Page:A fountain sealed by Sedgwick, Anne Douglas.djvu/12

6 lence; his wealth irked him and, full of a democratic transcendentalism, he longed to efface all the signs that separated him from the average toiler. While Rose was quite ignorant of her own country west of the Atlantic seaboard, Jack had wandered North, South, West. As for Mary, she had hardly left Boston in her life, except to go to the Massachusetts coast in summer and to pay a rare visit now and then to New York. It was of such a visit that she had been talking to them and of the friend who, since her own return home only a few days before, had suffered a sudden bereavement in the death of her father. Jack Pennington, also a near friend of Imogen Upton's, had just come from New York, where he had been with her during the mournful ceremonies of death, and Mary Colton, after a little pause, had said, "I suppose she was very wonderful through it all."

"She bore up very well," said Jack Pennington. "There would never be anything selfish in her grief."

"Never. And when one thinks what a grief it is. She is wonderful," said Mary.

"You think every one wonderful, Molly," Rose Packer remarked, not at all aggressively, but with her air of quiet ill-temper.

"Mary's enthusiasm has hit the mark this time," said Pennington, casting a glance more scrutinizing than severe upon the girl.

"I really can't see it. Of course Imogen Upton is pretty—remarkably pretty—though I 've always