And she nurses her
defect of isolation and self-sufficiency. I hope that we may win her over
to wider, sweeter outlooks some day."
Mattie Smith, however, was one of the people upon whom Imogen wasted no
smiles. On the Uptons first coming to spend their summers near Hamborough,
Imogen had found this indolent yet forcible personality barring her path
of benignant activity. Mattie Smith, unaided, undirected, ignorant of the
Time Spirit's high demands upon the individual, had already formed a club
of sorts, a tawdry little room hung with bright bunting and adorned with
colored pictures from the cheaper magazines, pictures of over-elegant,
amorously inclined young couples in ball-rooms or on yachts and beaches.
Here the girls read poor literature, played games, made candy over the
stove and gossiped about their young men. Imogen deeply disapproved of the
place; its ventilation was atrocious and its moral influence harmful; it
relaxed and did not discipline,--so she had expressed it to her father. It
soon withered under her rival beams. Mattie Smith's members drifted by
degrees into the more advantageous alliance. Mattie Smith had resented this
triumphant placing of the higher standard and took pains, as Imogen, with
the calm displeasure of the successful, observed, to make difficulties
for her and to treat her with ostentatious disregard. Imogen guessed very
accurately at the seething of anger and jealousy that bubbled in Mattie
Smith's breast; it was typical of so much of the lamentable spirit
displayed by rudimentary natures when feeling the pressure of an ideal they
did not share or when brought into contact with a more finished manner of
life from which they were excluded.
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