"Well, then, can't you help him?" Mary cried.
"How can I help him?—In what way?" Valerie asked, her grave smile fading.
"With Imogen. It's that, you see, their alienation, that's breaking his heart.
"Of course you've seen it all more clearly than I have," Mary went on, her hair about her face, her hand clasping Valerie's;—"Of course you understand it, and everything that has happened to them. I love Imogen, too—please don't doubt that;—but, but, I can't but feel that it's her mistake, her blindness that has been the cause. She couldn't accept it, you see, that he should—stand for a new thing, and be loyal to the old thing at the same time."
Valerie, now, had sunken into a chair near Mary's, and one hand was still in Mary's hand, and in the other she still held a tress of Mary's hair. She looked down at this tress while she said:—"But Imogen was right, quite right. He couldn't stand for the new thing and be loyal to the old."
Mary's eyes widened: "You mean,—Mrs. Upton?—"
"Just what you do. That I am the cause."
She raised her eyes to Mary's and the girl became scarlet.
"Oh,—you do see it all," she breathed.
"All, all, Mary. To Imogen I stand, I must stand, for the wrong; to Jack—though he can't think of me very well as 'standing' for anything, I'm not altogether in that category. So that his championship of me judges him in Imogen's eyes. Imogen has had a great deal to bear. Have you heard of the last thing? She has not told you? I have refused my consent to her having a biography of her father written. She had set her heart on it."