It's strange, isn't it, to see how subtly she has
changed everything? It's as if our frosty, sparkling landscape, all wind
and vigor and discipline, were suddenly transformed to this,--" Imogen
looked about her at the limpid day,--"to soft yielding, soft color, soft
perfume,--it's like mama, that fragrance of the wistaria,--to something
smiling, languid, alluring. This is the sort of day on which one drifts.
Our past day was a day of steering."
As much as for the meaning of her careful words, Jack felt rising in him an
anger against the sense of a readiness prepared beforehand. "You describe
it all very prettily, Imogen," he answered, mastering the anger. "But I
don't agree with you."
"You seldom do now, Jack. Perhaps it's because I've remained in my own
climate while you have been borne by the 'warm, sweet, harmless' current
into this one."
"I am not conscious of any tendency to drift, Imogen. I still steer. I
intend, very firmly, always to steer."
"To what, may I ask?"
He was silent for a moment; then said, lifting eyes in which she read
all that new steeliness of opposition, with, yet, in it, through it, the
sadness of hopeless appeal: "I believe in all our ideals--just as I used
to."
To this Imogen made no rejoinder.
"Do you like Sir Basil?" she asked presently, after, for some time, they
had turned along the windings of a long path in a heavy silence.
"I've hardly seen him." Jack's voice had a forced lightness, as though for
relief at the change of subject; but he guessed that the change was only
apparent.
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