir Basil were walking down a woodland path under the sky of American summer, a vast, high, cloudless dome of blue. Trees, tall and delicate, in early June foliage, grew closely on the hillside; the grass of the open glades was thick with wild Solomon's-seal, and fragile clusters of wild columbine grew in the niches and crannies of the rocks, their pale-red chalices filled with fantastically fretted gold.
Imogen, dressed in thin black lawn, fine plaitings of white at throat and wrists, her golden head uncovered, walked a little before Sir Basil with her long, light, deliberate step. She had an errand in the village two miles away, and her mother had suggested that Sir Basil should go with her and have some first impressions of rural New England. He had only arrived the night before. Miss Bocock and the Pottses were expected this afternoon, and Mrs. Wake had been for a fortnight established in her tiny cottage on the opposite hillside.
"Tell me about your village here," Sir Basil had said, and Imogen, with punctual courtesy and kindness, the carrying out of her promise to Jack, had rejoined: "It would be rather uneventful annals that I should have to tell you. The people are palely prosperous. They lead monotonous lives. They look forward for variety and interest, I think, to the summer, when all of us are here. One does all one can, then, to make some color for them. I have organized a kindergarten for the tiny children, and a girls' club for debates and reading; it will help to an awakening I believe. I'm going to the club this afternoon. I'm very grateful to my girls for helping me as they do to be of use to them. It's quite wonderful what they have done already. Our village life is in no sense like yours in England, you know; these people are all very proud and independent. It's as a friend, not as a Lady Bountiful, that I go among them."
"I see," said Sir Basil, with interest, "that's awfully nice all round. I wish we could get rid of a lot of stupid ways of thought at home. I'll see something of these friends of yours at the house, then. I'm immensely interested in all these differences, you know."
"You won't see them at the house. Our relation is friendly, not social.
That is a froth that doesn't count."
"Oh! and they don't mind that—not having the social relation, I mean—if they are friends?"
"Why should they? I am not hurt because they do not ask me to their picnics and parties, nor are they because I don't ask them to my dinners and teas. We both understand that all that is a matter of manner and accident; that in essentials we are equal."