"We make her very welcome when she comes to ours." Imogen did not descend to self-exculpation. She spoke gently and gravely, casting only a glance at Sir Basil, as if calling him to witness her pained magnanimity.
"It would be fun, you know, to help her to start a new one," said
Rose;—"something rebellious and anarchic. Will you help me if I do, Eddy?
Come, let's sow discord in Imogen's Eden, like a couple of serpents."
Reptilian analogies seemed uppermost this morning; Imogen felt their fitness while, smiling on, she answered: "I don't think that mere rebellion—not only against Eden but against the Tree of Knowledge as well—would carry you far, Rose. Your membership would be of three—Mattie and the two serpents."
Sir Basil laughed out at the retort.
"You evidently don't know the club and all those delightful young women," he said to Rose.
"Oh, yes, indeed I do. Every one sees Imogen's clubs. I don't think them delightful. Women in crowds are always horrid. We are only tolerable in isolation."
"You hand over to us, then,"—it was Jack who spoke, and with his usual impatience when bending to Rose's folly,—"all the civic virtues, all the virtues of fraternity?"
"With pleasure; they are becoming to nobody, for that matter. But I'm quite sure that men are brothers. Women never are sisters, however, unless, sometimes, we are sisters to you," Rose added demurely, at which Sir Basil gave a loud laugh.
Imogen, though incensed, was willing that on this low ground of silly flippancy Rose should make her little triumphs. She kept her smile. "I don't think that those of us who are capable of another sisterhood will agree with you," and her smile turned on Mary another coal of fire, for she suspected Mary of apostasy. "I don't think that the women whose aim in life is—well—to make brothers of men in Rose's sense, can understand sisterhood at all, as, for instance, Mary and I do."
"Oh, you and Mary!"—Rose tapped her eggshell and salted her egg. "That's not sisterhood;—that's prophetess and proselyte. You're an anarchist to the bone, Imogen, like the rest of us;—you couldn't bear to share anything—It's like children playing games:—If I can't be the driver, I won't play horses."