"Aren't you getting away from the point a little?" he asked, baffled and confused, as he often was, by her measured decisiveness.
"It seems to me that I am on the point.—The point is that she cared so little about him—in either way."
This was what he had foreseen that she would think.
"The point is that she cares so much for you," he ventured his conviction, fixing his eyes, oddly deepened with this, his deepest appeal, upon her.
But Imogen, as though it were a bait thrown out and powerless to allure, slid past it.
"To gain things we must work for them. It's not by merely caring, yielding, that one wins one's rights. Mama is a very 'sweet, warm, harmless' person; I see that as well as you do, Jack." So she put him in his place and he could only wonder if he had any right to feel so angry.
The preparations for the new tableau were at once begun and a few days after their last uncomfortable encounter, Jack and Imogen were again together, in happier circumstances it seemed, for Imogen, standing in the library while her mother adjusted her folds and draperies, could but delight a lover's eye. Mary, also on view, in her handmaiden array,—Mary's part was a small one in the picture of the restored Alcestis,—sat gazing in admiration, and Jack walked about mother and daughter with suggestion and comment.
"It's perfect, quite perfect," he declared, "that warm, soft white; and you have done it most beautifully, Mrs. Upton. You are a wonderful costumière."
"Isn't my chlamys a darling?" said Valerie happily from below, where she knelt to turn a hem.
"Mama won't let us forget that chlamys," Imogen said, casting a look of amusement upon her mother. "She is so deliciously vain about it." Imogen was feeling a thrill of confidence and hope. Jack's eyes, as they rested upon her, had shown the fondest admiration. She was in the humor, so rare with her of late, of gaiety and light assurance. And she thirsted for words of praise and delight from Jack.