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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Touchstone, by Edith Wharton
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Touchstone
+
+Author: Edith Wharton
+
+Posting Date: July 12, 2008 [EBook #267]
+Release Date: May, 1995
+[Last updated: September 4, 2017]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TOUCHSTONE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Judith Boss
+
+
+
+
+
+THE TOUCHSTONE
+
+By Edith Wharton
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+“Professor Joslin, who, as our readers are doubtless aware, is engaged in
+writing the life of Mrs. Aubyn, asks us to state that he will be greatly
+indebted to any of the famous novelist’s friends who will furnish
+him with information concerning the period previous to her coming to
+England. Mrs. Aubyn had so few intimate friends, and consequently so few
+regular correspondents, that letters will be of special value. Professor
+Joslin’s address is 10 Augusta Gardens, Kensington, and he begs us to
+say that he will promptly return any documents entrusted to him.”
+
+Glennard dropped the SPECTATOR and sat looking into the fire. The club
+was filling up, but he still had to himself the small inner room, with
+its darkening outlook down the rain-streaked prospect of Fifth Avenue.
+It was all dull and dismal enough, yet a moment earlier his boredom had
+been perversely tinged by a sense of resentment at the thought that, as
+things were going, he might in time have to surrender even the despised
+privilege of boring himself within those particular four walls. It was
+not that he cared much for the club, but that the remote contingency of
+having to give it up stood to him, just then, perhaps by very reason
+of its insignificance and remoteness, for the symbol of his increasing
+abnegations; of that perpetual paring-off that was gradually reducing
+existence to the naked business of keeping himself alive. It was the
+futility of his multiplied shifts and privations that made them
+seem unworthy of a high attitude; the sense that, however rapidly he
+eliminated the superfluous, his cleared horizon was likely to offer no
+nearer view of the one prospect toward which he strained. To give up
+things in order to marry the woman one loves is easier than to give them
+up without being brought appreciably nearer to such a conclusion.
+
+Through the open door he saw young Hollingsworth rise with a yawn
+from the ineffectual solace of a brandy-and-soda and transport his
+purposeless person to the window. Glennard measured his course with a
+contemptuous eye. It was so like Hollingsworth to get up and look out of
+the window just as it was growing too dark to see anything! There was
+a man rich enough to do what he pleased--had he been capable of
+being pleased--yet barred from all conceivable achievement by his own
+impervious dulness; while, a few feet off, Glennard, who wanted only
+enough to keep a decent coat on his back and a roof over the head of the
+woman he loved Glennard, who had sweated, toiled, denied himself for
+the scant measure of opportunity that his zeal would have converted into
+a kingdom--sat wretchedly calculating that, even when he had resigned
+from the club, and knocked off his cigars, and given up his Sundays out
+of town, he would still be no nearer attainment.
+
+The SPECTATOR had slipped to his feet and as he picked it up his eye
+fell again on the paragraph addressed to the friends of Mrs. Aubyn. He
+had read it for the first time with a scarcely perceptible quickening of
+attention: her name had so long been public property that his eye passed
+it unseeingly, as the crowd in the street hurries without a glance by
+some familiar monument.
+
+“Information concerning the period previous to her coming to
+England....” The words were an evocation. He saw her again as she had
+looked at their first meeting, the poor woman of genius with her long
+pale face and short-sighted eyes, softened a little by the grace of
+youth and inexperience, but so incapable even then of any hold upon
+the pulses. When she spoke, indeed, she was wonderful, more wonderful,
+perhaps, than when later, to Glennard’s fancy at least, the consciousness
+of memorable things uttered seemed to take from even her most intimate
+speech the perfect bloom of privacy. It was in those earliest days, if
+ever, that he had come near loving her; though even then his sentiment
+had lived only in the intervals of its expression. Later, when to
+be loved by her had been a state to touch any man’s imagination, the
+physical reluctance had, inexplicably, so overborne the intellectual
+attraction, that the last years had been, to both of them, an agony of
+conflicting impulses. Even now, if, in turning over old papers, his hand
+lit on her letters, the touch filled him with inarticulate misery....
+
+“She had so few intimate friends... that letters will be of special
+value.” So few intimate friends! For years she had had but one; one
+who in the last years had requited her wonderful pages, her tragic
+outpourings of love, humility, and pardon, with the scant phrases by
+which a man evades the vulgarest of sentimental importunities. He
+had been a brute in spite of himself, and sometimes, now that the
+remembrance of her face had faded, and only her voice and words remained
+with him, he chafed at his own inadequacy, his stupid inability to rise
+to the height of her passion. His egoism was not of a kind to mirror its
+complacency in the adventure. To have been loved by the most brilliant
+woman of her day, and to have been incapable of loving her, seemed to
+him, in looking back, the most derisive evidence of his limitations; and
+his remorseful tenderness for her memory was complicated with a sense of
+irritation against her for having given him once for all the measure of
+his emotional capacity. It was not often, however, that he thus probed
+the past. The public, in taking possession of Mrs. Aubyn, had eased his
+shoulders of their burden. There was something fatuous in an attitude of
+sentimental apology toward a memory already classic: to reproach one’s
+self for not having loved Margaret Aubyn was a good deal like being
+disturbed by an inability to admire the Venus of Milo. From her
+cold niche of fame she looked down ironically enough on his
+self-flagellations.... It was only when he came on something that
+belonged to her that he felt a sudden renewal of the old feeling, the
+strange dual impulse that drew him to her voice but drove him from her
+hand, so that even now, at sight of anything she had touched, his heart
+contracted painfully. It happened seldom nowadays. Her little presents,
+one by one, had disappeared from his rooms, and her letters, kept from
+some unacknowledged puerile vanity in the possession of such treasures,
+seldom came beneath his hand....
+
+“Her letters will be of special value--” Her letters! Why, he must have
+hundreds of them--enough to fill a volume. Sometimes it used to seem
+to him that they came with every post--he used to avoid looking in his
+letter-box when he came home to his rooms--but her writing seemed to
+spring out at him as he put his key in the door--.
+
+He stood up and strolled into the other room. Hollingsworth, lounging
+away from the window, had joined himself to a languidly convivial group
+of men to whom, in phrases as halting as though they struggled to define
+an ultimate idea, he was expounding the cursed nuisance of living in
+a hole with such a damned climate that one had to get out of it by
+February, with the contingent difficulty of there being no place to take
+one’s yacht to in winter but that other played-out hole, the Riviera.
+From the outskirts of this group Glennard wandered to another, where
+a voice as different as possible from Hollingsworth’s colorless organ
+dominated another circle of languid listeners.
+
+“Come and hear Dinslow talk about his patent: admission free,” one of
+the men sang out in a tone of mock resignation.
+
+Dinslow turned to Glennard the confident pugnacity of his smile. “Give
+it another six months and it’ll be talking about itself,” he declared.
+“It’s pretty nearly articulate now.”
+
+“Can it say papa?” someone else inquired.
+
+Dinslow’s smile broadened. “You’ll be deuced glad to say papa to IT
+a year from now,” he retorted. “It’ll be able to support even you in
+affluence. Look here, now, just let me explain to you--”
+
+Glennard moved away impatiently. The men at the club--all but those who
+were “in it”--were proverbially “tired” of Dinslow’s patent, and none
+more so than Glennard, whose knowledge of its merits made it loom large
+in the depressing catalogue of lost opportunities. The relations between
+the two men had always been friendly, and Dinslow’s urgent offers to
+“take him in on the ground floor” had of late intensified Glennard’s
+sense of his own inability to meet good luck half way. Some of the men
+who had paused to listen were already in evening clothes, others on
+their way home to dress; and Glennard, with an accustomed twinge of
+humiliation, said to himself that if he lingered among them it was in
+the miserable hope that one of the number might ask him to dine. Miss
+Trent had told him that she was to go to the opera that evening with her
+rich aunt; and if he should have the luck to pick up a dinner-invitation
+he might join her there without extra outlay.
+
+He moved about the room, lingering here and there in a tentative
+affectation of interest; but though the men greeted him pleasantly no
+one asked him to dine. Doubtless they were all engaged, these men who
+could afford to pay for their dinners, who did not have to hunt for
+invitations as a beggar rummages for a crust in an ash-barrel! But
+no--as Hollingsworth left the lessening circle about the table an
+admiring youth called out--“Holly, stop and dine!”
+
+Hollingsworth turned on him the crude countenance that looked like the
+wrong side of a more finished face. “Sorry I can’t. I’m in for a beastly
+banquet.”
+
+Glennard threw himself into an arm-chair. Why go home in the rain to
+dress? It was folly to take a cab to the opera, it was worse folly to go
+there at all. His perpetual meetings with Alexa Trent were as unfair to
+the girl as they were unnerving to himself. Since he couldn’t marry her,
+it was time to stand aside and give a better man the chance--and
+his thought admitted the ironical implication that in the terms of
+expediency the phrase might stand for Hollingsworth.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+He dined alone and walked home to his rooms in the rain. As he turned
+into Fifth Avenue he caught the wet gleam of carriages on their way to
+the opera, and he took the first side street, in a moment of irritation
+against the petty restrictions that thwarted every impulse. It was
+ridiculous to give up the opera, not because one might possibly be bored
+there, but because one must pay for the experiment.
+
+In his sitting-room, the tacit connivance of the inanimate had centred
+the lamp-light on a photograph of Alexa Trent, placed, in the obligatory
+silver frame, just where, as memory officiously reminded him, Margaret
+Aubyn’s picture had long throned in its stead. Miss Trent’s features
+cruelly justified the usurpation. She had the kind of beauty that comes
+of a happy accord of face and spirit. It is not given to many to have
+the lips and eyes of their rarest mood, and some women go through life
+behind a mask expressing only their anxiety about the butcher’s bill or
+their inability to see a joke. With Miss Trent, face and mind had the
+same high serious contour. She looked like a throned Justice by some
+grave Florentine painter; and it seemed to Glennard that her most
+salient attribute, or that at least to which her conduct gave most
+consistent expression, was a kind of passionate justice--the intuitive
+feminine justness that is so much rarer than a reasoned impartiality.
+Circumstances had tragically combined to develop this instinct into a
+conscious habit. She had seen more than most girls of the shabby side of
+life, of the perpetual tendency of want to cramp the noblest attitude.
+Poverty and misfortune had overhung her childhood and she had none of
+the pretty delusions about life that are supposed to be the crowning
+grace of girlhood. This very competence, which gave her a touching
+reasonableness, made Glennard’s situation more difficult than if he had
+aspired to a princess bred in the purple. Between them they asked
+so little--they knew so well how to make that little do--but they
+understood also, and she especially did not for a moment let him forget,
+that without that little the future they dreamed of was impossible.
+
+The sight of her photograph quickened Glennard’s exasperation. He was
+sick and ashamed of the part he was playing. He had loved her now for
+two years, with the tranquil tenderness that gathers depth and volume
+as it nears fulfilment; he knew that she would wait for him--but the
+certitude was an added pang. There are times when the constancy of the
+woman one cannot marry is almost as trying as that of the woman one does
+not want to.
+
+Glennard turned up his reading-lamp and stirred the fire. He had a long
+evening before him and he wanted to crowd out thought with action. He
+had brought some papers from his office and he spread them out on his
+table and squared himself to the task....
+
+It must have been an hour later that he found himself automatically
+fitting a key into a locked drawer. He had no more notion than a
+somnambulist of the mental process that had led up to this action. He
+was just dimly aware of having pushed aside the papers and the heavy
+calf volumes that a moment before had bounded his horizon, and of laying
+in their place, without a trace of conscious volition, the parcel he had
+taken from the drawer.
+
+The letters were tied in packets of thirty or forty. There were a great
+many packets. On some of the envelopes the ink was fading; on others,
+which bore the English post-mark, it was still fresh. She had been dead
+hardly three years, and she had written, at lengthening intervals, to
+the last....
+
+He undid one of the earlier packets--little notes written during their
+first acquaintance at Hillbridge. Glennard, on leaving college, had
+begun life in his uncle’s law office in the old university town. It was
+there that, at the house of her father, Professor Forth, he had first
+met the young lady then chiefly distinguished for having, after two
+years of a conspicuously unhappy marriage, returned to the protection of
+the paternal roof.
+
+Mrs. Aubyn was at that time an eager and somewhat tragic young woman,
+of complex mind and undeveloped manners, whom her crude experience of
+matrimony had fitted out with a stock of generalizations that exploded
+like bombs in the academic air of Hillbridge. In her choice of a husband
+she had been fortunate enough, if the paradox be permitted, to light on
+one so signally gifted with the faculty of putting himself in the wrong
+that her leaving him had the dignity of a manifesto--made her, as
+it were, the spokeswoman of outraged wifehood. In this light she was
+cherished by that dominant portion of Hillbridge society which was
+least indulgent to conjugal differences, and which found a proportionate
+pleasure in being for once able to feast openly on a dish liberally
+seasoned with the outrageous. So much did this endear Mrs. Aubyn to the
+university ladies that they were disposed from the first to allow her
+more latitude of speech and action than the ill-used wife was generally
+accorded in Hillbridge, where misfortune was still regarded as a
+visitation designed to put people in their proper place and make them
+feel the superiority of their neighbors. The young woman so privileged
+combined with a kind of personal shyness an intellectual audacity that
+was like a deflected impulse of coquetry: one felt that if she had been
+prettier she would have had emotions instead of ideas. She was in fact
+even then what she had always remained: a genius capable of the
+acutest generalizations, but curiously undiscerning where her personal
+susceptibilities were concerned. Her psychology failed her just where it
+serves most women and one felt that her brains would never be a guide
+to her heart. Of all this, however, Glennard thought little in the first
+year of their acquaintance. He was at an age when all the gifts and
+graces are but so much undiscriminated food to the ravening egoism of
+youth. In seeking Mrs. Aubyn’s company he was prompted by an intuitive
+taste for the best as a pledge of his own superiority. The sympathy
+of the cleverest woman in Hillbridge was balm to his craving for
+distinction: it was public confirmation of his secret sense that he was
+cut out for a bigger place. It must not be understood that Glennard was
+vain. Vanity contents itself with the coarsest diet; there is no
+palate so fastidious as that of self-distrust. To a youth of Glennard’s
+aspirations the encouragement of a clever woman stood for the symbol
+of all success. Later, when he had begun to feel his way, to gain a
+foothold, he would not need such support; but it served to carry
+him lightly and easily over what is often a period of insecurity and
+discouragement.
+
+It would be unjust, however, to represent his interest in Mrs. Aubyn as
+a matter of calculation. It was as instinctive as love, and it missed
+being love by just such a hair-breadth deflection from the line of
+beauty as had determined the curve of Mrs. Aubyn’s lips. When they met
+she had just published her first novel, and Glennard, who afterward had
+an ambitious man’s impatience of distinguished women, was young enough
+to be dazzled by the semi-publicity it gave her. It was the kind of book
+that makes elderly ladies lower their voices and call each other “my
+dear” when they furtively discuss it; and Glennard exulted in the
+superior knowledge of the world that enabled him to take as a matter of
+course sentiments over which the university shook its head. Still
+more delightful was it to hear Mrs. Aubyn waken the echoes of academic
+drawing-rooms with audacities surpassing those of her printed page. Her
+intellectual independence gave a touch of comradeship to their intimacy,
+prolonging the illusion of college friendships based on a joyous
+interchange of heresies. Mrs. Aubyn and Glennard represented to each
+other the augur’s wink behind the Hillbridge idol: they walked together
+in that light of young omniscience from which fate so curiously excludes
+one’s elders.
+
+Husbands who are notoriously inopportune, may even die inopportunely,
+and this was the revenge that Mr. Aubyn, some two years after her return
+to Hillbridge, took upon his injured wife. He died precisely at the
+moment when Glennard was beginning to criticise her. It was not that
+she bored him; she did what was infinitely worse--she made him feel his
+inferiority. The sense of mental equality had been gratifying to his raw
+ambition; but as his self-knowledge defined itself, his understanding of
+her also increased; and if man is at times indirectly flattered by the
+moral superiority of woman, her mental ascendency is extenuated by no
+such oblique tribute to his powers. The attitude of looking up is a
+strain on the muscles; and it was becoming more and more Glennard’s
+opinion that brains, in a woman, should be merely the obverse of beauty.
+To beauty Mrs. Aubyn could lay no claim; and while she had enough
+prettiness to exasperate him by her incapacity to make use of it, she
+seemed invincibly ignorant of any of the little artifices whereby women
+contrive to palliate their defects and even to turn them into graces.
+Her dress never seemed a part of her; all her clothes had an impersonal
+air, as though they had belonged to someone else and been borrowed in an
+emergency that had somehow become chronic. She was conscious enough of
+her deficiencies to try to amend them by rash imitations of the most
+approved models; but no woman who does not dress well intuitively will
+ever do so by the light of reason, and Mrs. Aubyn’s plagiarisms, to
+borrow a metaphor of her trade, somehow never seemed to be incorporated
+with the text.
+
+Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair.
+The fame that came to Mrs. Aubyn with her second book left Glennard’s
+imagination untouched, or had at most the negative effect of removing
+her still farther from the circle of his contracting sympathies. We are
+all the sport of time; and fate had so perversely ordered the chronology
+of Margaret Aubyn’s romance that when her husband died Glennard felt as
+though he had lost a friend.
+
+It was not in his nature to be needlessly unkind; and though he was
+in the impregnable position of the man who has given a woman no more
+definable claim on him than that of letting her fancy that he loves
+her, he would not for the world have accentuated his advantage by any
+betrayal of indifference. During the first year of her widowhood their
+friendship dragged on with halting renewals of sentiment, becoming more
+and more a banquet of empty dishes from which the covers were never
+removed; then Glennard went to New York to live and exchanged the faded
+pleasures of intercourse for the comparative novelty of correspondence.
+Her letters, oddly enough, seemed at first to bring her nearer than her
+presence. She had adopted, and she successfully maintained, a note as
+affectionately impersonal as his own; she wrote ardently of her work,
+she questioned him about his, she even bantered him on the inevitable
+pretty girl who was certain before long to divert the current of his
+confidences. To Glennard, who was almost a stranger in New York,
+the sight of Mrs. Aubyn’s writing was like a voice of reassurance in
+surroundings as yet insufficiently aware of him. His vanity found a
+retrospective enjoyment in the sentiment his heart had rejected, and
+this factitious emotion drove him once or twice to Hillbridge, whence,
+after scenes of evasive tenderness, he returned dissatisfied with
+himself and her. As he made room for himself in New York and peopled the
+space he had cleared with the sympathies at the disposal of agreeable
+and self-confident young men, it seemed to him natural to infer that
+Mrs. Aubyn had refurnished in the same manner the void he was not
+unwilling his departure should have left. But in the dissolution of
+sentimental partnerships it is seldom that both associates are able to
+withdraw their funds at the same time; and Glennard gradually learned
+that he stood for the venture on which Mrs. Aubyn had irretrievably
+staked her all. It was not the kind of figure he cared to cut. He had
+no fancy for leaving havoc in his wake and would have preferred to sow
+a quick growth of oblivion in the spaces wasted by his unconsidered
+inroads; but if he supplied the seed it was clearly Mrs. Aubyn’s
+business to see to the raising of the crop. Her attitude seemed indeed
+to throw his own reasonableness into distincter relief: so that they
+might have stood for thrift and improvidence in an allegory of the
+affections.
+
+It was not that Mrs. Aubyn permitted herself to be a pensioner on his
+bounty. He knew she had no wish to keep herself alive on the small
+change of sentiment; she simply fed on her own funded passion, and the
+luxuries it allowed her made him, even then, dimly aware that she had
+the secret of an inexhaustible alchemy.
+
+Their relations remained thus negatively tender till she suddenly wrote
+him of her decision to go abroad to live. Her father had died, she had
+no near ties in Hillbridge, and London offered more scope than New York
+to her expanding personality. She was already famous and her laurels
+were yet unharvested.
+
+For a moment the news roused Glennard to a jealous sense of lost
+opportunities. He wanted, at any rate, to reassert his power before she
+made the final effort of escape. They had not met for over a year, but
+of course he could not let her sail without seeing her. She came to
+New York the day before her departure, and they spent its last hours
+together. Glennard had planned no course of action--he simply meant to
+let himself drift. They both drifted, for a long time, down the languid
+current of reminiscence; she seemed to sit passive, letting him push
+his way back through the overgrown channels of the past. At length she
+reminded him that they must bring their explorations to an end. He rose
+to leave, and stood looking at her with the same uncertainty in his
+heart. He was tired of her already--he was always tired of her--yet he
+was not sure that he wanted her to go.
+
+“I may never see you again,” he said, as though confidently appealing to
+her compassion.
+
+Her look enveloped him. “And I shall see you always--always!”
+
+“Why go then--?” escaped him.
+
+“To be nearer you,” she answered; and the words dismissed him like a
+closing door.
+
+The door was never to reopen; but through its narrow crack Glennard, as
+the years went on, became more and more conscious of an inextinguishable
+light directing its small ray toward the past which consumed so little
+of his own commemorative oil. The reproach was taken from this thought
+by Mrs. Aubyn’s gradual translation into terms of universality. In
+becoming a personage she so naturally ceased to be a person that
+Glennard could almost look back to his explorations of her spirit as on
+a visit to some famous shrine, immortalized, but in a sense desecrated,
+by popular veneration.
+
+Her letters, from London, continued to come with the same tender
+punctuality; but the altered conditions of her life, the vistas of new
+relationships disclosed by every phrase, made her communications as
+impersonal as a piece of journalism. It was as though the state, the
+world, indeed, had taken her off his hands, assuming the maintenance of
+a temperament that had long exhausted his slender store of reciprocity.
+
+In the retrospective light shed by the letters he was blinded to
+their specific meaning. He was not a man who concerned himself with
+literature, and they had been to him, at first, simply the extension of
+her brilliant talk, later the dreaded vehicle of a tragic importunity.
+He knew, of course, that they were wonderful; that, unlike the authors
+who give their essence to the public and keep only a dry rind for their
+friends, Mrs. Aubyn had stored of her rarest vintage for this hidden
+sacrament of tenderness. Sometimes, indeed, he had been oppressed,
+humiliated almost, by the multiplicity of her allusions, the wide scope
+of her interests, her persistence in forcing her superabundance of
+thought and emotion into the shallow receptacle of his sympathy; but
+he had never thought of the letters objectively, as the production of a
+distinguished woman; had never measured the literary significance of her
+oppressive prodigality. He was almost frightened now at the wealth in
+his hands; the obligation of her love had never weighed on him like
+this gift of her imagination: it was as though he had accepted from her
+something to which even a reciprocal tenderness could not have justified
+his claim.
+
+He sat a long time staring at the scattered pages on his desk; and in
+the sudden realization of what they meant he could almost fancy some
+alchemistic process changing them to gold as he stared. He had the
+sense of not being alone in the room, of the presence of another self
+observing from without the stirring of subconscious impulses that sent
+flushes of humiliation to his forehead. At length he stood up, and
+with the gesture of a man who wishes to give outward expression to his
+purpose--to establish, as it were, a moral alibi--swept the letters into
+a heap and carried them toward the grate. But it would have taken too
+long to burn all the packets. He turned back to the table and one by one
+fitted the pages into their envelopes; then he tied up the letters and
+put them back into the locked drawer.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+It was one of the laws of Glennard’s intercourse with Miss Trent that
+he always went to see her the day after he had resolved to give her up.
+There was a special charm about the moments thus snatched from the
+jaws of renunciation; and his sense of their significance was on
+this occasion so keen that he hardly noticed the added gravity of her
+welcome.
+
+His feeling for her had become so vital a part of him that her nearness
+had the quality of imperceptibly readjusting his point of view, so
+that the jumbled phenomena of experience fell at once into a rational
+perspective. In this redistribution of values the sombre retrospect
+of the previous evening shrank to a mere cloud on the edge of
+consciousness. Perhaps the only service an unloved woman can render the
+man she loves is to enhance and prolong his illusions about her rival.
+It was the fate of Margaret Aubyn’s memory to serve as a foil to Miss
+Trent’s presence, and never had the poor lady thrown her successor into
+more vivid relief.
+
+Miss Trent had the charm of still waters that are felt to be renewed
+by rapid currents. Her attention spread a tranquil surface to the
+demonstrations of others, and it was only in days of storm that one felt
+the pressure of the tides. This inscrutable composure was perhaps her
+chief grace in Glennard’s eyes. Reserve, in some natures, implies merely
+the locking of empty rooms or the dissimulation of awkward encumbrances;
+but Miss Trent’s reticence was to Glennard like the closed door to the
+sanctuary, and his certainty of divining the hidden treasure made him
+content to remain outside in the happy expectancy of the neophyte.
+
+“You didn’t come to the opera last night,” she began, in the tone that
+seemed always rather to record a fact than to offer a reflection on it.
+
+He answered with a discouraged gesture. “What was the use? We couldn’t
+have talked.”
+
+“Not as well as here,” she assented; adding, after a meditative pause,
+“As you didn’t come I talked to Aunt Virginia instead.”
+
+“Ah!” he returned, the fact being hardly striking enough to detach him
+from the contemplation of her hands, which had fallen, as was their
+wont, into an attitude full of plastic possibilities. One felt them to
+be hands that, moving only to some purpose, were capable of intervals of
+serene inaction.
+
+“We had a long talk,” Miss Trent went on; and she waited again before
+adding, with the increased absence of stress that marked her graver
+communications, “Aunt Virginia wants me to go abroad with her.”
+
+Glennard looked up with a start. “Abroad? When?”
+
+“Now--next month. To be gone two years.”
+
+He permitted himself a movement of tender derision. “Does she really?
+Well, I want you to go abroad with ME--for any number of years. Which
+offer do you accept?”
+
+“Only one of them seems to require immediate consideration,” she
+returned, with a smile.
+
+Glennard looked at her again. “You’re not thinking of it?”
+
+Her gaze dropped and she unclasped her hands. Her movements were so rare
+that they might have been said to italicize her words. “Aunt Virginia
+talked to me very seriously. It will be a great relief to mother and the
+others to have me provided for in that way for two years. I must
+think of that, you know.” She glanced down at her gown which, under a
+renovated surface, dated back to the first days of Glennard’s wooing. “I
+try not to cost much--but I do.”
+
+“Good Lord!” Glennard groaned.
+
+They sat silent till at length she gently took up the argument. “As the
+eldest, you know, I’m bound to consider these things. Women are such a
+burden. Jim does what he can for mother, but with his own children to
+provide for it isn’t very much. You see, we’re all poor together.”
+
+“Your aunt isn’t. She might help your mother.”
+
+“She does--in her own way.”
+
+“Exactly--that’s the rich relation all over! You may be miserable in
+any way you like, but if you’re to be happy you’ve got to be so in her
+way--and in her old gowns.”
+
+“I could be very happy in Aunt Virginia’s old gowns,” Miss Trent
+interposed.
+
+“Abroad, you mean?”
+
+“I mean wherever I felt that I was helping. And my going abroad will
+help.”
+
+“Of course--I see that. And I see your considerateness in putting its
+advantages negatively.”
+
+“Negatively?”
+
+“In dwelling simply on what the going will take you from, not on what
+it will bring you to. It means a lot to a woman, of course, to get
+away from a life like this.” He summed up in a disparaging glance the
+background of indigent furniture. “The question is how you’ll like
+coming back to it.”
+
+She seemed to accept the full consequences of his thought. “I only know
+I don’t like leaving it.”
+
+He flung back sombrely, “You don’t even put it conditionally then?”
+
+Her gaze deepened. “On what?”
+
+He stood up and walked across the room. Then he came back and paused
+before her. “On the alternative of marrying me.”
+
+The slow color--even her blushes seemed deliberate--rose to her lower
+lids; her lips stirred, but the words resolved themselves into a smile
+and she waited.
+
+He took another turn, with the thwarted step of the man whose nervous
+exasperation escapes through his muscles.
+
+“And to think that in fifteen years I shall have a big practice!”
+
+Her eyes triumphed for him. “In less!”
+
+“The cursed irony of it! What do I care for the man I shall be then?
+It’s slaving one’s life away for a stranger!” He took her hands
+abruptly. “You’ll go to Cannes, I suppose, or Monte Carlo? I heard
+Hollingsworth say to-day that he meant to take his yacht over to the
+Mediterranean--”
+
+She released herself. “If you think that--”
+
+“I don’t. I almost wish I did. It would be easier, I mean.” He broke off
+incoherently. “I believe your Aunt Virginia does, though. She somehow
+connotes Hollingsworth and the Mediterranean.” He caught her hands
+again. “Alexa--if we could manage a little hole somewhere out of town?”
+
+“Could we?” she sighed, half yielding.
+
+“In one of those places where they make jokes about the mosquitoes,” he
+pressed her. “Could you get on with one servant?”
+
+“Could you get on without varnished boots?”
+
+“Promise me you won’t go, then!”
+
+“What are you thinking of, Stephen?”
+
+“I don’t know,” he stammered, the question giving unexpected form to his
+intention. “It’s all in the air yet, of course; but I picked up a tip
+the other day--”
+
+“You’re not speculating?” she cried, with a kind of superstitious
+terror.
+
+“Lord, no. This is a sure thing--I almost wish it wasn’t; I mean if I
+can work it--” He had a sudden vision of the comprehensiveness of the
+temptation. If only he had been less sure of Dinslow! His assurance gave
+the situation the base element of safety.
+
+“I don’t understand you,” she faltered.
+
+“Trust me, instead!” he adjured her, with sudden energy; and turning on
+her abruptly, “If you go, you know, you go free,” he concluded.
+
+She drew back, paling a little. “Why do you make it harder for me?”
+
+“To make it easier for myself,” he retorted.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Glennard, the next afternoon, leaving his office earlier than usual,
+turned, on his way home, into one of the public libraries.
+
+He had the place to himself at that closing hour, and the librarian
+was able to give an undivided attention to his tentative request for
+letters--collections of letters. The librarian suggested Walpole.
+
+“I meant women--women’s letters.”
+
+The librarian proffered Hannah More and Miss Martineau.
+
+Glennard cursed his own inarticulateness. “I mean letters to--to some
+one person--a man; their husband--or--”
+
+“Ah,” said the inspired librarian, “Eloise and Abailard.”
+
+“Well--something a little nearer, perhaps,” said Glennard, with
+lightness. “Didn’t Merimee--”
+
+“The lady’s letters, in that case, were not published.”
+
+“Of course not,” said Glennard, vexed at his blunder.
+
+“There are George Sand’s letters to Flaubert.”
+
+“Ah!” Glennard hesitated. “Was she--were they--?” He chafed at his own
+ignorance of the sentimental by-paths of literature.
+
+“If you want love-letters, perhaps some of the French eighteenth
+century correspondences might suit you better--Mlle. Aisse or Madame de
+Sabran--”
+
+But Glennard insisted. “I want something modern--English or American. I
+want to look something up,” he lamely concluded.
+
+The librarian could only suggest George Eliot.
+
+“Well, give me some of the French things, then--and I’ll have Merimee’s
+letters. It was the woman who published them, wasn’t it?”
+
+He caught up his armful, transferring it, on the doorstep, to a cab
+which carried him to his rooms. He dined alone, hurriedly, at a small
+restaurant near by, and returned at once to his books.
+
+Late that night, as he undressed, he wondered what contemptible impulse
+had forced from him his last words to Alexa Trent. It was bad enough to
+interfere with the girl’s chances by hanging about her to the obvious
+exclusion of other men, but it was worse to seem to justify his weakness
+by dressing up the future in delusive ambiguities. He saw himself
+sinking from depth to depth of sentimental cowardice in his reluctance
+to renounce his hold on her; and it filled him with self-disgust to
+think that the highest feeling of which he supposed himself capable was
+blent with such base elements.
+
+His awakening was hardly cheered by the sight of her writing. He tore
+her note open and took in the few lines--she seldom exceeded the first
+page--with the lucidity of apprehension that is the forerunner of evil.
+
+“My aunt sails on Saturday and I must give her my answer the day after
+to-morrow. Please don’t come till then--I want to think the question
+over by myself. I know I ought to go. Won’t you help me to be
+reasonable?”
+
+It was settled, then. Well, he would be reasonable; he wouldn’t stand
+in her way; he would let her go. For two years he had been living some
+other, luckier man’s life; the time had come when he must drop back into
+his own. He no longer tried to look ahead, to grope his way through
+the endless labyrinth of his material difficulties; a sense of dull
+resignation closed in on him like a fog.
+
+“Hullo, Glennard!” a voice said, as an electric-car, late that
+afternoon, dropped him at an uptown corner.
+
+He looked up and met the interrogative smile of Barton Flamel, who
+stood on the curbstone watching the retreating car with the eye of a man
+philosophic enough to remember that it will be followed by another.
+
+Glennard felt his usual impulse of pleasure at meeting Flamel; but
+it was not in this case curtailed by the reaction of contempt that
+habitually succeeded it. Probably even the few men who had known Flamel
+since his youth could have given no good reason for the vague mistrust
+that he inspired. Some people are judged by their actions, others by
+their ideas; and perhaps the shortest way of defining Flamel is to say
+that his well-known leniency of view was vaguely divined to include
+himself. Simple minds may have resented the discovery that his opinions
+were based on his perceptions; but there was certainly no more definite
+charge against him than that implied in the doubt as to how he would
+behave in an emergency, and his company was looked upon as one of those
+mildly unwholesome dissipations to which the prudent may occasionally
+yield. It now offered itself to Glennard as an easy escape from the
+obsession of moral problems, which somehow could no more be worn in
+Flamel’s presence than a surplice in the street.
+
+“Where are you going? To the club?” Flamel asked; adding, as the younger
+man assented, “Why not come to my studio instead? You’ll see one bore
+instead of twenty.”
+
+The apartment which Flamel described as his studio showed, as its one
+claim to the designation, a perennially empty easel; the rest of its
+space being filled with the evidences of a comprehensive dilettanteism.
+Against this background, which seemed the visible expression of its
+owner’s intellectual tolerance, rows of fine books detached themselves
+with a prominence, showing them to be Flamel’s chief care.
+
+Glennard glanced with the eye of untrained curiosity at the lines of
+warm-toned morocco, while his host busied himself with the uncorking of
+Apollinaris.
+
+“You’ve got a splendid lot of books,” he said.
+
+“They’re fairly decent,” the other assented, in the curt tone of the
+collector who will not talk of his passion for fear of talking of
+nothing else; then, as Glennard, his hands in his pockets, began to
+stroll perfunctorily down the long line of bookcases--“Some men,” Flamel
+irresistibly added, “think of books merely as tools, others as tooling.
+I’m between the two; there are days when I use them as scenery, other
+days when I want them as society; so that, as you see, my library
+represents a makeshift compromise between looks and brains, and the
+collectors look down on me almost as much as the students.”
+
+Glennard, without answering, was mechanically taking one book after
+another from the shelves. His hands slipped curiously over the smooth
+covers and the noiseless subsidence of opening pages. Suddenly he came
+on a thin volume of faded manuscript.
+
+“What’s this?” he asked, with a listless sense of wonder.
+
+“Ah, you’re at my manuscript shelf. I’ve been going in for that sort of
+thing lately.” Flamel came up and looked over his shoulders. “That’s a
+bit of Stendhal--one of the Italian stories--and here are some letters
+of Balzac to Madame Commanville.”
+
+Glennard took the book with sudden eagerness. “Who was Madame
+Commanville?”
+
+“His sister.” He was conscious that Flamel was looking at him with the
+smile that was like an interrogation point. “I didn’t know you cared for
+this kind of thing.”
+
+“I don’t--at least I’ve never had the chance. Have you many collections
+of letters?”
+
+“Lord, no--very few. I’m just beginning, and most of the interesting
+ones are out of my reach. Here’s a queer little collection, though--the
+rarest thing I’ve got--half a dozen of Shelley’s letters to Harriet
+Westbrook. I had a devil of a time getting them--a lot of collectors
+were after them.”
+
+Glennard, taking the volume from his hand, glanced with a kind of
+repugnance at the interleaving of yellow cris-crossed sheets. “She was
+the one who drowned herself, wasn’t she?”
+
+Flamel nodded. “I suppose that little episode adds about fifty per cent.
+to their value,” he said, meditatively.
+
+Glennard laid the book down. He wondered why he had joined Flamel.
+He was in no humor to be amused by the older man’s talk, and a
+recrudescence of personal misery rose about him like an icy tide.
+
+“I believe I must take myself off,” he said. “I’d forgotten an
+engagement.”
+
+He turned to go; but almost at the same moment he was conscious of a
+duality of intention wherein his apparent wish to leave revealed itself
+as a last effort of the will against the overmastering desire to stay
+and unbosom himself to Flamel.
+
+The older man, as though divining the conflict, laid a detaining
+pressure on his arm.
+
+“Won’t the engagement keep? Sit down and try one of these cigars. I
+don’t often have the luck of seeing you here.”
+
+“I’m rather driven just now,” said Glennard, vaguely. He found himself
+seated again, and Flamel had pushed to his side a low stand holding a
+bottle of Apollinaris and a decanter of cognac.
