Jack, too, thought Imogen's life a flower so precious that it must be placed where it could best bloom; but, feeling in her dispassionateness a hurt to his hope that it would best bloom in his care, he asked: "Mightn't the making something of it come after the choice, dear?"
Very clear as to what was her own meaning, Imogen shook her lovely, unconfused head. "No, only the real need could rightly choose, and one can only know the real need when one has made the real self."
These were Jack's own views, but, hearing them from her lips, they chilled.
"It seems to me that your self, already, is very real," he said, smiling a little ruefully. And Imogen now, though firm, was very wonderful, for, leaning to him, she put for a moment her hand on his and said, smiling back with the tranquil tenderness: "Not yet, not quite yet, Jack; but we trust each other's truth, and we can't but trust,—I do, dear Jack, with all my heart,—that it can never part us."
He kissed her hand at that, and promised to trust and to be patient, and Imogen presently lifted matters back into their accustomed place, saying that he must help her with her project for building a country home for her crippled children. She had laid the papers before him and they were deep in ways and means when a sharp, imperious scratching at the door interrupted them.
Imogen's face, as she raised it, showed a touch of weary impatience. "Mamma's dog," she said. "He can't find her. Let him scratch. He will go away when no one answers."
"Oh, let's satisfy him that she isn't here," said Jack, who was full of a mild, though alien, consideration for animals.
"Can you feel any fondness for such wisps of sentimentality and greediness as that?" Imogen asked, as the tiny griffon darted into the room and ran about, sniffing with interrogative anxiety.
"Not fondness, perhaps, but amused liking."
"There, now you see he will whine and bark to be let out again. He is as arrogant and as troublesome as a spoilt child."