And then they went out."
"Of course I don't suspect you; of course I don't think that you would
eavesdrop; though I do hate--hearing," Jack muttered.
"I hope you realize that I share your hatred," said Imogen. "But your
opinion of me is not, here, to the point. I only wish to put before you
what I have now to bear, Mrs. Pakenham said that she wagered that before
the year was out Sir Basil would have married mama." Imogen paused,
breathing deeply.
Jack walked on beside her, not knowing what to say. "I think so, too, and
wish her joy," would have been the truest rendering of his feeling.
He curbed it to ask cautiously, "And you mind so much?"
"Mind!" she repeated, a thunderous echo.
"You dislike it so?"
"Dislike? You use strangely inapt words."
He had another parenthetic shoot of impatience with her dreadful
articulateness; had Imogen always talked so much like the heroine of a
novel with a purpose?
"I only meant--can't you put up with it?"
"Put up with it? Can I do anything else? What power have I over her?
You don't seem to understand. I have passed beyond caring that she
makes herself petty, ridiculous; as a woman of her age must in marrying
again--the clutch of fading life at the happiness it has forfeited. Let
her clutch if she chooses; let her marry if she chooses, whom she chooses,
yes, when she chooses. But don't you see how it shatters my every hope of
her,--my every ideal of her? And don't you see how my heart is pierced by
the presence of that man in my father's house, the house that she abandoned
and cast a shadow upon? How filled with bitter shame and anguish I am when
I see him there, in that house, sacred to my grief and to my
memories--making love to my mother?"
No, really, never, never had he heard Imogen so fluent and so dramatically
telling; and never had he been so unmoved by the feeling under the fluency.
Pages:
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220