United States or Cameroon ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The poetry of their aspect was constantly contradicted by the prose of their glance. But she did more than turn her own poetry into prose, so he told himself; she turned other people's into prose, too. Her glance became to him a running translation into sane, almost merry, commonplace, of Imogen's soarings.
"You evidently don't know the club and all those delightful young women," he said to Rose. "Oh, yes, indeed I do. Every one sees Imogen's clubs. I don't think them delightful. Women in crowds are always horrid. We are only tolerable in isolation."
She knew that she had achieved her own place, and that from it, secure, above him, the veil between them, her smile was the smile of motherhood. To smile so was to put before him finally the fact that her enchantment contradicted and helplessly lured him to forget. She would never forget it now, nor could he. She was Imogen's mother, and she was old enough to be his.
Young's motherly desire to provide her children with every possible convenience for their new home, and Imogen's rooted conviction that nothing could be found in Colorado worth buying, and that it was essential to carry out all the tapes and sewing-silk and buttons and shoe-thread and shoes and stationery and court-plaster and cotton cloth and medicines that she and Lionel could possibly require during the next five years, it promised to be a long job.
He noticed, too, for the rest of the day, that, whatever Imogen's desperation, she made no effort to see Sir Basil alone. Almost ostentatiously she went away to her room after tea, saying that she had had bad news of an invalid protege and must write to her. She paused, as she went, to lean over Mary, a caressing hand upon her shoulder, and to speak to her in a low tone.
And that there was no confidential flavor in these remarks he demonstrated by adding that it was a point he and Imogen often discussed; he had often told her that she should try to feel more and to think less, so that Valerie might amusedly have recalled Imogen's explanation to her of the fundamental frankness that made lovers in America such "remarkable young men."
And beside Eddy Jack hardly needed the controlled quiet of Imogen's "There's mama" to identify the figure in black.
These were all sentiments that in the past, Mary felt sure, Jack must have acquiesced in and approved of, and yet she felt surer that Imogen's manner of enunciating them was making Jack very angry.
Jack, who almost expected to see Imogen's brow darken with reprobation for the type of existence so described, was relieved, and at the same time perturbed, to observe that the humorous kindliness of her manner remained unclouded. No doubt she found the subject too trivial and too remote for gravity.
Langley, blandly interested in this creditable enlightenment, turned to Jack with questioning about the tableaux. "We are all so much interested in Imogen's interests, aren't we? It's such an excellent idea. My girls are so sorry that they can't be in them. Rose tells me, Imogen, that there was some idea of your doing Antigone." "None whatever," said Imogen, with no abatement of frigidity.
Word Of The Day