"Well, the simile will do for my impression. The finger you lay on her is too heavy. You exaggerate things in her—over-emphasize things."
She was holding herself, forcing herself to look calmly at this road he pointed out to her, the only road, perhaps, that would lead her back to her old place with him. "Admirable things, you think, if one saw them truly?"
"I don't know about admirable; but warm, sweet—at the worst, harmless. I'm sure, to-day, that she only meant it for you, for what she felt must be your shrinking. Of course she had her sense of fitness, too, a fitness that we may, as you feel, overlook when we see the larger fitness. But her intention was perfectly,"—he paused, seeking an expression for the intention and repeated,—"Sweet, warm, harmless."
Imogen felt that she was holding herself as she had never held herself.
"Don't you think I see all that, Jack?"
"Well, I only meant that I, since coming to know her, really know her, in
Boston, see it most of all."
"And you can't see, too, how it must stab me to have papa—papa—put, through her trivial words, into the category of black-edged paper?"
Her voice had now the note of tears.
"But she doesn't," he protested.
"Can you deny that, for her, he counts for little more than the mere question of convention?"