She could claim no verbal victory, she had had to endure no verbal defeat; it was she herself who had forced this issue upon a situation that her mother would have been content to leave undefined. Her mother would never fix blame; her mother would never humiliate; but, she had found it to her own cost,—though the cost was as light as her mother could make it—she would not consent to be placed where Imogen had wished to place her. Let it be so, then, let it end on this note of seeming harmony and of silent discord; it was her mother's act, not her own. Truth was in her and had made once more its appeal; once more deep had called to deep only to find shallowness. For spiritual shallowness there must be where an appeal such as hers could be so misunderstood and so rejected.
She was angry, sore, vindictive, though her sharp insight did not reach so far as to tell her this; it did, however, tell her that she was wounded to the quick. But the final refuge was in the thought that she was soon to leave such judgments and such loves behind her for ever.
XXX
It was on a late October day that Jack Pennington rode over the hills to
Valerie's summer home.
Two months were gone since Imogen's reporter-haunted nuptials had been celebrated in the bland little country church that raised its white steeple from the woodlands. Jack had been present at them; decency had made that necessary, and a certain grimness in his aspect was easily to be interpreted in a dismal, defeated rival. It was as such, he knew, that he was seen there.
It had been a funny wedding,—to apply none of the other terms that lay deeper in him. In watching it from the white-wreathed chancel he had thought of Valerie's summing-up: "Imogen is one of the people who make the world go round." The world in every phase had been there, from the British ambassador and the Langleys to the East Side club girls—brought up from New York in the special train—and a flourishing consignment of cripples and nurses. Here and there in her path Imogen might meet the blankness of a Miss Bocock, the irony of a Mrs. Wake, a disillusion like Mary's, an insight like his own; but the great world, in its aspect of power and simplicity, would be with her always. He had realized as never before Imogen's capacity, when he saw the cohorts of her friends and followers overflow the church.
She had been a fitting center to it all; though the center, for Jack, was Valerie, exquisite, mildly radiant, not a hint on her of dispossession or of doom; but Imogen, white and rapt and grave, had looked almost as wonderful as on the day when she had first dawned upon Sir Basil's vision.
Jack, watching her uplifted profile as she stood at the altar-rail, found himself trivially, spitefully, irrelevantly murmuring:—"Her nose is too small." And yet she looked more than ever like a Botticelli Madonna.
Rose and Eddy were to be married that winter in New York, a gigantic opportunity for the newspapers, for already half the world seemed trooping to the festivities. Afterward, with old-fashioned Americanism, they would live in quite a little house and try to forget about Rose's fortune until Eddy made his.
Valerie was to have none of the bother of this wedding. Mrs. Packer, a mournful, jeweled, faded little beauty, was well fitted to cope with such emergencies. Her secretaries sat already with pens poised.