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Miss Bocock and the Pottses were expected this afternoon, and Mrs. Wake had been for a fortnight established in her tiny cottage on the opposite hillside. "Tell me about your village here," Sir Basil had said, and Imogen, with punctual courtesy and kindness, the carrying out of her promise to Jack, had rejoined: "It would be rather uneventful annals that I should have to tell you.
That had been her initiation and her consecration. After that, it could not have been many years after, though she had brought to it a far more understanding observation, the next scene that came up for her was a wrangle at lunch one day, over the Delancy Pottses if wrangle it could be called when one was so light and the other so softly stern.
Sir Basil thought that he had never seen anything prettier. Valerie, dressed in thin black, was sitting on the veranda, and beside her Miss Bocock, still in traveling dress, looked incongruously ungraceful. She had arrived an hour before with the Pottses, who had gone to their rooms, and said, in answer to Imogen's kindly queries, that the journey hadn't been bad, though the train was very stuffy.
Upton and Sir Basil, and soon showed, in her whole demeanor, a consciousness of the latter's small titular decoration that placed her more definitely for Imogen's eye than she had ever been placed before. The Pottses were middle-class with a vengeance.
Not that she hadn't been decent enough in her actual treatment, it was rather that she would never take the Pottses, or any of the others oddities she evidently considered them-seriously; it was, most of all, that she would never let them come near enough to try to take her seriously.
The first move of strategy was made directly after dinner. He asked Imogen to come out and see the moonlight with him. A word to the wise was a word to Mrs. Wake, who safely cornered Miss Bocock and the Pottses over a game of cards. Jack saw Valerie and Sir Basil established on the veranda, and then led Imogen away, drew her from her quarry, along the winding path in the woods.
Imogen could even see that the Pottses were reconsidering, with some confusion of mind, their old verdict on her mother. This realization brought to her brooding thoughts a sudden pang of self-reproach. It wouldn't do for the Pottses to find in her mother the cordiality they might miss in herself.
Valerie, in that ominous interlude, even when Sir Basil appeared on the veranda, alone, but saying that he had been for a walk with Miss Upton, who was tired and had gone to her room to rest, even when she observed that the Pottses had decided upon maintaining a splendid isolation in their own chambers, did not permit the ship to turn for one moment in such a direction.
In Sir Basil's pleasant disclaimers, too, there was an echo of Miss Bocock's matter-of-fact acknowledgments that seemed to set them both leagues away from the Pottses and to make their likeness greater than their difference. "Well, of course," Mrs.
One need have no illusion as to the quality of their note; it lacked distinction, serving only, in its unmodulated vehemence, the drum-like purpose of calling attention to great matters, of reverberating, so one hoped, through lethargic consciousness. But Imogen loved the Pottses, so she told herself. To be sure of loving the Pottses was a sort of pulse by which one tested one's moral health.
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