Imogen and Sir Basil were walking down a woodland path under the sky of American summer, a vast, high, cloudless dome of blue. Trees, tall and delicate, in early June foliage, grew closely on the hillside; the grass of the open glades was thick with wild Solomon's-seal, and fragile clusters of wild columbine grew in the niches and crannies of the rocks, their pale-red chalices filled with fantastically fretted gold.

Imogen, dressed in thin black lawn, fine plaitings of white at throat and wrists, her golden head uncovered, walked a little before Sir Basil with her long, light, deliberate step. She had an errand in the village two miles away, and her mother had suggested that Sir Basil should go with her and have some first impressions of rural New England. He had only arrived the night before. Miss Bocock and the Pottses were expected this afternoon, and Mrs. Wake had been for a fortnight established in her tiny cottage on the opposite hillside.

"Tell me about your village here," Sir Basil had said, and Imogen, with punctual courtesy and kindness, the carrying out of her promise to Jack, had rejoined: "It would be rather uneventful annals that I should have to tell you. The people are palely prosperous. They lead monotonous lives. They look forward for variety and interest, I think, to the summer, when all of us are here. One does all one can, then, to make some color for them. I have organized a kindergarten for the tiny children, and a girls' club for debates and reading; it will help to an awakening I believe. I'm going to the club this afternoon. I'm very grateful to my girls for helping me as they do to be of use to them. It's quite wonderful what they have done already. Our village life is in no sense like yours in England, you know; these people are all very proud and independent. It's as a friend, not as a Lady Bountiful, that I go among them."

"I see," said Sir Basil, with interest, "that's awfully nice all round. I wish we could get rid of a lot of stupid ways of thought at home. I'll see something of these friends of yours at the house, then. I'm immensely interested in all these differences, you know."

"You won't see them at the house. Our relation is friendly, not social.
That is a froth that doesn't count."

"Oh! and they don't mind that—not having the social relation, I mean—if they are friends?"

"Why should they? I am not hurt because they do not ask me to their picnics and parties, nor are they because I don't ask them to my dinners and teas. We both understand that all that is a matter of manner and accident; that in essentials we are equal."

"I see; but," Sir Basil still queried, "you wouldn't care about their parties, I suppose, and don't you think they might like your dinners? At least that's the way it would work out, I'm afraid, at home."

"Ah, it doesn't here. They are too civilized for that. Neither of us would feel fitted to the superficial aspects of the others' lives."

"We have that sort of thing in England, too, you know; only perhaps we look at it more from the other side, and recognize difference rather than sameness."

"Very much more, I think," said Imogen with a slight smile. "I should think that there was very little resemblance. Your social structure is a wholesome, natural growth, embodying ideals that, in the main, are unconscious. We started from that and have been building ever since toward conscious ideals."

"Well,"—Sir Basil passed over this simile, a little perplexed,—"it's very wonderful that they shouldn't feel—inferior, you know, in our ugly sense of the word, if they only get one side of friendship and not the other. Now that's how we manage in England, you see; but then I'm afraid it doesn't work out as you say it does here; I'm afraid they do feel inferior, after a fashion."

"Only the truly inferior could feel inferiority, since they get the real side of friendship," said Imogen, with gentle authority. "And I can't think that, in our sense of the word, the real side is given with you. There is conscious condescension, conscious adaptation to a standard supposed lower."

"I see; I see"; Sir Basil murmured, looking, while still perplexed, rather conscience-stricken; "yes, I suppose you're right."

Imogen looked as though she more than supposed it, and, feeling himself quite worsted, Sir Basil went on to ask her further questions about the club and kindergarten.

"What a lot of work it must all mean for you," he said.

"That, I think, is one's only right to the advantages one has—education, taste, inherited traditions," said Imogen, willing to enlighten this charmingly civilized, yet spiritually barbarous, interlocutor who followed her, tall, in his delightfully outdoor-looking garments, his tie and the tilt of his Panama hat answering her nicest sense of fitness, and his handsome brown face, quizzical, yet very attentive, meeting her eyes on its leafy background whenever she turned her head. "If they are not made instruments to use for others they rust in our hands and poison us," she said. "That's the only real significance of an aristocracy, a class fitted to serve, with the highest service, the needs of all. Of course, much of our best and deepest thought about these things is English; don't imagine me ungrateful to the noble thinkers of your—of my—race,—they have moulded and inspired us; but, there is the strange paradox of your civilization, your thought reacts so little on your life. Your idealists and seers count only for your culture, and even in your culture affect so little the automatic existence of your people. They form a little isolated class, a leaven that lies outside the lump. Now, with us, thought rises, works, ferments through every section of our common life."

Quite without fire, almost indolently, she spoke; very simply, too, glancing round at him, as though she could not expect much understanding from such an alien listener.

"I'm awfully glad, you know, to get you to talk to me like this," said Sir Basil, after a meditative pause; "I saw a good bit of you in New York, but you never talked much with me."

"You had mama to talk to."

"But I want to talk to you, too. You do a lot of thinking, I can see that."

"I try to"; she smiled a little at his naÏvetÉ.

"Your mother told me so much about you that I'm tremendously eager to know you for myself."

"Well, I hope that you may come to, for mama's pictures of me are not likely to be accurate," said Imogen mildly. "We don't think in the same way or see things in the same way and, though we are so fond of each other, we are not interested in the same things. Perhaps that is why I don't interest her particular friends. They would not find much in common between mama and me"; but her smile was now a little humorous and she was quite prepared for his "Oh, but, I assure you, I am interested in you."

Already, with her unerring instinct for power, Imogen knew that Sir Basil was interested in her. There was only, to be sure, a languid pleasure in the sense of power over a person already, as it were, so bespoken, so in bondage to other altars; but, though without a trace of coquetry, the smile quietly claimed him as a partial, a damaged convert. Imogen always knew when people were capable of being, as she expressed it to herself, "Hers." She made small effort for those who were without the capacity. She never misdirected such smiles upon Rose, or Miss Bocock, or Mrs. Wake. And now, as Sir Basil went on to asseverate, just behind her shoulder, his pleasant tones quite touched with eagerness, that the more he saw of her the more interested he became, she allowed him to draw her into a playful argument on the subject.

"Yes, I quite believe that you would like me—if you came to know me"—she was willing to concede at last; "but, no, indeed no, I don't think that you would ever feel much interest in me."

"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 assurance, and, with them, the sweetness, of this young girl were charming and perplexing to Sir Basil. Girls so assured 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 passing 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 spacious, 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 classic faÇade 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 hitched to posts along the pavements. The faces that passed 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 assured, perhaps too assured, but that Sir Basil did not observe. He found her voice unpleasant and her pronunciation 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 lustrous "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.