+
+Flamel, thrown back in his capacious arm-chair, surveyed him through
+a cloud of smoke with the comfortable tolerance of the man to whom no
+inconsistencies need be explained. Connivance was implicit in the air.
+It was the kind of atmosphere in which the outrageous loses its edge.
+Glennard felt a gradual relaxing of his nerves.
+
+“I suppose one has to pay a lot for letters like that?” he heard himself
+asking, with a glance in the direction of the volume he had laid aside.
+
+“Oh, so-so--depends on circumstances.” Flamel viewed him thoughtfully.
+“Are you thinking of collecting?”
+
+Glennard laughed. “Lord, no. The other way round.”
+
+“Selling?”
+
+“Oh, I hardly know. I was thinking of a poor chap--”
+
+Flamel filled the pause with a nod of interest.
+
+“A poor chap I used to know--who died--he died last year--and who left
+me a lot of letters, letters he thought a great deal of--he was fond
+of me and left ‘em to me outright, with the idea, I suppose, that
+they might benefit me somehow--I don’t know--I’m not much up on such
+things--” he reached his hand to the tall glass his host had filled.
+
+“A collection of autograph letters, eh? Any big names?”
+
+“Oh, only one name. They’re all letters written to him--by one person,
+you understand; a woman, in fact--”
+
+“Oh, a woman,” said Flamel, negligently.
+
+Glennard was nettled by his obvious loss of interest. “I rather think
+they’d attract a good deal of notice if they were published.”
+
+Flamel still looked uninterested. “Love-letters, I suppose?”
+
+“Oh, just--the letters a woman would write to a man she knew well. They
+were tremendous friends, he and she.”
+
+“And she wrote a clever letter?”
+
+“Clever? It was Margaret Aubyn.”
+
+A great silence filled the room. It seemed to Glennard that the words
+had burst from him as blood gushes from a wound.
+
+“Great Scott!” said Flamel, sitting up. “A collection of Margaret
+Aubyn’s letters? Did you say YOU had them?”
+
+“They were left me--by my friend.”
+
+“I see. Was he--well, no matter. You’re to be congratulated, at any
+rate. What are you going to do with them?”
+
+Glennard stood up with a sense of weariness in all his bones. “Oh, I
+don’t know. I haven’t thought much about it. I just happened to see that
+some fellow was writing her life--”
+
+“Joslin; yes. You didn’t think of giving them to him?”
+
+Glennard had lounged across the room and stood staring up at a bronze
+Bacchus who drooped his garlanded head above the pediment of an Italian
+cabinet. “What ought I to do? You’re just the fellow to advise me.” He
+felt the blood in his cheek as he spoke.
+
+Flamel sat with meditative eye. “What do you WANT to do with them?” he
+asked.
+
+“I want to publish them,” said Glennard, swinging round with sudden
+energy--“If I can--”
+
+“If you can? They’re yours, you say?”
+
+“They’re mine fast enough. There’s no one to prevent--I mean there are
+no restrictions--” he was arrested by the sense that these accumulated
+proofs of impunity might precisely stand as the strongest check on his
+action.
+
+“And Mrs. Aubyn had no family, I believe?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“Then I don’t see who’s to interfere,” said Flamel, studying his
+cigar-tip.
+
+Glennard had turned his unseeing stare on an ecstatic Saint Catherine
+framed in tarnished gilding.
+
+“It’s just this way,” he began again, with an effort. “When letters are
+as personal as--as these of my friend’s.... Well, I don’t mind telling
+you that the cash would make a heap of difference to me; such a lot that
+it rather obscures my judgment--the fact is if I could lay my hand on a
+few thousands now I could get into a big thing, and without appreciable
+risk; and I’d like to know whether you think I’d be justified--under the
+circumstances....” He paused, with a dry throat. It seemed to him at the
+moment that it would be impossible for him ever to sink lower in his own
+estimation. He was in truth less ashamed of weighing the temptation than
+of submitting his scruples to a man like Flamel, and affecting to appeal
+to sentiments of delicacy on the absence of which he had consciously
+reckoned. But he had reached a point where each word seemed to compel
+another, as each wave in a stream is forced forward by the pressure
+behind it; and before Flamel could speak he had faltered out--“You don’t
+think people could say... could criticise the man....”
+
+“But the man’s dead, isn’t he?”
+
+“He’s dead--yes; but can I assume the responsibility without--”
+
+Flamel hesitated; and almost immediately Glennard’s scruples gave way
+to irritation. If at this hour Flamel were to affect an inopportune
+reluctance--!
+
+The older man’s answer reassured him. “Why need you assume any
+responsibility? Your name won’t appear, of course; and as to your
+friend’s, I don’t see why his should, either. He wasn’t a celebrity
+himself, I suppose?”
+
+“No, no.”
+
+“Then the letters can be addressed to Mr. Blank. Doesn’t that make it
+all right?”
+
+Glennard’s hesitation revived. “For the public, yes. But I don’t see
+that it alters the case for me. The question is, ought I to publish them
+at all?”
+
+“Of course you ought to.” Flamel spoke with invigorating emphasis. “I
+doubt if you’d be justified in keeping them back. Anything of Margaret
+Aubyn’s is more or less public property by this time. She’s too great
+for any one of us. I was only wondering how you could use them to the
+best advantage--to yourself, I mean. How many are there?”
+
+“Oh, a lot; perhaps a hundred--I haven’t counted. There may be more....”
+
+“Gad! What a haul! When were they written?”
+
+“I don’t know--that is--they corresponded for years. What’s the odds?”
+ He moved toward his hat with a vague impulse of flight.
+
+“It all counts,” said Flamel, imperturbably. “A long
+correspondence--one, I mean, that covers a great deal of time--is
+obviously worth more than if the same number of letters had been written
+within a year. At any rate, you won’t give them to Joslin? They’d fill a
+book, wouldn’t they?”
+
+“I suppose so. I don’t know how much it takes to fill a book.”
+
+“Not love-letters, you say?”
+
+“Why?” flashed from Glennard.
+
+“Oh, nothing--only the big public is sentimental, and if they WERE--why,
+you could get any money for Margaret Aubyn’s love-letters.”
+
+Glennard was silent.
+
+“Are the letters interesting in themselves? I mean apart from the
+association with her name?”
+
+“I’m no judge.” Glennard took up his hat and thrust himself into his
+overcoat. “I dare say I sha’n’t do anything about it. And, Flamel--you
+won’t mention this to anyone?”
+
+“Lord, no. Well, I congratulate you. You’ve got a big thing.” Flamel was
+smiling at him from the hearth.
+
+Glennard, on the threshold, forced a response to the smile, while he
+questioned with loitering indifference--“Financially, eh?”
+
+“Rather; I should say so.”
+
+Glennard’s hand lingered on the knob. “How much--should you say? You
+know about such things.”
+
+“Oh, I should have to see the letters; but I should say--well, if you’ve
+got enough to fill a book and they’re fairly readable, and the book is
+brought out at the right time--say ten thousand down from the publisher,
+and possibly one or two more in royalties. If you got the publishers
+bidding against each other you might do even better; but of course I’m
+talking in the dark.”
+
+“Of course,” said Glennard, with sudden dizziness. His hand had slipped
+from the knob and he stood staring down at the exotic spirals of the
+Persian rug beneath his feet.
+
+“I’d have to see the letters,” Flamel repeated.
+
+“Of course--you’d have to see them....” Glennard stammered; and, without
+turning, he flung over his shoulder an inarticulate “Good-by....”
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+The little house, as Glennard strolled up to it between the trees,
+seemed no more than a gay tent pitched against the sunshine. It had the
+crispness of a freshly starched summer gown, and the geraniums on the
+veranda bloomed as simultaneously as the flowers in a bonnet. The garden
+was prospering absurdly. Seed they had sown at random--amid laughing
+counter-charges of incompetence--had shot up in fragrant defiance of
+their blunders. He smiled to see the clematis unfolding its punctual
+wings about the porch. The tiny lawn was smooth as a shaven cheek, and a
+crimson rambler mounted to the nursery-window of a baby who never cried.
+A breeze shook the awning above the tea-table, and his wife, as he drew
+near, could be seen bending above a kettle that was just about to boil.
+So vividly did the whole scene suggest the painted bliss of a stage
+setting, that it would have been hardly surprising to see her step
+forward among the flowers and trill out her virtuous happiness from the
+veranda-rail.
+
+The stale heat of the long day in town, the dusty promiscuity of the
+suburban train were now but the requisite foil to an evening of scented
+breezes and tranquil talk. They had been married more than a year,
+and each home-coming still reflected the freshness of their first day
+together. If, indeed, their happiness had a flaw, it was in resembling
+too closely the bright impermanence of their surroundings. Their love as
+yet was but the gay tent of holiday-makers.
+
+His wife looked up with a smile. The country life suited her, and her
+beauty had gained depth from a stillness in which certain faces might
+have grown opaque.
+
+“Are you very tired?” she asked, pouring his tea.
+
+“Just enough to enjoy this.” He rose from the chair in which he had
+thrown himself and bent over the tray for his cream. “You’ve had a
+visitor?” he commented, noticing a half-empty cup beside her own.
+
+“Only Mr. Flamel,” she said, indifferently.
+
+“Flamel? Again?”
+
+She answered without show of surprise. “He left just now. His yacht is
+down at Laurel Bay and he borrowed a trap of the Dreshams to drive over
+here.”
+
+Glennard made no comment, and she went on, leaning her head back against
+the cushions of her bamboo-seat, “He wants us to go for a sail with him
+next Sunday.”
+
+Glennard meditatively stirred his tea. He was trying to think of the
+most natural and unartificial thing to say, and his voice seemed to come
+from the outside, as though he were speaking behind a marionette. “Do
+you want to?”
+
+“Just as you please,” she said, compliantly. No affectation of
+indifference could have been as baffling as her compliance. Glennard, of
+late, was beginning to feel that the surface which, a year ago, he
+had taken for a sheet of clear glass, might, after all, be a mirror
+reflecting merely his own conception of what lay behind it.
+
+“Do you like Flamel?” he suddenly asked; to which, still engaged with
+her tea, she returned the feminine answer--“I thought you did.”
+
+“I do, of course,” he agreed, vexed at his own incorrigible tendency to
+magnify Flamel’s importance by hovering about the topic. “A sail would
+be rather jolly; let’s go.”
+
+She made no reply and he drew forth the rolled-up evening papers which
+he had thrust into his pocket on leaving the train. As he smoothed them
+out his own countenance seemed to undergo the same process. He ran his
+eye down the list of stocks and Flamel’s importunate personality receded
+behind the rows of figures pushing forward into notice like so many
+bearers of good news. Glennard’s investments were flowering like his
+garden: the dryest shares blossomed into dividends, and a golden harvest
+awaited his sickle.
+
+He glanced at his wife with the tranquil air of the man who digests
+good luck as naturally as the dry ground absorbs a shower. “Things are
+looking uncommonly well. I believe we shall be able to go to town for
+two or three months next winter if we can find something cheap.”
+
+She smiled luxuriously: it was pleasant to be able to say, with an air
+of balancing relative advantages, “Really, on the baby’s account I shall
+be almost sorry; but if we do go, there’s Kate Erskine’s house... she’ll
+let us have it for almost nothing....”
+
+“Well, write her about it,” he recommended, his eyes travelling on
+in search of the weather report. He had turned to the wrong page; and
+suddenly a line of black characters leapt out at him as from an ambush.
+
+“‘Margaret Aubyn’s Letters.’ Two volumes. Out to-day. First edition of
+five thousand sold out before leaving the press. Second edition ready
+next week. THE BOOK OF THE YEAR....”
+
+He looked up stupidly. His wife still sat with her head thrown back,
+her pure profile detached against the cushions. She was smiling a little
+over the prospect his last words had opened. Behind her head shivers
+of sun and shade ran across the striped awning. A row of maples and
+a privet hedge hid their neighbor’s gables, giving them undivided
+possession of their leafy half-acre; and life, a moment before, had
+been like their plot of ground, shut off, hedged in from importunities,
+impenetrably his and hers. Now it seemed to him that every maple-leaf,
+every privet-bud, was a relentless human gaze, pressing close upon their
+privacy. It was as though they sat in a brightly lit room, uncurtained
+from a darkness full of hostile watchers.... His wife still smiled; and
+her unconsciousness of danger seemed, in some horrible way, to put her
+beyond the reach of rescue....
+
+He had not known that it would be like this. After the first odious
+weeks, spent in preparing the letters for publication, in submitting
+them to Flamel, and in negotiating with the publishers, the transaction
+had dropped out of his consciousness into that unvisited limbo to which
+we relegate the deeds we would rather not have done but have no notion
+of undoing. From the moment he had obtained Miss Trent’s promise not
+to sail with her aunt he had tried to imagine himself irrevocably
+committed. After that, he argued, his first duty was to her--she had
+become his conscience. The sum obtained from the publishers by Flamel’s
+adroit manipulations and opportunely transferred to Dinslow’s successful
+venture, already yielded a return which, combined with Glennard’s
+professional earnings, took the edge of compulsion from their way of
+living, making it appear the expression of a graceful preference for
+simplicity. It was the mitigated poverty which can subscribe to a review
+or two and have a few flowers on the dinner-table. And already in
+a small way Glennard was beginning to feel the magnetic quality of
+prosperity. Clients who had passed his door in the hungry days sought
+it out now that it bore the name of a successful man. It was understood
+that a small inheritance, cleverly invested, was the source of his
+fortune; and there was a feeling that a man who could do so well for
+himself was likely to know how to turn over other people’s money.
+
+But it was in the more intimate reward of his wife’s happiness that
+Glennard tasted the full flavor of success. Coming out of conditions so
+narrow that those he offered her seemed spacious, she fitted into her
+new life without any of those manifest efforts at adjustment that are
+as sore to a husband’s pride as the critical rearrangement of the bridal
+furniture. She had given him, instead, the delicate pleasure of watching
+her expand like a sea-creature restored to its element, stretching out
+the atrophied tentacles of girlish vanity and enjoyment to the rising
+tide of opportunity. And somehow--in the windowless inner cell of his
+consciousness where self-criticism cowered--Glennard’s course seemed
+justified by its merely material success. How could such a crop of
+innocent blessedness have sprung from tainted soil?
+
+
+
+Now he had the injured sense of a man entrapped into a disadvantageous
+bargain. He had not known it would be like this; and a dull anger
+gathered at his heart. Anger against whom? Against his wife, for not
+knowing what he suffered? Against Flamel, for being the unconscious
+instrument of his wrong-doing? Or against that mute memory to which his
+own act had suddenly given a voice of accusation? Yes, that was it;
+and his punishment henceforth would be the presence, the unescapable
+presence, of the woman he had so persistently evaded. She would always
+be there now. It was as though he had married her instead of the other.
+It was what she had always wanted--to be with him--and she had gained
+her point at last....
+
+He sprang up, as though in an impulse of flight.... The sudden movement
+lifted his wife’s lids, and she asked, in the incurious voice of the
+woman whose life is enclosed in a magic circle of prosperity--“Any
+news?”
+
+“No--none--” he said, roused to a sense of immediate peril. The papers
+lay scattered at his feet--what if she were to see them? He stretched
+his arm to gather them up, but his next thought showed him the futility
+of such concealment. The same advertisement would appear every day, for
+weeks to come, in every newspaper; how could he prevent her seeing it?
+He could not always be hiding the papers from her.... Well, and what if
+she did see it? It would signify nothing to her, the chances were that
+she would never even read the book.... As she ceased to be an element of
+fear in his calculations the distance between them seemed to lessen
+and he took her again, as it were, into the circle of his conjugal
+protection.... Yet a moment before he had almost hated her!... He
+laughed aloud at his senseless terrors.... He was off his balance,
+decidedly.
+
+“What are you laughing at?” she asked.
+
+He explained, elaborately, that he was laughing at the recollection
+of an old woman in the train, an old woman with a lot of bundles, who
+couldn’t find her ticket.... But somehow, in the telling, the humor of
+the story seemed to evaporate, and he felt the conventionality of her
+smile. He glanced at his watch, “Isn’t it time to dress?”
+
+She rose with serene reluctance. “It’s a pity to go in. The garden looks
+so lovely.”
+
+They lingered side by side, surveying their domain. There was not space
+in it, at this hour, for the shadow of the elm-tree in the angle of the
+hedge; it crossed the lawn, cut the flower-border in two, and ran up the
+side of the house to the nursery window. She bent to flick a caterpillar
+from the honey-suckle; then, as they turned indoors, “If we mean to
+go on the yacht next Sunday,” she suggested, “oughtn’t you to let Mr.
+Flamel know?”
+
+Glennard’s exasperation deflected suddenly. “Of course I shall let him
+know. You always seem to imply that I’m going to do something rude to
+Flamel.”
+
+The words reverberated through her silence; she had a way of thus
+leaving one space in which to contemplate one’s folly at arm’s length.
+Glennard turned on his heel and went upstairs. As he dropped into a
+chair before his dressing-table he said to himself that in the last hour
+he had sounded the depths of his humiliation and that the lowest dregs
+of it, the very bottom-slime, was the hateful necessity of having
+always, as long as the two men lived, to be civil to Barton Flamel.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+THE week in town had been sultry, and the men, in the Sunday
+emancipation of white flannel and duck, filled the deck-chairs of the
+yacht with their outstretched apathy, following, through a mist of
+cigarette-smoke, the flitting inconsequences of the women. The party
+was a small one--Flamel had few intimate friends--but composed of more
+heterogeneous atoms than the little pools into which society usually
+runs. The reaction from the chief episode of his earlier life had
+bred in Glennard an uneasy distaste for any kind of personal saliency.
+Cleverness was useful in business; but in society it seemed to him as
+futile as the sham cascades formed by a stream that might have been used
+to drive a mill. He liked the collective point of view that goes with
+the civilized uniformity of dress-clothes, and his wife’s attitude
+implied the same preference; yet they found themselves slipping more
+and more into Flamel’s intimacy. Alexa had once or twice said that she
+enjoyed meeting clever people; but her enjoyment took the negative form
+of a smiling receptivity; and Glennard felt a growing preference for the
+kind of people who have their thinking done for them by the community.
+
+Still, the deck of the yacht was a pleasant refuge from the heat on
+shore, and his wife’s profile, serenely projected against the changing
+blue, lay on his retina like a cool hand on the nerves. He had never
+been more impressed by the kind of absoluteness that lifted her beauty
+above the transient effects of other women, making the most harmonious
+face seem an accidental collocation of features.
+
+The ladies who directly suggested this comparison were of a kind
+accustomed to take similar risks with more gratifying results. Mrs.
+Armiger had in fact long been the triumphant alternative of those who
+couldn’t “see” Alexa Glennard’s looks; and Mrs. Touchett’s claims to
+consideration were founded on that distribution of effects which is the
+wonder of those who admire a highly cultivated country. The third lady
+of the trio which Glennard’s fancy had put to such unflattering uses,
+was bound by circumstances to support the claims of the other two. This
+was Mrs. Dresham, the wife of the editor of the RADIATOR. Mrs. Dresham
+was a lady who had rescued herself from social obscurity by assuming the
+role of her husband’s exponent and interpreter; and Dresham’s leisure
+being devoted to the cultivation of remarkable women, his
+wife’s attitude committed her to the public celebration of their
+remarkableness. For the conceivable tedium of this duty, Mrs. Dresham
+was repaid by the fact that there were people who took HER for a
+remarkable woman; and who in turn probably purchased similar distinction
+with the small change of her reflected importance. As to the other
+ladies of the party, they were simply the wives of some of the men--the
+kind of women who expect to be talked to collectively and to have their
+questions left unanswered.
+
+Mrs. Armiger, the latest embodiment of Dresham’s instinct for the
+remarkable, was an innocent beauty who for years had distilled
+dulness among a set of people now self-condemned by their inability
+to appreciate her. Under Dresham’s tutelage she had developed into a
+“thoughtful woman,” who read his leaders in the RADIATOR and bought the
+books he recommended. When a new novel appeared, people wanted to know
+what Mrs. Armiger thought of it; and a young gentleman who had made a
+trip in Touraine had recently inscribed to her the wide-margined result
+of his explorations.
+
+Glennard, leaning back with his head against the rail and a slit of
+fugitive blue between his half-closed lids, vaguely wished she wouldn’t
+spoil the afternoon by making people talk; though he reduced his
+annoyance to the minimum by not listening to what was said, there
+remained a latent irritation against the general futility of words.
+
+His wife’s gift of silence seemed to him the most vivid commentary on
+the clumsiness of speech as a means of intercourse, and his eyes had
+turned to her in renewed appreciation of this finer faculty when
+Mrs. Armiger’s voice abruptly brought home to him the underrated
+potentialities of language.
+
+“You’ve read them, of course, Mrs. Glennard?” he heard her ask; and, in
+reply to Alexa’s vague interrogation--“Why, the ‘Aubyn Letters’--it’s
+the only book people are talking of this week.”
+
+Mrs. Dresham immediately saw her advantage. “You HAVEN’T read them? How
+very extraordinary! As Mrs. Armiger says, the book’s in the air; one
+breathes it in like the influenza.”
+
+Glennard sat motionless, watching his wife.
+
+“Perhaps it hasn’t reached the suburbs yet,” she said, with her
+unruffled smile.
+
+“Oh, DO let me come to you, then!” Mrs. Touchett cried; “anything for a
+change of air! I’m positively sick of the book and I can’t put it down.
+Can’t you sail us beyond its reach, Mr. Flamel?”
+
+Flamel shook his head. “Not even with this breeze. Literature travels
+faster than steam nowadays. And the worst of it is that we can’t any
+of us give up reading; it’s as insidious as a vice and as tiresome as a
+virtue.”
+
+“I believe it IS a vice, almost, to read such a book as the ‘Letters,’”
+ said Mrs. Touchett. “It’s the woman’s soul, absolutely torn up by the
+roots--her whole self laid bare; and to a man who evidently didn’t care;
+who couldn’t have cared. I don’t mean to read another line; it’s too
+much like listening at a keyhole.”
+
+“But if she wanted it published?”
+
+“Wanted it? How do we know she did?”
+
+“Why, I heard she’d left the letters to the man--whoever he is--with
+directions that they should be published after his death--”
+
+“I don’t believe it,” Mrs. Touchett declared.
+
+“He’s dead then, is he?” one of the men asked.
+
+“Why, you don’t suppose if he were alive he could ever hold up his
+head again, with these letters being read by everybody?” Mrs. Touchett
+protested. “It must have been horrible enough to know they’d been
+written to him; but to publish them! No man could have done it and no
+woman could have told him to--”
+
+“Oh, come, come,” Dresham judicially interposed; “after all, they’re not
+love-letters.”
+
+“No--that’s the worst of it; they’re unloved letters,” Mrs. Touchett
+retorted.
+
+“Then, obviously, she needn’t have written them; whereas the man, poor
+devil, could hardly help receiving them.”
+
+“Perhaps he counted on the public to save him the trouble of reading
+them,” said young Hartly, who was in the cynical stage.
+
+Mrs. Armiger turned her reproachful loveliness to Dresham. “From the way
+you defend him, I believe you know who he is.”
+
+Everyone looked at Dresham, and his wife smiled with the superior air of
+the woman who is in her husband’s professional secrets. Dresham shrugged
+his shoulders.
+
+“What have I said to defend him?”
+
+“You called him a poor devil--you pitied him.”
+
+“A man who could let Margaret Aubyn write to him in that way? Of course
+I pity him.”
+
+“Then you MUST know who he is,” cried Mrs. Armiger, with a triumphant
+air of penetration.
+
+Hartly and Flamel laughed and Dresham shook his head. “No one knows; not
+even the publishers; so they tell me at least.”
+
+“So they tell you to tell us,” Hartly astutely amended; and Mrs. Armiger
+added, with the appearance of carrying the argument a point farther,
+“But even if HE’S dead and SHE’S dead, somebody must have given the
+letters to the publishers.”
+
+“A little bird, probably,” said Dresham, smiling indulgently on her
+deduction.
+
+“A little bird of prey then--a vulture, I should say--” another man
+interpolated.
+
+“Oh, I’m not with you there,” said Dresham, easily. “Those letters
+belonged to the public.”
+
+“How can any letters belong to the public that weren’t written to the
+public?” Mrs. Touchett interposed.
+
+“Well, these were, in a sense. A personality as big as Margaret Aubyn’s
+belongs to the world. Such a mind is part of the general fund of
+thought. It’s the penalty of greatness--one becomes a monument
+historique. Posterity pays the cost of keeping one up, but on condition
+that one is always open to the public.”
+
+“I don’t see that that exonerates the man who gives up the keys of the
+sanctuary, as it were.”
+
+“Who WAS he?” another voice inquired.
+
+“Who was he? Oh, nobody, I fancy--the letter-box, the slit in the wall
+through which the letters passed to posterity....”
+
+“But she never meant them for posterity!”
+
+“A woman shouldn’t write such letters if she doesn’t mean them to be
+published....”
+
+“She shouldn’t write them to such a man!” Mrs. Touchett scornfully
+corrected.
+
+“I never keep letters,” said Mrs. Armiger, under the obvious impression
+that she was contributing a valuable point to the discussion.
+
+There was a general laugh, and Flamel, who had not spoken, said, lazily,
+“You women are too incurably subjective. I venture to say that most men
+would see in those letters merely their immense literary value, their
+significance as documents. The personal side doesn’t count where there’s
+so much else.”
+
+“Oh, we all know you haven’t any principles,” Mrs. Armiger declared; and
+Alexa Glennard, lifting an indolent smile, said: “I shall never write
+you a love-letter, Mr. Flamel.”
+
+Glennard moved away impatiently. Such talk was as tedious as the buzzing
+of gnats. He wondered why his wife had wanted to drag him on such a
+senseless expedition.... He hated Flamel’s crowd--and what business had
+Flamel himself to interfere in that way, standing up for the publication
+of the letters as though Glennard needed his defence?...
+
+Glennard turned his head and saw that Flamel had drawn a seat to Alexa’s
+elbow and was speaking to her in a low tone. The other groups had
+scattered, straying in twos along the deck. It came over Glennard that
+he should never again be able to see Flamel speaking to his wife without
+the sense of sick mistrust that now loosened his joints....
+
+
+Alexa, the next morning, over their early breakfast, surprised her
+husband by an unexpected request.
+
+“Will you bring me those letters from town?” she asked.
+
+“What letters?” he said, putting down his cup. He felt himself as
+helplessly vulnerable as a man who is lunged at in the dark.
+
+“Mrs. Aubyn’s. The book they were all talking about yesterday.”
+
+Glennard, carefully measuring his second cup of tea, said, with
+deliberation, “I didn’t know you cared about that sort of thing.”
+
+She was, in fact, not a great reader, and a new book seldom reached her
+till it was, so to speak, on the home stretch; but she replied, with a
+gentle tenacity, “I think it would interest me because I read her life
+last year.”
+
+“Her life? Where did you get that?”
+
+“Someone lent it to me when it came out--Mr. Flamel, I think.”
+
+His first impulse was to exclaim, “Why the devil do you borrow books of
+Flamel? I can buy you all you want--” but he felt himself irresistibly
+forced into an attitude of smiling compliance. “Flamel always has the
+newest books going, hasn’t he? You must be careful, by the way, about
+returning what he lends you. He’s rather crotchety about his library.”
+
+“Oh, I’m always very careful,” she said, with a touch of competence that
+struck him; and she added, as he caught up his hat: “Don’t forget the
+letters.”
+
+Why had she asked for the book? Was her sudden wish to see it the result
+of some hint of Flamel’s? The thought turned Glennard sick, but he
+preserved sufficient lucidity to tell himself, a moment later, that his
+last hope of self-control would be lost if he yielded to the temptation
+of seeing a hidden purpose in everything she said and did. How much
+Flamel guessed, he had no means of divining; nor could he predicate,
+from what he knew of the man, to what use his inferences might be put.
+The very qualities that had made Flamel a useful adviser made him the
+most dangerous of accomplices. Glennard felt himself agrope among alien
+forces that his own act had set in motion....
+
+Alexa was a woman of few requirements; but her wishes, even in trifles,
+had a definiteness that distinguished them from the fluid impulses of
+her kind. He knew that, having once asked for the book, she would not
+forget it; and he put aside, as an ineffectual expedient, his momentary
+idea of applying for it at the circulating library and telling her that
+all the copies were out. If the book was to be bought it had better be
+bought at once. He left his office earlier than usual and turned in at
+the first book-shop on his way to the train. The show-window was stacked
+with conspicuously lettered volumes. “Margaret Aubyn” flashed back
+at him in endless repetition. He plunged into the shop and came on a
+counter where the name reiterated itself on row after row of bindings.
+It seemed to have driven the rest of literature to the back shelves. He
+caught up a copy, tossing the money to an astonished clerk who pursued
+him to the door with the unheeded offer to wrap up the volumes.
+
+In the street he was seized with a sudden apprehension. What if he were
+to meet Flamel? The thought was intolerable. He called a cab and drove
+straight to the station where, amid the palm-leaf fans of a perspiring
+crowd, he waited a long half-hour for his train to start.
+
+He had thrust a volume in either pocket and in the train he dared not
+draw them out; but the detested words leaped at him from the folds of
+the evening paper. The air seemed full of Margaret Aubyn’s name. The
+motion of the train set it dancing up and down on the page of a magazine
+that a man in front of him was reading....
+
+At the door he was told that Mrs. Glennard was still out, and he went
+upstairs to his room and dragged the books from his pocket. They lay
+on the table before him like live things that he feared to touch.... At
+length he opened the first volume. A familiar letter sprang out at
+him, each word quickened by its glaring garb of type. The little broken
+phrases fled across the page like wounded animals in the open.... It was
+a horrible sight.... A battue of helpless things driven savagely out of
+shelter. He had not known it would be like this....
+
+He understood now that, at the moment of selling the letters, he had
+viewed the transaction solely as it affected himself: as an unfortunate
+blemish on an otherwise presentable record. He had scarcely considered
+the act in relation to Margaret Aubyn; for death, if it hallows,
+also makes innocuous. Glennard’s God was a god of the living, of the
+immediate, the actual, the tangible; all his days he had lived in the
+presence of that god, heedless of the divinities who, below the surface
+of our deeds and passions, silently forge the fatal weapons of the dead.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+A knock roused him and looking up he saw his wife. He met her glance in
+silence, and she faltered out, “Are you ill?”
+
+The words restored his self-possession. “Ill? Of course not. They told
+me you were out and I came upstairs.”
+
+The books lay between them on the table; he wondered when she would see
+them. She lingered tentatively on the threshold, with the air of leaving
+his explanation on his hands. She was not the kind of woman who could be
+counted on to fortify an excuse by appearing to dispute it.
+
+“Where have you been?” Glennard asked, moving forward so that he
+obstructed her vision of the books.
+
+“I walked over to the Dreshams for tea.”
+
+“I can’t think what you see in those people,” he said with a shrug;
+adding, uncontrollably--“I suppose Flamel was there?”
+
+“No; he left on the yacht this morning.”
+
+An answer so obstructing to the natural escape of his irritation left
+Glennard with no momentary resource but that of strolling impatiently to
+the window. As her eyes followed him they lit on the books.
+
+“Ah, you’ve brought them! I’m so glad,” she exclaimed.
+
+He answered over his shoulder, “For a woman who never reads you make the
+most astounding exceptions!”
+
+Her smile was an exasperating concession to the probability that it had
+been hot in town or that something had bothered him.
+
+“Do you mean it’s not nice to want to read the book?” she asked. “It was
+not nice to publish it, certainly; but after all, I’m not responsible
+for that, am I?” She paused, and, as he made no answer, went on, still
+smiling, “I do read sometimes, you know; and I’m very fond of Margaret
+Aubyn’s books. I was reading ‘Pomegranate Seed’ when we first met. Don’t
+you remember? It was then you told me all about her.”
+
+Glennard had turned back into the room and stood staring at his wife.
+“All about her?” he repeated, and with the words remembrance came to
+him. He had found Miss Trent one afternoon with the novel in her hand,
+and moved by the lover’s fatuous impulse to associate himself in some
+way with whatever fills the mind of the beloved, had broken through
+his habitual silence about the past. Rewarded by the consciousness of
+figuring impressively in Miss Trent’s imagination he had gone on from
+one anecdote to another, reviving dormant details of his old Hillbridge
+life, and pasturing his vanity on the eagerness with which she received
+his reminiscences of a being already clothed in the impersonality of
+greatness.
+
+The incident had left no trace in his mind; but it sprang up now like an
+old enemy, the more dangerous for having been forgotten. The instinct
+of self-preservation--sometimes the most perilous that man can
+exercise--made him awkwardly declare--“Oh, I used to see her at people’s
+houses, that was all;” and her silence as usual leaving room for a
+multiplication of blunders, he added, with increased indifference, “I
+simply can’t see what you can find to interest you in such a book.”
+
+She seemed to consider this intently. “You’ve read it, then?”
+
+“I glanced at it--I never read such things.”
+
+“Is it true that she didn’t wish the letters to be published?”
+
+Glennard felt the sudden dizziness of the mountaineer on a narrow ledge,
+and with it the sense that he was lost if he looked more than a step
+ahead.
+
+“I’m sure I don’t know,” he said; then, summoning a smile, he passed
+his hand through her arm. “I didn’t have tea at the Dreshams, you know;
+won’t you give me some now?” he suggested.
+
+That evening Glennard, under pretext of work to be done, shut himself
+into the small study opening off the drawing-room. As he gathered up his
+papers he said to his wife: “You’re not going to sit indoors on such a
+night as this? I’ll join you presently outside.”
+
+But she had drawn her armchair to the lamp. “I want to look at my book,”
+ she said, taking up the first volume of the “Letters.”
+
+Glennard, with a shrug, withdrew into the study. “I’m going to shut
+the door; I want to be quiet,” he explained from the threshold; and she
+nodded without lifting her eyes from the book.
+
+He sank into a chair, staring aimlessly at the outspread papers. How was
+he to work, while on the other side of the door she sat with that volume
+in her hand? The door did not shut her out--he saw her distinctly, felt
+her close to him in a contact as painful as the pressure on a bruise.
+
+The sensation was part of the general strangeness that made him feel
+like a man waking from a long sleep to find himself in an unknown
+country among people of alien tongue. We live in our own souls as in
+an unmapped region, a few acres of which we have cleared for our
+habitation; while of the nature of those nearest us we know but the
+boundaries that march with ours. Of the points in his wife’s character
+not in direct contact with his own, Glennard now discerned his
+ignorance; and the baffling sense of her remoteness was intensified by
+the discovery that, in one way, she was closer to him than ever before.
+As one may live for years in happy unconsciousness of the possession
+of a sensitive nerve, he had lived beside his wife unaware that her
+individuality had become a part of the texture of his life, ineradicable
+as some growth on a vital organ; and he now felt himself at once
+incapable of forecasting her judgment and powerless to evade its
+effects.
+
+To escape, the next morning, the confidences of the breakfast-table, he
+went to town earlier than usual. His wife, who read slowly, was given to
+talking over what she read, and at present his first object in life was
+to postpone the inevitable discussion of the letters. This instinct of
+protection in the afternoon, on his way uptown, guided him to the club
+in search of a man who might be persuaded to come out to the country to
+dine. The only man in the club was Flamel.
+
+Glennard, as he heard himself almost involuntarily pressing Flamel to
+come and dine, felt the full irony of the situation. To use Flamel as
+a shield against his wife’s scrutiny was only a shade less humiliating
+than to reckon on his wife as a defence against Flamel.
+
+He felt a contradictory movement of annoyance at the latter’s ready
+acceptance, and the two men drove in silence to the station. As they
+passed the bookstall in the waiting-room Flamel lingered a moment and
+the eyes of both fell on Margaret Aubyn’s name, conspicuously displayed
+above a counter stacked with the familiar volumes.
+
+“We shall be late, you know,” Glennard remonstrated, pulling out his
+watch.
+
+“Go ahead,” said Flamel, imperturbably. “I want to get something--”
+
+Glennard turned on his heel and walked down the platform. Flamel
+rejoined him with an innocent-looking magazine in his hand; but Glennard
+dared not even glance at the cover, lest it should show the syllables he
+feared.
+
+The train was full of people they knew, and they were kept apart till
+it dropped them at the little suburban station. As they strolled up the
+shaded hill, Glennard talked volubly, pointing out the improvements
+in the neighborhood, deploring the threatened approach of an electric
+railway, and screening himself by a series of reflex adjustments from
+the imminent risk of any allusion to the “Letters.” Flamel suffered his
+discourse with the bland inattention that we accord to the affairs of
+someone else’s suburb, and they reached the shelter of Alexa’s tea-table
+without a perceptible turn toward the dreaded topic.
