"He, too, knows and feels what ominous destinies are hanging over us, Mary." The deeply marked passages had been in Maeterlinck that day. "We are parted, perhaps forever, because he sees at last that I will not stoop. When one has grown up, all one's life, straight, facing the sunrise, one cannot bend and look down."
"You stoop! Why it's that that he would never let you do!"
"No? You think that, after the other day? He has stooped, Mary, to other levels. He breathes a different air from mine now. I cannot follow him into his new world."
"You mean?—you mean?—" Mary faltered.
Imogen's clear eyes told her what she meant; it did not need the slow acquiescence of her head nor the articulated, "Yes, I mean mama.—Poor mama. A little person can make great sorrows, Mary."
But now Mary's good, limpid eyes, unfaltering and candid as a child's, dwelt on her with a new hope. "But, Imogen, it's just that: is she so little? She isn't like you, of course. She can't lift and sustain, as you can. She doesn't stand for great things, as you do and as your father did. But I seem to feel more and more how much she could be to you.—It only needs-more understanding; and, if that's all, I really believe, Imogen darling, that you and Jack will be all right again. Perhaps," Mary went on with a terrible unconsciousness, "perhaps he has come to understand, already, better than you do,—I thought that, really, the other day,—and it's that that makes the sense of division. You are at different places of understanding. And he hasn't to remember, and get over, all the mistakes, the faults in her past; and perhaps it's because of that that he sees the present reality more clearly than you do. Jack is such a wonderful person for seeing the real self of people."
Imogen's steady gaze, during this speech, continued to rest unwaveringly upon her; Mary felt no warning in it and, when she had done, waited eagerly for some echo to her faith.
But when Imogen spoke, it was in a voice that revealed to her her profound miscalculation.
"You do not understand, Mary. You see nothing. Her present self is her past self, unchanged, unashamed, unatoned for. It is her mistakes, her faults, that Jack now stands for. It is her mistakes and faults that I must stand for, if I am to be beside him again. That would be the stooping that I meant. I fear that not only Jack but you are blinded, Mary. I fear that it is not only Jack but you that she is taking from me." Her voice was calm, but the steely edge of an accusation was in it.
Mary sat aghast. "Taking me from you! Oh, Imogen, you don't mean that you won't care for me if I get fond of her!"