Her mother--oh! despite pallor and
fading--was a woman to be loved; and that she believed herself a woman
loved, Imogen, with a deep stirring of indignation and antagonism,
suspected. Yes, she counted upon Sir Basil, of that Imogen was sure,
but what she couldn't make out was whether her mother guessed that her
confidence was threatened. Did she at all see where Sir Basil's heart had
turned, as Jack had seen? Was her mother, too, capable of Jack's maneuvers?
From her mother she looked at Sir Basil, looked with eyes marvelously
serene. He lounged delightfully. His clothes were delightfully right; they
seemed as much a part of his personality as the cones were of the pines,
the ferns of the long glades. Rightness--exquisite, unconscious rightness,
was what he expressed. Not the rightness of warfare and effort that Imogen
believed in and stood for, but a rightness that had come to him as a gift,
not as a conquest, just as the cones had come to the pine-trees. The way
he tilted his Panama hat over his eyes so that only his chin and crisply
twisted mustache were unshadowed, the way in which he held his cigarette in
a hand so brown that the gold of the seal ring upon it looked pale, even
the way in which he wagged, now and then, his foot in its shapely tan
shoe,--were all as delightful as his limpid smile up at her mother, as his
voice, deep, decisive, and limpid, too.
Imogen was not aware of these appreciations in herself as she watched him
with that serene covertness, not at all aware that her senses were lending
her a hand in her struggle for possession and ascendancy, and giving to
her hold on the new and threatened belonging a peculiar tenacity.
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