+
+The dinner passed off safely. Flamel, always at his best in Alexa’s
+presence, gave her the kind of attention which is like a beaconing light
+thrown on the speaker’s words: his answers seemed to bring out a latent
+significance in her phrases, as the sculptor draws his statue from the
+block. Glennard, under his wife’s composure, detected a sensibility to
+this manoeuvre, and the discovery was like the lightning-flash across a
+nocturnal landscape. Thus far these momentary illuminations had served
+only to reveal the strangeness of the intervening country: each fresh
+observation seemed to increase the sum-total of his ignorance. Her
+simplicity of outline was more puzzling than a complex surface. One may
+conceivably work one’s way through a labyrinth; but Alexa’s candor
+was like a snow-covered plain where, the road once lost, there are no
+landmarks to travel by.
+
+Dinner over, they returned to the veranda, where a moon, rising behind
+the old elm, was combining with that complaisant tree a romantic
+enlargement of their borders. Glennard had forgotten the cigars. He went
+to his study to fetch them, and in passing through the drawing-room he
+saw the second volume of the “Letters” lying open on his wife’s table.
+He picked up the book and looked at the date of the letter she had been
+reading. It was one of the last... he knew the few lines by heart. He
+dropped the book and leaned against the wall. Why had he included that
+one among the others? Or was it possible that now they would all seem
+like that...?
+
+Alexa’s voice came suddenly out of the dusk. “May Touchett was right--it
+IS like listening at a key-hole. I wish I hadn’t read it!”
+
+Flamel returned, in the leisurely tone of the man whose phrases are
+punctuated by a cigarette, “It seems so to us, perhaps; but to another
+generation the book will be a classic.”
+
+“Then it ought not to have been published till it had become a classic.
+It’s horrible, it’s degrading almost, to read the secrets of a woman one
+might have known.” She added, in a lower tone, “Stephen DID know her--”
+
+“Did he?” came from Flamel.
+
+“He knew her very well, at Hillbridge, years ago. The book has made him
+feel dreadfully... he wouldn’t read it... he didn’t want me to read it.
+I didn’t understand at first, but now I can see how horribly disloyal it
+must seem to him. It’s so much worse to surprise a friend’s secrets than
+a stranger’s.”
+
+“Oh, Glennard’s such a sensitive chap,” Flamel said, easily; and Alexa
+almost rebukingly rejoined, “If you’d known her I’m sure you’d feel as
+he does....”
+
+Glennard stood motionless, overcome by the singular infelicity with
+which he had contrived to put Flamel in possession of the two points
+most damaging to his case: the fact that he had been a friend of
+Margaret Aubyn’s, and that he had concealed from Alexa his share in the
+publication of the letters. To a man of less than Flamel’s astuteness
+it must now be clear to whom the letters were addressed; and the
+possibility once suggested, nothing could be easier than to confirm it
+by discreet research. An impulse of self-accusal drove Glennard to the
+window. Why not anticipate betrayal by telling his wife the truth in
+Flamel’s presence? If the man had a drop of decent feeling in him, such
+a course would be the surest means of securing his silence; and above
+all, it would rid Glennard of the necessity of defending himself against
+the perpetual criticism of his wife’s belief in him....
+
+The impulse was strong enough to carry him to the window; but there
+a reaction of defiance set in. What had he done, after all, to need
+defence and explanation? Both Dresham and Flamel had, in his hearing,
+declared the publication of the letters to be not only justifiable but
+obligatory; and if the disinterestedness of Flamel’s verdict might be
+questioned, Dresham’s at least represented the impartial view of the
+man of letters. As to Alexa’s words, they were simply the conventional
+utterance of the “nice” woman on a question already decided for her by
+other “nice” women. She had said the proper thing as mechanically as she
+would have put on the appropriate gown or written the correct form of
+dinner-invitation. Glennard had small faith in the abstract judgments
+of the other sex; he knew that half the women who were horrified by
+the publication of Mrs. Aubyn’s letters would have betrayed her secrets
+without a scruple.
+
+The sudden lowering of his emotional pitch brought a proportionate
+relief. He told himself that now the worst was over and things would
+fall into perspective again. His wife and Flamel had turned to other
+topics, and coming out on the veranda, he handed the cigars to Flamel,
+saying, cheerfully--and yet he could have sworn they were the last words
+he meant to utter!--“Look here, old man, before you go down to Newport
+you must come out and spend a few days with us--mustn’t he, Alexa?”
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+Glennard had, perhaps unconsciously, counted on the continuance of this
+easier mood. He had always taken pride in a certain robustness of fibre
+that enabled him to harden himself against the inevitable, to convert
+his failures into the building materials of success. Though it did not
+even now occur to him that what he called the inevitable had hitherto
+been the alternative he happened to prefer, he was yet obscurely
+aware that his present difficulty was one not to be conjured by any
+affectation of indifference. Some griefs build the soul a spacious
+house--but in this misery of Glennard’s he could not stand upright. It
+pressed against him at every turn. He told himself that this was because
+there was no escape from the visible evidences of his act. The “Letters”
+ confronted him everywhere. People who had never opened a book discussed
+them with critical reservations; to have read them had become a social
+obligation in circles to which literature never penetrates except in a
+personal guise.
+
+Glennard did himself injustice, it was from the unexpected discovery of
+his own pettiness that he chiefly suffered. Our self-esteem is apt to
+be based on the hypothetical great act we have never had occasion to
+perform; and even the most self-scrutinizing modesty credits itself
+negatively with a high standard of conduct. Glennard had never thought
+himself a hero; but he had been certain that he was incapable of
+baseness. We all like our wrong-doings to have a becoming cut, to be
+made to order, as it were; and Glennard found himself suddenly thrust
+into a garb of dishonor surely meant for a meaner figure.
+
+The immediate result of his first weeks of wretchedness was the resolve
+to go to town for the winter. He knew that such a course was just beyond
+the limit of prudence; but it was easy to allay the fears of Alexa who,
+scrupulously vigilant in the management of the household, preserved
+the American wife’s usual aloofness from her husband’s business cares.
+Glennard felt that he could not trust himself to a winter’s solitude
+with her. He had an unspeakable dread of her learning the truth about
+the letters, yet could not be sure of steeling himself against the
+suicidal impulse of avowal. His very soul was parched for sympathy; he
+thirsted for a voice of pity and comprehension. But would his wife pity?
+Would she understand? Again he found himself brought up abruptly against
+his incredible ignorance of her nature. The fact that he knew well
+enough how she would behave in the ordinary emergencies of life, that
+he could count, in such contingencies, on the kind of high courage and
+directness he had always divined in her, made him the more hopeless of
+her entering into the torturous psychology of an act that he himself
+could no longer explain or understand. It would have been easier had
+she been more complex, more feminine--if he could have counted on
+her imaginative sympathy or her moral obtuseness--but he was sure of
+neither. He was sure of nothing but that, for a time, he must avoid her.
+Glennard could not rid himself of the delusion that by and by his action
+would cease to make its consequences felt. He would not have cared to
+own to himself that he counted on the dulling of his sensibilities: he
+preferred to indulge the vague hypothesis that extraneous circumstances
+would somehow efface the blot upon his conscience. In his worst moments
+of self-abasement he tried to find solace in the thought that Flamel had
+sanctioned his course. Flamel, at the outset, must have guessed to
+whom the letters were addressed; yet neither then nor afterward had he
+hesitated to advise their publication. This thought drew Glennard to
+him in fitful impulses of friendliness, from each of which there was a
+sharper reaction of distrust and aversion. When Flamel was not at the
+house, he missed the support of his tacit connivance; when he was there,
+his presence seemed the assertion of an intolerable claim.
+
+Early in the winter the Glennards took possession of the little house
+that was to cost them almost nothing. The change brought Glennard the
+immediate relief of seeing less of his wife, and of being protected, in
+her presence, by the multiplied preoccupations of town life. Alexa, who
+could never appear hurried, showed the smiling abstraction of a pretty
+woman to whom the social side of married life has not lost its novelty.
+Glennard, with the recklessness of a man fresh from his first financial
+imprudence, encouraged her in such little extravagances as her good
+sense at first resisted. Since they had come to town, he argued, they
+might as well enjoy themselves. He took a sympathetic view of the
+necessity of new gowns, he gave her a set of furs at Christmas, and
+before the New Year they had agreed on the obligation of adding a
+parlour-maid to their small establishment.
+
+Providence the very next day hastened to justify this measure by placing
+on Glennard’s breakfast-plate an envelope bearing the name of the
+publishers to whom he had sold Mrs. Aubyn’s letters. It happened to be
+the only letter the early post had brought, and he glanced across the
+table at his wife, who had come down before him and had probably
+laid the envelope on his plate. She was not the woman to ask awkward
+questions, but he felt the conjecture of her glance, and he was debating
+whether to affect surprise at the receipt of the letter, or to pass it
+off as a business communication that had strayed to his house, when a
+check fell from the envelope. It was the royalty on the first edition of
+the letters. His first feeling was one of simple satisfaction. The
+money had come with such infernal opportuneness that he could not help
+welcoming it. Before long, too, there would be more; he knew the book
+was still selling far beyond the publisher’s previsions. He put the
+check in his pocket and left the room without looking at his wife.
+
+On the way to his office the habitual reaction set in. The money he had
+received was the first tangible reminder that he was living on the
+sale of his self-esteem. The thought of material benefit had been
+overshadowed by his sense of the intrinsic baseness of making the
+letters known; now he saw what an element of sordidness it added to the
+situation and how the fact that he needed the money, and must use it,
+pledged him more irrevocably than ever to the consequences of his act.
+It seemed to him, in that first hour of misery, that he had betrayed his
+friend anew.
+
+When, that afternoon, he reached home earlier than usual, Alexa’s
+drawing-room was full of a gayety that overflowed to the stairs. Flamel,
+for a wonder, was not there; but Dresham and young Hartly, grouped about
+the tea-table, were receiving with resonant mirth a narrative delivered
+in the fluttered staccato that made Mrs. Armiger’s conversation like the
+ejaculations of a startled aviary.
+
+She paused as Glennard entered, and he had time to notice that his wife,
+who was busied about the tea-tray, had not joined in the laughter of the
+men.
+
+“Oh, go on, go on,” young Hartly rapturously groaned; and Mrs. Armiger
+met Glennard’s inquiry with the deprecating cry that really she didn’t
+see what there was to laugh at. “I’m sure I feel more like crying. I
+don’t know what I should have done if Alexa hadn’t been home to give me
+a cup of tea. My nerves are in shreds--yes, another, dear, please--” and
+as Glennard looked his perplexity, she went on, after pondering on
+the selection of a second lump of sugar, “Why, I’ve just come from the
+reading, you know--the reading at the Waldorf.”
+
+“I haven’t been in town long enough to know anything,” said Glennard,
+taking the cup his wife handed him. “Who has been reading what?”
+
+“That lovely girl from the South--Georgie--Georgie what’s her name--Mrs.
+Dresham’s protegee--unless she’s YOURS, Mr. Dresham! Why, the big
+ball-room was PACKED, and all the women were crying like idiots--it was
+the most harrowing thing I ever heard--”
+
+“What DID you hear?” Glennard asked; and his wife interposed: “Won’t you
+have another bit of cake, Julia? Or, Stephen, ring for some hot
+toast, please.” Her tone betrayed a polite satiety of the topic under
+discussion. Glennard turned to the bell, but Mrs. Armiger pursued him
+with her lovely amazement.
+
+“Why, the ‘Aubyn Letters’--didn’t you know about it? The girl read them
+so beautifully that it was quite horrible--I should have fainted if
+there’d been a man near enough to carry me out.”
+
+Hartly’s glee redoubled, and Dresham said, jovially, “How like you women
+to raise a shriek over the book and then do all you can to encourage the
+blatant publicity of the readings!”
+
+Mrs. Armiger met him more than half-way on a torrent of self-accusal.
+“It WAS horrid; it was disgraceful. I told your wife we ought all to
+be ashamed of ourselves for going, and I think Alexa was quite right to
+refuse to take any tickets--even if it was for a charity.”
+
+“Oh,” her hostess murmured, indifferently, “with me charity begins at
+home. I can’t afford emotional luxuries.”
+
+“A charity? A charity?” Hartly exulted. “I hadn’t seized the full beauty
+of it. Reading poor Margaret Aubyn’s love-letters at the Waldorf before
+five hundred people for a charity! WHAT charity, dear Mrs. Armiger?”
+
+“Why, the Home for Friendless Women--”
+
+“It was well chosen,” Dresham commented; and Hartly buried his mirth in
+the sofa-cushions.
+
+When they were alone Glennard, still holding his untouched cup of tea,
+turned to his wife, who sat silently behind the kettle. “Who asked you
+to take a ticket for that reading?”
+
+“I don’t know, really--Kate Dresham, I fancy. It was she who got it up.”
+
+“It’s just the sort of damnable vulgarity she’s capable of! It’s
+loathsome--it’s monstrous--”
+
+His wife, without looking up, answered gravely, “I thought so too. It
+was for that reason I didn’t go. But you must remember that very few
+people feel about Mrs. Aubyn as you do--”
+
+Glennard managed to set down his cup with a steady hand, but the room
+swung round with him and he dropped into the nearest chair. “As I do?”
+ he repeated.
+
+“I mean that very few people knew her when she lived in New York. To
+most of the women who went to the reading she was a mere name, too
+remote to have any personality. With me, of course, it was different--”
+
+Glennard gave her a startled look. “Different? Why different?”
+
+“Since you were her friend--”
+
+“Her friend!” He stood up impatiently. “You speak as if she had had only
+one--the most famous woman of her day!” He moved vaguely about the room,
+bending down to look at some books on the table. “I hope,” he added,
+“you didn’t give that as a reason, by the way?”
+
+“A reason?”
+
+“For not going. A woman who gives reasons for getting out of social
+obligations is sure to make herself unpopular or ridiculous.
+
+The words were uncalculated; but in an instant he saw that they had
+strangely bridged the distance between his wife and himself. He felt her
+close on him, like a panting foe; and her answer was a flash that showed
+the hand on the trigger.
+
+“I seem,” she said from the threshold, “to have done both in giving my
+reason to you.”
+
+
+The fact that they were dining out that evening made it easy for him to
+avoid Alexa till she came downstairs in her opera-cloak. Mrs. Touchett,
+who was going to the same dinner, had offered to call for her, and
+Glennard, refusing a precarious seat between the ladies’ draperies,
+followed on foot. The evening was interminable. The reading at the
+Waldorf, at which all the women had been present, had revived the
+discussion of the “Aubyn Letters” and Glennard, hearing his wife
+questioned as to her absence, felt himself miserably wishing that she
+had gone, rather than that her staying away should have been remarked.
+He was rapidly losing all sense of proportion where the “Letters” were
+concerned. He could no longer hear them mentioned without suspecting
+a purpose in the allusion; he even yielded himself for a moment to
+the extravagance of imagining that Mrs. Dresham, whom he disliked, had
+organized the reading in the hope of making him betray himself--for he
+was already sure that Dresham had divined his share in the transaction.
+
+The attempt to keep a smooth surface on this inner tumult was as endless
+and unavailing as efforts made in a nightmare. He lost all sense of what
+he was saying to his neighbors and once when he looked up his wife’s
+glance struck him cold.
+
+She sat nearly opposite him, at Flamel’s side, and it appeared to
+Glennard that they had built about themselves one of those airy barriers
+of talk behind which two people can say what they please. While the
+reading was discussed they were silent. Their silence seemed to Glennard
+almost cynical--it stripped the last disguise from their complicity. A
+throb of anger rose in him, but suddenly it fell, and he felt, with
+a curious sense of relief, that at bottom he no longer cared whether
+Flamel had told his wife or not. The assumption that Flamel knew about
+the letters had become a fact to Glennard; and it now seemed to him
+better that Alexa should know too.
+
+He was frightened at first by the discovery of his own indifference. The
+last barriers of his will seemed to be breaking down before a flood of
+moral lassitude. How could he continue to play his part, to keep his
+front to the enemy, with this poison of indifference stealing through
+his veins? He tried to brace himself with the remembrance of his wife’s
+scorn. He had not forgotten the note on which their conversation had
+closed. If he had ever wondered how she would receive the truth
+he wondered no longer--she would despise him. But this lent a new
+insidiousness to his temptation, since her contempt would be a refuge
+from his own. He said to himself that, since he no longer cared for
+the consequences, he could at least acquit himself of speaking in
+self-defence. What he wanted now was not immunity but castigation: his
+wife’s indignation might still reconcile him to himself. Therein lay
+his one hope of regeneration; her scorn was the moral antiseptic that he
+needed, her comprehension the one balm that could heal him....
+
+When they left the dinner he was so afraid of speaking that he let her
+drive home alone, and went to the club with Flamel.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+HE rose next morning with the resolve to know what Alexa thought of him.
+It was not anchoring in a haven, but lying to in a storm--he felt the
+need of a temporary lull in the turmoil of his sensations.
+
+He came home late, for they were dining alone and he knew that
+they would have the evening together. When he followed her to the
+drawing-room after dinner he thought himself on the point of speaking;
+but as she handed him his coffee he said, involuntarily: “I shall have
+to carry this off to the study, I’ve got a lot of work to-night.”
+
+Alone in the study he cursed his cowardice. What was it that had
+withheld him? A certain bright unapproachableness seemed to keep him at
+arm’s length. She was not the kind of woman whose compassion could be
+circumvented; there was no chance of slipping past the outposts; he
+would never take her by surprise. Well--why not face her, then? What he
+shrank from could be no worse than what he was enduring. He had pushed
+back his chair and turned to go upstairs when a new expedient presented
+itself. What if, instead of telling her, he were to let her find out for
+herself and watch the effect of the discovery before speaking? In this
+way he made over to chance the burden of the revelation.
+
+The idea had been suggested by the sight of the formula enclosing
+the publisher’s check. He had deposited the money, but the notice
+accompanying it dropped from his note-case as he cleared his table for
+work. It was the formula usual in such cases and revealed clearly enough
+that he was the recipient of a royalty on Margaret Aubyn’s letters. It
+would be impossible for Alexa to read it without understanding at once
+that the letters had been written to him and that he had sold them....
+
+He sat downstairs till he heard her ring for the parlor-maid to put out
+the lights; then he went up to the drawing-room with a bundle of papers
+in his hand. Alexa was just rising from her seat and the lamplight fell
+on the deep roll of hair that overhung her brow like the eaves of a
+temple. Her face had often the high secluded look of a shrine; and it
+was this touch of awe in her beauty that now made him feel himself on
+the brink of sacrilege.
+
+Lest the feeling should dominate him, he spoke at once. “I’ve brought
+you a piece of work--a lot of old bills and things that I want you to
+sort for me. Some are not worth keeping--but you’ll be able to judge of
+that. There may be a letter or two among them--nothing of much account,
+but I don’t like to throw away the whole lot without having them looked
+over and I haven’t time to do it myself.”
+
+He held out the papers and she took them with a smile that seemed to
+recognize in the service he asked the tacit intention of making amends
+for the incident of the previous day.
+
+“Are you sure I shall know which to keep?”
+
+“Oh, quite sure,” he answered, easily--“and besides, none are of much
+importance.”
+
+The next morning he invented an excuse for leaving the house without
+seeing her, and when he returned, just before dinner, he found a
+visitor’s hat and stick in the hall. The visitor was Flamel, who was in
+the act of taking leave.
+
+He had risen, but Alexa remained seated; and their attitude gave the
+impression of a colloquy that had prolonged itself beyond the limits of
+speech. Both turned a surprised eye on Glennard and he had the sense of
+walking into a room grown suddenly empty, as though their thoughts were
+conspirators dispersed by his approach. He felt the clutch of his old
+fear. What if his wife had already sorted the papers and had told Flamel
+of her discovery? Well, it was no news to Flamel that Glennard was in
+receipt of a royalty on the “Aubyn Letters.”...
+
+A sudden resolve to know the worst made him lift his eyes to his wife
+as the door closed on Flamel. But Alexa had risen also, and bending over
+her writing-table, with her back to Glennard, was beginning to speak
+precipitately.
+
+“I’m dining out to-night--you don’t mind my deserting you? Julia Armiger
+sent me word just now that she had an extra ticket for the last Ambrose
+concert. She told me to say how sorry she was that she hadn’t two--but I
+knew YOU wouldn’t be sorry!” She ended with a laugh that had the effect
+of being a strayed echo of Mrs. Armiger’s; and before Glennard could
+speak she had added, with her hand on the door, “Mr. Flamel stayed so
+late that I’ve hardly time to dress. The concert begins ridiculously
+early, and Julia dines at half-past seven--”
+
+Glennard stood alone in the empty room that seemed somehow full of
+an ironical consciousness of what was happening. “She hates me,” he
+murmured. “She hates me....”
+
+
+The next day was Sunday, and Glennard purposely lingered late in
+his room. When he came downstairs his wife was already seated at the
+breakfast-table. She lifted her usual smile to his entrance and they
+took shelter in the nearest topic, like wayfarers overtaken by a storm.
+While he listened to her account of the concert he began to think that,
+after all, she had not yet sorted the papers, and that her agitation of
+the previous day must be ascribed to another cause, in which perhaps he
+had but an indirect concern. He wondered it had never before occurred to
+him that Flamel was the kind of man who might very well please a woman
+at his own expense, without need of fortuitous assistance. If this
+possibility cleared the outlook it did not brighten it. Glennard merely
+felt himself left alone with his baseness.
+
+Alexa left the breakfast-table before him and when he went up to the
+drawing-room he found her dressed to go out.
+
+“Aren’t you a little early for church?” he asked.
+
+She replied that, on the way there, she meant to stop a moment at
+her mother’s; and while she drew on her gloves, he fumbled among the
+knick-knacks on the mantel-piece for a match to light his cigarette.
+
+“Well, good-by,” she said, turning to go; and from the threshold she
+added: “By the way, I’ve sorted the papers you gave me. Those that
+I thought you would like to keep are on your study-table.” She went
+downstairs and he heard the door close behind her.
+
+She had sorted the papers--she knew, then--she MUST know--and she had
+made no sign!
+
+Glennard, he hardly knew how, found himself once more in the study. On
+the table lay the packet he had given her. It was much smaller--she had
+evidently gone over the papers with care, destroying the greater number.
+He loosened the elastic band and spread the remaining envelopes on his
+desk. The publisher’s notice was among them.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+His wife knew and she made no sign. Glennard found himself in the case
+of the seafarer who, closing his eyes at nightfall on a scene he thinks
+to put leagues behind him before day, wakes to a port-hole framing the
+same patch of shore. From the kind of exaltation to which his resolve
+had lifted him he dropped to an unreasoning apathy. His impulse of
+confession had acted as a drug to self-reproach. He had tried to shift
+a portion of his burden to his wife’s shoulders and now that she had
+tacitly refused to carry it, he felt the load too heavy to be taken up
+again.
+
+A fortunate interval of hard work brought respite from this phase of
+sterile misery. He went West to argue an important case, won it, and
+came back to fresh preoccupations. His own affairs were thriving enough
+to engross him in the pauses of his professional work, and for over
+two months he had little time to look himself in the face. Not
+unnaturally--for he was as yet unskilled in the subtleties of
+introspection--he mistook his temporary insensibility for a gradual
+revival of moral health.
+
+He told himself that he was recovering his sense of proportion, getting
+to see things in their true light; and if he now thought of his rash
+appeal to his wife’s sympathy it was as an act of folly from the
+consequences of which he had been saved by the providence that watches
+over madmen. He had little leisure to observe Alexa; but he concluded
+that the common-sense momentarily denied him had counselled her
+uncritical acceptance of the inevitable. If such a quality was a
+poor substitute for the passionate justness that had once seemed to
+characterize her, he accepted the alternative as a part of that general
+lowering of the key that seems needful to the maintenance of the
+matrimonial duet. What woman ever retained her abstract sense of justice
+where another woman was concerned? Possibly the thought that he had
+profited by Mrs. Aubyn’s tenderness was not wholly disagreeable to his
+wife.
+
+When the pressure of work began to lessen, and he found himself, in the
+lengthening afternoons, able to reach home somewhat earlier, he noticed
+that the little drawing-room was always full and that he and his wife
+seldom had an evening alone together. When he was tired, as often
+happened, she went out alone; the idea of giving up an engagement to
+remain with him seemed not to occur to her. She had shown, as a girl,
+little fondness for society, nor had she seemed to regret it during the
+year they had spent in the country. He reflected, however, that he was
+sharing the common lot of husbands, who proverbially mistake the early
+ardors of housekeeping for a sign of settled domesticity. Alexa, at any
+rate, was refuting his theory as inconsiderately as a seedling defeats
+the gardener’s expectations. An undefinable change had come over her. In
+one sense it was a happy one, since she had grown, if not handsomer,
+at least more vivid and expressive; her beauty had become more
+communicable: it was as though she had learned the conscious exercise of
+intuitive attributes and now used her effects with the discrimination of
+an artist skilled in values. To a dispassionate critic (as Glennard now
+rated himself) the art may at times have been a little too obvious. Her
+attempts at lightness lacked spontaneity, and she sometimes rasped
+him by laughing like Julia Armiger; but he had enough imagination
+to perceive that, in respect of the wife’s social arts, a husband
+necessarily sees the wrong side of the tapestry.
+
+In this ironical estimate of their relation Glennard found himself
+strangely relieved of all concern as to his wife’s feelings for Flamel.
+From an Olympian pinnacle of indifference he calmly surveyed their
+inoffensive antics. It was surprising how his cheapening of his wife put
+him at ease with himself. Far as he and she were from each other they
+yet had, in a sense, the tacit nearness of complicity. Yes, they were
+accomplices; he could no more be jealous of her than she could despise
+him. The jealousy that would once have seemed a blur on her whiteness
+now appeared like a tribute to ideals in which he no longer believed....
+
+
+Glennard was little given to exploring the outskirts of literature. He
+always skipped the “literary notices” in the papers and he had small
+leisure for the intermittent pleasures of the periodical. He had
+therefore no notion of the prolonged reverberations which the “Aubyn
+Letters” had awakened in the precincts of criticism. When the book
+ceased to be talked about he supposed it had ceased to be read; and this
+apparent subsidence of the agitation about it brought the reassuring
+sense that he had exaggerated its vitality. The conviction, if it did
+not ease his conscience, at least offered him the relative relief of
+obscurity: he felt like an offender taken down from the pillory and
+thrust into the soothing darkness of a cell.
+
+But one evening, when Alexa had left him to go to a dance, he chanced to
+turn over the magazines on her table, and the copy of the Horoscope, to
+which he settled down with his cigar, confronted him, on its first
+page, with a portrait of Margaret Aubyn. It was a reproduction of the
+photograph that had stood so long on his desk. The desiccating air of
+memory had turned her into the mere abstraction of a woman, and this
+unexpected evocation seemed to bring her nearer than she had ever been
+in life. Was it because he understood her better? He looked long into
+her eyes; little personal traits reached out to him like caresses--the
+tired droop of her lids, her quick way of leaning forward as she spoke,
+the movements of her long expressive hands. All that was feminine
+in her, the quality he had always missed, stole toward him from her
+unreproachful gaze; and now that it was too late life had developed
+in him the subtler perceptions which could detect it in even this poor
+semblance of herself. For a moment he found consolation in the thought
+that, at any cost, they had thus been brought together; then a flood of
+shame rushed over him. Face to face with her, he felt himself laid bare
+to the inmost fold of consciousness. The shame was deep, but it was a
+renovating anguish; he was like a man whom intolerable pain has roused
+from the creeping lethargy of death....
+
+He rose next morning to as fresh a sense of life as though his hour of
+mute communion with Margaret Aubyn had been a more exquisite renewal
+of their earlier meetings. His waking thought was that he must see her
+again; and as consciousness affirmed itself he felt an intense fear of
+losing the sense of her nearness. But she was still close to him; her
+presence remained the sole reality in a world of shadows. All through
+his working hours he was re-living with incredible minuteness every
+incident of their obliterated past; as a man who has mastered the spirit
+of a foreign tongue turns with renewed wonder to the pages his youth has
+plodded over. In this lucidity of retrospection the most trivial detail
+had its significance, and the rapture of recovery was embittered to
+Glennard by the perception of all that he had missed. He had been
+pitiably, grotesquely stupid; and there was irony in the thought that,
+but for the crisis through which he was passing, he might have lived on
+in complacent ignorance of his loss. It was as though she had bought him
+with her blood....
+
+That evening he and Alexa dined alone. After dinner he followed her to
+the drawing-room. He no longer felt the need of avoiding her; he was
+hardly conscious of her presence. After a few words they lapsed into
+silence and he sat smoking with his eyes on the fire. It was not that he
+was unwilling to talk to her; he felt a curious desire to be as kind
+as possible; but he was always forgetting that she was there. Her full
+bright presence, through which the currents of life flowed so warmly,
+had grown as tenuous as a shadow, and he saw so far beyond her--
+
+Presently she rose and began to move about the room. She seemed to be
+looking for something and he roused himself to ask what she wanted.
+
+“Only the last number of the Horoscope. I thought I’d left it on this
+table.” He said nothing, and she went on: “You haven’t seen it?”
+
+“No,” he returned coldly. The magazine was locked in his desk.
+
+His wife had moved to the mantel-piece. She stood facing him and as he
+looked up he met her tentative gaze. “I was reading an article in it--a
+review of Mrs. Aubyn’s letters,” she added, slowly, with her deep,
+deliberate blush.
+
+Glennard stooped to toss his cigar into the fire. He felt a savage wish
+that she would not speak the other woman’s name; nothing else seemed to
+matter. “You seem to do a lot of reading,” he said.
+
+She still earnestly confronted him. “I was keeping this for you--I
+thought it might interest you,” she said, with an air of gentle
+insistence.
+
+He stood up and turned away. He was sure she knew that he had taken the
+review and he felt that he was beginning to hate her again.
+
+“I haven’t time for such things,” he said, indifferently. As he moved to
+the door he heard her take a precipitate step forward; then she paused
+and sank without speaking into the chair from which he had risen.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+As Glennard, in the raw February sunlight, mounted the road to the
+cemetery, he felt the beatitude that comes with an abrupt cessation of
+physical pain. He had reached the point where self-analysis ceases;
+the impulse that moved him was purely intuitive. He did not even seek
+a reason for it, beyond the obvious one that his desire to stand by
+Margaret Aubyn’s grave was prompted by no attempt at a sentimental
+reparation, but rather by the vague need to affirm in some way the
+reality of the tie between them.
+
+The ironical promiscuity of death had brought Mrs. Aubyn back to
+share the narrow hospitality of her husband’s last lodging; but though
+Glennard knew she had been buried near New York he had never visited
+her grave. He was oppressed, as he now threaded the long avenues, by a
+chilling vision of her return. There was no family to follow her hearse;
+she had died alone, as she had lived; and the “distinguished mourners”
+ who had formed the escort of the famous writer knew nothing of the woman
+they were committing to the grave. Glennard could not even remember at
+what season she had been buried; but his mood indulged the fancy that it
+must have been on some such day of harsh sunlight, the incisive February
+brightness that gives perspicuity without warmth. The white avenues
+stretched before him interminably, lined with stereotyped emblems of
+affliction, as though all the platitudes ever uttered had been turned to
+marble and set up over the unresisting dead. Here and there, no doubt, a
+frigid urn or an insipid angel imprisoned some fine-fibred grief, as the
+most hackneyed words may become the vehicle of rare meanings; but for
+the most part the endless alignment of monuments seemed to embody those
+easy generalizations about death that do not disturb the repose of the
+living. Glennard’s eye, as he followed the way indicated to him, had
+instinctively sought some low mound with a quiet headstone. He had
+forgotten that the dead seldom plan their own houses, and with a pang he
+discovered the name he sought on the cyclopean base of a granite shaft
+rearing its aggressive height at the angle of two avenues.
+
+“How she would have hated it!” he murmured.
+
+A bench stood near and he seated himself. The monument rose before him
+like some pretentious uninhabited dwelling; he could not believe that
+Margaret Aubyn lay there. It was a Sunday morning and black figures
+moved among the paths, placing flowers on the frost-bound hillocks.
+Glennard noticed that the neighboring graves had been thus newly
+dressed; and he fancied a blind stir of expectancy through the sod, as
+though the bare mounds spread a parched surface to that commemorative
+rain. He rose presently and walked back to the entrance of the cemetery.
+Several greenhouses stood near the gates, and turning in at the first he
+asked for some flowers.
+
+“Anything in the emblematic line?” asked the anaemic man behind the
+dripping counter.
+
+Glennard shook his head.
+
+“Just cut flowers? This way, then.” The florist unlocked a glass door
+and led him down a moist green aisle. The hot air was choked with the
+scent of white azaleas, white lilies, white lilacs; all the flowers were
+white; they were like a prolongation, a mystical efflorescence, of the
+long rows of marble tombstones, and their perfume seemed to cover an
+odor of decay. The rich atmosphere made Glennard dizzy. As he leaned
+in the doorpost, waiting for the flowers, he had a penetrating sense of
+Margaret Aubyn’s nearness--not the imponderable presence of his inner
+vision, but a life that beat warm in his arms....
+
+The sharp air caught him as he stepped out into it again. He walked back
+and scattered the flowers over the grave. The edges of the white petals
+shrivelled like burnt paper in the cold; and as he watched them the
+illusion of her nearness faded, shrank back frozen.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+The motive of his visit to the cemetery remained undefined save as a
+final effort of escape from his wife’s inexpressive acceptance of his
+shame. It seemed to him that as long as he could keep himself alive to
+that shame he would not wholly have succumbed to its consequences. His
+chief fear was that he should become the creature of his act. His wife’s
+indifference degraded him; it seemed to put him on a level with his
+dishonor. Margaret Aubyn would have abhorred the deed in proportion to
+her pity for the man. The sense of her potential pity drew him back to
+her. The one woman knew but did not understand; the other, it sometimes
+seemed, understood without knowing.
+
+In its last disguise of retrospective remorse, his self-pity affected a
+desire for solitude and meditation. He lost himself in morbid musings,
+in futile visions of what life with Margaret Aubyn might have been.
+There were moments when, in the strange dislocation of his view, the
+wrong he had done her seemed a tie between them.
+
+To indulge these emotions he fell into the habit, on Sunday afternoons,
+of solitary walks prolonged till after dusk. The days were lengthening,
+there was a touch of spring in the air, and his wanderings now usually
+led him to the Park and its outlying regions.
+
+One Sunday, tired of aimless locomotion, he took a cab at the Park gates
+and let it carry him out to the Riverside Drive. It was a gray afternoon
+streaked with east wind. Glennard’s cab advanced slowly, and as he
+leaned back, gazing with absent intentness at the deserted paths that
+wound under bare boughs between grass banks of premature vividness, his
+attention was arrested by two figures walking ahead of him. This couple,
+who had the path to themselves, moved at an uneven pace, as though
+adapting their gait to a conversation marked by meditative intervals.
+Now and then they paused, and in one of these pauses the lady, turning
+toward her companion, showed Glennard the outline of his wife’s profile.
+The man was Flamel.
+
+The blood rushed to Glennard’s forehead. He sat up with a jerk and
+pushed back the lid in the roof of the hansom; but when the cabman bent
+down he dropped into his seat without speaking. Then, becoming
+conscious of the prolonged interrogation of the lifted lid, he called
+out--“Turn--drive back--anywhere--I’m in a hurry--”
+
+As the cab swung round he caught a last glimpse of the two figures. They
+had not moved; Alexa, with bent head, stood listening.
+
+“My God, my God--” he groaned.
+
+It was hideous--it was abominable--he could not understand it. The woman
+was nothing to him--less than nothing--yet the blood hummed in his ears
+and hung a cloud before him. He knew it was only the stirring of the
+primal instinct, that it had no more to do with his reasoning self
+than any reflex impulse of the body; but that merely lowered anguish
+to disgust. Yes, it was disgust he felt--almost a physical nausea. The
+poisonous fumes of life were in his lungs. He was sick, unutterably
+sick....
+
+He drove home and went to his room. They were giving a little dinner
+that night, and when he came down the guests were arriving. He looked at
+his wife: her beauty was extraordinary, but it seemed to him the beauty
+of a smooth sea along an unlit coast. She frightened him.
+
+He sat late that night in his study. He heard the parlor-maid lock the
+front door; then his wife went upstairs and the lights were put out.
+His brain was like some great empty hall with an echo in it; one thought
+reverberated endlessly.... At length he drew his chair to the table and
+began to write. He addressed an envelope and then slowly re-read what he
+had written.
+
+
+“MY DEAR FLAMEL,”
+
+“Many apologies for not sending you sooner the enclosed check, which
+represents the customary percentage on the sale of the Letters.”
+
+“Trusting you will excuse the oversight,
+
+“Yours truly,
+
+“STEPHEN GLENNARD.”
+
+
+He let himself out of the darkened house and dropped the letter in the
+post-box at the corner.
+
+
+The next afternoon he was detained late at his office, and as he was
+preparing to leave he heard someone asking for him in the outer room. He
+seated himself again and Flamel was shown in.
+
+The two men, as Glennard pushed aside an obstructive chair, had a
+moment to measure each other; then Flamel advanced, and drawing out his
+note-case, laid a slip of paper on the desk.
+
+“My dear fellow, what on earth does this mean?” Glennard recognized his
+check.
+
+“That I was remiss, simply. It ought to have gone to you before.”
