"Sensible?" again Imogen accepted. "Well, isn't that portrait sensible? Doesn't that lovely, luxurious girl see and want all the happy, the easy things of life? It is sensible, of course, clearly to know what they are, and firmly to make for them. That's just what I recognize now in her, that all she wants is to make things easy, to glisser."
"Yes, I can believe that," he murmured, a little dazed by her clear decisiveness; he often felt Imogen to be so much more clear-sighted, so much more clever than himself when it came to judgments and insights, that he could only at the moment acquiesce, through helplessness. "I suppose that is the essential—the desire of ease."
"And it hurts you that I should be able to see it, to say it, of my mother." Her eyes, with no hardness, no reproach, probed him, too. She almost made him feel unworthy of the trust she showed him.
"No," he said, smiling at her, "because I know that it's only to a friend who so understands you, who so cares for all that comes into your life."
"Only to such a friend, indeed," she returned gently.
"Have they been hard, these days?" he asked her, atoning to himself for the momentary shrinking that she had detected.
"Yes, they have," she answered, "and the more so from my seeing all her efforts to keep them soft; as if it was ease I wanted! But I have faced it all."
"What else has there been to face?"
She said nothing for some moments, looking at him with a thoughtful openness that, he felt, was almost marital in its sharing of silence.
"She's against everything, everything," she said at last.