Then it appeared that Miss Bocock and Sir Basil were acquainted;
they recollected each other, shook hands heartily, and asked and answered
local questions. Miss Bocock's people lived not so many miles from Thremdon
Hall, and, though she had been little at home of late years, she and Sir
Basil had country memories in common. She said presently that she, too,
would like to tidy for the tea, and Imogen, taking her to her room, sat
with her while she smoothed out one section of her hair and tonged the
other, and while she put on a very stiff holland skirt and a blouse
distressing to Imogen's sensitive taste, a crude pink blouse, irrelevantly
adorned about the shoulders with a deep frill of imitation lace. While she
dressed she talked, in her high-pitched, cheerful voice, of the recent very
successful lectures she had given in Boston and the acquaintances she had
made there.
"I hope that my letters of introduction proved useful," said Imogen. She
considered Miss Bocock her _protegee_, but Miss Bocock, very vexatiously,
seemed always oblivious of that fact; so that Imogen, though feeling that
she had secured a guest who conferred luster, couldn't resist, now and
then, trying to bring her to a slightly clearer sense of obligation.
Miss Bocock said that, yes, they had been very useful, and Imogen watched
her select from the graceful nosegay on her dressing-table two red roses
which she pinned to her pink blouse with a heavy silver brooch
representing, in an encircling bough, a mother bird hovering with
outstretched wings over a precariously placed nest.
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