+
+Flamel’s tone had been that of unaffected surprise, but at this his
+accent changed and he asked, quickly: “On what ground?”
+
+Glennard had moved away from the desk and stood leaning against the
+calf-backed volumes of the bookcase. “On the ground that you sold Mrs.
+Aubyn’s letters for me, and that I find the intermediary in such cases
+is entitled to a percentage on the sale.”
+
+Flamel paused before answering. “You find, you say. It’s a recent
+discovery?”
+
+“Obviously, from my not sending the check sooner. You see I’m new to the
+business.”
+
+“And since when have you discovered that there was any question of
+business, as far as I was concerned?”
+
+Glennard flushed and his voice rose slightly. “Are you reproaching me
+for not having remembered it sooner?”
+
+Flamel, who had spoken in the rapid repressed tone of a man on the
+verge of anger, stared a moment at this and then, in his natural voice,
+rejoined, good-humoredly, “Upon my soul, I don’t understand you!”
+
+The change of key seemed to disconcert Glennard. “It’s simple enough--”
+ he muttered.
+
+“Simple enough--your offering me money in return for a friendly service?
+I don’t know what your other friends expect!”
+
+“Some of my friends wouldn’t have undertaken the job. Those who would
+have done so would probably have expected to be paid.”
+
+He lifted his eyes to Flamel and the two men looked at each other.
+Flamel had turned white and his lips stirred, but he held his temperate
+note. “If you mean to imply that the job was not a nice one, you lay
+yourself open to the retort that you proposed it. But for my part
+I’ve never seen, I never shall see, any reason for not publishing the
+letters.”
+
+“That’s just it!”
+
+“What--?”
+
+“The certainty of your not seeing was what made me go to you. When
+a man’s got stolen goods to pawn he doesn’t take them to the
+police-station.”
+
+“Stolen?” Flamel echoed. “The letters were stolen?”
+
+Glennard burst into a coarse laugh. “How much longer do you expect me to
+keep up that pretence about the letters? You knew well enough they were
+written to me.”
+
+Flamel looked at him in silence. “Were they?” he said at length. “I
+didn’t know it.”
+
+“And didn’t suspect it, I suppose,” Glennard sneered.
+
+The other was again silent; then he said, “I may remind you that,
+supposing I had felt any curiosity about the matter, I had no way of
+finding out that the letters were written to you. You never showed me
+the originals.”
+
+“What does that prove? There were fifty ways of finding out. It’s the
+kind of thing one can easily do.”
+
+Flamel glanced at him with contempt. “Our ideas probably differ as to
+what a man can easily do. It would not have been easy for me.”
+
+Glennard’s anger vented itself in the words uppermost in his thought.
+“It may, then, interest you to hear that my wife DOES know about the
+letters--has known for some months....”
+
+“Ah,” said the other, slowly. Glennard saw that, in his blind clutch at
+a weapon, he had seized the one most apt to wound. Flamel’s muscles were
+under control, but his face showed the undefinable change produced
+by the slow infiltration of poison. Every implication that the words
+contained had reached its mark; but Glennard felt that their obvious
+intention was lost in the anguish of what they suggested. He was sure
+now that Flamel would never have betrayed him; but the inference only
+made a wider outlet for his anger. He paused breathlessly for Flamel to
+speak.
+
+“If she knows, it’s not through me.” It was what Glennard had waited
+for.
+
+“Through you, by God? Who said it was through you? Do you suppose I
+leave it to you, or to anybody else, for that matter, to keep my wife
+informed of my actions? I didn’t suppose even such egregious conceit as
+yours could delude a man to that degree!” Struggling for a foothold in
+the small landslide of his dignity, he added, in a steadier tone, “My
+wife learned the facts from me.”
+
+Flamel received this in silence. The other’s outbreak seemed to
+have reinforced his self-control, and when he spoke it was with a
+deliberation implying that his course was chosen. “In that case I
+understand still less--”
+
+“Still less--?”
+
+“The meaning of this.” He pointed to the check. “When you began to speak
+I supposed you had meant it as a bribe; now I can only infer it was
+intended as a random insult. In either case, here’s my answer.”
+
+He tore the slip of paper in two and tossed the fragments across the
+desk to Glennard. Then he turned and walked out of the office.
+
+Glennard dropped his head on his hands. If he had hoped to restore his
+self-respect by the simple expedient of assailing Flamel’s, the result
+had not justified his expectation. The blow he had struck had blunted
+the edge of his anger, and the unforeseen extent of the hurt inflicted
+did not alter the fact that his weapon had broken in his hands. He
+saw now that his rage against Flamel was only the last projection of a
+passionate self-disgust. This consciousness did not dull his dislike of
+the man; it simply made reprisals ineffectual. Flamel’s unwillingness to
+quarrel with him was the last stage of his abasement.
+
+In the light of this final humiliation his assumption of his wife’s
+indifference struck him as hardly so fatuous as the sentimental
+resuscitation of his past. He had been living in a factitious world
+wherein his emotions were the sycophants of his vanity, and it was with
+instinctive relief that he felt its ruins crash about his head.
+
+It was nearly dark when he left his office, and he walked slowly
+homeward in the complete mental abeyance that follows on such a crisis.
+He was not aware that he was thinking of his wife; yet when he reached
+his own door he found that, in the involuntary readjustment of his
+vision, she had once more become the central point of consciousness.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+It had never before occurred to him that she might, after all, have
+missed the purport of the document he had put in her way. What if, in
+her hurried inspection of the papers, she had passed it over as related
+to the private business of some client? What, for instance, was to
+prevent her concluding that Glennard was the counsel of the unknown
+person who had sold the “Aubyn Letters.” The subject was one not likely
+to fix her attention--she was not a curious woman.
+
+Glennard at this point laid down his fork and glanced at her between the
+candle-shades. The alternative explanation of her indifference was not
+slow in presenting itself. Her head had the same listening droop as
+when he had caught sight of her the day before in Flamel’s company; the
+attitude revived the vividness of his impression. It was simple enough,
+after all. She had ceased to care for him because she cared for someone
+else.
+
+As he followed her upstairs he felt a sudden stirring of his dormant
+anger. His sentiments had lost all their factitious complexity. He had
+already acquitted her of any connivance in his baseness, and he felt
+only that he loved her and that she had escaped him. This was now,
+strangely enough, his dominating thought: the consciousness that he and
+she had passed through the fusion of love and had emerged from it as
+incommunicably apart as though the transmutation had never taken place.
+Every other passion, he mused, left some mark upon the nature; but love
+passed like the flight of a ship across the waters.
+
+She sank into her usual seat near the lamp, and he leaned against the
+chimney, moving about with an inattentive hand the knick-knacks on the
+mantel.
+
+Suddenly he caught sight of her reflection in the mirror. She was
+looking at him. He turned and their eyes met.
+
+He moved across the room and stood before her.
+
+“There’s something that I want to say to you,” he began in a low tone.
+
+She held his gaze, but her color deepened. He noticed again, with a
+jealous pang, how her beauty had gained in warmth and meaning. It was
+as though a transparent cup had been filled with wine. He looked at her
+ironically.
+
+“I’ve never prevented your seeing your friends here,” he broke out. “Why
+do you meet Flamel in out-of-the-way places? Nothing makes a woman so
+cheap--”
+
+She rose abruptly and they faced each other a few feet apart.
+
+“What do you mean?” she asked.
+
+“I saw you with him last Sunday on the Riverside Drive,” he went on, the
+utterance of the charge reviving his anger.
+
+“Ah,” she murmured. She sank into her chair again and began to play with
+a paper-knife that lay on the table at her elbow.
+
+Her silence exasperated him.
+
+“Well?” he burst out. “Is that all you have to say?”
+
+“Do you wish me to explain?” she asked, proudly.
+
+“Do you imply I haven’t the right to?”
+
+“I imply nothing. I will tell you whatever you wish to know. I went for
+a walk with Mr. Flamel because he asked me to.”
+
+“I didn’t suppose you went uninvited. But there are certain things a
+sensible woman doesn’t do. She doesn’t slink about in out-of-the-way
+streets with men. Why couldn’t you have seen him here?”
+
+She hesitated. “Because he wanted to see me alone.”
+
+“Did he, indeed? And may I ask if you gratify all his wishes with equal
+alacrity?”
+
+“I don’t know that he has any others where I am concerned.” She
+paused again and then continued, in a lower voice that somehow had an
+under-note of warning. “He wished to bid me good-by. He’s going away.”
+
+Glennard turned on her a startled glance. “Going away?”
+
+“He’s going to Europe to-morrow. He goes for a long time. I supposed you
+knew.”
+
+The last phrase revived his irritation. “You forget that I depend on you
+for my information about Flamel. He’s your friend and not mine. In fact,
+I’ve sometimes wondered at your going out of your way to be so civil to
+him when you must see plainly enough that I don’t like him.”
+
+Her answer to this was not immediate. She seemed to be choosing her
+words with care, not so much for her own sake as for his, and his
+exasperation was increased by the suspicion that she was trying to spare
+him.
+
+“He was your friend before he was mine. I never knew him till I was
+married. It was you who brought him to the house and who seemed to wish
+me to like him.”
+
+Glennard gave a short laugh. The defence was feebler than he had
+expected: she was certainly not a clever woman.
+
+“Your deference to my wishes is really beautiful; but it’s not the first
+time in history that a man has made a mistake in introducing his
+friends to his wife. You must, at any rate, have seen since then that
+my enthusiasm had cooled; but so, perhaps, has your eagerness to oblige
+me.”
+
+She met this with a silence that seemed to rob the taunt of half its
+efficacy.
+
+“Is that what you imply?” he pressed her.
+
+“No,” she answered with sudden directness. “I noticed some time ago that
+you seemed to dislike him, but since then--”
+
+“Well--since then?”
+
+“I’ve imagined that you had reasons for still wishing me to be civil to
+him, as you call it.”
+
+“Ah,” said Glennard, with an effort at lightness; but his irony dropped,
+for something in her voice made him feel that he and she stood at last
+in that naked desert of apprehension where meaning skulks vainly behind
+speech.
+
+“And why did you imagine this?” The blood mounted to his forehead.
+“Because he told you that I was under obligations to him?”
+
+She turned pale. “Under obligations?”
+
+“Oh, don’t let’s beat about the bush. Didn’t he tell you it was I who
+published Mrs. Aubyn’s letters? Answer me that.”
+
+“No,” she said; and after a moment which seemed given to the weighing of
+alternatives, she added: “No one told me.”
+
+“You didn’t know then?”
+
+She seemed to speak with an effort. “Not until--not until--”
+
+“Till I gave you those papers to sort?”
+
+Her head sank.
+
+“You understood then?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+He looked at her immovable face. “Had you suspected--before?” was slowly
+wrung from him.
+
+“At times--yes--” Her voice dropped to a whisper.
+
+“Why? From anything that was said--?”
+
+There was a shade of pity in her glance. “No one said anything--no one
+told me anything.” She looked away from him. “It was your manner--”
+
+“My manner?”
+
+“Whenever the book was mentioned. Things you said--once or twice--your
+irritation--I can’t explain--”
+
+Glennard, unconsciously, had moved nearer. He breathed like a man who
+has been running. “You knew, then, you knew”--he stammered. The avowal
+of her love for Flamel would have hurt him less, would have rendered
+her less remote. “You knew--you knew--” he repeated; and suddenly his
+anguish gathered voice. “My God!” he cried, “you suspected it first, you
+say--and then you knew it--this damnable, this accursed thing; you knew
+it months ago--it’s months since I put that paper in your way--and yet
+you’ve done nothing, you’ve said nothing, you’ve made no sign, you’ve
+lived alongside of me as if it had made no difference--no difference in
+either of our lives. What are you made of, I wonder? Don’t you see the
+hideous ignominy of it? Don’t you see how you’ve shared in my disgrace?
+Or haven’t you any sense of shame?”
+
+He preserved sufficient lucidity, as the words poured from him, to see
+how fatally they invited her derision; but something told him they had
+both passed beyond the phase of obvious retaliations, and that if any
+chord in her responded it would not be that of scorn.
+
+He was right. She rose slowly and moved toward him.
+
+“Haven’t you had enough--without that?” she said, in a strange voice of
+pity.
+
+He stared at her. “Enough--?”
+
+“Of misery....”
+
+An iron band seemed loosened from his temples. “You saw then...?” he
+whispered.
+
+“Oh, God----oh, God----” she sobbed. She dropped beside him and hid
+her anguish against his knees. They clung thus in silence, a long time,
+driven together down the same fierce blast of shame.
+
+When at length she lifted her face he averted his. Her scorn would have
+hurt him less than the tears on his hands.
+
+She spoke languidly, like a child emerging from a passion of weeping.
+“It was for the money--?”
+
+His lips shaped an assent.
+
+“That was the inheritance--that we married on?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+She drew back and rose to her feet. He sat watching her as she wandered
+away from him.
+
+“You hate me,” broke from him.
+
+She made no answer.
+
+“Say you hate me!” he persisted.
+
+“That would have been so simple,” she answered with a strange smile. She
+dropped into a chair near the writing-table and rested a bowed forehead
+on her hand.
+
+“Was it much--?” she began at length.
+
+“Much--?” he returned, vaguely.
+
+“The money.”
+
+“The money?” That part of it seemed to count so little that for a moment
+he did not follow her thought.
+
+“It must be paid back,” she insisted. “Can you do it?”
+
+“Oh, yes,” he returned, listlessly. “I can do it.”
+
+“I would make any sacrifice for that!” she urged.
+
+He nodded. “Of course.” He sat staring at her in dry-eyed self-contempt.
+“Do you count on its making much difference?”
+
+“Much difference?”
+
+“In the way I feel--or you feel about me?”
+
+She shook her head.
+
+“It’s the least part of it,” he groaned.
+
+“It’s the only part we can repair.”
+
+“Good heavens! If there were any reparation--” He rose quickly and
+crossed the space that divided them. “Why did you never speak?” he
+asked.
+
+“Haven’t you answered that yourself?”
+
+“Answered it?”
+
+“Just now--when you told me you did it for me.” She paused a moment and
+then went on with a deepening note--“I would have spoken if I could have
+helped you.”
+
+“But you must have despised me.”
+
+“I’ve told you that would have been simpler.”
+
+“But how could you go on like this--hating the money?”
+
+“I knew you would speak in time. I wanted you, first, to hate it as I
+did.”
+
+He gazed at her with a kind of awe. “You’re wonderful,” he murmured.
+“But you don’t yet know the depths I’ve reached.”
+
+She raised an entreating hand. “I don’t want to!”
+
+“You’re afraid, then, that you’ll hate me?”
+
+“No--but that you’ll hate ME. Let me understand without your telling
+me.”
+
+“You can’t. It’s too base. I thought you didn’t care because you loved
+Flamel.”
+
+She blushed deeply. “Don’t--don’t--” she warned him.
+
+“I haven’t the right to, you mean?”
+
+“I mean that you’ll be sorry.”
+
+He stood imploringly before her. “I want to say something
+worse--something more outrageous. If you don’t understand THIS you’ll be
+perfectly justified in ordering me out of the house.”
+
+She answered him with a glance of divination. “I shall understand--but
+you’ll be sorry.”
+
+“I must take my chance of that.” He moved away and tossed the books
+about the table. Then he swung round and faced her. “Does Flamel care
+for you?” he asked.
+
+Her flush deepened, but she still looked at him without anger. “What
+would be the use?” she said with a note of sadness.
+
+“Ah, I didn’t ask THAT,” he penitently murmured.
+
+“Well, then--”
+
+To this adjuration he made no response beyond that of gazing at her
+with an eye which seemed now to view her as a mere factor in an immense
+redistribution of meanings.
+
+“I insulted Flamel to-day. I let him see that I suspected him of having
+told you. I hated him because he knew about the letters.”
+
+He caught the spreading horror of her eyes, and for an instant he had
+to grapple with the new temptation they lit up. Then he said, with an
+effort--“Don’t blame him--he’s impeccable. He helped me to get them
+published; but I lied to him too; I pretended they were written to
+another man... a man who was dead....”
+
+She raised her arms in a gesture that seemed to ward off his blows.
+
+“You DO despise me!” he insisted.
+
+“Ah, that poor woman--that poor woman--” he heard her murmur.
+
+“I spare no one, you see!” he triumphed over her. She kept her face
+hidden.
+
+“You do hate me, you do despise me!” he strangely exulted.
+
+“Be silent!” she commanded him; but he seemed no longer conscious of any
+check on his gathering purpose.
+
+“He cared for you--he cared for you,” he repeated, “and he never told
+you of the letters--”
+
+She sprang to her feet. “How can you?” she flamed. “How dare you?
+THAT--!”
+
+Glennard was ashy pale. “It’s a weapon... like another....”
+
+“A scoundrel’s!”
+
+He smiled wretchedly. “I should have used it in his place.”
+
+“Stephen! Stephen!” she cried, as though to drown the blasphemy on his
+lips. She swept to him with a rescuing gesture. “Don’t say such things.
+I forbid you! It degrades us both.”
+
+He put her back with trembling hands. “Nothing that I say of myself can
+degrade you. We’re on different levels.”
+
+“I’m on yours, whatever it is!”
+
+He lifted his head and their gaze flowed together.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+The great renewals take effect as imperceptibly as the first workings of
+spring. Glennard, though he felt himself brought nearer to his wife,
+was still, as it were, hardly within speaking distance. He was
+but laboriously acquiring the rudiments of their new medium of
+communication; and he had to grope for her through the dense fog of his
+humiliation, the distorting vapor against which his personality loomed
+grotesque and mean.
+
+Only the fact that we are unaware how well our nearest know us
+enables us to live with them. Love is the most impregnable refuge of
+self-esteem, and we hate the eye that reaches to our nakedness. If
+Glennard did not hate his wife it was slowly, sufferingly, that there
+was born in him that profounder passion which made his earlier feeling
+seem a mere commotion of the blood. He was like a child coming back to
+the sense of an enveloping presence: her nearness was a breast on which
+he leaned.
+
+They did not, at first, talk much together, and each beat a devious
+track about the outskirts of the subject that lay between them like a
+haunted wood. But every word, every action, seemed to glance at it,
+to draw toward it, as though a fount of healing sprang in its poisoned
+shade. If only they might cut away through the thicket to that restoring
+spring!
+
+Glennard, watching his wife with the intentness of a wanderer to whom no
+natural sign is negligible, saw that she had taken temporary refuge in
+the purpose of renouncing the money. If both, theoretically, owned the
+inefficacy of such amends, the woman’s instinctive subjectiveness made
+her find relief in this crude form of penance. Glennard saw that she
+meant to live as frugally as possible till what she deemed their debt
+was discharged; and he prayed she might not discover how far-reaching,
+in its merely material sense, was the obligation she thus hoped to
+acquit. Her mind was fixed on the sum originally paid for the letters,
+and this he knew he could lay aside in a year or two. He was touched,
+meanwhile, by the spirit that made her discard the petty luxuries which
+she regarded as the signs of their bondage. Their shared renunciations
+drew her nearer to him, helped, in their evidence of her helplessness,
+to restore the full protecting stature of his love. And still they did
+not speak.
+
+It was several weeks later that, one afternoon by the drawing-room fire,
+she handed him a letter that she had been reading when he entered.
+
+“I’ve heard from Mr. Flamel,” she said.
+
+Glennard turned pale. It was as though a latent presence had suddenly
+become visible to both. He took the letter mechanically.
+
+“It’s from Smyrna,” she said. “Won’t you read it?”
+
+He handed it back. “You can tell me about it--his hand’s so illegible.”
+ He wandered to the other end of the room and then turned and stood
+before her. “I’ve been thinking of writing to Flamel,” he said.
+
+She looked up.
+
+“There’s one point,” he continued, slowly, “that I ought to clear up.
+I told him you’d known about the letters all along; for a long time, at
+least; and I saw it hurt him horribly. It was just what I meant to do,
+of course; but I can’t leave him to that false impression; I must write
+him.”
+
+She received this without outward movement, but he saw that the depths
+were stirred. At length she returned, in a hesitating tone, “Why do you
+call it a false impression? I did know.”
+
+“Yes, but I implied you didn’t care.”
+
+“Ah!”
+
+He still stood looking down on her. “Don’t you want me to set that
+right?” he tentatively pursued.
+
+She lifted her head and fixed him bravely. “It isn’t necessary,” she
+said.
+
+Glennard flushed with the shock of the retort; then, with a gesture
+of comprehension, “No,” he said, “with you it couldn’t be; but I might
+still set myself right.”
+
+She looked at him gently. “Don’t I,” she murmured, “do that?”
+
+“In being yourself merely? Alas, the rehabilitation’s too complete!
+You make me seem--to myself even--what I’m not; what I can never be.
+I can’t, at times, defend myself from the delusion; but I can at least
+enlighten others.”
+
+The flood was loosened, and kneeling by her he caught her hands. “Don’t
+you see that it’s become an obsession with me? That if I could strip
+myself down to the last lie--only there’d always be another one left
+under it!--and do penance naked in the market-place, I should at least
+have the relief of easing one anguish by another? Don’t you see that the
+worst of my torture is the impossibility of such amends?”
+
+Her hands lay in his without returning pressure. “Ah, poor woman, poor
+woman,” he heard her sigh.
+
+“Don’t pity her, pity me! What have I done to her or to you, after all?
+You’re both inaccessible! It was myself I sold.”
+
+He took an abrupt turn away from her; then halted before her again. “How
+much longer,” he burst out, “do you suppose you can stand it? You’ve
+been magnificent, you’ve been inspired, but what’s the use? You can’t
+wipe out the ignominy of it. It’s miserable for you and it does HER no
+good!”
+
+She lifted a vivid face. “That’s the thought I can’t bear!” she cried.
+
+“What thought?”
+
+“That it does her no good--all you’re feeling, all you’re suffering. Can
+it be that it makes no difference?”
+
+He avoided her challenging glance. “What’s done is done,” he muttered.
+
+“Is it ever, quite, I wonder?” she mused. He made no answer and they
+lapsed into one of the pauses that are a subterranean channel of
+communication.
+
+It was she who, after awhile, began to speak with a new suffusing
+diffidence that made him turn a roused eye on her.
+
+“Don’t they say,” she asked, feeling her way as in a kind of tender
+apprehensiveness, “that the early Christians, instead of pulling down
+the heathen temples--the temples of the unclean gods--purified them by
+turning them to their own uses? I’ve always thought one might do that
+with one’s actions--the actions one loathes but can’t undo. One can
+make, I mean, a wrong the door to other wrongs or an impassable wall
+against them....” Her voice wavered on the word. “We can’t always tear
+down the temples we’ve built to the unclean gods, but we can put
+good spirits in the house of evil--the spirits of mercy and shame and
+understanding, that might never have come to us if we hadn’t been in
+such great need....”
+
+She moved over to him and laid a hesitating hand on his. His head was
+bent and he did not change his attitude. She sat down beside him without
+speaking; but their silences now were fertile as rain-clouds--they
+quickened the seeds of understanding.
+
+At length he looked up. “I don’t know,” he said, “what spirits have come
+to live in the house of evil that I built--but you’re there and that’s
+enough for me. It’s strange,” he went on after another pause, “she
+wished the best for me so often, and now, at last, it’s through her that
+it’s come to me. But for her I shouldn’t have known you--it’s through
+her that I’ve found you. Sometimes, do you know?--that makes it
+hardest--makes me most intolerable to myself. Can’t you see that it’s
+the worst thing I’ve got to face? I sometimes think I could have
+borne it better if you hadn’t understood! I took everything from
+her--everything--even to the poor shelter of loyalty she’d trusted
+in--the only thing I could have left her!--I took everything from her,
+I deceived her, I despoiled her, I destroyed her--and she’s given me YOU
+in return!”
+
+His wife’s cry caught him up. “It isn’t that she’s given ME to you--it
+is that she’s given you to yourself.” She leaned to him as though swept
+forward on a wave of pity. “Don’t you see,” she went on, as his eyes
+hung on her, “that that’s the gift you can’t escape from, the debt
+you’re pledged to acquit? Don’t you see that you’ve never before been
+what she thought you, and that now, so wonderfully, she’s made you into
+the man she loved? THAT’S worth suffering for, worth dying for, to a
+woman--that’s the gift she would have wished to give!”
+
+“Ah,” he cried, “but woe to him by whom it cometh. What did I ever give
+her?”
+
+“The happiness of giving,” she said.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Touchstone, by Edith Wharton
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+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />
+    <title>
+      The Touchstone, by Edith Wharton
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
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+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Touchstone, by Edith Wharton
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Touchstone
+
+Author: Edith Wharton
+
+Release Date: July 12, 2008 [EBook #267]
+[Last updated: September 4, 2017]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TOUCHSTONE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Judith Boss, and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      THE TOUCHSTONE
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      By Edith Wharton
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <big><b>CONTENTS</b></big>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> I </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> II </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> III </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> IV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> V </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> VI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0007"> VII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0008"> VIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0009"> IX </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0010"> X </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0011"> XI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0012"> XII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0013"> XIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0014"> XIV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      I
+    </h2>
+<div class="blk">
+    <p class="nind">
+      <span class="smcap">“Professor Joslin,</span> who, as our readers are doubtless aware, is engaged in
+      writing the life of Mrs. Aubyn, asks us to state that he will be greatly
+      indebted to any of the famous novelist’s friends who will furnish him with
+      information concerning the period previous to her coming to England. Mrs.
+      Aubyn had so few intimate friends, and consequently so few regular
+      correspondents, that letters will be of special value. Professor Joslin’s
+      address is 10 Augusta Gardens, Kensington, and he begs us to say that he
+      will promptly return any documents entrusted to him.”
+     </p>
+</div>
+    <p class="nind">
+      <span class="smcap">Glennard</span> dropped the <i>Spectator</i> and sat looking into the fire. The club was
+      filling up, but he still had to himself the small inner room, with its
+      darkening outlook down the rain-streaked prospect of Fifth Avenue. It was
+      all dull and dismal enough, yet a moment earlier his boredom had been
+      perversely tinged by a sense of resentment at the thought that, as things
+      were going, he might in time have to surrender even the despised privilege
+      of boring himself within those particular four walls. It was not that he
+      cared much for the club, but that the remote contingency of having to give
+      it up stood to him, just then, perhaps by very reason of its
+      insignificance and remoteness, for the symbol of his increasing
+      abnegations; of that perpetual paring-off that was gradually reducing
+      existence to the naked business of keeping himself alive. It was the
+      futility of his multiplied shifts and privations that made them seem
+      unworthy of a high attitude; the sense that, however rapidly he eliminated
+      the superfluous, his cleared horizon was likely to offer no nearer view of
+      the one prospect toward which he strained. To give up things in order to
+      marry the woman one loves is easier than to give them up without being
+      brought appreciably nearer to such a conclusion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Through the open door he saw young Hollingsworth rise with a yawn from the
+      ineffectual solace of a brandy-and-soda and transport his purposeless
+      person to the window. Glennard measured his course with a contemptuous
+      eye. It was so like Hollingsworth to get up and look out of the window
+      just as it was growing too dark to see anything! There was a man rich
+      enough to do what he pleased&mdash;had he been capable of being pleased&mdash;yet
+      barred from all conceivable achievement by his own impervious dulness;
+      while, a few feet off, Glennard, who wanted only enough to keep a decent
+      coat on his back and a roof over the head of the woman he loved Glennard,
+      who had sweated, toiled, denied himself for the scant measure of
+      opportunity that his zeal would have converted into a kingdom&mdash;sat
+      wretchedly calculating that, even when he had resigned from the club, and
+      knocked off his cigars, and given up his Sundays out of town, he would
+      still be no nearer attainment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The <i>Spectator</i> had slipped to his feet and as he picked it up his eye fell
+      again on the paragraph addressed to the friends of Mrs. Aubyn. He had read
+      it for the first time with a scarcely perceptible quickening of attention:
+      her name had so long been public property that his eye passed it
+      unseeingly, as the crowd in the street hurries without a glance by some
+      familiar monument.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Information concerning the period previous to her coming to England....”
+       The words were an evocation. He saw her again as she had looked at their
+      first meeting, the poor woman of genius with her long pale face and
+      short-sighted eyes, softened a little by the grace of youth and
+      inexperience, but so incapable even then of any hold upon the pulses. When
+      she spoke, indeed, she was wonderful, more wonderful, perhaps, than when
+      later, to Glennard’s fancy at least, the consciousness of memorable things
+      uttered seemed to take from even her most intimate speech the perfect
+      bloom of privacy. It was in those earliest days, if ever, that he had come
+      near loving her; though even then his sentiment had lived only in the
+      intervals of its expression. Later, when to be loved by her had been a
+      state to touch any man’s imagination, the physical reluctance had,
+      inexplicably, so overborne the intellectual attraction, that the last
+      years had been, to both of them, an agony of conflicting impulses. Even
+      now, if, in turning over old papers, his hand lit on her letters, the
+      touch filled him with inarticulate misery....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “She had so few intimate friends... that letters will be of special
+      value.” So few intimate friends! For years she had had but one; one who in
+      the last years had requited her wonderful pages, her tragic outpourings of
+      love, humility, and pardon, with the scant phrases by which a man evades
+      the vulgarest of sentimental importunities. He had been a brute in spite
+      of himself, and sometimes, now that the remembrance of her face had faded,
+      and only her voice and words remained with him, he chafed at his own
+      inadequacy, his stupid inability to rise to the height of her passion. His
+      egoism was not of a kind to mirror its complacency in the adventure. To
+      have been loved by the most brilliant woman of her day, and to have been
+      incapable of loving her, seemed to him, in looking back, the most derisive
+      evidence of his limitations; and his remorseful tenderness for her memory
+      was complicated with a sense of irritation against her for having given
+      him once for all the measure of his emotional capacity. It was not often,
+      however, that he thus probed the past. The public, in taking possession of
+      Mrs. Aubyn, had eased his shoulders of their burden. There was something
+      fatuous in an attitude of sentimental apology toward a memory already
+      classic: to reproach one’s self for not having loved Margaret Aubyn was a
+      good deal like being disturbed by an inability to admire the Venus of
+      Milo. From her cold niche of fame she looked down ironically enough on his
+      self-flagellations.... It was only when he came on something that belonged
+      to her that he felt a sudden renewal of the old feeling, the strange dual
+      impulse that drew him to her voice but drove him from her hand, so that
+      even now, at sight of anything she had touched, his heart contracted
+      painfully. It happened seldom nowadays. Her little presents, one by one,
+      had disappeared from his rooms, and her letters, kept from some
+      unacknowledged puerile vanity in the possession of such treasures, seldom
+      came beneath his hand....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Her letters will be of special value&mdash;” Her letters! Why, he must
+      have hundreds of them&mdash;enough to fill a volume. Sometimes it used to
+      seem to him that they came with every post&mdash;he used to avoid looking
+      in his letter-box when he came home to his rooms&mdash;but her writing
+      seemed to spring out at him as he put his key in the door&mdash;.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood up and strolled into the other room. Hollingsworth, lounging away
+      from the window, had joined himself to a languidly convivial group of men
+      to whom, in phrases as halting as though they struggled to define an
+      ultimate idea, he was expounding the cursed nuisance of living in a hole
+      with such a damned climate that one had to get out of it by February, with
+      the contingent difficulty of there being no place to take one’s yacht to
+      in winter but that other played-out hole, the Riviera. From the outskirts
+      of this group Glennard wandered to another, where a voice as different as
+      possible from Hollingsworth’s colorless organ dominated another circle of
+      languid listeners.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Come and hear Dinslow talk about his patent: admission free,” one of the
+      men sang out in a tone of mock resignation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dinslow turned to Glennard the confident pugnacity of his smile. “Give it
+      another six months and it’ll be talking about itself,” he declared. “It’s
+      pretty nearly articulate now.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Can it say papa?” someone else inquired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dinslow’s smile broadened. “You’ll be deuced glad to say papa to <i>it</i> a year
+      from now,” he retorted. “It’ll be able to support even you in affluence.
+      Look here, now, just let me explain to you&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard moved away impatiently. The men at the club&mdash;all but those
+      who were “in it”&mdash;were proverbially “tired” of Dinslow’s patent, and
+      none more so than Glennard, whose knowledge of its merits made it loom
+      large in the depressing catalogue of lost opportunities. The relations
+      between the two men had always been friendly, and Dinslow’s urgent offers
+      to “take him in on the ground floor” had of late intensified Glennard’s
+      sense of his own inability to meet good luck half way. Some of the men who
+      had paused to listen were already in evening clothes, others on their way
+      home to dress; and Glennard, with an accustomed twinge of humiliation,
+      said to himself that if he lingered among them it was in the miserable
+      hope that one of the number might ask him to dine. Miss Trent had told him
+      that she was to go to the opera that evening with her rich aunt; and if he
+      should have the luck to pick up a dinner-invitation he might join her
+      there without extra outlay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He moved about the room, lingering here and there in a tentative
+      affectation of interest; but though the men greeted him pleasantly no one
+      asked him to dine. Doubtless they were all engaged, these men who could
+      afford to pay for their dinners, who did not have to hunt for invitations
+      as a beggar rummages for a crust in an ash-barrel! But no&mdash;as
+      Hollingsworth left the lessening circle about the table an admiring youth
+      called out&mdash;“Holly, stop and dine!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hollingsworth turned on him the crude countenance that looked like the
+      wrong side of a more finished face. “Sorry I can’t. I’m in for a beastly
+      banquet.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard threw himself into an arm-chair. Why go home in the rain to
+      dress? It was folly to take a cab to the opera, it was worse folly to go
+      there at all. His perpetual meetings with Alexa Trent were as unfair to
+      the girl as they were unnerving to himself. Since he couldn’t marry her,
+      it was time to stand aside and give a better man the chance&mdash;and his
+      thought admitted the ironical implication that in the terms of expediency
+      the phrase might stand for Hollingsworth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II
+    </h2>
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">He</span> dined alone and walked home to his rooms in the rain. As he turned into
+      Fifth Avenue he caught the wet gleam of carriages on their way to the
+      opera, and he took the first side street, in a moment of irritation
+      against the petty restrictions that thwarted every impulse. It was
+      ridiculous to give up the opera, not because one might possibly be bored
+      there, but because one must pay for the experiment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In his sitting-room, the tacit connivance of the inanimate had centred the
+      lamp-light on a photograph of Alexa Trent, placed, in the obligatory
+      silver frame, just where, as memory officiously reminded him, Margaret
+      Aubyn’s picture had long throned in its stead. Miss Trent’s features
+      cruelly justified the usurpation. She had the kind of beauty that comes of
+      a happy accord of face and spirit. It is not given to many to have the
+      lips and eyes of their rarest mood, and some women go through life behind
+      a mask expressing only their anxiety about the butcher’s bill or their
+      inability to see a joke. With Miss Trent, face and mind had the same high
+      serious contour. She looked like a throned Justice by some grave
+      Florentine painter; and it seemed to Glennard that her most salient
+      attribute, or that at least to which her conduct gave most consistent
+      expression, was a kind of passionate justice&mdash;the intuitive feminine
+      justness that is so much rarer than a reasoned impartiality. Circumstances
+      had tragically combined to develop this instinct into a conscious habit.
+      She had seen more than most girls of the shabby side of life, of the
+      perpetual tendency of want to cramp the noblest attitude. Poverty and
+      misfortune had overhung her childhood and she had none of the pretty
+      delusions about life that are supposed to be the crowning grace of
+      girlhood. This very competence, which gave her a touching reasonableness,
+      made Glennard’s situation more difficult than if he had aspired to a
+      princess bred in the purple. Between them they asked so little&mdash;they
+      knew so well how to make that little do&mdash;but they understood also,
+      and she especially did not for a moment let him forget, that without that
+      little the future they dreamed of was impossible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sight of her photograph quickened Glennard’s exasperation. He was sick
+      and ashamed of the part he was playing. He had loved her now for two
+      years, with the tranquil tenderness that gathers depth and volume as it
+      nears fulfilment; he knew that she would wait for him&mdash;but the
+      certitude was an added pang. There are times when the constancy of the
+      woman one cannot marry is almost as trying as that of the woman one does
+      not want to.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard turned up his reading-lamp and stirred the fire. He had a long
+      evening before him and he wanted to crowd out thought with action. He had
+      brought some papers from his office and he spread them out on his table
+      and squared himself to the task....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It must have been an hour later that he found himself automatically
+      fitting a key into a locked drawer. He had no more notion than a
+      somnambulist of the mental process that had led up to this action. He was
+      just dimly aware of having pushed aside the papers and the heavy calf
+      volumes that a moment before had bounded his horizon, and of laying in
+      their place, without a trace of conscious volition, the parcel he had
+      taken from the drawer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The letters were tied in packets of thirty or forty. There were a great
+      many packets. On some of the envelopes the ink was fading; on others,
+      which bore the English post-mark, it was still fresh. She had been dead
+      hardly three years, and she had written, at lengthening intervals, to the
+      last....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He undid one of the earlier packets&mdash;little notes written during
+      their first acquaintance at Hillbridge. Glennard, on leaving college, had
+      begun life in his uncle’s law office in the old university town. It was
+      there that, at the house of her father, Professor Forth, he had first met
+      the young lady then chiefly distinguished for having, after two years of a
+      conspicuously unhappy marriage, returned to the protection of the paternal
+      roof.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Aubyn was at that time an eager and somewhat tragic young woman, of
+      complex mind and undeveloped manners, whom her crude experience of
+      matrimony had fitted out with a stock of generalizations that exploded
+      like bombs in the academic air of Hillbridge. In her choice of a husband
+      she had been fortunate enough, if the paradox be permitted, to light on
+      one so signally gifted with the faculty of putting himself in the wrong
+      that her leaving him had the dignity of a manifesto&mdash;made her, as it
+      were, the spokeswoman of outraged wifehood. In this light she was
+      cherished by that dominant portion of Hillbridge society which was least
+      indulgent to conjugal differences, and which found a proportionate
+      pleasure in being for once able to feast openly on a dish liberally
+      seasoned with the outrageous. So much did this endear Mrs. Aubyn to the
+      university ladies that they were disposed from the first to allow her more
+      latitude of speech and action than the ill-used wife was generally
+      accorded in Hillbridge, where misfortune was still regarded as a
+      visitation designed to put people in their proper place and make them feel
+      the superiority of their neighbors. The young woman so privileged combined
+      with a kind of personal shyness an intellectual audacity that was like a
+      deflected impulse of coquetry: one felt that if she had been prettier she
+      would have had emotions instead of ideas. She was in fact even then what
+      she had always remained: a genius capable of the acutest generalizations,
+      but curiously undiscerning where her personal susceptibilities were
+      concerned. Her psychology failed her just where it serves most women and
+      one felt that her brains would never be a guide to her heart. Of all this,
+      however, Glennard thought little in the first year of their acquaintance.
