Imogen felt that
her neutrality of attitude could best be maintained by silence.
"Mrs. Potts came back," her mother said, smiling a little, and, Imogen
fancied, with the old touch of timidity that she remembered in her. "She
said that you took her on a most fearful climb."
"What foolishness, poor dear Mrs. Potts! I took her along the upper path."
"The upper path! Is there an upper path?" Mrs. Upton descended beside her
daughter. "I thought that it was the usual path that had proved too much
for her."
"I wanted them to see the view from the rock," said Imogen; "I forgot that
poor Mrs. Potts would find it too difficult a climb."
"Oh, I remember, now, the rock! That is a difficult climb," said Mrs.
Upton.
Imogen wondered if her mother guessed at why Mrs. Potts had been taken on
it. She must feel it of good augury, if she did, that her daughter should
already like Sir Basil enough to indulge in such an uncharitable freak.
Imogen felt her color rise a little as she suspected herself and her
motives revealed. It was not that she wasn't quite ready to own to a
friendship with Sir Basil; but she didn't want friendship to be confused
with condonation, and she didn't like her mother to guess that she could
use Mrs. Potts uncharitably.
XIX
Her magnanimity toward Jack--so Imogen more and more clearly saw it to have
been--at the time of their parting, had made it inevitable that he should
hold to his engagement to visit them that summer, and even because of that
magnanimity, she felt, in thinking over again and again the things that
Jack had said of her and to her, a deepening of the cold indignation that
the magnanimity had quelled at the moment of his speaking them.
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