Potts, very firmly busked and bridled, her head
very sleek, her smile very tight, took a chair between Mrs. Upton and Sir
Basil, and soon showed, in her whole demeanor, a consciousness of the
latter's small titular decoration that placed her more definitely for
Imogen's eye than she had ever been placed before. The Pottses were
middle-class with a vengeance. Imogen's irritation grew as she watched
these limpet-like friends, one sprawling and ill-at-ease for all his
careful languor, the other quite dreadfully well-mannered, sipping her
tea, arching her brows and assuming all sorts of perilous elegancies of
pronunciation that Imogen had never before heard her attempt. It was an
additional vexation to have them display toward herself, with even more
exaggeration than usual, their tenacious tenderness; listening, with a
grave turning of head and eye when she spoke, and receiving each remark
with an over-emphasis of feeling on their over-mobile features.
There was, indeed, an odd irony in the Pottses being there at all. They
had, in her father's lifetime, only been asked with a horde of their kind,
the whole uplifted batch thus worked off together, and Imogen had really
not expected her mother to agree to her suggestion that they should be
invited to pay the annual visit during Sir Basil's stay. She would not own
to herself that her suggestion had been made from a vague wish to put her
mother to a test, to force her into a definite declaration against the
incongruous guests; she had thought of the suggestion, rather, as an
upholding of her father's banner before the oncoming betrayal; but, instead
of refusal, she had met with an instant, happy acquiescence, and it was now
surely the climax of irony to see how her mother, for her sake, bore with
them.
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