+      He was at an age when all the gifts and graces are but so much
+      undiscriminated food to the ravening egoism of youth. In seeking Mrs.
+      Aubyn’s company he was prompted by an intuitive taste for the best as a
+      pledge of his own superiority. The sympathy of the cleverest woman in
+      Hillbridge was balm to his craving for distinction: it was public
+      confirmation of his secret sense that he was cut out for a bigger place.
+      It must not be understood that Glennard was vain. Vanity contents itself
+      with the coarsest diet; there is no palate so fastidious as that of
+      self-distrust. To a youth of Glennard’s aspirations the encouragement of a
+      clever woman stood for the symbol of all success. Later, when he had begun
+      to feel his way, to gain a foothold, he would not need such support; but
+      it served to carry him lightly and easily over what is often a period of
+      insecurity and discouragement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would be unjust, however, to represent his interest in Mrs. Aubyn as a
+      matter of calculation. It was as instinctive as love, and it missed being
+      love by just such a hair-breadth deflection from the line of beauty as had
+      determined the curve of Mrs. Aubyn’s lips. When they met she had just
+      published her first novel, and Glennard, who afterward had an ambitious
+      man’s impatience of distinguished women, was young enough to be dazzled by
+      the semi-publicity it gave her. It was the kind of book that makes elderly
+      ladies lower their voices and call each other “my dear” when they
+      furtively discuss it; and Glennard exulted in the superior knowledge of
+      the world that enabled him to take as a matter of course sentiments over
+      which the university shook its head. Still more delightful was it to hear
+      Mrs. Aubyn waken the echoes of academic drawing-rooms with audacities
+      surpassing those of her printed page. Her intellectual independence gave a
+      touch of comradeship to their intimacy, prolonging the illusion of college
+      friendships based on a joyous interchange of heresies. Mrs. Aubyn and
+      Glennard represented to each other the augur’s wink behind the Hillbridge
+      idol: they walked together in that light of young omniscience from which
+      fate so curiously excludes one’s elders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Husbands who are notoriously inopportune, may even die inopportunely, and
+      this was the revenge that Mr. Aubyn, some two years after her return to
+      Hillbridge, took upon his injured wife. He died precisely at the moment
+      when Glennard was beginning to criticise her. It was not that she bored
+      him; she did what was infinitely worse&mdash;she made him feel his
+      inferiority. The sense of mental equality had been gratifying to his raw
+      ambition; but as his self-knowledge defined itself, his understanding of
+      her also increased; and if man is at times indirectly flattered by the
+      moral superiority of woman, her mental ascendency is extenuated by no such
+      oblique tribute to his powers. The attitude of looking up is a strain on
+      the muscles; and it was becoming more and more Glennard’s opinion that
+      brains, in a woman, should be merely the obverse of beauty. To beauty Mrs.
+      Aubyn could lay no claim; and while she had enough prettiness to
+      exasperate him by her incapacity to make use of it, she seemed invincibly
+      ignorant of any of the little artifices whereby women contrive to palliate
+      their defects and even to turn them into graces. Her dress never seemed a
+      part of her; all her clothes had an impersonal air, as though they had
+      belonged to someone else and been borrowed in an emergency that had
+      somehow become chronic. She was conscious enough of her deficiencies to
+      try to amend them by rash imitations of the most approved models; but no
+      woman who does not dress well intuitively will ever do so by the light of
+      reason, and Mrs. Aubyn’s plagiarisms, to borrow a metaphor of her trade,
+      somehow never seemed to be incorporated with the text.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair.
+      The fame that came to Mrs. Aubyn with her second book left Glennard’s
+      imagination untouched, or had at most the negative effect of removing her
+      still farther from the circle of his contracting sympathies. We are all
+      the sport of time; and fate had so perversely ordered the chronology of
+      Margaret Aubyn’s romance that when her husband died Glennard felt as
+      though he had lost a friend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not in his nature to be needlessly unkind; and though he was in the
+      impregnable position of the man who has given a woman no more definable
+      claim on him than that of letting her fancy that he loves her, he would
+      not for the world have accentuated his advantage by any betrayal of
+      indifference. During the first year of her widowhood their friendship
+      dragged on with halting renewals of sentiment, becoming more and more a
+      banquet of empty dishes from which the covers were never removed; then
+      Glennard went to New York to live and exchanged the faded pleasures of
+      intercourse for the comparative novelty of correspondence. Her letters,
+      oddly enough, seemed at first to bring her nearer than her presence. She
+      had adopted, and she successfully maintained, a note as affectionately
+      impersonal as his own; she wrote ardently of her work, she questioned him
+      about his, she even bantered him on the inevitable pretty girl who was
+      certain before long to divert the current of his confidences. To Glennard,
+      who was almost a stranger in New York, the sight of Mrs. Aubyn’s writing
+      was like a voice of reassurance in surroundings as yet insufficiently
+      aware of him. His vanity found a retrospective enjoyment in the sentiment
+      his heart had rejected, and this factitious emotion drove him once or
+      twice to Hillbridge, whence, after scenes of evasive tenderness, he
+      returned dissatisfied with himself and her. As he made room for himself in
+      New York and peopled the space he had cleared with the sympathies at the
+      disposal of agreeable and self-confident young men, it seemed to him
+      natural to infer that Mrs. Aubyn had refurnished in the same manner the
+      void he was not unwilling his departure should have left. But in the
+      dissolution of sentimental partnerships it is seldom that both associates
+      are able to withdraw their funds at the same time; and Glennard gradually
+      learned that he stood for the venture on which Mrs. Aubyn had
+      irretrievably staked her all. It was not the kind of figure he cared to
+      cut. He had no fancy for leaving havoc in his wake and would have
+      preferred to sow a quick growth of oblivion in the spaces wasted by his
+      unconsidered inroads; but if he supplied the seed it was clearly Mrs.
+      Aubyn’s business to see to the raising of the crop. Her attitude seemed
+      indeed to throw his own reasonableness into distincter relief: so that
+      they might have stood for thrift and improvidence in an allegory of the
+      affections.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not that Mrs. Aubyn permitted herself to be a pensioner on his
+      bounty. He knew she had no wish to keep herself alive on the small change
+      of sentiment; she simply fed on her own funded passion, and the luxuries
+      it allowed her made him, even then, dimly aware that she had the secret of
+      an inexhaustible alchemy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Their relations remained thus negatively tender till she suddenly wrote
+      him of her decision to go abroad to live. Her father had died, she had no
+      near ties in Hillbridge, and London offered more scope than New York to
+      her expanding personality. She was already famous and her laurels were yet
+      unharvested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a moment the news roused Glennard to a jealous sense of lost
+      opportunities. He wanted, at any rate, to reassert his power before she
+      made the final effort of escape. They had not met for over a year, but of
+      course he could not let her sail without seeing her. She came to New York
+      the day before her departure, and they spent its last hours together.
+      Glennard had planned no course of action&mdash;he simply meant to let
+      himself drift. They both drifted, for a long time, down the languid
+      current of reminiscence; she seemed to sit passive, letting him push his
+      way back through the overgrown channels of the past. At length she
+      reminded him that they must bring their explorations to an end. He rose to
+      leave, and stood looking at her with the same uncertainty in his heart. He
+      was tired of her already&mdash;he was always tired of her&mdash;yet he was
+      not sure that he wanted her to go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I may never see you again,” he said, as though confidently appealing to
+      her compassion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her look enveloped him. “And I shall see you always&mdash;always!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Why go then&mdash;?” escaped him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “To be nearer you,” she answered; and the words dismissed him like a
+      closing door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The door was never to reopen; but through its narrow crack Glennard, as
+      the years went on, became more and more conscious of an inextinguishable
+      light directing its small ray toward the past which consumed so little of
+      his own commemorative oil. The reproach was taken from this thought by
+      Mrs. Aubyn’s gradual translation into terms of universality. In becoming a
+      personage she so naturally ceased to be a person that Glennard could
+      almost look back to his explorations of her spirit as on a visit to some
+      famous shrine, immortalized, but in a sense desecrated, by popular
+      veneration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her letters, from London, continued to come with the same tender
+      punctuality; but the altered conditions of her life, the vistas of new
+      relationships disclosed by every phrase, made her communications as
+      impersonal as a piece of journalism. It was as though the state, the
+      world, indeed, had taken her off his hands, assuming the maintenance of a
+      temperament that had long exhausted his slender store of reciprocity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the retrospective light shed by the letters he was blinded to their
+      specific meaning. He was not a man who concerned himself with literature,
+      and they had been to him, at first, simply the extension of her brilliant
+      talk, later the dreaded vehicle of a tragic importunity. He knew, of
+      course, that they were wonderful; that, unlike the authors who give their
+      essence to the public and keep only a dry rind for their friends, Mrs.
+      Aubyn had stored of her rarest vintage for this hidden sacrament of
+      tenderness. Sometimes, indeed, he had been oppressed, humiliated almost,
+      by the multiplicity of her allusions, the wide scope of her interests, her
+      persistence in forcing her superabundance of thought and emotion into the
+      shallow receptacle of his sympathy; but he had never thought of the
+      letters objectively, as the production of a distinguished woman; had never
+      measured the literary significance of her oppressive prodigality. He was
+      almost frightened now at the wealth in his hands; the obligation of her
+      love had never weighed on him like this gift of her imagination: it was as
+      though he had accepted from her something to which even a reciprocal
+      tenderness could not have justified his claim.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat a long time staring at the scattered pages on his desk; and in the
+      sudden realization of what they meant he could almost fancy some
+      alchemistic process changing them to gold as he stared. He had the sense
+      of not being alone in the room, of the presence of another self observing
+      from without the stirring of subconscious impulses that sent flushes of
+      humiliation to his forehead. At length he stood up, and with the gesture
+      of a man who wishes to give outward expression to his purpose&mdash;to
+      establish, as it were, a moral alibi&mdash;swept the letters into a heap
+      and carried them toward the grate. But it would have taken too long to
+      burn all the packets. He turned back to the table and one by one fitted
+      the pages into their envelopes; then he tied up the letters and put them
+      back into the locked drawer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III
+    </h2>
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">It</span> was one of the laws of Glennard’s intercourse with Miss Trent that he
+      always went to see her the day after he had resolved to give her up. There
+      was a special charm about the moments thus snatched from the jaws of
+      renunciation; and his sense of their significance was on this occasion so
+      keen that he hardly noticed the added gravity of her welcome.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His feeling for her had become so vital a part of him that her nearness
+      had the quality of imperceptibly readjusting his point of view, so that
+      the jumbled phenomena of experience fell at once into a rational
+      perspective. In this redistribution of values the sombre retrospect of the
+      previous evening shrank to a mere cloud on the edge of consciousness.
+      Perhaps the only service an unloved woman can render the man she loves is
+      to enhance and prolong his illusions about her rival. It was the fate of
+      Margaret Aubyn’s memory to serve as a foil to Miss Trent’s presence, and
+      never had the poor lady thrown her successor into more vivid relief.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Trent had the charm of still waters that are felt to be renewed by
+      rapid currents. Her attention spread a tranquil surface to the
+      demonstrations of others, and it was only in days of storm that one felt
+      the pressure of the tides. This inscrutable composure was perhaps her
+      chief grace in Glennard’s eyes. Reserve, in some natures, implies merely
+      the locking of empty rooms or the dissimulation of awkward encumbrances;
+      but Miss Trent’s reticence was to Glennard like the closed door to the
+      sanctuary, and his certainty of divining the hidden treasure made him
+      content to remain outside in the happy expectancy of the neophyte.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “You didn’t come to the opera last night,” she began, in the tone that
+      seemed always rather to record a fact than to offer a reflection on it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He answered with a discouraged gesture. “What was the use? We couldn’t
+      have talked.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Not as well as here,” she assented; adding, after a meditative pause, “As
+      you didn’t come I talked to Aunt Virginia instead.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ah!” he returned, the fact being hardly striking enough to detach him
+      from the contemplation of her hands, which had fallen, as was their wont,
+      into an attitude full of plastic possibilities. One felt them to be hands
+      that, moving only to some purpose, were capable of intervals of serene
+      inaction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “We had a long talk,” Miss Trent went on; and she waited again before
+      adding, with the increased absence of stress that marked her graver
+      communications, “Aunt Virginia wants me to go abroad with her.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard looked up with a start. “Abroad? When?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Now&mdash;next month. To be gone two years.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He permitted himself a movement of tender derision. “Does she really?
+      Well, I want you to go abroad with <i>me</i>&mdash;for any number of years. Which
+      offer do you accept?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Only one of them seems to require immediate consideration,” she returned,
+      with a smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard looked at her again. “You’re not thinking of it?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her gaze dropped and she unclasped her hands. Her movements were so rare
+      that they might have been said to italicize her words. “Aunt Virginia
+      talked to me very seriously. It will be a great relief to mother and the
+      others to have me provided for in that way for two years. I must think of
+      that, you know.” She glanced down at her gown which, under a renovated
+      surface, dated back to the first days of Glennard’s wooing. “I try not to
+      cost much&mdash;but I do.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Good Lord!” Glennard groaned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They sat silent till at length she gently took up the argument. “As the
+      eldest, you know, I’m bound to consider these things. Women are such a
+      burden. Jim does what he can for mother, but with his own children to
+      provide for it isn’t very much. You see, we’re all poor together.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Your aunt isn’t. She might help your mother.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “She does&mdash;in her own way.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Exactly&mdash;that’s the rich relation all over! You may be miserable in
+      any way you like, but if you’re to be happy you’ve got to be so in her way&mdash;and
+      in her old gowns.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I could be very happy in Aunt Virginia’s old gowns,” Miss Trent
+      interposed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Abroad, you mean?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I mean wherever I felt that I was helping. And my going abroad will
+      help.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Of course&mdash;I see that. And I see your considerateness in putting its
+      advantages negatively.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Negatively?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “In dwelling simply on what the going will take you from, not on what it
+      will bring you to. It means a lot to a woman, of course, to get away from
+      a life like this.” He summed up in a disparaging glance the background of
+      indigent furniture. “The question is how you’ll like coming back to it.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She seemed to accept the full consequences of his thought. “I only know I
+      don’t like leaving it.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He flung back sombrely, “You don’t even put it conditionally then?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her gaze deepened. “On what?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood up and walked across the room. Then he came back and paused
+      before her. “On the alternative of marrying me.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The slow color&mdash;even her blushes seemed deliberate&mdash;rose to her
+      lower lids; her lips stirred, but the words resolved themselves into a
+      smile and she waited.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He took another turn, with the thwarted step of the man whose nervous
+      exasperation escapes through his muscles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “And to think that in fifteen years I shall have a big practice!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her eyes triumphed for him. “In less!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “The cursed irony of it! What do I care for the man I shall be then? It’s
+      slaving one’s life away for a stranger!” He took her hands abruptly.
+      “You’ll go to Cannes, I suppose, or Monte Carlo? I heard Hollingsworth say
+      to-day that he meant to take his yacht over to the Mediterranean&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She released herself. “If you think that&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I don’t. I almost wish I did. It would be easier, I mean.” He broke off
+      incoherently. “I believe your Aunt Virginia does, though. She somehow
+      connotes Hollingsworth and the Mediterranean.” He caught her hands again.
+      “Alexa&mdash;if we could manage a little hole somewhere out of town?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Could we?” she sighed, half yielding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “In one of those places where they make jokes about the mosquitoes,” he
+      pressed her. “Could you get on with one servant?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Could you get on without varnished boots?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Promise me you won’t go, then!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “What are you thinking of, Stephen?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I don’t know,” he stammered, the question giving unexpected form to his
+      intention. “It’s all in the air yet, of course; but I picked up a tip the
+      other day&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “You’re not speculating?” she cried, with a kind of superstitious terror.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Lord, no. This is a sure thing&mdash;I almost wish it wasn’t; I mean if I
+      can work it&mdash;” He had a sudden vision of the comprehensiveness of the
+      temptation. If only he had been less sure of Dinslow! His assurance gave
+      the situation the base element of safety.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I don’t understand you,” she faltered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Trust me, instead!” he adjured her, with sudden energy; and turning on
+      her abruptly, “If you go, you know, you go free,” he concluded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She drew back, paling a little. “Why do you make it harder for me?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “To make it easier for myself,” he retorted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">Glennard</span>, the next afternoon, leaving his office earlier than usual,
+      turned, on his way home, into one of the public libraries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had the place to himself at that closing hour, and the librarian was
+      able to give an undivided attention to his tentative request for letters&mdash;collections
+      of letters. The librarian suggested Walpole.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I meant women&mdash;women’s letters.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The librarian proffered Hannah More and Miss Martineau.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard cursed his own inarticulateness. “I mean letters to&mdash;to some
+      one person&mdash;a man; their husband&mdash;or&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ah,” said the inspired librarian, “Eloise and Abailard.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well&mdash;something a little nearer, perhaps,” said Glennard, with
+      lightness. “Didn’t Merimee&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “The lady’s letters, in that case, were not published.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Of course not,” said Glennard, vexed at his blunder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “There are George Sand’s letters to Flaubert.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ah!” Glennard hesitated. “Was she&mdash;were they&mdash;?” He chafed at
+      his own ignorance of the sentimental by-paths of literature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “If you want love-letters, perhaps some of the French eighteenth century
+      correspondences might suit you better&mdash;Mlle. Aisse or Madame de
+      Sabran&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Glennard insisted. “I want something modern&mdash;English or American.
+      I want to look something up,” he lamely concluded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The librarian could only suggest George Eliot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well, give me some of the French things, then&mdash;and I’ll have
+      Merimee’s letters. It was the woman who published them, wasn’t it?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He caught up his armful, transferring it, on the doorstep, to a cab which
+      carried him to his rooms. He dined alone, hurriedly, at a small restaurant
+      near by, and returned at once to his books.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Late that night, as he undressed, he wondered what contemptible impulse
+      had forced from him his last words to Alexa Trent. It was bad enough to
+      interfere with the girl’s chances by hanging about her to the obvious
+      exclusion of other men, but it was worse to seem to justify his weakness
+      by dressing up the future in delusive ambiguities. He saw himself sinking
+      from depth to depth of sentimental cowardice in his reluctance to renounce
+      his hold on her; and it filled him with self-disgust to think that the
+      highest feeling of which he supposed himself capable was blent with such
+      base elements.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His awakening was hardly cheered by the sight of her writing. He tore her
+      note open and took in the few lines&mdash;she seldom exceeded the first
+      page&mdash;with the lucidity of apprehension that is the forerunner of
+      evil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “My aunt sails on Saturday and I must give her my answer the day after
+      to-morrow. Please don’t come till then&mdash;I want to think the question
+      over by myself. I know I ought to go. Won’t you help me to be reasonable?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was settled, then. Well, he would be reasonable; he wouldn’t stand in
+      her way; he would let her go. For two years he had been living some other,
+      luckier man’s life; the time had come when he must drop back into his own.
+      He no longer tried to look ahead, to grope his way through the endless
+      labyrinth of his material difficulties; a sense of dull resignation closed
+      in on him like a fog.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Hullo, Glennard!” a voice said, as an electric-car, late that afternoon,
+      dropped him at an uptown corner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked up and met the interrogative smile of Barton Flamel, who stood
+      on the curbstone watching the retreating car with the eye of a man
+      philosophic enough to remember that it will be followed by another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard felt his usual impulse of pleasure at meeting Flamel; but it was
+      not in this case curtailed by the reaction of contempt that habitually
+      succeeded it. Probably even the few men who had known Flamel since his
+      youth could have given no good reason for the vague mistrust that he
+      inspired. Some people are judged by their actions, others by their ideas;
+      and perhaps the shortest way of defining Flamel is to say that his
+      well-known leniency of view was vaguely divined to include himself. Simple
+      minds may have resented the discovery that his opinions were based on his
+      perceptions; but there was certainly no more definite charge against him
+      than that implied in the doubt as to how he would behave in an emergency,
+      and his company was looked upon as one of those mildly unwholesome
+      dissipations to which the prudent may occasionally yield. It now offered
+      itself to Glennard as an easy escape from the obsession of moral problems,
+      which somehow could no more be worn in Flamel’s presence than a surplice
+      in the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Where are you going? To the club?” Flamel asked; adding, as the younger
+      man assented, “Why not come to my studio instead? You’ll see one bore
+      instead of twenty.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The apartment which Flamel described as his studio showed, as its one
+      claim to the designation, a perennially empty easel; the rest of its space
+      being filled with the evidences of a comprehensive dilettanteism. Against
+      this background, which seemed the visible expression of its owner’s
+      intellectual tolerance, rows of fine books detached themselves with a
+      prominence, showing them to be Flamel’s chief care.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard glanced with the eye of untrained curiosity at the lines of
+      warm-toned morocco, while his host busied himself with the uncorking of
+      Apollinaris.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “You’ve got a splendid lot of books,” he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “They’re fairly decent,” the other assented, in the curt tone of the
+      collector who will not talk of his passion for fear of talking of nothing
+      else; then, as Glennard, his hands in his pockets, began to stroll
+      perfunctorily down the long line of bookcases&mdash;“Some men,” Flamel
+      irresistibly added, “think of books merely as tools, others as tooling.
+      I’m between the two; there are days when I use them as scenery, other days
+      when I want them as society; so that, as you see, my library represents a
+      makeshift compromise between looks and brains, and the collectors look
+      down on me almost as much as the students.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard, without answering, was mechanically taking one book after
+      another from the shelves. His hands slipped curiously over the smooth
+      covers and the noiseless subsidence of opening pages. Suddenly he came on
+      a thin volume of faded manuscript.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “What’s this?” he asked, with a listless sense of wonder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ah, you’re at my manuscript shelf. I’ve been going in for that sort of
+      thing lately.” Flamel came up and looked over his shoulders. “That’s a bit
+      of Stendhal&mdash;one of the Italian stories&mdash;and here are some
+      letters of Balzac to Madame Commanville.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard took the book with sudden eagerness. “Who was Madame
+      Commanville?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “His sister.” He was conscious that Flamel was looking at him with the
+      smile that was like an interrogation point. “I didn’t know you cared for
+      this kind of thing.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I don’t&mdash;at least I’ve never had the chance. Have you many
+      collections of letters?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Lord, no&mdash;very few. I’m just beginning, and most of the interesting
+      ones are out of my reach. Here’s a queer little collection, though&mdash;the
+      rarest thing I’ve got&mdash;half a dozen of Shelley’s letters to Harriet
+      Westbrook. I had a devil of a time getting them&mdash;a lot of collectors
+      were after them.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard, taking the volume from his hand, glanced with a kind of
+      repugnance at the interleaving of yellow cris-crossed sheets. “She was the
+      one who drowned herself, wasn’t she?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Flamel nodded. “I suppose that little episode adds about fifty per cent.
+      to their value,” he said, meditatively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard laid the book down. He wondered why he had joined Flamel. He was
+      in no humor to be amused by the older man’s talk, and a recrudescence of
+      personal misery rose about him like an icy tide.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I believe I must take myself off,” he said. “I’d forgotten an
+      engagement.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned to go; but almost at the same moment he was conscious of a
+      duality of intention wherein his apparent wish to leave revealed itself as
+      a last effort of the will against the overmastering desire to stay and
+      unbosom himself to Flamel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The older man, as though divining the conflict, laid a detaining pressure
+      on his arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Won’t the engagement keep? Sit down and try one of these cigars. I don’t
+      often have the luck of seeing you here.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I’m rather driven just now,” said Glennard, vaguely. He found himself
+      seated again, and Flamel had pushed to his side a low stand holding a
+      bottle of Apollinaris and a decanter of cognac.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Flamel, thrown back in his capacious arm-chair, surveyed him through a
+      cloud of smoke with the comfortable tolerance of the man to whom no
+      inconsistencies need be explained. Connivance was implicit in the air. It
+      was the kind of atmosphere in which the outrageous loses its edge.
+      Glennard felt a gradual relaxing of his nerves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I suppose one has to pay a lot for letters like that?” he heard himself
+      asking, with a glance in the direction of the volume he had laid aside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, so-so&mdash;depends on circumstances.” Flamel viewed him
+      thoughtfully. “Are you thinking of collecting?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard laughed. “Lord, no. The other way round.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Selling?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, I hardly know. I was thinking of a poor chap&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Flamel filled the pause with a nod of interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “A poor chap I used to know&mdash;who died&mdash;he died last year&mdash;and
+      who left me a lot of letters, letters he thought a great deal of&mdash;he
+      was fond of me and left ’em to me outright, with the idea, I suppose, that
+      they might benefit me somehow&mdash;I don’t know&mdash;I’m not much up on
+      such things&mdash;” he reached his hand to the tall glass his host had
+      filled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “A collection of autograph letters, eh? Any big names?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, only one name. They’re all letters written to him&mdash;by one
+      person, you understand; a woman, in fact&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, a woman,” said Flamel, negligently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard was nettled by his obvious loss of interest. “I rather think
+      they’d attract a good deal of notice if they were published.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Flamel still looked uninterested. “Love-letters, I suppose?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, just&mdash;the letters a woman would write to a man she knew well.
+      They were tremendous friends, he and she.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “And she wrote a clever letter?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Clever? It was Margaret Aubyn.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A great silence filled the room. It seemed to Glennard that the words had
+      burst from him as blood gushes from a wound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Great Scott!” said Flamel, sitting up. “A collection of Margaret Aubyn’s
+      letters? Did you say <i>you</i> had them?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “They were left me&mdash;by my friend.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I see. Was he&mdash;well, no matter. You’re to be congratulated, at any
+      rate. What are you going to do with them?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard stood up with a sense of weariness in all his bones. “Oh, I don’t
+      know. I haven’t thought much about it. I just happened to see that some
+      fellow was writing her life&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Joslin; yes. You didn’t think of giving them to him?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard had lounged across the room and stood staring up at a bronze
+      Bacchus who drooped his garlanded head above the pediment of an Italian
+      cabinet. “What ought I to do? You’re just the fellow to advise me.” He
+      felt the blood in his cheek as he spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Flamel sat with meditative eye. “What do you <i>want</i> to do with them?” he
+      asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I want to publish them,” said Glennard, swinging round with sudden energy&mdash;“If
+      I can&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “If you can? They’re yours, you say?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “They’re mine fast enough. There’s no one to prevent&mdash;I mean there
+      are no restrictions&mdash;” he was arrested by the sense that these
+      accumulated proofs of impunity might precisely stand as the strongest
+      check on his action.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “And Mrs. Aubyn had no family, I believe?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “No.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Then I don’t see who’s to interfere,” said Flamel, studying his
+      cigar-tip.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard had turned his unseeing stare on an ecstatic Saint Catherine
+      framed in tarnished gilding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “It’s just this way,” he began again, with an effort. “When letters are as
+      personal as&mdash;as these of my friend’s.... Well, I don’t mind telling
+      you that the cash would make a heap of difference to me; such a lot that
+      it rather obscures my judgment&mdash;the fact is if I could lay my hand on
+      a few thousands now I could get into a big thing, and without appreciable
+      risk; and I’d like to know whether you think I’d be justified&mdash;under
+      the circumstances....” He paused, with a dry throat. It seemed to him at
+      the moment that it would be impossible for him ever to sink lower in his
+      own estimation. He was in truth less ashamed of weighing the temptation
+      than of submitting his scruples to a man like Flamel, and affecting to
+      appeal to sentiments of delicacy on the absence of which he had
+      consciously reckoned. But he had reached a point where each word seemed to
+      compel another, as each wave in a stream is forced forward by the pressure
+      behind it; and before Flamel could speak he had faltered out&mdash;“You
+      don’t think people could say... could criticise the man....”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But the man’s dead, isn’t he?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “He’s dead&mdash;yes; but can I assume the responsibility without&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Flamel hesitated; and almost immediately Glennard’s scruples gave way to
+      irritation. If at this hour Flamel were to affect an inopportune
+      reluctance&mdash;!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The older man’s answer reassured him. “Why need you assume any
+      responsibility? Your name won’t appear, of course; and as to your
+      friend’s, I don’t see why his should, either. He wasn’t a celebrity
+      himself, I suppose?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “No, no.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Then the letters can be addressed to Mr. Blank. Doesn’t that make it all
+      right?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard’s hesitation revived. “For the public, yes. But I don’t see that
+      it alters the case for me. The question is, ought I to publish them at
+      all?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Of course you ought to.” Flamel spoke with invigorating emphasis. “I
+      doubt if you’d be justified in keeping them back. Anything of Margaret
+      Aubyn’s is more or less public property by this time. She’s too great for
+      any one of us. I was only wondering how you could use them to the best
+      advantage&mdash;to yourself, I mean. How many are there?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, a lot; perhaps a hundred&mdash;I haven’t counted. There may be
+      more....”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Gad! What a haul! When were they written?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I don’t know&mdash;that is&mdash;they corresponded for years. What’s the
+      odds?” He moved toward his hat with a vague impulse of flight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “It all counts,” said Flamel, imperturbably. “A long correspondence&mdash;one,
+      I mean, that covers a great deal of time&mdash;is obviously worth more
+      than if the same number of letters had been written within a year. At any
+      rate, you won’t give them to Joslin? They’d fill a book, wouldn’t they?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I suppose so. I don’t know how much it takes to fill a book.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Not love-letters, you say?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Why?” flashed from Glennard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, nothing&mdash;only the big public is sentimental, and if they <i>were</i>&mdash;why,
+      you could get any money for Margaret Aubyn’s love-letters.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard was silent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Are the letters interesting in themselves? I mean apart from the
+      association with her name?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I’m no judge.” Glennard took up his hat and thrust himself into his
+      overcoat. “I dare say I sha’n’t do anything about it. And, Flamel&mdash;you
+      won’t mention this to anyone?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Lord, no. Well, I congratulate you. You’ve got a big thing.” Flamel was
+      smiling at him from the hearth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard, on the threshold, forced a response to the smile, while he
+      questioned with loitering indifference&mdash;“Financially, eh?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Rather; I should say so.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard’s hand lingered on the knob. “How much&mdash;should you say? You
+      know about such things.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, I should have to see the letters; but I should say&mdash;well, if
+      you’ve got enough to fill a book and they’re fairly readable, and the book
+      is brought out at the right time&mdash;say ten thousand down from the
+      publisher, and possibly one or two more in royalties. If you got the
+      publishers bidding against each other you might do even better; but of
+      course I’m talking in the dark.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Of course,” said Glennard, with sudden dizziness. His hand had slipped
+      from the knob and he stood staring down at the exotic spirals of the
+      Persian rug beneath his feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I’d have to see the letters,” Flamel repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Of course&mdash;you’d have to see them....” Glennard stammered; and,
+      without turning, he flung over his shoulder an inarticulate “Good-by....”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V
+    </h2>
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">The</span> little house, as Glennard strolled up to it between the trees, seemed
+      no more than a gay tent pitched against the sunshine. It had the crispness
+      of a freshly starched summer gown, and the geraniums on the veranda
+      bloomed as simultaneously as the flowers in a bonnet. The garden was
+      prospering absurdly. Seed they had sown at random&mdash;amid laughing
+      counter-charges of incompetence&mdash;had shot up in fragrant defiance of
+      their blunders. He smiled to see the clematis unfolding its punctual wings
+      about the porch. The tiny lawn was smooth as a shaven cheek, and a crimson
+      rambler mounted to the nursery-window of a baby who never cried. A breeze
+      shook the awning above the tea-table, and his wife, as he drew near, could
+      be seen bending above a kettle that was just about to boil. So vividly did
+      the whole scene suggest the painted bliss of a stage setting, that it
+      would have been hardly surprising to see her step forward among the
+      flowers and trill out her virtuous happiness from the veranda-rail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The stale heat of the long day in town, the dusty promiscuity of the
+      suburban train were now but the requisite foil to an evening of scented
+      breezes and tranquil talk. They had been married more than a year, and
+      each home-coming still reflected the freshness of their first day
+      together. If, indeed, their happiness had a flaw, it was in resembling too
+      closely the bright impermanence of their surroundings. Their love as yet
+      was but the gay tent of holiday-makers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His wife looked up with a smile. The country life suited her, and her
+      beauty had gained depth from a stillness in which certain faces might have
+      grown opaque.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Are you very tired?” she asked, pouring his tea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Just enough to enjoy this.” He rose from the chair in which he had thrown
+      himself and bent over the tray for his cream. “You’ve had a visitor?” he
+      commented, noticing a half-empty cup beside her own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Only Mr. Flamel,” she said, indifferently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Flamel? Again?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She answered without show of surprise. “He left just now. His yacht is
+      down at Laurel Bay and he borrowed a trap of the Dreshams to drive over
+      here.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard made no comment, and she went on, leaning her head back against
+      the cushions of her bamboo-seat, “He wants us to go for a sail with him
+      next Sunday.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard meditatively stirred his tea. He was trying to think of the most
+      natural and unartificial thing to say, and his voice seemed to come from
+      the outside, as though he were speaking behind a marionette. “Do you want
+      to?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Just as you please,” she said, compliantly. No affectation of
+      indifference could have been as baffling as her compliance. Glennard, of
+      late, was beginning to feel that the surface which, a year ago, he had
+      taken for a sheet of clear glass, might, after all, be a mirror reflecting
+      merely his own conception of what lay behind it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Do you like Flamel?” he suddenly asked; to which, still engaged with her
+      tea, she returned the feminine answer&mdash;“I thought you did.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I do, of course,” he agreed, vexed at his own incorrigible tendency to
+      magnify Flamel’s importance by hovering about the topic. “A sail would be
+      rather jolly; let’s go.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She made no reply and he drew forth the rolled-up evening papers which he
+      had thrust into his pocket on leaving the train. As he smoothed them out
+      his own countenance seemed to undergo the same process. He ran his eye
+      down the list of stocks and Flamel’s importunate personality receded
+      behind the rows of figures pushing forward into notice like so many
+      bearers of good news. Glennard’s investments were flowering like his
+      garden: the dryest shares blossomed into dividends, and a golden harvest
+      awaited his sickle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He glanced at his wife with the tranquil air of the man who digests good
+      luck as naturally as the dry ground absorbs a shower. “Things are looking
+      uncommonly well. I believe we shall be able to go to town for two or three
+      months next winter if we can find something cheap.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She smiled luxuriously: it was pleasant to be able to say, with an air of
+      balancing relative advantages, “Really, on the baby’s account I shall be
+      almost sorry; but if we do go, there’s Kate Erskine’s house... she’ll let
+      us have it for almost nothing....”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well, write her about it,” he recommended, his eyes travelling on in
+      search of the weather report. He had turned to the wrong page; and
+      suddenly a line of black characters leapt out at him as from an ambush.
+    </p>
+<div class="blk">
+    <p class="c">
+      “‘Margaret Aubyn’s Letters.’</p>
+<p> Two volumes. Out to-day. First edition of
+      five thousand sold out before leaving the press. Second edition ready next
+      week. The Book Of The Year....”
+     </p>
+</div>
+    <p>
+      He looked up stupidly. His wife still sat with her head thrown back, her
+      pure profile detached against the cushions. She was smiling a little over
+      the prospect his last words had opened. Behind her head shivers of sun and
+      shade ran across the striped awning. A row of maples and a privet hedge
+      hid their neighbor’s gables, giving them undivided possession of their
+      leafy half-acre; and life, a moment before, had been like their plot of
+      ground, shut off, hedged in from importunities, impenetrably his and hers.
