"You mean because I'm not sufficiently interesting myself? Is that it, eh?"

Sir Basil acutely asked, reflecting that he had never seen a girl walk so beautifully or dress so exquisitely. The sunlight glittered in her hair.

"I don't mean that at all," said Imogen; "although I don't fancy that you are interested so deeply, and in so many things, as I am."

"Now, really! Why not? You haven't given me a chance to show you. Of course I'm not clever."

"I meant nothing petty, like cleverness."

"You mean that I don't take life seriously enough to please you?"

"Not that, exactly. It's that we face in opposite directions, as it were.

Life isn't to you what it is to me, it isn't to you such a big, beautiful thing, with so many wonderful vistas in it--such far, high peaks."

She was very grave now, and the gravity, the a.s.surance, and, with them, the sweetness, of this young girl were charming and perplexing to Sir Basil.

Girls so a.s.sured he had found harsh, disagreeable and, almost always, ugly; they had been the sort of girl one avoided. And girls so lovely had usually been coy and foolish. This girl walked like a queen, looked at one like a philosopher, smiled at one like an angel. He fixed his mind on her last words, rallying his sense of quizzical paternity to meet such disconcerting statements.

"Well, but you are very young; life looks like that--peaks, you know, and vistas, and all the rest--when one is young. You've not had time to find it out, to be disappointed," said Sir Basil.

Imogen's calm eye rested upon him, and even before she spoke he knew that he had made a very false step. It was as if, sunken to the knees in his foolish bog, he stood before her while she replied:

"Ah, it's that that is shallow in you, or, let us say, undeveloped, still to be able to think of life in those terms. They are the thoughts of an unawakened person, and some people, I know, go all through life without awaking. You imagine, I suppose, that I think of life as something that is going to give me happiness, to fulfil sentimental, girlish dreams. You are mistaken. I have known bitter disappointments, bitter losses, bitter shatterings of hope. But life is wonderful and beautiful to me because we can be our best and do our best in it, and for it, if we try. It's an immense adventure of the soul, an adventure that can disappoint only in the frivolous sense you were thinking of. Such joys are not the objects of our quest. One is disappointed with oneself, often, for falling so short of one's vision, and people whom we love and trust may fail us and give us piercing pain; but life, in all its oneness, is good and beautiful if we wake to its deepest reality and give our hearts to the highest that we know."

She spoke sadly, softly, surely, thinking of her own deep wounds, and to speak such words was almost like repeating a familiar lesson,--how often she had heard them on her father's lips,--and Sir Basil listened, while he looked at the golden head, at the white hand stretched out now and then to put aside a branch or sapling--listened with an amazement half baffled and wholly admiring. He had never heard a girl talk like that. He had heard such words before, often, of course, but they had never sounded like this; they seemed fresh, and sparkling with a heavenly dew, spoken so quietly, with such indifference to their effect, such calmness of conviction. The first impression of her, that always hovered near, grew more strongly upon him. There was something heavenly about this girl. It was as though he had heard an angel singing in the woods, and a feeling of humility stole over him. It was usual for Sir Basil, who rarely thought about himself, to feel modest, but very unusual for him to feel humble.

"You make me believe it, when you say it," he murmured. "I'm afraid you think me a dreadfully earthy, commonplace person."

Imogen, at the change of note in his voice, looked round at him, more really aware of him than she had been at all, and when she met his glance the prophet's calm fervor rose in her to answer the faith that she felt in him. She paused, letting him come abreast of her in the narrow path, and they both stood still, looking at each other.

"You are not earthy; you are not commonplace," said Imogen, then, as a result of her contemplation. "I believe that you are a very big person, Sir Basil."

"A big person? How do you mean?" He absolutely flushed, half abashed, half delighted.

Imogen continued to gaze, clearly and deeply. "There are all sorts of possibilities in you."

"Oh, come now! At my age! Why, any possibilities are over, except for a cheerful kind of vegetating."

"You have vegetated all your life, I can see that. No one has ever waked you. You have hardly _used_ your soul at all. It's with you as it is with your country, whose life is built strongly and sanely with body and brain but who has not felt nationally, as a whole, its spirit. Like it, you have a spirit; like it, you are full of possibilities."

