A Fountain Sealed

mind. An interview with Jack usually left her lapped about with a warm sense of security; she couldn't feel desolate, even with the greatness of her loss so upon her, when such devotion surrounded

and serenely in one's place and watch it hover. It was, after all, as if she had strung herself to an attitude of str

for you-to be hurt all your life by a butterfly." But he had been far, far too big to let it spoil anyt

, the crimson curtains drawn on a snowy street,-had happened the earliest of the episodes that her memory recalled as having so placed her, so defined her attitude, even for her almost babyish apprehension. She had brought down her dolls from her nursery, after tea, and ranged them on the sofa, while her father walked up and down the room, his hands in his pockets, his head thrown back, reciting something to himself, some poem, or stately fragment of antique oratory. He paused now and then as he passed her and laid

ght, in his gentleness, and that she, in her vividness, must be wrong. She felt that for herself, even before, turning as if from an unseemly contest, her father said, looking down at her

him, not looking at her mother, knowing in her childish soul tha

ome her mother's voice, but with a deadened

Valerie, never to lie fo

who needs me; the tr

a dinner engagement, at the last hour,

al conventions and social ideals will always go down for me, Valerie, before

rply and swept out of the room, the sense of united triumph had made him bend down to her and made her stretch her arms tip to him, so that, in their l

ny projects for reform and philanthropy. Both he and Mrs. Potts adored her father. He lent them, indeed, all their significance; they were there, as it were, only for the purpose of crystallizing around his magnetic center. And of these good people her mother had said, in her crisp, merry voice, "I hate 'em,"-disposing of the whole question of value, flipping the Pottses away into space, as it were, and separating herself from any interest in them. Even then little Imogen had comprehendingly shared her father's still indignation for such levity. Hate the excellent Pottses, who wrote so beautifully of her father's books, so worshiped all

wn it-with a kindly smile and a pleasant sense of benign onlooking at oddity. One met there young girls dressed in the strangest ways and affecting the manners of budding Margaret Fullers-young writers or musicians or social workers, and funny frowsy, sole

coiled behind, and a fat face, pale fawn-color in tint, encompassing with waste of cheek and chin such a small group of features-the small, straight nose, the small, sharp eyes, the small,

yebrow, a long nose, that his wife often fondly alluded to as "aristocratic" (they were keen on "blood," the Delancy Pottses), and a very retreating chi

disapproved more, almost, than they disapproved of municipal corruption and "the smart set." As onlooker she had been forced to own that her mother's manner toward them had been quite perfect. She had accepted them as her husband's mourners; had accepted them as Imogen's friends; h

alf-decisive, "I hate 'em," as if to throw up the final barrier of her own perversity before pursuit. Not that she hadn't been decent enough in her actual treatment, it was rather that she would never take the Pottses, or any of the others-oddities she evidentl

longer laughed and no longer lost its temper, but that, quiet, kind, observant, went its own way, leaving her father to go his. The last memory that came up for her was of what had followed such a storm. It seemed to mark an epoch, to close the chapter of

that to do so was selfish; so that, as she listened to the undisciplined grief, and thought that it might be well for her to go in to her mother and con

gods

not the tumul

uoted to her and she always thou

sat on, stroking her hair and hand, the door softly opened and her mother came in. Imogen could see her, in her long white dressing-gown, with her wide braids falling on either side, all the traces of weeping carefully effaced. She often came in so to kiss Imogen good-night, gently, and with a slight touch of shyness, as though she knew herself shut away from the inner chamber of the child's heart, and the moment was their tenderest, for Imogen, understanding, though powerless to respond, never felt so s

gment; and if she felt the need of sustainment, she never claimed it. It would, indeed, have been rather fruitless to claim it from the fourth member of the family group. Eddy seemed so little to belong to the group. As far as he went, to be sure, he went always with her and against his father, but then Eddy never went far en

onventionality in the family life; and Imogen, even now, could not see quite clearly whether it had been she who had judged and abandoned her husband, or he

his country a base travesty of the doctrine, the largeness of their grasp was perhaps a trifle loose. Imogen did not see it. Her appreciation was more of aims than of achievements; but she felt that her father's writings were the body, only, of his message; its spirit lived-lived in herself and in all those with whom he had come in fruitful-contact. It was to hand on the meaning of that spirit that she felt herself dedicat