+      Now it seemed to him that every maple-leaf, every privet-bud, was a
+      relentless human gaze, pressing close upon their privacy. It was as though
+      they sat in a brightly lit room, uncurtained from a darkness full of
+      hostile watchers.... His wife still smiled; and her unconsciousness of
+      danger seemed, in some horrible way, to put her beyond the reach of
+      rescue....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had not known that it would be like this. After the first odious weeks,
+      spent in preparing the letters for publication, in submitting them to
+      Flamel, and in negotiating with the publishers, the transaction had
+      dropped out of his consciousness into that unvisited limbo to which we
+      relegate the deeds we would rather not have done but have no notion of
+      undoing. From the moment he had obtained Miss Trent’s promise not to sail
+      with her aunt he had tried to imagine himself irrevocably committed. After
+      that, he argued, his first duty was to her&mdash;she had become his
+      conscience. The sum obtained from the publishers by Flamel’s adroit
+      manipulations and opportunely transferred to Dinslow’s successful venture,
+      already yielded a return which, combined with Glennard’s professional
+      earnings, took the edge of compulsion from their way of living, making it
+      appear the expression of a graceful preference for simplicity. It was the
+      mitigated poverty which can subscribe to a review or two and have a few
+      flowers on the dinner-table. And already in a small way Glennard was
+      beginning to feel the magnetic quality of prosperity. Clients who had
+      passed his door in the hungry days sought it out now that it bore the name
+      of a successful man. It was understood that a small inheritance, cleverly
+      invested, was the source of his fortune; and there was a feeling that a
+      man who could do so well for himself was likely to know how to turn over
+      other people’s money.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it was in the more intimate reward of his wife’s happiness that
+      Glennard tasted the full flavor of success. Coming out of conditions so
+      narrow that those he offered her seemed spacious, she fitted into her new
+      life without any of those manifest efforts at adjustment that are as sore
+      to a husband’s pride as the critical rearrangement of the bridal
+      furniture. She had given him, instead, the delicate pleasure of watching
+      her expand like a sea-creature restored to its element, stretching out the
+      atrophied tentacles of girlish vanity and enjoyment to the rising tide of
+      opportunity. And somehow&mdash;in the windowless inner cell of his
+      consciousness where self-criticism cowered&mdash;Glennard’s course seemed
+      justified by its merely material success. How could such a crop of
+      innocent blessedness have sprung from tainted soil?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now he had the injured sense of a man entrapped into a disadvantageous
+      bargain. He had not known it would be like this; and a dull anger gathered
+      at his heart. Anger against whom? Against his wife, for not knowing what
+      he suffered? Against Flamel, for being the unconscious instrument of his
+      wrong-doing? Or against that mute memory to which his own act had suddenly
+      given a voice of accusation? Yes, that was it; and his punishment
+      henceforth would be the presence, the unescapable presence, of the woman
+      he had so persistently evaded. She would always be there now. It was as
+      though he had married her instead of the other. It was what she had always
+      wanted&mdash;to be with him&mdash;and she had gained her point at last....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sprang up, as though in an impulse of flight.... The sudden movement
+      lifted his wife’s lids, and she asked, in the incurious voice of the woman
+      whose life is enclosed in a magic circle of prosperity&mdash;“Any news?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “No&mdash;none&mdash;” he said, roused to a sense of immediate peril. The
+      papers lay scattered at his feet&mdash;what if she were to see them? He
+      stretched his arm to gather them up, but his next thought showed him the
+      futility of such concealment. The same advertisement would appear every
+      day, for weeks to come, in every newspaper; how could he prevent her
+      seeing it? He could not always be hiding the papers from her.... Well, and
+      what if she did see it? It would signify nothing to her, the chances were
+      that she would never even read the book.... As she ceased to be an element
+      of fear in his calculations the distance between them seemed to lessen and
+      he took her again, as it were, into the circle of his conjugal
+      protection.... Yet a moment before he had almost hated her!... He laughed
+      aloud at his senseless terrors.... He was off his balance, decidedly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “What are you laughing at?” she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He explained, elaborately, that he was laughing at the recollection of an
+      old woman in the train, an old woman with a lot of bundles, who couldn’t
+      find her ticket.... But somehow, in the telling, the humor of the story
+      seemed to evaporate, and he felt the conventionality of her smile. He
+      glanced at his watch, “Isn’t it time to dress?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She rose with serene reluctance. “It’s a pity to go in. The garden looks
+      so lovely.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They lingered side by side, surveying their domain. There was not space in
+      it, at this hour, for the shadow of the elm-tree in the angle of the
+      hedge; it crossed the lawn, cut the flower-border in two, and ran up the
+      side of the house to the nursery window. She bent to flick a caterpillar
+      from the honey-suckle; then, as they turned indoors, “If we mean to go on
+      the yacht next Sunday,” she suggested, “oughtn’t you to let Mr. Flamel
+      know?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard’s exasperation deflected suddenly. “Of course I shall let him
+      know. You always seem to imply that I’m going to do something rude to
+      Flamel.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The words reverberated through her silence; she had a way of thus leaving
+      one space in which to contemplate one’s folly at arm’s length. Glennard
+      turned on his heel and went upstairs. As he dropped into a chair before
+      his dressing-table he said to himself that in the last hour he had sounded
+      the depths of his humiliation and that the lowest dregs of it, the very
+      bottom-slime, was the hateful necessity of having always, as long as the
+      two men lived, to be civil to Barton Flamel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">The</span> week in town had been sultry, and the men, in the Sunday emancipation
+      of white flannel and duck, filled the deck-chairs of the yacht with their
+      outstretched apathy, following, through a mist of cigarette-smoke, the
+      flitting inconsequences of the women. The party was a small one&mdash;Flamel
+      had few intimate friends&mdash;but composed of more heterogeneous atoms
+      than the little pools into which society usually runs. The reaction from
+      the chief episode of his earlier life had bred in Glennard an uneasy
+      distaste for any kind of personal saliency. Cleverness was useful in
+      business; but in society it seemed to him as futile as the sham cascades
+      formed by a stream that might have been used to drive a mill. He liked the
+      collective point of view that goes with the civilized uniformity of
+      dress-clothes, and his wife’s attitude implied the same preference; yet
+      they found themselves slipping more and more into Flamel’s intimacy. Alexa
+      had once or twice said that she enjoyed meeting clever people; but her
+      enjoyment took the negative form of a smiling receptivity; and Glennard
+      felt a growing preference for the kind of people who have their thinking
+      done for them by the community.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Still, the deck of the yacht was a pleasant refuge from the heat on shore,
+      and his wife’s profile, serenely projected against the changing blue, lay
+      on his retina like a cool hand on the nerves. He had never been more
+      impressed by the kind of absoluteness that lifted her beauty above the
+      transient effects of other women, making the most harmonious face seem an
+      accidental collocation of features.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ladies who directly suggested this comparison were of a kind
+      accustomed to take similar risks with more gratifying results. Mrs.
+      Armiger had in fact long been the triumphant alternative of those who
+      couldn’t “see” Alexa Glennard’s looks; and Mrs. Touchett’s claims to
+      consideration were founded on that distribution of effects which is the
+      wonder of those who admire a highly cultivated country. The third lady of
+      the trio which Glennard’s fancy had put to such unflattering uses, was
+      bound by circumstances to support the claims of the other two. This was
+      Mrs. Dresham, the wife of the editor of the <i>Radiator</i>. Mrs. Dresham was a
+      lady who had rescued herself from social obscurity by assuming the role of
+      her husband’s exponent and interpreter; and Dresham’s leisure being
+      devoted to the cultivation of remarkable women, his wife’s attitude
+      committed her to the public celebration of their remarkableness. For the
+      conceivable tedium of this duty, Mrs. Dresham was repaid by the fact that
+      there were people who took <i>her</i> for a remarkable woman; and who in turn
+      probably purchased similar distinction with the small change of her
+      reflected importance. As to the other ladies of the party, they were
+      simply the wives of some of the men&mdash;the kind of women who expect to
+      be talked to collectively and to have their questions left unanswered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Armiger, the latest embodiment of Dresham’s instinct for the
+      remarkable, was an innocent beauty who for years had distilled dulness
+      among a set of people now self-condemned by their inability to appreciate
+      her. Under Dresham’s tutelage she had developed into a “thoughtful woman,”
+       who read his leaders in the <i>Radiator</i> and bought the books he recommended.
+      When a new novel appeared, people wanted to know what Mrs. Armiger thought
+      of it; and a young gentleman who had made a trip in Touraine had recently
+      inscribed to her the wide-margined result of his explorations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard, leaning back with his head against the rail and a slit of
+      fugitive blue between his half-closed lids, vaguely wished she wouldn’t
+      spoil the afternoon by making people talk; though he reduced his annoyance
+      to the minimum by not listening to what was said, there remained a latent
+      irritation against the general futility of words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His wife’s gift of silence seemed to him the most vivid commentary on the
+      clumsiness of speech as a means of intercourse, and his eyes had turned to
+      her in renewed appreciation of this finer faculty when Mrs. Armiger’s
+      voice abruptly brought home to him the underrated potentialities of
+      language.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “You’ve read them, of course, Mrs. Glennard?” he heard her ask; and, in
+      reply to Alexa’s vague interrogation&mdash;“Why, the ‘Aubyn Letters’&mdash;it’s
+      the only book people are talking of this week.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Dresham immediately saw her advantage. “You <i>haven’t</i> read them? How
+      very extraordinary! As Mrs. Armiger says, the book’s in the air; one
+      breathes it in like the influenza.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard sat motionless, watching his wife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Perhaps it hasn’t reached the suburbs yet,” she said, with her unruffled
+      smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, <i>do</i> let me come to you, then!” Mrs. Touchett cried; “anything for a
+      change of air! I’m positively sick of the book and I can’t put it down.
+      Can’t you sail us beyond its reach, Mr. Flamel?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Flamel shook his head. “Not even with this breeze. Literature travels
+      faster than steam nowadays. And the worst of it is that we can’t any of us
+      give up reading; it’s as insidious as a vice and as tiresome as a virtue.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I believe it <i>is</i> a vice, almost, to read such a book as the ‘Letters,’”
+       said Mrs. Touchett. “It’s the woman’s soul, absolutely torn up by the
+      roots&mdash;her whole self laid bare; and to a man who evidently didn’t
+      care; who couldn’t have cared. I don’t mean to read another line; it’s too
+      much like listening at a keyhole.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But if she wanted it published?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Wanted it? How do we know she did?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Why, I heard she’d left the letters to the man&mdash;whoever he is&mdash;with
+      directions that they should be published after his death&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I don’t believe it,” Mrs. Touchett declared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “He’s dead then, is he?” one of the men asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Why, you don’t suppose if he were alive he could ever hold up his head
+      again, with these letters being read by everybody?” Mrs. Touchett
+      protested. “It must have been horrible enough to know they’d been written
+      to him; but to publish them! No man could have done it and no woman could
+      have told him to&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, come, come,” Dresham judicially interposed; “after all, they’re not
+      love-letters.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “No&mdash;that’s the worst of it; they’re unloved letters,” Mrs. Touchett
+      retorted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Then, obviously, she needn’t have written them; whereas the man, poor
+      devil, could hardly help receiving them.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Perhaps he counted on the public to save him the trouble of reading
+      them,” said young Hartly, who was in the cynical stage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Armiger turned her reproachful loveliness to Dresham. “From the way
+      you defend him, I believe you know who he is.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Everyone looked at Dresham, and his wife smiled with the superior air of
+      the woman who is in her husband’s professional secrets. Dresham shrugged
+      his shoulders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “What have I said to defend him?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “You called him a poor devil&mdash;you pitied him.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “A man who could let Margaret Aubyn write to him in that way? Of course I
+      pity him.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Then you <i>must</i> know who he is,” cried Mrs. Armiger, with a triumphant air
+      of penetration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hartly and Flamel laughed and Dresham shook his head. “No one knows; not
+      even the publishers; so they tell me at least.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “So they tell you to tell us,” Hartly astutely amended; and Mrs. Armiger
+      added, with the appearance of carrying the argument a point farther, “But
+      even if <i>he’s</i> dead and <i>she’s</i> dead, somebody must have given the letters to
+      the publishers.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “A little bird, probably,” said Dresham, smiling indulgently on her
+      deduction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “A little bird of prey then&mdash;a vulture, I should say&mdash;” another
+      man interpolated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, I’m not with you there,” said Dresham, easily. “Those letters
+      belonged to the public.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “How can any letters belong to the public that weren’t written to the
+      public?” Mrs. Touchett interposed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well, these were, in a sense. A personality as big as Margaret Aubyn’s
+      belongs to the world. Such a mind is part of the general fund of thought.
+      It’s the penalty of greatness&mdash;one becomes a monument historique.
+      Posterity pays the cost of keeping one up, but on condition that one is
+      always open to the public.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I don’t see that that exonerates the man who gives up the keys of the
+      sanctuary, as it were.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Who <i>was</i> he?” another voice inquired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Who was he? Oh, nobody, I fancy&mdash;the letter-box, the slit in the
+      wall through which the letters passed to posterity....”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But she never meant them for posterity!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “A woman shouldn’t write such letters if she doesn’t mean them to be
+      published....”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “She shouldn’t write them to such a man!” Mrs. Touchett scornfully
+      corrected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I never keep letters,” said Mrs. Armiger, under the obvious impression
+      that she was contributing a valuable point to the discussion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a general laugh, and Flamel, who had not spoken, said, lazily,
+      “You women are too incurably subjective. I venture to say that most men
+      would see in those letters merely their immense literary value, their
+      significance as documents. The personal side doesn’t count where there’s
+      so much else.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, we all know you haven’t any principles,” Mrs. Armiger declared; and
+      Alexa Glennard, lifting an indolent smile, said: “I shall never write you
+      a love-letter, Mr. Flamel.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard moved away impatiently. Such talk was as tedious as the buzzing
+      of gnats. He wondered why his wife had wanted to drag him on such a
+      senseless expedition.... He hated Flamel’s crowd&mdash;and what business
+      had Flamel himself to interfere in that way, standing up for the
+      publication of the letters as though Glennard needed his defence?...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard turned his head and saw that Flamel had drawn a seat to Alexa’s
+      elbow and was speaking to her in a low tone. The other groups had
+      scattered, straying in twos along the deck. It came over Glennard that he
+      should never again be able to see Flamel speaking to his wife without the
+      sense of sick mistrust that now loosened his joints....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alexa, the next morning, over their early breakfast, surprised her husband
+      by an unexpected request.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Will you bring me those letters from town?” she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “What letters?” he said, putting down his cup. He felt himself as
+      helplessly vulnerable as a man who is lunged at in the dark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Mrs. Aubyn’s. The book they were all talking about yesterday.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard, carefully measuring his second cup of tea, said, with
+      deliberation, “I didn’t know you cared about that sort of thing.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was, in fact, not a great reader, and a new book seldom reached her
+      till it was, so to speak, on the home stretch; but she replied, with a
+      gentle tenacity, “I think it would interest me because I read her life
+      last year.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Her life? Where did you get that?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Someone lent it to me when it came out&mdash;Mr. Flamel, I think.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His first impulse was to exclaim, “Why the devil do you borrow books of
+      Flamel? I can buy you all you want&mdash;” but he felt himself
+      irresistibly forced into an attitude of smiling compliance. “Flamel always
+      has the newest books going, hasn’t he? You must be careful, by the way,
+      about returning what he lends you. He’s rather crotchety about his
+      library.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, I’m always very careful,” she said, with a touch of competence that
+      struck him; and she added, as he caught up his hat: “Don’t forget the
+      letters.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Why had she asked for the book? Was her sudden wish to see it the result
+      of some hint of Flamel’s? The thought turned Glennard sick, but he
+      preserved sufficient lucidity to tell himself, a moment later, that his
+      last hope of self-control would be lost if he yielded to the temptation of
+      seeing a hidden purpose in everything she said and did. How much Flamel
+      guessed, he had no means of divining; nor could he predicate, from what he
+      knew of the man, to what use his inferences might be put. The very
+      qualities that had made Flamel a useful adviser made him the most
+      dangerous of accomplices. Glennard felt himself agrope among alien forces
+      that his own act had set in motion....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alexa was a woman of few requirements; but her wishes, even in trifles,
+      had a definiteness that distinguished them from the fluid impulses of her
+      kind. He knew that, having once asked for the book, she would not forget
+      it; and he put aside, as an ineffectual expedient, his momentary idea of
+      applying for it at the circulating library and telling her that all the
+      copies were out. If the book was to be bought it had better be bought at
+      once. He left his office earlier than usual and turned in at the first
+      book-shop on his way to the train. The show-window was stacked with
+      conspicuously lettered volumes. “Margaret Aubyn” flashed back at him in
+      endless repetition. He plunged into the shop and came on a counter where
+      the name reiterated itself on row after row of bindings. It seemed to have
+      driven the rest of literature to the back shelves. He caught up a copy,
+      tossing the money to an astonished clerk who pursued him to the door with
+      the unheeded offer to wrap up the volumes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the street he was seized with a sudden apprehension. What if he were to
+      meet Flamel? The thought was intolerable. He called a cab and drove
+      straight to the station where, amid the palm-leaf fans of a perspiring
+      crowd, he waited a long half-hour for his train to start.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had thrust a volume in either pocket and in the train he dared not draw
+      them out; but the detested words leaped at him from the folds of the
+      evening paper. The air seemed full of Margaret Aubyn’s name. The motion of
+      the train set it dancing up and down on the page of a magazine that a man
+      in front of him was reading....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the door he was told that Mrs. Glennard was still out, and he went
+      upstairs to his room and dragged the books from his pocket. They lay on
+      the table before him like live things that he feared to touch.... At
+      length he opened the first volume. A familiar letter sprang out at him,
+      each word quickened by its glaring garb of type. The little broken phrases
+      fled across the page like wounded animals in the open.... It was a
+      horrible sight.... A battue of helpless things driven savagely out of
+      shelter. He had not known it would be like this....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He understood now that, at the moment of selling the letters, he had
+      viewed the transaction solely as it affected himself: as an unfortunate
+      blemish on an otherwise presentable record. He had scarcely considered the
+      act in relation to Margaret Aubyn; for death, if it hallows, also makes
+      innocuous. Glennard’s God was a god of the living, of the immediate, the
+      actual, the tangible; all his days he had lived in the presence of that
+      god, heedless of the divinities who, below the surface of our deeds and
+      passions, silently forge the fatal weapons of the dead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0007" id="link2H_4_0007">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">A knock</span> roused him and looking up he saw his wife. He met her glance in
+      silence, and she faltered out, “Are you ill?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The words restored his self-possession. “Ill? Of course not. They told me
+      you were out and I came upstairs.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The books lay between them on the table; he wondered when she would see
+      them. She lingered tentatively on the threshold, with the air of leaving
+      his explanation on his hands. She was not the kind of woman who could be
+      counted on to fortify an excuse by appearing to dispute it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Where have you been?” Glennard asked, moving forward so that he
+      obstructed her vision of the books.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I walked over to the Dreshams for tea.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I can’t think what you see in those people,” he said with a shrug;
+      adding, uncontrollably&mdash;“I suppose Flamel was there?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “No; he left on the yacht this morning.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      An answer so obstructing to the natural escape of his irritation left
+      Glennard with no momentary resource but that of strolling impatiently to
+      the window. As her eyes followed him they lit on the books.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ah, you’ve brought them! I’m so glad,” she exclaimed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He answered over his shoulder, “For a woman who never reads you make the
+      most astounding exceptions!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her smile was an exasperating concession to the probability that it had
+      been hot in town or that something had bothered him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Do you mean it’s not nice to want to read the book?” she asked. “It was
+      not nice to publish it, certainly; but after all, I’m not responsible for
+      that, am I?” She paused, and, as he made no answer, went on, still
+      smiling, “I do read sometimes, you know; and I’m very fond of Margaret
+      Aubyn’s books. I was reading ‘Pomegranate Seed’ when we first met. Don’t
+      you remember? It was then you told me all about her.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard had turned back into the room and stood staring at his wife. “All
+      about her?” he repeated, and with the words remembrance came to him. He
+      had found Miss Trent one afternoon with the novel in her hand, and moved
+      by the lover’s fatuous impulse to associate himself in some way with
+      whatever fills the mind of the beloved, had broken through his habitual
+      silence about the past. Rewarded by the consciousness of figuring
+      impressively in Miss Trent’s imagination he had gone on from one anecdote
+      to another, reviving dormant details of his old Hillbridge life, and
+      pasturing his vanity on the eagerness with which she received his
+      reminiscences of a being already clothed in the impersonality of
+      greatness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The incident had left no trace in his mind; but it sprang up now like an
+      old enemy, the more dangerous for having been forgotten. The instinct of
+      self-preservation&mdash;sometimes the most perilous that man can exercise&mdash;made
+      him awkwardly declare&mdash;“Oh, I used to see her at people’s houses,
+      that was all;” and her silence as usual leaving room for a multiplication
+      of blunders, he added, with increased indifference, “I simply can’t see
+      what you can find to interest you in such a book.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She seemed to consider this intently. “You’ve read it, then?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I glanced at it&mdash;I never read such things.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Is it true that she didn’t wish the letters to be published?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard felt the sudden dizziness of the mountaineer on a narrow ledge,
+      and with it the sense that he was lost if he looked more than a step
+      ahead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I’m sure I don’t know,” he said; then, summoning a smile, he passed his
+      hand through her arm. “I didn’t have tea at the Dreshams, you know; won’t
+      you give me some now?” he suggested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That evening Glennard, under pretext of work to be done, shut himself into
+      the small study opening off the drawing-room. As he gathered up his papers
+      he said to his wife: “You’re not going to sit indoors on such a night as
+      this? I’ll join you presently outside.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But she had drawn her armchair to the lamp. “I want to look at my book,”
+       she said, taking up the first volume of the “Letters.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard, with a shrug, withdrew into the study. “I’m going to shut the
+      door; I want to be quiet,” he explained from the threshold; and she nodded
+      without lifting her eyes from the book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sank into a chair, staring aimlessly at the outspread papers. How was
+      he to work, while on the other side of the door she sat with that volume
+      in her hand? The door did not shut her out&mdash;he saw her distinctly,
+      felt her close to him in a contact as painful as the pressure on a bruise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sensation was part of the general strangeness that made him feel like
+      a man waking from a long sleep to find himself in an unknown country among
+      people of alien tongue. We live in our own souls as in an unmapped region,
+      a few acres of which we have cleared for our habitation; while of the
+      nature of those nearest us we know but the boundaries that march with
+      ours. Of the points in his wife’s character not in direct contact with his
+      own, Glennard now discerned his ignorance; and the baffling sense of her
+      remoteness was intensified by the discovery that, in one way, she was
+      closer to him than ever before. As one may live for years in happy
+      unconsciousness of the possession of a sensitive nerve, he had lived
+      beside his wife unaware that her individuality had become a part of the
+      texture of his life, ineradicable as some growth on a vital organ; and he
+      now felt himself at once incapable of forecasting her judgment and
+      powerless to evade its effects.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To escape, the next morning, the confidences of the breakfast-table, he
+      went to town earlier than usual. His wife, who read slowly, was given to
+      talking over what she read, and at present his first object in life was to
+      postpone the inevitable discussion of the letters. This instinct of
+      protection in the afternoon, on his way uptown, guided him to the club in
+      search of a man who might be persuaded to come out to the country to dine.
+      The only man in the club was Flamel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard, as he heard himself almost involuntarily pressing Flamel to come
+      and dine, felt the full irony of the situation. To use Flamel as a shield
+      against his wife’s scrutiny was only a shade less humiliating than to
+      reckon on his wife as a defence against Flamel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He felt a contradictory movement of annoyance at the latter’s ready
+      acceptance, and the two men drove in silence to the station. As they
+      passed the bookstall in the waiting-room Flamel lingered a moment and the
+      eyes of both fell on Margaret Aubyn’s name, conspicuously displayed above
+      a counter stacked with the familiar volumes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “We shall be late, you know,” Glennard remonstrated, pulling out his
+      watch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Go ahead,” said Flamel, imperturbably. “I want to get something&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard turned on his heel and walked down the platform. Flamel rejoined
+      him with an innocent-looking magazine in his hand; but Glennard dared not
+      even glance at the cover, lest it should show the syllables he feared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The train was full of people they knew, and they were kept apart till it
+      dropped them at the little suburban station. As they strolled up the
+      shaded hill, Glennard talked volubly, pointing out the improvements in the
+      neighborhood, deploring the threatened approach of an electric railway,
+      and screening himself by a series of reflex adjustments from the imminent
+      risk of any allusion to the “Letters.” Flamel suffered his discourse with
+      the bland inattention that we accord to the affairs of someone else’s
+      suburb, and they reached the shelter of Alexa’s tea-table without a
+      perceptible turn toward the dreaded topic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The dinner passed off safely. Flamel, always at his best in Alexa’s
+      presence, gave her the kind of attention which is like a beaconing light
+      thrown on the speaker’s words: his answers seemed to bring out a latent
+      significance in her phrases, as the sculptor draws his statue from the
+      block. Glennard, under his wife’s composure, detected a sensibility to
+      this manoeuvre, and the discovery was like the lightning-flash across a
+      nocturnal landscape. Thus far these momentary illuminations had served
+      only to reveal the strangeness of the intervening country: each fresh
+      observation seemed to increase the sum-total of his ignorance. Her
+      simplicity of outline was more puzzling than a complex surface. One may
+      conceivably work one’s way through a labyrinth; but Alexa’s candor was
+      like a snow-covered plain where, the road once lost, there are no
+      landmarks to travel by.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dinner over, they returned to the veranda, where a moon, rising behind the
+      old elm, was combining with that complaisant tree a romantic enlargement
+      of their borders. Glennard had forgotten the cigars. He went to his study
+      to fetch them, and in passing through the drawing-room he saw the second
+      volume of the “Letters” lying open on his wife’s table. He picked up the
+      book and looked at the date of the letter she had been reading. It was one
+      of the last... he knew the few lines by heart. He dropped the book and
+      leaned against the wall. Why had he included that one among the others? Or
+      was it possible that now they would all seem like that...?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alexa’s voice came suddenly out of the dusk. “May Touchett was right&mdash;it
+      <i>is</i> like listening at a key-hole. I wish I hadn’t read it!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Flamel returned, in the leisurely tone of the man whose phrases are
+      punctuated by a cigarette, “It seems so to us, perhaps; but to another
+      generation the book will be a classic.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Then it ought not to have been published till it had become a classic.
+      It’s horrible, it’s degrading almost, to read the secrets of a woman one
+      might have known.” She added, in a lower tone, “Stephen <i>did</i> know her&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Did he?” came from Flamel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “He knew her very well, at Hillbridge, years ago. The book has made him
+      feel dreadfully... he wouldn’t read it... he didn’t want me to read it. I
+      didn’t understand at first, but now I can see how horribly disloyal it
+      must seem to him. It’s so much worse to surprise a friend’s secrets than a
+      stranger’s.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, Glennard’s such a sensitive chap,” Flamel said, easily; and Alexa
+      almost rebukingly rejoined, “If you’d known her I’m sure you’d feel as he
+      does....”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard stood motionless, overcome by the singular infelicity with which
+      he had contrived to put Flamel in possession of the two points most
+      damaging to his case: the fact that he had been a friend of Margaret
+      Aubyn’s, and that he had concealed from Alexa his share in the publication
+      of the letters. To a man of less than Flamel’s astuteness it must now be
+      clear to whom the letters were addressed; and the possibility once
+      suggested, nothing could be easier than to confirm it by discreet
+      research. An impulse of self-accusal drove Glennard to the window. Why not
+      anticipate betrayal by telling his wife the truth in Flamel’s presence? If
+      the man had a drop of decent feeling in him, such a course would be the
+      surest means of securing his silence; and above all, it would rid Glennard
+      of the necessity of defending himself against the perpetual criticism of
+      his wife’s belief in him....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The impulse was strong enough to carry him to the window; but there a
+      reaction of defiance set in. What had he done, after all, to need defence
+      and explanation? Both Dresham and Flamel had, in his hearing, declared the
+      publication of the letters to be not only justifiable but obligatory; and
+      if the disinterestedness of Flamel’s verdict might be questioned,
+      Dresham’s at least represented the impartial view of the man of letters.
+      As to Alexa’s words, they were simply the conventional utterance of the
+      “nice” woman on a question already decided for her by other “nice” women.
+      She had said the proper thing as mechanically as she would have put on the
+      appropriate gown or written the correct form of dinner-invitation.
+      Glennard had small faith in the abstract judgments of the other sex; he
+      knew that half the women who were horrified by the publication of Mrs.
+      Aubyn’s letters would have betrayed her secrets without a scruple.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sudden lowering of his emotional pitch brought a proportionate relief.
+      He told himself that now the worst was over and things would fall into
+      perspective again. His wife and Flamel had turned to other topics, and
+      coming out on the veranda, he handed the cigars to Flamel, saying,
+      cheerfully&mdash;and yet he could have sworn they were the last words he
+      meant to utter!&mdash;“Look here, old man, before you go down to Newport
+      you must come out and spend a few days with us&mdash;mustn’t he, Alexa?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0008" id="link2H_4_0008">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">Glennard</span> had, perhaps unconsciously, counted on the continuance of this
+      easier mood. He had always taken pride in a certain robustness of fibre
+      that enabled him to harden himself against the inevitable, to convert his
+      failures into the building materials of success. Though it did not even
+      now occur to him that what he called the inevitable had hitherto been the
+      alternative he happened to prefer, he was yet obscurely aware that his
+      present difficulty was one not to be conjured by any affectation of
+      indifference. Some griefs build the soul a spacious house&mdash;but in
+      this misery of Glennard’s he could not stand upright. It pressed against
+      him at every turn. He told himself that this was because there was no
+      escape from the visible evidences of his act. The “Letters” confronted him
+      everywhere. People who had never opened a book discussed them with
+      critical reservations; to have read them had become a social obligation in
+      circles to which literature never penetrates except in a personal guise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard did himself injustice, it was from the unexpected discovery of
+      his own pettiness that he chiefly suffered. Our self-esteem is apt to be
+      based on the hypothetical great act we have never had occasion to perform;
+      and even the most self-scrutinizing modesty credits itself negatively with
+      a high standard of conduct. Glennard had never thought himself a hero; but
+      he had been certain that he was incapable of baseness. We all like our
+      wrong-doings to have a becoming cut, to be made to order, as it were; and
+      Glennard found himself suddenly thrust into a garb of dishonor surely
+      meant for a meaner figure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The immediate result of his first weeks of wretchedness was the resolve to
+      go to town for the winter. He knew that such a course was just beyond the
+      limit of prudence; but it was easy to allay the fears of Alexa who,
+      scrupulously vigilant in the management of the household, preserved the
+      American wife’s usual aloofness from her husband’s business cares.
+      Glennard felt that he could not trust himself to a winter’s solitude with
+      her. He had an unspeakable dread of her learning the truth about the
+      letters, yet could not be sure of steeling himself against the suicidal
+      impulse of avowal. His very soul was parched for sympathy; he thirsted for
+      a voice of pity and comprehension. But would his wife pity? Would she
+      understand? Again he found himself brought up abruptly against his
+      incredible ignorance of her nature. The fact that he knew well enough how
+      she would behave in the ordinary emergencies of life, that he could count,
+      in such contingencies, on the kind of high courage and directness he had
+      always divined in her, made him the more hopeless of her entering into the
+      torturous psychology of an act that he himself could no longer explain or
+      understand. It would have been easier had she been more complex, more
+      feminine&mdash;if he could have counted on her imaginative sympathy or her
+      moral obtuseness&mdash;but he was sure of neither. He was sure of nothing
+      but that, for a time, he must avoid her. Glennard could not rid himself of
+      the delusion that by and by his action would cease to make its
+      consequences felt. He would not have cared to own to himself that he
+      counted on the dulling of his sensibilities: he preferred to indulge the
+      vague hypothesis that extraneous circumstances would somehow efface the
+      blot upon his conscience. In his worst moments of self-abasement he tried
+      to find solace in the thought that Flamel had sanctioned his course.
+      Flamel, at the outset, must have guessed to whom the letters were
+      addressed; yet neither then nor afterward had he hesitated to advise their
+      publication. This thought drew Glennard to him in fitful impulses of
+      friendliness, from each of which there was a sharper reaction of distrust
+      and aversion. When Flamel was not at the house, he missed the support of
+      his tacit connivance; when he was there, his presence seemed the assertion
+      of an intolerable claim.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Early in the winter the Glennards took possession of the little house that
+      was to cost them almost nothing. The change brought Glennard the immediate
+      relief of seeing less of his wife, and of being protected, in her
+      presence, by the multiplied preoccupations of town life. Alexa, who could
+      never appear hurried, showed the smiling abstraction of a pretty woman to
+      whom the social side of married life has not lost its novelty. Glennard,
+      with the recklessness of a man fresh from his first financial imprudence,
+      encouraged her in such little extravagances as her good sense at first
+      resisted. Since they had come to town, he argued, they might as well enjoy
+      themselves. He took a sympathetic view of the necessity of new gowns, he
+      gave her a set of furs at Christmas, and before the New Year they had
+      agreed on the obligation of adding a parlour-maid to their small
+      establishment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Providence the very next day hastened to justify this measure by placing
+      on Glennard’s breakfast-plate an envelope bearing the name of the
+      publishers to whom he had sold Mrs. Aubyn’s letters. It happened to be the
+      only letter the early post had brought, and he glanced across the table at
+      his wife, who had come down before him and had probably laid the envelope
+      on his plate. She was not the woman to ask awkward questions, but he felt
+      the conjecture of her glance, and he was debating whether to affect
+      surprise at the receipt of the letter, or to pass it off as a business
+      communication that had strayed to his house, when a check fell from the
+      envelope. It was the royalty on the first edition of the letters. His
+      first feeling was one of simple satisfaction. The money had come with such
+      infernal opportuneness that he could not help welcoming it. Before long,
+      too, there would be more; he knew the book was still selling far beyond
+      the publisher’s previsions. He put the check in his pocket and left the
+      room without looking at his wife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the way to his office the habitual reaction set in. The money he had
+      received was the first tangible reminder that he was living on the sale of
+      his self-esteem. The thought of material benefit had been overshadowed by
+      his sense of the intrinsic baseness of making the letters known; now he
+      saw what an element of sordidness it added to the situation and how the
+      fact that he needed the money, and must use it, pledged him more
+      irrevocably than ever to the consequences of his act. It seemed to him, in
+      that first hour of misery, that he had betrayed his friend anew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When, that afternoon, he reached home earlier than usual, Alexa’s
+      drawing-room was full of a gayety that overflowed to the stairs. Flamel,
+      for a wonder, was not there; but Dresham and young Hartly, grouped about
+      the tea-table, were receiving with resonant mirth a narrative delivered in
+      the fluttered staccato that made Mrs. Armiger’s conversation like the
+      ejaculations of a startled aviary.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She paused as Glennard entered, and he had time to notice that his wife,
+      who was busied about the tea-tray, had not joined in the laughter of the
+      men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, go on, go on,” young Hartly rapturously groaned; and Mrs. Armiger met
+      Glennard’s inquiry with the deprecating cry that really she didn’t see
+      what there was to laugh at. “I’m sure I feel more like crying. I don’t
+      know what I should have done if Alexa hadn’t been home to give me a cup of
+      tea. My nerves are in shreds&mdash;yes, another, dear, please&mdash;” and
+      as Glennard looked his perplexity, she went on, after pondering on the
+      selection of a second lump of sugar, “Why, I’ve just come from the
+      reading, you know&mdash;the reading at the Waldorf.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I haven’t been in town long enough to know anything,” said Glennard,
+      taking the cup his wife handed him. “Who has been reading what?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “That lovely girl from the South&mdash;Georgie&mdash;Georgie what’s her
+      name&mdash;Mrs. Dresham’s protegee&mdash;unless she’s <i>yours</i>, Mr. Dresham!
+      Why, the big ball-room was <i>packed</i>, and all the women were crying like
+      idiots&mdash;it was the most harrowing thing I ever heard&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “What <i>did</i> you hear?” Glennard asked; and his wife interposed: “Won’t you
+      have another bit of cake, Julia? Or, Stephen, ring for some hot toast,
+      please.” Her tone betrayed a polite satiety of the topic under discussion.