"Miss Upton, you aren't like anybody I've ever known. What sort of possibilities?"

She walked on now, feeling his thrill echo in herself, symptomatic of the pa.s.sing forth of power and its return as enrichment of life and inspiration to helpfulness. "Of service," she said. "Of devotion to great needs; courage in great causes. I don't think that you have ever had a chance."

Sir Basil, keeping his eyes on her straight, pale profile, groping and confused in this new flood of light, wondered if he had.

"You are an extraordinary young woman," he said at last. "You make me believe in everything you say, though it's so awfully queer, you know, to think in that way about myself. If you talk to me often like this, about needs and causes, will it give me more of a chance, do you think?"

"We must all win to the light for ourselves," said Imogen very gently, "but we can help one another."

They had come now to the edge of the wood and out upon the white road that curved from the village up to the blue of the hills they had descended. A tiny brook ran with a sharp, silvery tinkle on its farther edge and it was bordered by a light barrier of white railing. Beyond were s.p.a.cious, half-cultivated meadows, stretched out for miles in the lap of low-lying hills.

Serene yet inhuman the landscape looked, a background to the thinnest of histories, significant only of its own dreaming solitude; and the village, among its elms, a little farther on, suggested the barest past, the most barren future. The road led on into its main street, where the elms made a stately avenue, arching over scattered frame houses of buff and gray and white. Imogen told Sir Basil that some of these houses were old, and pointed out an austere cla.s.sic facade with pediment and pillars; explained to him, too, the pathetic condition of so much of abandoned New England.

Sir Basil was thinking more of her last words in the woods than of local color, but he had, while he listened, a fairly definite impression of pinchbeck shops; of shabby awnings slanting in the sunlight over heaps of tumbled fruit and vegetables; of "buggies," slip-shod, with dust-whitened wheels, the long-tailed, long-maned, slightly harnessed horses. .h.i.tched to posts along the pavements. The faces that pa.s.sed were indolent yet eager.

The jaws of many worked mechanically at some unappeasing task of mastication.

Sir Basil had traveled since his arrival in America, had seen the luxuries of the Atlantic seacoast, the purposeful energy of Chicago, California's Eden-like abundance, and had seen other New England villages where beauty was cherished and made permanent. He hardly needed Imogen's further comments to establish his sense of contrast.

"This was always a poor enough little place. Any people who made it count left it long ago. But even here," she went on, "even in its stagnation, one can find some of the things we care for in our country, some of the things we live for."

Some of these things seemed personified in the figure of the young woman who met them in the girls' club, among the shelves of books and the numerous framed photographs from the old masters. Imogen introduced Sir Basil to her and he watched her with interest while she and Imogen discussed some business matters. She was slender and upright, perhaps too upright; she was, in manner, unaffected and a.s.sured, perhaps too a.s.sured, but that Sir Basil did not observe. He found her voice unpleasant and her p.r.o.nunciation faulty, but thought that she expressed herself with great force and fluency. Her eyes were bright, her skin sallow, she smiled gravely, and her calmness and her smile reminded Sir Basil a little of Imogen; perhaps they were racial. She was dressed in a simple gray cotton frock with neat lawn collar and cuffs, and her hair was raised in a l.u.s.trous "pompadour," a wide comb traversing it behind and combs at the sides of her head upholding it in front. Toward Sir Basil she behaved with gracious stateliness of demeanor, so that he wondered anew at the anomalies of a country of ideals where a young person so well-appearing should not be asked to dinner.

Several other girls came in while they were there, and they all surrounded Imogen with eager familiarity of manner; all displayed toward himself, as he was introduced, variations of Miss Hickson's stateliness. He thought it most delightful and interesting and the young women very remarkable persons. One discordant note, only, was struck in the harmony, and that discord was barely discerned by his untrained ear. While Imogen was talking, a girl appeared in the doorway, hesitated, then, with an indifferent and forbidding manner, strolled across the room to the book-shelves, where she selected a book, strolling out again with the barest nod of sullen recognition. She was a swarthy girl, robust and ample of form, with black eyes and dusky cheeks. Her torn red blouse and untidy hair marked her out from the sleek and social group. Sir Basil thought her very interesting looking. He asked Imogen, as they walked away under the elms, who she was. "That artistic young person, with the dark hair."

