"Why say that, Jack, when you have just told me that I do it worse and worse?"
"It was only a momentary impression. Really, I'm ashamed of myself."
"But it's your impression that is the standard in those tableaux. How can I do the part if I contradict your conception?"
"You can't. I was in a bad temper."
"And why, may I ask, were you in a bad temper?"
The gaze from her serene yet awful brows was bent upon him, but under it, in a sudden reaction from its very serenity, its very awfulness, a firm determination rose in him to meet it. Turning very red but eyeing Imogen very straight: "I thought you inconsiderate, ungrateful, to your mother, as you often are," he said.
For a long moment Imogen was silent, glancing presently at Mary—scarlet with dismay, her hastily adjusted eye-glasses in odd contrast to her classic draperies—and then turning her eyes upon her mother who, still standing near the table, was frowning and looking down.
"Well, mama dear," she asked, "what have you to say to this piece of information? Have I, all unconsciously, been unkind? Have I been ungrateful? Do you share Jack's sense of injury?"
Mrs. Upton looked up as though from painful and puzzling reflection. "My dear Imogen," she said, "I think that you and Jack are rather self-righteous young people, far too prone to discussing yourselves. I think that you were a little inconsiderate; but Jack has no call to take up my defense or to express any opinion as to our relations. Of course you will do the Antigone, and of course, when he recovers his temper,—and I believe he has already,—he will be very glad that you should. And now let's have no more of this foolish affair."
None of them had ever heard her make such a measured, and, as it were, such a considered speech before, and the unexpectedness of it so wrought upon them that it reduced not only Jack but even the voluble Antigone to silence. But in Jack's silence was an odd satisfaction, even an elation. He didn't mind his own humiliation—that of an officious little boy put in a corner—one bit; for there in the corner opposite was Imogen, actually Imogen, and the sight of it gave him a shameful pleasure.