+      Glennard turned to the bell, but Mrs. Armiger pursued him with her lovely
+      amazement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Why, the ‘Aubyn Letters’&mdash;didn’t you know about it? The girl read
+      them so beautifully that it was quite horrible&mdash;I should have fainted
+      if there’d been a man near enough to carry me out.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hartly’s glee redoubled, and Dresham said, jovially, “How like you women
+      to raise a shriek over the book and then do all you can to encourage the
+      blatant publicity of the readings!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Armiger met him more than half-way on a torrent of self-accusal. “It
+      <i>was</i> horrid; it was disgraceful. I told your wife we ought all to be
+      ashamed of ourselves for going, and I think Alexa was quite right to
+      refuse to take any tickets&mdash;even if it was for a charity.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh,” her hostess murmured, indifferently, “with me charity begins at
+      home. I can’t afford emotional luxuries.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “A charity? A charity?” Hartly exulted. “I hadn’t seized the full beauty
+      of it. Reading poor Margaret Aubyn’s love-letters at the Waldorf before
+      five hundred people for a charity! <i>What</i> charity, dear Mrs. Armiger?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Why, the Home for Friendless Women&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “It was well chosen,” Dresham commented; and Hartly buried his mirth in
+      the sofa-cushions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When they were alone Glennard, still holding his untouched cup of tea,
+      turned to his wife, who sat silently behind the kettle. “Who asked you to
+      take a ticket for that reading?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I don’t know, really&mdash;Kate Dresham, I fancy. It was she who got it
+      up.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “It’s just the sort of damnable vulgarity she’s capable of! It’s loathsome&mdash;it’s
+      monstrous&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His wife, without looking up, answered gravely, “I thought so too. It was
+      for that reason I didn’t go. But you must remember that very few people
+      feel about Mrs. Aubyn as you do&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard managed to set down his cup with a steady hand, but the room
+      swung round with him and he dropped into the nearest chair. “As I do?” he
+      repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I mean that very few people knew her when she lived in New York. To most
+      of the women who went to the reading she was a mere name, too remote to
+      have any personality. With me, of course, it was different&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard gave her a startled look. “Different? Why different?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Since you were her friend&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Her friend!” He stood up impatiently. “You speak as if she had had only
+      one&mdash;the most famous woman of her day!” He moved vaguely about the
+      room, bending down to look at some books on the table. “I hope,” he added,
+      “you didn’t give that as a reason, by the way?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “A reason?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “For not going. A woman who gives reasons for getting out of social
+      obligations is sure to make herself unpopular or ridiculous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The words were uncalculated; but in an instant he saw that they had
+      strangely bridged the distance between his wife and himself. He felt her
+      close on him, like a panting foe; and her answer was a flash that showed
+      the hand on the trigger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I seem,” she said from the threshold, “to have done both in giving my
+      reason to you.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The fact that they were dining out that evening made it easy for him to
+      avoid Alexa till she came downstairs in her opera-cloak. Mrs. Touchett,
+      who was going to the same dinner, had offered to call for her, and
+      Glennard, refusing a precarious seat between the ladies’ draperies,
+      followed on foot. The evening was interminable. The reading at the
+      Waldorf, at which all the women had been present, had revived the
+      discussion of the “Aubyn Letters” and Glennard, hearing his wife
+      questioned as to her absence, felt himself miserably wishing that she had
+      gone, rather than that her staying away should have been remarked. He was
+      rapidly losing all sense of proportion where the “Letters” were concerned.
+      He could no longer hear them mentioned without suspecting a purpose in the
+      allusion; he even yielded himself for a moment to the extravagance of
+      imagining that Mrs. Dresham, whom he disliked, had organized the reading
+      in the hope of making him betray himself&mdash;for he was already sure
+      that Dresham had divined his share in the transaction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The attempt to keep a smooth surface on this inner tumult was as endless
+      and unavailing as efforts made in a nightmare. He lost all sense of what
+      he was saying to his neighbors and once when he looked up his wife’s
+      glance struck him cold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat nearly opposite him, at Flamel’s side, and it appeared to Glennard
+      that they had built about themselves one of those airy barriers of talk
+      behind which two people can say what they please. While the reading was
+      discussed they were silent. Their silence seemed to Glennard almost
+      cynical&mdash;it stripped the last disguise from their complicity. A throb
+      of anger rose in him, but suddenly it fell, and he felt, with a curious
+      sense of relief, that at bottom he no longer cared whether Flamel had told
+      his wife or not. The assumption that Flamel knew about the letters had
+      become a fact to Glennard; and it now seemed to him better that Alexa
+      should know too.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was frightened at first by the discovery of his own indifference. The
+      last barriers of his will seemed to be breaking down before a flood of
+      moral lassitude. How could he continue to play his part, to keep his front
+      to the enemy, with this poison of indifference stealing through his veins?
+      He tried to brace himself with the remembrance of his wife’s scorn. He had
+      not forgotten the note on which their conversation had closed. If he had
+      ever wondered how she would receive the truth he wondered no longer&mdash;she
+      would despise him. But this lent a new insidiousness to his temptation,
+      since her contempt would be a refuge from his own. He said to himself
+      that, since he no longer cared for the consequences, he could at least
+      acquit himself of speaking in self-defence. What he wanted now was not
+      immunity but castigation: his wife’s indignation might still reconcile him
+      to himself. Therein lay his one hope of regeneration; her scorn was the
+      moral antiseptic that he needed, her comprehension the one balm that could
+      heal him....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When they left the dinner he was so afraid of speaking that he let her
+      drive home alone, and went to the club with Flamel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0009" id="link2H_4_0009">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">He</span> rose next morning with the resolve to know what Alexa thought of him.
+      It was not anchoring in a haven, but lying to in a storm&mdash;he felt the
+      need of a temporary lull in the turmoil of his sensations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He came home late, for they were dining alone and he knew that they would
+      have the evening together. When he followed her to the drawing-room after
+      dinner he thought himself on the point of speaking; but as she handed him
+      his coffee he said, involuntarily: “I shall have to carry this off to the
+      study, I’ve got a lot of work to-night.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Alone in the study he cursed his cowardice. What was it that had withheld
+      him? A certain bright unapproachableness seemed to keep him at arm’s
+      length. She was not the kind of woman whose compassion could be
+      circumvented; there was no chance of slipping past the outposts; he would
+      never take her by surprise. Well&mdash;why not face her, then? What he
+      shrank from could be no worse than what he was enduring. He had pushed
+      back his chair and turned to go upstairs when a new expedient presented
+      itself. What if, instead of telling her, he were to let her find out for
+      herself and watch the effect of the discovery before speaking? In this way
+      he made over to chance the burden of the revelation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The idea had been suggested by the sight of the formula enclosing the
+      publisher’s check. He had deposited the money, but the notice accompanying
+      it dropped from his note-case as he cleared his table for work. It was the
+      formula usual in such cases and revealed clearly enough that he was the
+      recipient of a royalty on Margaret Aubyn’s letters. It would be impossible
+      for Alexa to read it without understanding at once that the letters had
+      been written to him and that he had sold them....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat downstairs till he heard her ring for the parlor-maid to put out
+      the lights; then he went up to the drawing-room with a bundle of papers in
+      his hand. Alexa was just rising from her seat and the lamplight fell on
+      the deep roll of hair that overhung her brow like the eaves of a temple.
+      Her face had often the high secluded look of a shrine; and it was this
+      touch of awe in her beauty that now made him feel himself on the brink of
+      sacrilege.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lest the feeling should dominate him, he spoke at once. “I’ve brought you
+      a piece of work&mdash;a lot of old bills and things that I want you to
+      sort for me. Some are not worth keeping&mdash;but you’ll be able to judge
+      of that. There may be a letter or two among them&mdash;nothing of much
+      account, but I don’t like to throw away the whole lot without having them
+      looked over and I haven’t time to do it myself.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He held out the papers and she took them with a smile that seemed to
+      recognize in the service he asked the tacit intention of making amends for
+      the incident of the previous day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Are you sure I shall know which to keep?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, quite sure,” he answered, easily&mdash;“and besides, none are of much
+      importance.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The next morning he invented an excuse for leaving the house without
+      seeing her, and when he returned, just before dinner, he found a visitor’s
+      hat and stick in the hall. The visitor was Flamel, who was in the act of
+      taking leave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had risen, but Alexa remained seated; and their attitude gave the
+      impression of a colloquy that had prolonged itself beyond the limits of
+      speech. Both turned a surprised eye on Glennard and he had the sense of
+      walking into a room grown suddenly empty, as though their thoughts were
+      conspirators dispersed by his approach. He felt the clutch of his old
+      fear. What if his wife had already sorted the papers and had told Flamel
+      of her discovery? Well, it was no news to Flamel that Glennard was in
+      receipt of a royalty on the “Aubyn Letters.”...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A sudden resolve to know the worst made him lift his eyes to his wife as
+      the door closed on Flamel. But Alexa had risen also, and bending over her
+      writing-table, with her back to Glennard, was beginning to speak
+      precipitately.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I’m dining out to-night&mdash;you don’t mind my deserting you? Julia
+      Armiger sent me word just now that she had an extra ticket for the last
+      Ambrose concert. She told me to say how sorry she was that she hadn’t two&mdash;but
+      I knew <i>you</i> wouldn’t be sorry!” She ended with a laugh that had the effect
+      of being a strayed echo of Mrs. Armiger’s; and before Glennard could speak
+      she had added, with her hand on the door, “Mr. Flamel stayed so late that
+      I’ve hardly time to dress. The concert begins ridiculously early, and
+      Julia dines at half-past seven&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard stood alone in the empty room that seemed somehow full of an
+      ironical consciousness of what was happening. “She hates me,” he murmured.
+      “She hates me....”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The next day was Sunday, and Glennard purposely lingered late in his room.
+      When he came downstairs his wife was already seated at the
+      breakfast-table. She lifted her usual smile to his entrance and they took
+      shelter in the nearest topic, like wayfarers overtaken by a storm. While
+      he listened to her account of the concert he began to think that, after
+      all, she had not yet sorted the papers, and that her agitation of the
+      previous day must be ascribed to another cause, in which perhaps he had
+      but an indirect concern. He wondered it had never before occurred to him
+      that Flamel was the kind of man who might very well please a woman at his
+      own expense, without need of fortuitous assistance. If this possibility
+      cleared the outlook it did not brighten it. Glennard merely felt himself
+      left alone with his baseness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alexa left the breakfast-table before him and when he went up to the
+      drawing-room he found her dressed to go out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Aren’t you a little early for church?” he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She replied that, on the way there, she meant to stop a moment at her
+      mother’s; and while she drew on her gloves, he fumbled among the
+      knick-knacks on the mantel-piece for a match to light his cigarette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well, good-by,” she said, turning to go; and from the threshold she
+      added: “By the way, I’ve sorted the papers you gave me. Those that I
+      thought you would like to keep are on your study-table.” She went
+      downstairs and he heard the door close behind her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had sorted the papers&mdash;she knew, then&mdash;she <i>must</i> know&mdash;and
+      she had made no sign!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard, he hardly knew how, found himself once more in the study. On the
+      table lay the packet he had given her. It was much smaller&mdash;she had
+      evidently gone over the papers with care, destroying the greater number.
+      He loosened the elastic band and spread the remaining envelopes on his
+      desk. The publisher’s notice was among them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0010" id="link2H_4_0010">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      X
+    </h2>
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">His</span> wife knew and she made no sign. Glennard found himself in the case of
+      the seafarer who, closing his eyes at nightfall on a scene he thinks to
+      put leagues behind him before day, wakes to a port-hole framing the same
+      patch of shore. From the kind of exaltation to which his resolve had
+      lifted him he dropped to an unreasoning apathy. His impulse of confession
+      had acted as a drug to self-reproach. He had tried to shift a portion of
+      his burden to his wife’s shoulders and now that she had tacitly refused to
+      carry it, he felt the load too heavy to be taken up again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A fortunate interval of hard work brought respite from this phase of
+      sterile misery. He went West to argue an important case, won it, and came
+      back to fresh preoccupations. His own affairs were thriving enough to
+      engross him in the pauses of his professional work, and for over two
+      months he had little time to look himself in the face. Not unnaturally&mdash;for
+      he was as yet unskilled in the subtleties of introspection&mdash;he
+      mistook his temporary insensibility for a gradual revival of moral health.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He told himself that he was recovering his sense of proportion, getting to
+      see things in their true light; and if he now thought of his rash appeal
+      to his wife’s sympathy it was as an act of folly from the consequences of
+      which he had been saved by the providence that watches over madmen. He had
+      little leisure to observe Alexa; but he concluded that the common-sense
+      momentarily denied him had counselled her uncritical acceptance of the
+      inevitable. If such a quality was a poor substitute for the passionate
+      justness that had once seemed to characterize her, he accepted the
+      alternative as a part of that general lowering of the key that seems
+      needful to the maintenance of the matrimonial duet. What woman ever
+      retained her abstract sense of justice where another woman was concerned?
+      Possibly the thought that he had profited by Mrs. Aubyn’s tenderness was
+      not wholly disagreeable to his wife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the pressure of work began to lessen, and he found himself, in the
+      lengthening afternoons, able to reach home somewhat earlier, he noticed
+      that the little drawing-room was always full and that he and his wife
+      seldom had an evening alone together. When he was tired, as often
+      happened, she went out alone; the idea of giving up an engagement to
+      remain with him seemed not to occur to her. She had shown, as a girl,
+      little fondness for society, nor had she seemed to regret it during the
+      year they had spent in the country. He reflected, however, that he was
+      sharing the common lot of husbands, who proverbially mistake the early
+      ardors of housekeeping for a sign of settled domesticity. Alexa, at any
+      rate, was refuting his theory as inconsiderately as a seedling defeats the
+      gardener’s expectations. An undefinable change had come over her. In one
+      sense it was a happy one, since she had grown, if not handsomer, at least
+      more vivid and expressive; her beauty had become more communicable: it was
+      as though she had learned the conscious exercise of intuitive attributes
+      and now used her effects with the discrimination of an artist skilled in
+      values. To a dispassionate critic (as Glennard now rated himself) the art
+      may at times have been a little too obvious. Her attempts at lightness
+      lacked spontaneity, and she sometimes rasped him by laughing like Julia
+      Armiger; but he had enough imagination to perceive that, in respect of the
+      wife’s social arts, a husband necessarily sees the wrong side of the
+      tapestry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this ironical estimate of their relation Glennard found himself
+      strangely relieved of all concern as to his wife’s feelings for Flamel.
+      From an Olympian pinnacle of indifference he calmly surveyed their
+      inoffensive antics. It was surprising how his cheapening of his wife put
+      him at ease with himself. Far as he and she were from each other they yet
+      had, in a sense, the tacit nearness of complicity. Yes, they were
+      accomplices; he could no more be jealous of her than she could despise
+      him. The jealousy that would once have seemed a blur on her whiteness now
+      appeared like a tribute to ideals in which he no longer believed....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard was little given to exploring the outskirts of literature. He
+      always skipped the “literary notices” in the papers and he had small
+      leisure for the intermittent pleasures of the periodical. He had therefore
+      no notion of the prolonged reverberations which the “Aubyn Letters” had
+      awakened in the precincts of criticism. When the book ceased to be talked
+      about he supposed it had ceased to be read; and this apparent subsidence
+      of the agitation about it brought the reassuring sense that he had
+      exaggerated its vitality. The conviction, if it did not ease his
+      conscience, at least offered him the relative relief of obscurity: he felt
+      like an offender taken down from the pillory and thrust into the soothing
+      darkness of a cell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But one evening, when Alexa had left him to go to a dance, he chanced to
+      turn over the magazines on her table, and the copy of the Horoscope, to
+      which he settled down with his cigar, confronted him, on its first page,
+      with a portrait of Margaret Aubyn. It was a reproduction of the photograph
+      that had stood so long on his desk. The desiccating air of memory had
+      turned her into the mere abstraction of a woman, and this unexpected
+      evocation seemed to bring her nearer than she had ever been in life. Was
+      it because he understood her better? He looked long into her eyes; little
+      personal traits reached out to him like caresses&mdash;the tired droop of
+      her lids, her quick way of leaning forward as she spoke, the movements of
+      her long expressive hands. All that was feminine in her, the quality he
+      had always missed, stole toward him from her unreproachful gaze; and now
+      that it was too late life had developed in him the subtler perceptions
+      which could detect it in even this poor semblance of herself. For a moment
+      he found consolation in the thought that, at any cost, they had thus been
+      brought together; then a flood of shame rushed over him. Face to face with
+      her, he felt himself laid bare to the inmost fold of consciousness. The
+      shame was deep, but it was a renovating anguish; he was like a man whom
+      intolerable pain has roused from the creeping lethargy of death....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He rose next morning to as fresh a sense of life as though his hour of
+      mute communion with Margaret Aubyn had been a more exquisite renewal of
+      their earlier meetings. His waking thought was that he must see her again;
+      and as consciousness affirmed itself he felt an intense fear of losing the
+      sense of her nearness. But she was still close to him; her presence
+      remained the sole reality in a world of shadows. All through his working
+      hours he was re-living with incredible minuteness every incident of their
+      obliterated past; as a man who has mastered the spirit of a foreign tongue
+      turns with renewed wonder to the pages his youth has plodded over. In this
+      lucidity of retrospection the most trivial detail had its significance,
+      and the rapture of recovery was embittered to Glennard by the perception
+      of all that he had missed. He had been pitiably, grotesquely stupid; and
+      there was irony in the thought that, but for the crisis through which he
+      was passing, he might have lived on in complacent ignorance of his loss.
+      It was as though she had bought him with her blood....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That evening he and Alexa dined alone. After dinner he followed her to the
+      drawing-room. He no longer felt the need of avoiding her; he was hardly
+      conscious of her presence. After a few words they lapsed into silence and
+      he sat smoking with his eyes on the fire. It was not that he was unwilling
+      to talk to her; he felt a curious desire to be as kind as possible; but he
+      was always forgetting that she was there. Her full bright presence,
+      through which the currents of life flowed so warmly, had grown as tenuous
+      as a shadow, and he saw so far beyond her&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently she rose and began to move about the room. She seemed to be
+      looking for something and he roused himself to ask what she wanted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Only the last number of the Horoscope. I thought I’d left it on this
+      table.” He said nothing, and she went on: “You haven’t seen it?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “No,” he returned coldly. The magazine was locked in his desk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His wife had moved to the mantel-piece. She stood facing him and as he
+      looked up he met her tentative gaze. “I was reading an article in it&mdash;a
+      review of Mrs. Aubyn’s letters,” she added, slowly, with her deep,
+      deliberate blush.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard stooped to toss his cigar into the fire. He felt a savage wish
+      that she would not speak the other woman’s name; nothing else seemed to
+      matter. “You seem to do a lot of reading,” he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She still earnestly confronted him. “I was keeping this for you&mdash;I
+      thought it might interest you,” she said, with an air of gentle
+      insistence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood up and turned away. He was sure she knew that he had taken the
+      review and he felt that he was beginning to hate her again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I haven’t time for such things,” he said, indifferently. As he moved to
+      the door he heard her take a precipitate step forward; then she paused and
+      sank without speaking into the chair from which he had risen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0011" id="link2H_4_0011">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">As</span> Glennard, in the raw February sunlight, mounted the road to the
+      cemetery, he felt the beatitude that comes with an abrupt cessation of
+      physical pain. He had reached the point where self-analysis ceases; the
+      impulse that moved him was purely intuitive. He did not even seek a reason
+      for it, beyond the obvious one that his desire to stand by Margaret
+      Aubyn’s grave was prompted by no attempt at a sentimental reparation, but
+      rather by the vague need to affirm in some way the reality of the tie
+      between them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ironical promiscuity of death had brought Mrs. Aubyn back to share the
+      narrow hospitality of her husband’s last lodging; but though Glennard knew
+      she had been buried near New York he had never visited her grave. He was
+      oppressed, as he now threaded the long avenues, by a chilling vision of
+      her return. There was no family to follow her hearse; she had died alone,
+      as she had lived; and the “distinguished mourners” who had formed the
+      escort of the famous writer knew nothing of the woman they were committing
+      to the grave. Glennard could not even remember at what season she had been
+      buried; but his mood indulged the fancy that it must have been on some
+      such day of harsh sunlight, the incisive February brightness that gives
+      perspicuity without warmth. The white avenues stretched before him
+      interminably, lined with stereotyped emblems of affliction, as though all
+      the platitudes ever uttered had been turned to marble and set up over the
+      unresisting dead. Here and there, no doubt, a frigid urn or an insipid
+      angel imprisoned some fine-fibred grief, as the most hackneyed words may
+      become the vehicle of rare meanings; but for the most part the endless
+      alignment of monuments seemed to embody those easy generalizations about
+      death that do not disturb the repose of the living. Glennard’s eye, as he
+      followed the way indicated to him, had instinctively sought some low mound
+      with a quiet headstone. He had forgotten that the dead seldom plan their
+      own houses, and with a pang he discovered the name he sought on the
+      cyclopean base of a granite shaft rearing its aggressive height at the
+      angle of two avenues.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “How she would have hated it!” he murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A bench stood near and he seated himself. The monument rose before him
+      like some pretentious uninhabited dwelling; he could not believe that
+      Margaret Aubyn lay there. It was a Sunday morning and black figures moved
+      among the paths, placing flowers on the frost-bound hillocks. Glennard
+      noticed that the neighboring graves had been thus newly dressed; and he
+      fancied a blind stir of expectancy through the sod, as though the bare
+      mounds spread a parched surface to that commemorative rain. He rose
+      presently and walked back to the entrance of the cemetery. Several
+      greenhouses stood near the gates, and turning in at the first he asked for
+      some flowers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Anything in the emblematic line?” asked the anaemic man behind the
+      dripping counter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Just cut flowers? This way, then.” The florist unlocked a glass door and
+      led him down a moist green aisle. The hot air was choked with the scent of
+      white azaleas, white lilies, white lilacs; all the flowers were white;
+      they were like a prolongation, a mystical efflorescence, of the long rows
+      of marble tombstones, and their perfume seemed to cover an odor of decay.
+      The rich atmosphere made Glennard dizzy. As he leaned in the doorpost,
+      waiting for the flowers, he had a penetrating sense of Margaret Aubyn’s
+      nearness&mdash;not the imponderable presence of his inner vision, but a
+      life that beat warm in his arms....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sharp air caught him as he stepped out into it again. He walked back
+      and scattered the flowers over the grave. The edges of the white petals
+      shrivelled like burnt paper in the cold; and as he watched them the
+      illusion of her nearness faded, shrank back frozen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0012" id="link2H_4_0012">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">The</span> motive of his visit to the cemetery remained undefined save as a final
+      effort of escape from his wife’s inexpressive acceptance of his shame. It
+      seemed to him that as long as he could keep himself alive to that shame he
+      would not wholly have succumbed to its consequences. His chief fear was
+      that he should become the creature of his act. His wife’s indifference
+      degraded him; it seemed to put him on a level with his dishonor. Margaret
+      Aubyn would have abhorred the deed in proportion to her pity for the man.
+      The sense of her potential pity drew him back to her. The one woman knew
+      but did not understand; the other, it sometimes seemed, understood without
+      knowing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In its last disguise of retrospective remorse, his self-pity affected a
+      desire for solitude and meditation. He lost himself in morbid musings, in
+      futile visions of what life with Margaret Aubyn might have been. There
+      were moments when, in the strange dislocation of his view, the wrong he
+      had done her seemed a tie between them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To indulge these emotions he fell into the habit, on Sunday afternoons, of
+      solitary walks prolonged till after dusk. The days were lengthening, there
+      was a touch of spring in the air, and his wanderings now usually led him
+      to the Park and its outlying regions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One Sunday, tired of aimless locomotion, he took a cab at the Park gates
+      and let it carry him out to the Riverside Drive. It was a gray afternoon
+      streaked with east wind. Glennard’s cab advanced slowly, and as he leaned
+      back, gazing with absent intentness at the deserted paths that wound under
+      bare boughs between grass banks of premature vividness, his attention was
+      arrested by two figures walking ahead of him. This couple, who had the
+      path to themselves, moved at an uneven pace, as though adapting their gait
+      to a conversation marked by meditative intervals. Now and then they
+      paused, and in one of these pauses the lady, turning toward her companion,
+      showed Glennard the outline of his wife’s profile. The man was Flamel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The blood rushed to Glennard’s forehead. He sat up with a jerk and pushed
+      back the lid in the roof of the hansom; but when the cabman bent down he
+      dropped into his seat without speaking. Then, becoming conscious of the
+      prolonged interrogation of the lifted lid, he called out&mdash;“Turn&mdash;drive
+      back&mdash;anywhere&mdash;I’m in a hurry&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As the cab swung round he caught a last glimpse of the two figures. They
+      had not moved; Alexa, with bent head, stood listening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “My God, my God&mdash;” he groaned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was hideous&mdash;it was abominable&mdash;he could not understand it.
+      The woman was nothing to him&mdash;less than nothing&mdash;yet the blood
+      hummed in his ears and hung a cloud before him. He knew it was only the
+      stirring of the primal instinct, that it had no more to do with his
+      reasoning self than any reflex impulse of the body; but that merely
+      lowered anguish to disgust. Yes, it was disgust he felt&mdash;almost a
+      physical nausea. The poisonous fumes of life were in his lungs. He was
+      sick, unutterably sick....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He drove home and went to his room. They were giving a little dinner that
+      night, and when he came down the guests were arriving. He looked at his
+      wife: her beauty was extraordinary, but it seemed to him the beauty of a
+      smooth sea along an unlit coast. She frightened him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat late that night in his study. He heard the parlor-maid lock the
+      front door; then his wife went upstairs and the lights were put out. His
+      brain was like some great empty hall with an echo in it; one thought
+      reverberated endlessly.... At length he drew his chair to the table and
+      began to write. He addressed an envelope and then slowly re-read what he
+      had written.
+    </p>
+<div class="blk">
+    <p class="nind"><span class="smcap">“<i>My dear Flamel</i>,”</span></p>
+    <p><i>
+      “Many apologies for not sending you sooner the enclosed check, which
+      represents the customary percentage on the sale of the Letters.”</i>
+     </p>
+    <p><i>
+      “Trusting you will excuse the oversight,</i>
+    </p>
+    <p class="r">
+	<i>“Yours truly</i>,&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
+<br />
+<span class="smcap"><i>“Stephen Glennard.”</i></span>
+     </p>
+</div>
+    <p>
+      He let himself out of the darkened house and dropped the letter in the
+      post-box at the corner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next afternoon he was detained late at his office, and as he was
+      preparing to leave he heard someone asking for him in the outer room. He
+      seated himself again and Flamel was shown in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two men, as Glennard pushed aside an obstructive chair, had a moment
+      to measure each other; then Flamel advanced, and drawing out his
+      note-case, laid a slip of paper on the desk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “My dear fellow, what on earth does this mean?” Glennard recognized his
+      check.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “That I was remiss, simply. It ought to have gone to you before.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Flamel’s tone had been that of unaffected surprise, but at this his accent
+      changed and he asked, quickly: “On what ground?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard had moved away from the desk and stood leaning against the
+      calf-backed volumes of the bookcase. “On the ground that you sold Mrs.
+      Aubyn’s letters for me, and that I find the intermediary in such cases is
+      entitled to a percentage on the sale.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Flamel paused before answering. “You find, you say. It’s a recent
+      discovery?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Obviously, from my not sending the check sooner. You see I’m new to the
+      business.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “And since when have you discovered that there was any question of
+      business, as far as I was concerned?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard flushed and his voice rose slightly. “Are you reproaching me for
+      not having remembered it sooner?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Flamel, who had spoken in the rapid repressed tone of a man on the verge
+      of anger, stared a moment at this and then, in his natural voice,
+      rejoined, good-humoredly, “Upon my soul, I don’t understand you!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The change of key seemed to disconcert Glennard. “It’s simple enough&mdash;”
+       he muttered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Simple enough&mdash;your offering me money in return for a friendly
+      service? I don’t know what your other friends expect!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Some of my friends wouldn’t have undertaken the job. Those who would have
+      done so would probably have expected to be paid.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He lifted his eyes to Flamel and the two men looked at each other. Flamel
+      had turned white and his lips stirred, but he held his temperate note. “If
+      you mean to imply that the job was not a nice one, you lay yourself open
+      to the retort that you proposed it. But for my part I’ve never seen, I
+      never shall see, any reason for not publishing the letters.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “That’s just it!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “What&mdash;?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “The certainty of your not seeing was what made me go to you. When a man’s
+      got stolen goods to pawn he doesn’t take them to the police-station.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Stolen?” Flamel echoed. “The letters were stolen?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard burst into a coarse laugh. “How much longer do you expect me to
+      keep up that pretence about the letters? You knew well enough they were
+      written to me.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Flamel looked at him in silence. “Were they?” he said at length. “I didn’t
+      know it.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “And didn’t suspect it, I suppose,” Glennard sneered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The other was again silent; then he said, “I may remind you that,
+      supposing I had felt any curiosity about the matter, I had no way of
+      finding out that the letters were written to you. You never showed me the
+      originals.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “What does that prove? There were fifty ways of finding out. It’s the kind
+      of thing one can easily do.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Flamel glanced at him with contempt. “Our ideas probably differ as to what
+      a man can easily do. It would not have been easy for me.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard’s anger vented itself in the words uppermost in his thought. “It
+      may, then, interest you to hear that my wife <i>does</i> know about the letters&mdash;has
+      known for some months....”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ah,” said the other, slowly. Glennard saw that, in his blind clutch at a
+      weapon, he had seized the one most apt to wound. Flamel’s muscles were
+      under control, but his face showed the undefinable change produced by the
+      slow infiltration of poison. Every implication that the words contained
+      had reached its mark; but Glennard felt that their obvious intention was
+      lost in the anguish of what they suggested. He was sure now that Flamel
+      would never have betrayed him; but the inference only made a wider outlet
+      for his anger. He paused breathlessly for Flamel to speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “If she knows, it’s not through me.” It was what Glennard had waited for.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Through you, by God? Who said it was through you? Do you suppose I leave
+      it to you, or to anybody else, for that matter, to keep my wife informed
+      of my actions? I didn’t suppose even such egregious conceit as yours could
+      delude a man to that degree!” Struggling for a foothold in the small
+      landslide of his dignity, he added, in a steadier tone, “My wife learned
+      the facts from me.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Flamel received this in silence. The other’s outbreak seemed to have
+      reinforced his self-control, and when he spoke it was with a deliberation
+      implying that his course was chosen. “In that case I understand still less&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Still less&mdash;?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “The meaning of this.” He pointed to the check. “When you began to speak I
+      supposed you had meant it as a bribe; now I can only infer it was intended
+      as a random insult. In either case, here’s my answer.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He tore the slip of paper in two and tossed the fragments across the desk
+      to Glennard. Then he turned and walked out of the office.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard dropped his head on his hands. If he had hoped to restore his
+      self-respect by the simple expedient of assailing Flamel’s, the result had
+      not justified his expectation. The blow he had struck had blunted the edge
+      of his anger, and the unforeseen extent of the hurt inflicted did not
+      alter the fact that his weapon had broken in his hands. He saw now that
+      his rage against Flamel was only the last projection of a passionate
+      self-disgust. This consciousness did not dull his dislike of the man; it
+      simply made reprisals ineffectual. Flamel’s unwillingness to quarrel with
+      him was the last stage of his abasement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the light of this final humiliation his assumption of his wife’s
+      indifference struck him as hardly so fatuous as the sentimental
+      resuscitation of his past. He had been living in a factitious world
+      wherein his emotions were the sycophants of his vanity, and it was with
+      instinctive relief that he felt its ruins crash about his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was nearly dark when he left his office, and he walked slowly homeward
+      in the complete mental abeyance that follows on such a crisis. He was not
+      aware that he was thinking of his wife; yet when he reached his own door
+      he found that, in the involuntary readjustment of his vision, she had once
+      more become the central point of consciousness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0013" id="link2H_4_0013">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">It</span> had never before occurred to him that she might, after all, have missed
+      the purport of the document he had put in her way. What if, in her hurried
+      inspection of the papers, she had passed it over as related to the private
+      business of some client? What, for instance, was to prevent her concluding
+      that Glennard was the counsel of the unknown person who had sold the
+      “Aubyn Letters.” The subject was one not likely to fix her attention&mdash;she
+      was not a curious woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard at this point laid down his fork and glanced at her between the
+      candle-shades. The alternative explanation of her indifference was not
+      slow in presenting itself. Her head had the same listening droop as when
+      he had caught sight of her the day before in Flamel’s company; the
+      attitude revived the vividness of his impression. It was simple enough,
+      after all. She had ceased to care for him because she cared for someone
+      else.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As he followed her upstairs he felt a sudden stirring of his dormant
+      anger. His sentiments had lost all their factitious complexity. He had
+      already acquitted her of any connivance in his baseness, and he felt only
+      that he loved her and that she had escaped him. This was now, strangely
+      enough, his dominating thought: the consciousness that he and she had
+      passed through the fusion of love and had emerged from it as
+      incommunicably apart as though the transmutation had never taken place.
+      Every other passion, he mused, left some mark upon the nature; but love
+      passed like the flight of a ship across the waters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She sank into her usual seat near the lamp, and he leaned against the
+      chimney, moving about with an inattentive hand the knick-knacks on the
+      mantel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly he caught sight of her reflection in the mirror. She was looking
+      at him. He turned and their eyes met.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He moved across the room and stood before her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “There’s something that I want to say to you,” he began in a low tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She held his gaze, but her color deepened. He noticed again, with a
+      jealous pang, how her beauty had gained in warmth and meaning. It was as
+      though a transparent cup had been filled with wine. He looked at her
+      ironically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I’ve never prevented your seeing your friends here,” he broke out. “Why
+      do you meet Flamel in out-of-the-way places? Nothing makes a woman so
+      cheap&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She rose abruptly and they faced each other a few feet apart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “What do you mean?” she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I saw you with him last Sunday on the Riverside Drive,” he went on, the
+      utterance of the charge reviving his anger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ah,” she murmured. She sank into her chair again and began to play with a
+      paper-knife that lay on the table at her elbow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her silence exasperated him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well?” he burst out. “Is that all you have to say?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Do you wish me to explain?” she asked, proudly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Do you imply I haven’t the right to?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I imply nothing. I will tell you whatever you wish to know. I went for a
+      walk with Mr. Flamel because he asked me to.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I didn’t suppose you went uninvited. But there are certain things a
+      sensible woman doesn’t do. She doesn’t slink about in out-of-the-way
+      streets with men. Why couldn’t you have seen him here?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She hesitated. “Because he wanted to see me alone.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Did he, indeed? And may I ask if you gratify all his wishes with equal
+      alacrity?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I don’t know that he has any others where I am concerned.” She paused
+      again and then continued, in a lower voice that somehow had an under-note
+      of warning. “He wished to bid me good-by. He’s going away.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard turned on her a startled glance. “Going away?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “He’s going to Europe to-morrow. He goes for a long time. I supposed you
+      knew.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The last phrase revived his irritation. “You forget that I depend on you
+      for my information about Flamel. He’s your friend and not mine. In fact,
+      I’ve sometimes wondered at your going out of your way to be so civil to
+      him when you must see plainly enough that I don’t like him.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her answer to this was not immediate. She seemed to be choosing her words
+      with care, not so much for her own sake as for his, and his exasperation
+      was increased by the suspicion that she was trying to spare him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “He was your friend before he was mine. I never knew him till I was
+      married. It was you who brought him to the house and who seemed to wish me
+      to like him.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard gave a short laugh. The defence was feebler than he had expected:
+      she was certainly not a clever woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Your deference to my wishes is really beautiful; but it’s not the first
+      time in history that a man has made a mistake in introducing his friends
+      to his wife. You must, at any rate, have seen since then that my
+      enthusiasm had cooled; but so, perhaps, has your eagerness to oblige me.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She met this with a silence that seemed to rob the taunt of half its
+      efficacy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Is that what you imply?” he pressed her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “No,” she answered with sudden directness. “I noticed some time ago that
+      you seemed to dislike him, but since then&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well&mdash;since then?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I’ve imagined that you had reasons for still wishing me to be civil to
+      him, as you call it.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ah,” said Glennard, with an effort at lightness; but his irony dropped,
+      for something in her voice made him feel that he and she stood at last in
+      that naked desert of apprehension where meaning skulks vainly behind
+      speech.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “And why did you imagine this?” The blood mounted to his forehead.