"Artistic? Do you mean Mattie Smith?--the girl with the bad manners?" asked Imogen, smiling tolerantly.

"Yes, she looked like a clever young person. She belongs to the club?"

"She hardly counts as one of its members, though we welcome everyone, and, like all the girls of the village, she enjoys the use of our library. She is not clever, however. She is an envious and a rather ill-tempered girl, with very little of the spirit of sisterhood in her. 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. Imogen, too, could not have borne a rival ascendancy; but she was ascendant through right divine, and, while so acutely understanding Mattie Smith's state of mind, she could not recognize a certain sameness of nature. She hoped that Mattie Smith would "grow," but she felt that, essentially, she was not of the sort from which "hers" were made.

XVIII

It was almost four o'clock by the time that Imogen and Sir Basil reached the summit of one of the lower hills, and, among the trees, came upon the white glimmer of the Upton's summer home. It stood in a wide clearing surrounded on three sides by the woods, the higher ranges rising about it, its lawn running down to slopes of long gra.s.s, thick with tall daisies and b.u.t.tercups. Farther on was an orchard, and then, beyond the dip of a valley, the blue, undulating distance, bathed in a crystalline quivering.

The house, of rough white stucco, had lintels and window-frames of dark wood, a roof of gray shingles, and bright green shutters. A wide veranda ran around it, wreathed in vines and creepers, and borders of flowers grew to the edges of the woods. Sir Basil thought that he had never seen anything prettier. Valerie, dressed in thin black, was sitting on the veranda, and beside her Miss Boc.o.c.k, still in traveling dress, looked incongruously ungraceful. She had arrived an hour before with the Pottses, who had gone to their rooms, and said, in answer to Imogen's kindly queries, that the journey hadn't been bad, though the train was very stuffy. Then it appeared that Miss Boc.o.c.k and Sir Basil were acquainted; they recollected each other, shook hands heartily, and asked and answered local questions. Miss Boc.o.c.k'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 Boc.o.c.k her _protegee_, but Miss Boc.o.c.k, very vexatiously, seemed always oblivious of that fact; so that Imogen, though feeling that she had secured a guest who conferred l.u.s.ter, couldn't resist, now and then, trying to bring her to a slightly clearer sense of obligation.

Miss Boc.o.c.k 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.

"Let me get you a white rose," Imogen suggested; but Miss Boc.o.c.k said, no, thanks, she was very fond of that shade of red.

"So you know Sir Basil," said Imogen, repressing her sense of irritation.

"Know him? Yes, of course. Everybody in the county knows him. He is the big man thereabouts, you see. The old squire, his father, was very fond of my father, and we go to a garden-party at the hall once a year or so. It's a nice old place."

Imogen felt some perplexity. "But if your father and his were such friends why don't you see more of each other?"

Miss Boc.o.c.k looked cheerfully at her. "Why, because he is big and we aren't. We are middle-cla.s.s and he very much upper; it's a very old family, the Thremdons,--I forget for how many generations they have been in Surrey.

Now my dear old dad was only a country doctor," Miss Boc.o.c.k went on, seated in a rocking-chair--she liked rocking-chairs--with her knees crossed, her horribly shaped patent-leather shoes displayed and her clear eyes, through their gla.s.ses, fixed on Imogen while she made these unshrinking statements; "and a country doctor's family hasn't much to do with county people."

"What an ugly thing," said Imogen, while, swiftly, her mind adjusted itself to this new seeing of Miss Boc.o.c.k. By its illumination Miss Boc.o.c.k's a.s.surance toward herself grew more irritating than before, and the fact that Miss Boc.o.c.k's flavor was very different from Sir Basil's became apparent.

"Not at all," said Miss Boc.o.c.k. "It's a natural crystallization. You are working toward the same sort of thing over here--only not in such a wholesome way, I think."