"
For a long moment her hand continued to grasp his, before, as if taking in
the ambiguous comfort of his final definiteness, it relaxed and she drew it
away.
"Perhaps she will care enough," she said.
"To accept my vision? To forego blue? To consent that I shall see her as
green?"
"Yes, when she has taken up all the threads."
"Perhaps she will," said Jack.
XVI
It was a few days after this, just before Jack's return to Boston--and the
parting now was to be until they met in Vermont--that he and Imogen had
another walk, another talk together.
The mid-May had become seasonably mild and, at Jack's suggestion, they had
taken the elevated cars up to Central Park for the purpose of there seeing
the wistaria in its full bloom.
They strolled in the sunlight under arbors rippling all over with the
exquisite purple, dark and pale, the thin fine leaves of a strange
olive-green, the delicate tendrils; they passed into open spaces where,
on gray rocks, it streamed like the tresses of a cascade; it climbed and
heaped itself on wayside trellises and ran nimbly, in a shower of fragile
color, up the trunks, along the branches, of the trees. Jack always
afterward associated the soft, falling purple, the soft, languorous
fragrance, the almost uncanny beauty of the wistaria, with melancholy and
presage.
Imogen, for the first time since her father's death, showed a concession to
the year's revival in a transparent band of white at her neck and wrists.
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