His comradely tone brought her the sensation of their old, their so recent,
relation, complete, unflawed, once more. An impulse of recovery rose in
her, and, her mind busy with the sweet imagination, she said presently,
reflectively, "I think I will do your Antigone after all."
Completely without coquetry, and sincerely innocent of feminine wiles,
Imogen had always known, sub-consciously as it were, for the matter seldom
assumed the least significance for her, that Jack delighted in her personal
appearance. She saw herself, suddenly, in all the appealing youth and
beauty of the Grecian heroine, stamping on his heart, by means of the outer
manifestation, that inner reality to which he had become so strangely
blind. It was to this revelation of reality that her thought clung, and an
added impulse of mere tenderness had helped to bring the words to her lips.
In her essential childishness where emotion and the drama of the senses
were concerned, she could not have guessed that the impulse, with its
tender mask, was the primitive one of conquest, the cruel female instinct
for holding even where one might not care to keep. At the bottom of her
heart, a realm never visited by her unspotted thoughts, was a yearning,
strangely mingled, to be adored, and to wreak vengeance for the faltering
in adoration that she had felt. Ah, to bind him!--to bind him, helpless, to
her! That was the mingled cry.
Jack looked round at her, as unconscious as she of these pathetic and
tigerish depths, but though his eye lighted with the artist's delight in
the vision that he had relinquished reluctantly, she saw, in another
moment, that he hesitated.
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