+      “Because he told you that I was under obligations to him?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned pale. “Under obligations?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, don’t let’s beat about the bush. Didn’t he tell you it was I who
+      published Mrs. Aubyn’s letters? Answer me that.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “No,” she said; and after a moment which seemed given to the weighing of
+      alternatives, she added: “No one told me.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “You didn’t know then?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She seemed to speak with an effort. “Not until&mdash;not until&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Till I gave you those papers to sort?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her head sank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “You understood then?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Yes.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked at her immovable face. “Had you suspected&mdash;before?” was
+      slowly wrung from him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “At times&mdash;yes&mdash;” Her voice dropped to a whisper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Why? From anything that was said&mdash;?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a shade of pity in her glance. “No one said anything&mdash;no
+      one told me anything.” She looked away from him. “It was your manner&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “My manner?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Whenever the book was mentioned. Things you said&mdash;once or twice&mdash;your
+      irritation&mdash;I can’t explain&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard, unconsciously, had moved nearer. He breathed like a man who has
+      been running. “You knew, then, you knew”&mdash;he stammered. The avowal of
+      her love for Flamel would have hurt him less, would have rendered her less
+      remote. “You knew&mdash;you knew&mdash;” he repeated; and suddenly his
+      anguish gathered voice. “My God!” he cried, “you suspected it first, you
+      say&mdash;and then you knew it&mdash;this damnable, this accursed thing;
+      you knew it months ago&mdash;it’s months since I put that paper in your
+      way&mdash;and yet you’ve done nothing, you’ve said nothing, you’ve made no
+      sign, you’ve lived alongside of me as if it had made no difference&mdash;no
+      difference in either of our lives. What are you made of, I wonder? Don’t
+      you see the hideous ignominy of it? Don’t you see how you’ve shared in my
+      disgrace? Or haven’t you any sense of shame?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He preserved sufficient lucidity, as the words poured from him, to see how
+      fatally they invited her derision; but something told him they had both
+      passed beyond the phase of obvious retaliations, and that if any chord in
+      her responded it would not be that of scorn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was right. She rose slowly and moved toward him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Haven’t you had enough&mdash;without that?” she said, in a strange voice
+      of pity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stared at her. “Enough&mdash;?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Of misery....”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      An iron band seemed loosened from his temples. “You saw then...?” he
+      whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, God&mdash;&mdash;oh, God&mdash;&mdash;” she sobbed. She dropped
+      beside him and hid her anguish against his knees. They clung thus in
+      silence, a long time, driven together down the same fierce blast of shame.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When at length she lifted her face he averted his. Her scorn would have
+      hurt him less than the tears on his hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She spoke languidly, like a child emerging from a passion of weeping. “It
+      was for the money&mdash;?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His lips shaped an assent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “That was the inheritance&mdash;that we married on?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Yes.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She drew back and rose to her feet. He sat watching her as she wandered
+      away from him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “You hate me,” broke from him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She made no answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Say you hate me!” he persisted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “That would have been so simple,” she answered with a strange smile. She
+      dropped into a chair near the writing-table and rested a bowed forehead on
+      her hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Was it much&mdash;?” she began at length.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Much&mdash;?” he returned, vaguely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “The money.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “The money?” That part of it seemed to count so little that for a moment
+      he did not follow her thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “It must be paid back,” she insisted. “Can you do it?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, yes,” he returned, listlessly. “I can do it.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I would make any sacrifice for that!” she urged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He nodded. “Of course.” He sat staring at her in dry-eyed self-contempt.
+      “Do you count on its making much difference?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Much difference?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “In the way I feel&mdash;or you feel about me?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shook her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “It’s the least part of it,” he groaned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “It’s the only part we can repair.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Good heavens! If there were any reparation&mdash;” He rose quickly and
+      crossed the space that divided them. “Why did you never speak?” he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Haven’t you answered that yourself?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Answered it?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Just now&mdash;when you told me you did it for me.” She paused a moment
+      and then went on with a deepening note&mdash;“I would have spoken if I
+      could have helped you.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But you must have despised me.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I’ve told you that would have been simpler.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But how could you go on like this&mdash;hating the money?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I knew you would speak in time. I wanted you, first, to hate it as I
+      did.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He gazed at her with a kind of awe. “You’re wonderful,” he murmured. “But
+      you don’t yet know the depths I’ve reached.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She raised an entreating hand. “I don’t want to!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “You’re afraid, then, that you’ll hate me?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “No&mdash;but that you’ll hate <i>me</i>. Let me understand without your telling
+      me.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “You can’t. It’s too base. I thought you didn’t care because you loved
+      Flamel.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She blushed deeply. “Don’t&mdash;don’t&mdash;” she warned him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I haven’t the right to, you mean?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I mean that you’ll be sorry.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood imploringly before her. “I want to say something worse&mdash;something
+      more outrageous. If you don’t understand <i>this</i> you’ll be perfectly
+      justified in ordering me out of the house.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She answered him with a glance of divination. “I shall understand&mdash;but
+      you’ll be sorry.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I must take my chance of that.” He moved away and tossed the books about
+      the table. Then he swung round and faced her. “Does Flamel care for you?”
+       he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her flush deepened, but she still looked at him without anger. “What would
+      be the use?” she said with a note of sadness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ah, I didn’t ask <i>that</i>,” he penitently murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well, then&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      To this adjuration he made no response beyond that of gazing at her with
+      an eye which seemed now to view her as a mere factor in an immense
+      redistribution of meanings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I insulted Flamel to-day. I let him see that I suspected him of having
+      told you. I hated him because he knew about the letters.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He caught the spreading horror of her eyes, and for an instant he had to
+      grapple with the new temptation they lit up. Then he said, with an effort&mdash;“Don’t
+      blame him&mdash;he’s impeccable. He helped me to get them published; but I
+      lied to him too; I pretended they were written to another man... a man who
+      was dead....”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She raised her arms in a gesture that seemed to ward off his blows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “You <i>do</i> despise me!” he insisted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ah, that poor woman&mdash;that poor woman&mdash;” he heard her murmur.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I spare no one, you see!” he triumphed over her. She kept her face
+      hidden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “You do hate me, you do despise me!” he strangely exulted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Be silent!” she commanded him; but he seemed no longer conscious of any
+      check on his gathering purpose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “He cared for you&mdash;he cared for you,” he repeated, “and he never told
+      you of the letters&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She sprang to her feet. “How can you?” she flamed. “How dare you? <i>That</i>&mdash;!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard was ashy pale. “It’s a weapon... like another....”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “A scoundrel’s!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled wretchedly. “I should have used it in his place.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Stephen! Stephen!” she cried, as though to drown the blasphemy on his
+      lips. She swept to him with a rescuing gesture. “Don’t say such things. I
+      forbid you! It degrades us both.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He put her back with trembling hands. “Nothing that I say of myself can
+      degrade you. We’re on different levels.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I’m on yours, whatever it is!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He lifted his head and their gaze flowed together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0014" id="link2H_4_0014">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XIV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">The</span> great renewals take effect as imperceptibly as the first workings of
+      spring. Glennard, though he felt himself brought nearer to his wife, was
+      still, as it were, hardly within speaking distance. He was but laboriously
+      acquiring the rudiments of their new medium of communication; and he had
+      to grope for her through the dense fog of his humiliation, the distorting
+      vapor against which his personality loomed grotesque and mean.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Only the fact that we are unaware how well our nearest know us enables us
+      to live with them. Love is the most impregnable refuge of self-esteem, and
+      we hate the eye that reaches to our nakedness. If Glennard did not hate
+      his wife it was slowly, sufferingly, that there was born in him that
+      profounder passion which made his earlier feeling seem a mere commotion of
+      the blood. He was like a child coming back to the sense of an enveloping
+      presence: her nearness was a breast on which he leaned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They did not, at first, talk much together, and each beat a devious track
+      about the outskirts of the subject that lay between them like a haunted
+      wood. But every word, every action, seemed to glance at it, to draw toward
+      it, as though a fount of healing sprang in its poisoned shade. If only
+      they might cut away through the thicket to that restoring spring!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard, watching his wife with the intentness of a wanderer to whom no
+      natural sign is negligible, saw that she had taken temporary refuge in the
+      purpose of renouncing the money. If both, theoretically, owned the
+      inefficacy of such amends, the woman’s instinctive subjectiveness made her
+      find relief in this crude form of penance. Glennard saw that she meant to
+      live as frugally as possible till what she deemed their debt was
+      discharged; and he prayed she might not discover how far-reaching, in its
+      merely material sense, was the obligation she thus hoped to acquit. Her
+      mind was fixed on the sum originally paid for the letters, and this he
+      knew he could lay aside in a year or two. He was touched, meanwhile, by
+      the spirit that made her discard the petty luxuries which she regarded as
+      the signs of their bondage. Their shared renunciations drew her nearer to
+      him, helped, in their evidence of her helplessness, to restore the full
+      protecting stature of his love. And still they did not speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was several weeks later that, one afternoon by the drawing-room fire,
+      she handed him a letter that she had been reading when he entered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I’ve heard from Mr. Flamel,” she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard turned pale. It was as though a latent presence had suddenly
+      become visible to both. He took the letter mechanically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “It’s from Smyrna,” she said. “Won’t you read it?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He handed it back. “You can tell me about it&mdash;his hand’s so
+      illegible.” He wandered to the other end of the room and then turned and
+      stood before her. “I’ve been thinking of writing to Flamel,” he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “There’s one point,” he continued, slowly, “that I ought to clear up. I
+      told him you’d known about the letters all along; for a long time, at
+      least; and I saw it hurt him horribly. It was just what I meant to do, of
+      course; but I can’t leave him to that false impression; I must write him.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She received this without outward movement, but he saw that the depths
+      were stirred. At length she returned, in a hesitating tone, “Why do you
+      call it a false impression? I did know.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Yes, but I implied you didn’t care.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ah!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He still stood looking down on her. “Don’t you want me to set that right?”
+       he tentatively pursued.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She lifted her head and fixed him bravely. “It isn’t necessary,” she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard flushed with the shock of the retort; then, with a gesture of
+      comprehension, “No,” he said, “with you it couldn’t be; but I might still
+      set myself right.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked at him gently. “Don’t I,” she murmured, “do that?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “In being yourself merely? Alas, the rehabilitation’s too complete! You
+      make me seem&mdash;to myself even&mdash;what I’m not; what I can never be.
+      I can’t, at times, defend myself from the delusion; but I can at least
+      enlighten others.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The flood was loosened, and kneeling by her he caught her hands. “Don’t
+      you see that it’s become an obsession with me? That if I could strip
+      myself down to the last lie&mdash;only there’d always be another one left
+      under it!&mdash;and do penance naked in the market-place, I should at
+      least have the relief of easing one anguish by another? Don’t you see that
+      the worst of my torture is the impossibility of such amends?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her hands lay in his without returning pressure. “Ah, poor woman, poor
+      woman,” he heard her sigh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Don’t pity her, pity me! What have I done to her or to you, after all?
+      You’re both inaccessible! It was myself I sold.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He took an abrupt turn away from her; then halted before her again. “How
+      much longer,” he burst out, “do you suppose you can stand it? You’ve been
+      magnificent, you’ve been inspired, but what’s the use? You can’t wipe out
+      the ignominy of it. It’s miserable for you and it does <i>her</i> no good!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She lifted a vivid face. “That’s the thought I can’t bear!” she cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “What thought?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “That it does her no good&mdash;all you’re feeling, all you’re suffering.
+      Can it be that it makes no difference?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He avoided her challenging glance. “What’s done is done,” he muttered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Is it ever, quite, I wonder?” she mused. He made no answer and they
+      lapsed into one of the pauses that are a subterranean channel of
+      communication.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was she who, after awhile, began to speak with a new suffusing
+      diffidence that made him turn a roused eye on her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Don’t they say,” she asked, feeling her way as in a kind of tender
+      apprehensiveness, “that the early Christians, instead of pulling down the
+      heathen temples&mdash;the temples of the unclean gods&mdash;purified them
+      by turning them to their own uses? I’ve always thought one might do that
+      with one’s actions&mdash;the actions one loathes but can’t undo. One can
+      make, I mean, a wrong the door to other wrongs or an impassable wall
+      against them....” Her voice wavered on the word. “We can’t always tear
+      down the temples we’ve built to the unclean gods, but we can put good
+      spirits in the house of evil&mdash;the spirits of mercy and shame and
+      understanding, that might never have come to us if we hadn’t been in such
+      great need....”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She moved over to him and laid a hesitating hand on his. His head was bent
+      and he did not change his attitude. She sat down beside him without
+      speaking; but their silences now were fertile as rain-clouds&mdash;they
+      quickened the seeds of understanding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At length he looked up. “I don’t know,” he said, “what spirits have come
+      to live in the house of evil that I built&mdash;but you’re there and
+      that’s enough for me. It’s strange,” he went on after another pause, “she
+      wished the best for me so often, and now, at last, it’s through her that
+      it’s come to me. But for her I shouldn’t have known you&mdash;it’s through
+      her that I’ve found you. Sometimes, do you know?&mdash;that makes it
+      hardest&mdash;makes me most intolerable to myself. Can’t you see that it’s
+      the worst thing I’ve got to face? I sometimes think I could have borne it
+      better if you hadn’t understood! I took everything from her&mdash;everything&mdash;even
+      to the poor shelter of loyalty she’d trusted in&mdash;the only thing I
+      could have left her!&mdash;I took everything from her, I deceived her, I
+      despoiled her, I destroyed her&mdash;and she’s given me <i>you</i> in return!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His wife’s cry caught him up. “It isn’t that she’s given <i>me</i> to you&mdash;it
+      is that she’s given you to yourself.” She leaned to him as though swept
+      forward on a wave of pity. “Don’t you see,” she went on, as his eyes hung
+      on her, “that that’s the gift you can’t escape from, the debt you’re
+      pledged to acquit? Don’t you see that you’ve never before been what she
+      thought you, and that now, so wonderfully, she’s made you into the man she
+      loved? <i>That’s</i> worth suffering for, worth dying for, to a woman&mdash;that’s
+      the gift she would have wished to give!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ah,” he cried, “but woe to him by whom it cometh. What did I ever give
+      her?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “The happiness of giving,” she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Touchstone, by Edith Wharton
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Touchstone
+
+Author: Edith Wharton
+
+Posting Date: July 12, 2008 [EBook #267]
+[Last updated: September 4, 2017]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TOUCHSTONE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Judith Boss
+
+
+
+
+
+THE TOUCHSTONE
+
+By Edith Wharton
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+"Professor Joslin, who, as our readers are doubtless aware, is engaged in
+writing the life of Mrs. Aubyn, asks us to state that he will be greatly
+indebted to any of the famous novelist's friends who will furnish
+him with information concerning the period previous to her coming to
+England. Mrs. Aubyn had so few intimate friends, and consequently so few
+regular correspondents, that letters will be of special value. Professor
+Joslin's address is 10 Augusta Gardens, Kensington, and he begs us to
+say that he will promptly return any documents entrusted to him."
+
+Glennard dropped the SPECTATOR and sat looking into the fire. The club
+was filling up, but he still had to himself the small inner room, with
+its darkening outlook down the rain-streaked prospect of Fifth Avenue.
+It was all dull and dismal enough, yet a moment earlier his boredom had
+been perversely tinged by a sense of resentment at the thought that, as
+things were going, he might in time have to surrender even the despised
+privilege of boring himself within those particular four walls. It was
+not that he cared much for the club, but that the remote contingency of
+having to give it up stood to him, just then, perhaps by very reason
+of its insignificance and remoteness, for the symbol of his increasing
+abnegations; of that perpetual paring-off that was gradually reducing
+existence to the naked business of keeping himself alive. It was the
+futility of his multiplied shifts and privations that made them
+seem unworthy of a high attitude; the sense that, however rapidly he
+eliminated the superfluous, his cleared horizon was likely to offer no
+nearer view of the one prospect toward which he strained. To give up
+things in order to marry the woman one loves is easier than to give them
+up without being brought appreciably nearer to such a conclusion.
+
+Through the open door he saw young Hollingsworth rise with a yawn
+from the ineffectual solace of a brandy-and-soda and transport his
+purposeless person to the window. Glennard measured his course with a
+contemptuous eye. It was so like Hollingsworth to get up and look out of
+the window just as it was growing too dark to see anything! There was
+a man rich enough to do what he pleased--had he been capable of
+being pleased--yet barred from all conceivable achievement by his own
+impervious dulness; while, a few feet off, Glennard, who wanted only
+enough to keep a decent coat on his back and a roof over the head of the
+woman he loved Glennard, who had sweated, toiled, denied himself for
+the scant measure of opportunity that his zeal would have converted into
+a kingdom--sat wretchedly calculating that, even when he had resigned
+from the club, and knocked off his cigars, and given up his Sundays out
+of town, he would still be no nearer attainment.
+
+The SPECTATOR had slipped to his feet and as he picked it up his eye
+fell again on the paragraph addressed to the friends of Mrs. Aubyn. He
+had read it for the first time with a scarcely perceptible quickening of
+attention: her name had so long been public property that his eye passed
+it unseeingly, as the crowd in the street hurries without a glance by
+some familiar monument.
+
+"Information concerning the period previous to her coming to
+England...." The words were an evocation. He saw her again as she had
+looked at their first meeting, the poor woman of genius with her long
+pale face and short-sighted eyes, softened a little by the grace of
+youth and inexperience, but so incapable even then of any hold upon
+the pulses. When she spoke, indeed, she was wonderful, more wonderful,
+perhaps, than when later, to Glennard's fancy at least, the consciousness
+of memorable things uttered seemed to take from even her most intimate
+speech the perfect bloom of privacy. It was in those earliest days, if
+ever, that he had come near loving her; though even then his sentiment
+had lived only in the intervals of its expression. Later, when to
+be loved by her had been a state to touch any man's imagination, the
+physical reluctance had, inexplicably, so overborne the intellectual
+attraction, that the last years had been, to both of them, an agony of
+conflicting impulses. Even now, if, in turning over old papers, his hand
+lit on her letters, the touch filled him with inarticulate misery....
+
+"She had so few intimate friends... that letters will be of special
+value." So few intimate friends! For years she had had but one; one
+who in the last years had requited her wonderful pages, her tragic
+outpourings of love, humility, and pardon, with the scant phrases by
+which a man evades the vulgarest of sentimental importunities. He
+had been a brute in spite of himself, and sometimes, now that the
+remembrance of her face had faded, and only her voice and words remained
+with him, he chafed at his own inadequacy, his stupid inability to rise
+to the height of her passion. His egoism was not of a kind to mirror its
+complacency in the adventure. To have been loved by the most brilliant
+woman of her day, and to have been incapable of loving her, seemed to
+him, in looking back, the most derisive evidence of his limitations; and
+his remorseful tenderness for her memory was complicated with a sense of
+irritation against her for having given him once for all the measure of
+his emotional capacity. It was not often, however, that he thus probed
+the past. The public, in taking possession of Mrs. Aubyn, had eased his
+shoulders of their burden. There was something fatuous in an attitude of
+sentimental apology toward a memory already classic: to reproach one's
+self for not having loved Margaret Aubyn was a good deal like being
+disturbed by an inability to admire the Venus of Milo. From her
+cold niche of fame she looked down ironically enough on his
+self-flagellations.... It was only when he came on something that
+belonged to her that he felt a sudden renewal of the old feeling, the
+strange dual impulse that drew him to her voice but drove him from her
+hand, so that even now, at sight of anything she had touched, his heart
+contracted painfully. It happened seldom nowadays. Her little presents,
+one by one, had disappeared from his rooms, and her letters, kept from
+some unacknowledged puerile vanity in the possession of such treasures,
+seldom came beneath his hand....
+
+"Her letters will be of special value--" Her letters! Why, he must have
+hundreds of them--enough to fill a volume. Sometimes it used to seem
+to him that they came with every post--he used to avoid looking in his
+letter-box when he came home to his rooms--but her writing seemed to
+spring out at him as he put his key in the door--.
+
+He stood up and strolled into the other room. Hollingsworth, lounging
+away from the window, had joined himself to a languidly convivial group
+of men to whom, in phrases as halting as though they struggled to define
+an ultimate idea, he was expounding the cursed nuisance of living in
+a hole with such a damned climate that one had to get out of it by
+February, with the contingent difficulty of there being no place to take
+one's yacht to in winter but that other played-out hole, the Riviera.
+From the outskirts of this group Glennard wandered to another, where
+a voice as different as possible from Hollingsworth's colorless organ
+dominated another circle of languid listeners.
+
+"Come and hear Dinslow talk about his patent: admission free," one of
+the men sang out in a tone of mock resignation.
+
+Dinslow turned to Glennard the confident pugnacity of his smile. "Give
+it another six months and it'll be talking about itself," he declared.
+"It's pretty nearly articulate now."
+
+"Can it say papa?" someone else inquired.
+
+Dinslow's smile broadened. "You'll be deuced glad to say papa to IT
+a year from now," he retorted. "It'll be able to support even you in
+affluence. Look here, now, just let me explain to you--"
+
+Glennard moved away impatiently. The men at the club--all but those who
+were "in it"--were proverbially "tired" of Dinslow's patent, and none
+more so than Glennard, whose knowledge of its merits made it loom large
+in the depressing catalogue of lost opportunities. The relations between
+the two men had always been friendly, and Dinslow's urgent offers to
+"take him in on the ground floor" had of late intensified Glennard's
+sense of his own inability to meet good luck half way. Some of the men
+who had paused to listen were already in evening clothes, others on
+their way home to dress; and Glennard, with an accustomed twinge of
+humiliation, said to himself that if he lingered among them it was in
+the miserable hope that one of the number might ask him to dine. Miss
+Trent had told him that she was to go to the opera that evening with her
+rich aunt; and if he should have the luck to pick up a dinner-invitation
+he might join her there without extra outlay.
+
+He moved about the room, lingering here and there in a tentative
+affectation of interest; but though the men greeted him pleasantly no
+one asked him to dine. Doubtless they were all engaged, these men who
+could afford to pay for their dinners, who did not have to hunt for
+invitations as a beggar rummages for a crust in an ash-barrel! But
+no--as Hollingsworth left the lessening circle about the table an
+admiring youth called out--"Holly, stop and dine!"
+
+Hollingsworth turned on him the crude countenance that looked like the
+wrong side of a more finished face. "Sorry I can't. I'm in for a beastly
+banquet."
+
+Glennard threw himself into an arm-chair. Why go home in the rain to
+dress? It was folly to take a cab to the opera, it was worse folly to go
+there at all. His perpetual meetings with Alexa Trent were as unfair to
+the girl as they were unnerving to himself. Since he couldn't marry her,
+it was time to stand aside and give a better man the chance--and
+his thought admitted the ironical implication that in the terms of
+expediency the phrase might stand for Hollingsworth.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+He dined alone and walked home to his rooms in the rain. As he turned
+into Fifth Avenue he caught the wet gleam of carriages on their way to
+the opera, and he took the first side street, in a moment of irritation
+against the petty restrictions that thwarted every impulse. It was
+ridiculous to give up the opera, not because one might possibly be bored
+there, but because one must pay for the experiment.
+
+In his sitting-room, the tacit connivance of the inanimate had centred
+the lamp-light on a photograph of Alexa Trent, placed, in the obligatory
+silver frame, just where, as memory officiously reminded him, Margaret
+Aubyn's picture had long throned in its stead. Miss Trent's features
+cruelly justified the usurpation. She had the kind of beauty that comes
+of a happy accord of face and spirit. It is not given to many to have
+the lips and eyes of their rarest mood, and some women go through life
+behind a mask expressing only their anxiety about the butcher's bill or
+their inability to see a joke. With Miss Trent, face and mind had the
+same high serious contour. She looked like a throned Justice by some
+grave Florentine painter; and it seemed to Glennard that her most
+salient attribute, or that at least to which her conduct gave most
+consistent expression, was a kind of passionate justice--the intuitive
+feminine justness that is so much rarer than a reasoned impartiality.
+Circumstances had tragically combined to develop this instinct into a
+conscious habit. She had seen more than most girls of the shabby side of
+life, of the perpetual tendency of want to cramp the noblest attitude.
+Poverty and misfortune had overhung her childhood and she had none of
+the pretty delusions about life that are supposed to be the crowning
+grace of girlhood. This very competence, which gave her a touching
+reasonableness, made Glennard's situation more difficult than if he had
+aspired to a princess bred in the purple. Between them they asked
+so little--they knew so well how to make that little do--but they
+understood also, and she especially did not for a moment let him forget,
+that without that little the future they dreamed of was impossible.
+
+The sight of her photograph quickened Glennard's exasperation. He was
+sick and ashamed of the part he was playing. He had loved her now for
+two years, with the tranquil tenderness that gathers depth and volume
+as it nears fulfilment; he knew that she would wait for him--but the
+certitude was an added pang. There are times when the constancy of the
+woman one cannot marry is almost as trying as that of the woman one does
+not want to.
+
+Glennard turned up his reading-lamp and stirred the fire. He had a long
+evening before him and he wanted to crowd out thought with action. He
+had brought some papers from his office and he spread them out on his
+table and squared himself to the task....
+
+It must have been an hour later that he found himself automatically
+fitting a key into a locked drawer. He had no more notion than a
+somnambulist of the mental process that had led up to this action. He
+was just dimly aware of having pushed aside the papers and the heavy
+calf volumes that a moment before had bounded his horizon, and of laying
+in their place, without a trace of conscious volition, the parcel he had
+taken from the drawer.
+
+The letters were tied in packets of thirty or forty. There were a great
+many packets. On some of the envelopes the ink was fading; on others,
+which bore the English post-mark, it was still fresh. She had been dead
+hardly three years, and she had written, at lengthening intervals, to
+the last....
+
+He undid one of the earlier packets--little notes written during their
+first acquaintance at Hillbridge. Glennard, on leaving college, had
+begun life in his uncle's law office in the old university town. It was
+there that, at the house of her father, Professor Forth, he had first
+met the young lady then chiefly distinguished for having, after two
+years of a conspicuously unhappy marriage, returned to the protection of
+the paternal roof.
+
+Mrs. Aubyn was at that time an eager and somewhat tragic young woman,
+of complex mind and undeveloped manners, whom her crude experience of
+matrimony had fitted out with a stock of generalizations that exploded
+like bombs in the academic air of Hillbridge. In her choice of a husband
+she had been fortunate enough, if the paradox be permitted, to light on
+one so signally gifted with the faculty of putting himself in the wrong
+that her leaving him had the dignity of a manifesto--made her, as
+it were, the spokeswoman of outraged wifehood. In this light she was
+cherished by that dominant portion of Hillbridge society which was
+least indulgent to conjugal differences, and which found a proportionate
+pleasure in being for once able to feast openly on a dish liberally
+seasoned with the outrageous. So much did this endear Mrs. Aubyn to the
+university ladies that they were disposed from the first to allow her
+more latitude of speech and action than the ill-used wife was generally
+accorded in Hillbridge, where misfortune was still regarded as a
+visitation designed to put people in their proper place and make them
+feel the superiority of their neighbors. The young woman so privileged
+combined with a kind of personal shyness an intellectual audacity that
+was like a deflected impulse of coquetry: one felt that if she had been
+prettier she would have had emotions instead of ideas. She was in fact
+even then what she had always remained: a genius capable of the
+acutest generalizations, but curiously undiscerning where her personal
+susceptibilities were concerned. Her psychology failed her just where it
+serves most women and one felt that her brains would never be a guide
+to her heart. Of all this, however, Glennard thought little in the first
+year of their acquaintance. He was at an age when all the gifts and
+graces are but so much undiscriminated food to the ravening egoism of
+youth. In seeking Mrs. Aubyn's company he was prompted by an intuitive
+taste for the best as a pledge of his own superiority. The sympathy
+of the cleverest woman in Hillbridge was balm to his craving for
+distinction: it was public confirmation of his secret sense that he was
+cut out for a bigger place. It must not be understood that Glennard was
+vain. Vanity contents itself with the coarsest diet; there is no
+palate so fastidious as that of self-distrust. To a youth of Glennard's
+aspirations the encouragement of a clever woman stood for the symbol
+of all success. Later, when he had begun to feel his way, to gain a
+foothold, he would not need such support; but it served to carry
+him lightly and easily over what is often a period of insecurity and
+discouragement.
+
+It would be unjust, however, to represent his interest in Mrs. Aubyn as
+a matter of calculation. It was as instinctive as love, and it missed
+being love by just such a hair-breadth deflection from the line of
+beauty as had determined the curve of Mrs. Aubyn's lips. When they met
+she had just published her first novel, and Glennard, who afterward had
+an ambitious man's impatience of distinguished women, was young enough
+to be dazzled by the semi-publicity it gave her. It was the kind of book
+that makes elderly ladies lower their voices and call each other "my
+dear" when they furtively discuss it; and Glennard exulted in the
+superior knowledge of the world that enabled him to take as a matter of
+course sentiments over which the university shook its head. Still
+more delightful was it to hear Mrs. Aubyn waken the echoes of academic
+drawing-rooms with audacities surpassing those of her printed page. Her
+intellectual independence gave a touch of comradeship to their intimacy,
+prolonging the illusion of college friendships based on a joyous
+interchange of heresies. Mrs. Aubyn and Glennard represented to each
+other the augur's wink behind the Hillbridge idol: they walked together
+in that light of young omniscience from which fate so curiously excludes
+one's elders.
+
+Husbands who are notoriously inopportune, may even die inopportunely,
+and this was the revenge that Mr. Aubyn, some two years after her return
+to Hillbridge, took upon his injured wife. He died precisely at the
+moment when Glennard was beginning to criticise her. It was not that
+she bored him; she did what was infinitely worse--she made him feel his
+inferiority. The sense of mental equality had been gratifying to his raw
+ambition; but as his self-knowledge defined itself, his understanding of
+her also increased; and if man is at times indirectly flattered by the
+moral superiority of woman, her mental ascendency is extenuated by no
+such oblique tribute to his powers. The attitude of looking up is a
+strain on the muscles; and it was becoming more and more Glennard's
+opinion that brains, in a woman, should be merely the obverse of beauty.
+To beauty Mrs. Aubyn could lay no claim; and while she had enough
+prettiness to exasperate him by her incapacity to make use of it, she
+seemed invincibly ignorant of any of the little artifices whereby women
+contrive to palliate their defects and even to turn them into graces.
+Her dress never seemed a part of her; all her clothes had an impersonal
+air, as though they had belonged to someone else and been borrowed in an
+emergency that had somehow become chronic. She was conscious enough of
+her deficiencies to try to amend them by rash imitations of the most
+approved models; but no woman who does not dress well intuitively will
+ever do so by the light of reason, and Mrs. Aubyn's plagiarisms, to
+borrow a metaphor of her trade, somehow never seemed to be incorporated
+with the text.
+
+Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair.
+The fame that came to Mrs. Aubyn with her second book left Glennard's
+imagination untouched, or had at most the negative effect of removing
+her still farther from the circle of his contracting sympathies. We are
+all the sport of time; and fate had so perversely ordered the chronology
+of Margaret Aubyn's romance that when her husband died Glennard felt as
+though he had lost a friend.
+
+It was not in his nature to be needlessly unkind; and though he was
+in the impregnable position of the man who has given a woman no more
+definable claim on him than that of letting her fancy that he loves
+her, he would not for the world have accentuated his advantage by any
+betrayal of indifference. During the first year of her widowhood their
+friendship dragged on with halting renewals of sentiment, becoming more
+and more a banquet of empty dishes from which the covers were never
+removed; then Glennard went to New York to live and exchanged the faded
+pleasures of intercourse for the comparative novelty of correspondence.
+Her letters, oddly enough, seemed at first to bring her nearer than her
+presence. She had adopted, and she successfully maintained, a note as
+affectionately impersonal as his own; she wrote ardently of her work,
+she questioned him about his, she even bantered him on the inevitable
+pretty girl who was certain before long to divert the current of his
+confidences. To Glennard, who was almost a stranger in New York,
+the sight of Mrs. Aubyn's writing was like a voice of reassurance in
+surroundings as yet insufficiently aware of him. His vanity found a
+retrospective enjoyment in the sentiment his heart had rejected, and
+this factitious emotion drove him once or twice to Hillbridge, whence,
+after scenes of evasive tenderness, he returned dissatisfied with
+himself and her. As he made room for himself in New York and peopled the
+space he had cleared with the sympathies at the disposal of agreeable
+and self-confident young men, it seemed to him natural to infer that
+Mrs. Aubyn had refurnished in the same manner the void he was not
+unwilling his departure should have left. But in the dissolution of
+sentimental partnerships it is seldom that both associates are able to
+withdraw their funds at the same time; and Glennard gradually learned
+that he stood for the venture on which Mrs. Aubyn had irretrievably
+staked her all. It was not the kind of figure he cared to cut. He had
+no fancy for leaving havoc in his wake and would have preferred to sow
+a quick growth of oblivion in the spaces wasted by his unconsidered
+inroads; but if he supplied the seed it was clearly Mrs. Aubyn's
+business to see to the raising of the crop. Her attitude seemed indeed
+to throw his own reasonableness into distincter relief: so that they
+might have stood for thrift and improvidence in an allegory of the
+affections.
+
+It was not that Mrs. Aubyn permitted herself to be a pensioner on his
+bounty. He knew she had no wish to keep herself alive on the small
+change of sentiment; she simply fed on her own funded passion, and the
+luxuries it allowed her made him, even then, dimly aware that she had
+the secret of an inexhaustible alchemy.
+
+Their relations remained thus negatively tender till she suddenly wrote
+him of her decision to go abroad to live. Her father had died, she had
+no near ties in Hillbridge, and London offered more scope than New York
+to her expanding personality. She was already famous and her laurels
+were yet unharvested.
+
+For a moment the news roused Glennard to a jealous sense of lost
+opportunities. He wanted, at any rate, to reassert his power before she
+made the final effort of escape. They had not met for over a year, but
+of course he could not let her sail without seeing her. She came to
+New York the day before her departure, and they spent its last hours
+together. Glennard had planned no course of action--he simply meant to
+let himself drift. They both drifted, for a long time, down the languid
+current of reminiscence; she seemed to sit passive, letting him push
+his way back through the overgrown channels of the past. At length she
+reminded him that they must bring their explorations to an end. He rose
+to leave, and stood looking at her with the same uncertainty in his
+heart. He was tired of her already--he was always tired of her--yet he
+was not sure that he wanted her to go.
+
+"I may never see you again," he said, as though confidently appealing to
+her compassion.
+
+Her look enveloped him. "And I shall see you always--always!"
+
+"Why go then--?" escaped him.
+
+"To be nearer you," she answered; and the words dismissed him like a
+closing door.
+
+The door was never to reopen; but through its narrow crack Glennard, as
+the years went on, became more and more conscious of an inextinguishable
+light directing its small ray toward the past which consumed so little
+of his own commemorative oil. The reproach was taken from this thought
+by Mrs. Aubyn's gradual translation into terms of universality. In
+becoming a personage she so naturally ceased to be a person that
+Glennard could almost look back to his explorations of her spirit as on
+a visit to some famous shrine, immortalized, but in a sense desecrated,
+by popular veneration.
+
+Her letters, from London, continued to come with the same tender
+punctuality; but the altered conditions of her life, the vistas of new
+relationships disclosed by every phrase, made her communications as
+impersonal as a piece of journalism. It was as though the state, the
+world, indeed, had taken her off his hands, assuming the maintenance of
+a temperament that had long exhausted his slender store of reciprocity.
+
+In the retrospective light shed by the letters he was blinded to
+their specific meaning. He was not a man who concerned himself with
+literature, and they had been to him, at first, simply the extension of
+her brilliant talk, later the dreaded vehicle of a tragic importunity.
+He knew, of course, that they were wonderful; that, unlike the authors
+who give their essence to the public and keep only a dry rind for their
+friends, Mrs. Aubyn had stored of her rarest vintage for this hidden
+sacrament of tenderness. Sometimes, indeed, he had been oppressed,
+humiliated almost, by the multiplicity of her allusions, the wide scope
+of her interests, her persistence in forcing her superabundance of
+thought and emotion into the shallow receptacle of his sympathy; but
+he had never thought of the letters objectively, as the production of a
+distinguished woman; had never measured the literary significance of her
+oppressive prodigality. He was almost frightened now at the wealth in
+his hands; the obligation of her love had never weighed on him like
+this gift of her imagination: it was as though he had accepted from her
+something to which even a reciprocal tenderness could not have justified
+his claim.
+
+He sat a long time staring at the scattered pages on his desk; and in
+the sudden realization of what they meant he could almost fancy some
+alchemistic process changing them to gold as he stared. He had the
+sense of not being alone in the room, of the presence of another self
+observing from without the stirring of subconscious impulses that sent
+flushes of humiliation to his forehead. At length he stood up, and
+with the gesture of a man who wishes to give outward expression to his
+purpose--to establish, as it were, a moral alibi--swept the letters into
+a heap and carried them toward the grate. But it would have taken too
+long to burn all the packets. He turned back to the table and one by one
+fitted the pages into their envelopes; then he tied up the letters and
+put them back into the locked drawer.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+It was one of the laws of Glennard's intercourse with Miss Trent that
+he always went to see her the day after he had resolved to give her up.
+There was a special charm about the moments thus snatched from the
+jaws of renunciation; and his sense of their significance was on
+this occasion so keen that he hardly noticed the added gravity of her
+welcome.
+
+His feeling for her had become so vital a part of him that her nearness
+had the quality of imperceptibly readjusting his point of view, so
+that the jumbled phenomena of experience fell at once into a rational
+perspective. In this redistribution of values the sombre retrospect
+of the previous evening shrank to a mere cloud on the edge of
+consciousness. Perhaps the only service an unloved woman can render the
+man she loves is to enhance and prolong his illusions about her rival.
+It was the fate of Margaret Aubyn's memory to serve as a foil to Miss
+Trent's presence, and never had the poor lady thrown her successor into
+more vivid relief.
+
+Miss Trent had the charm of still waters that are felt to be renewed
+by rapid currents. Her attention spread a tranquil surface to the
+demonstrations of others, and it was only in days of storm that one felt
+the pressure of the tides. This inscrutable composure was perhaps her
+chief grace in Glennard's eyes. Reserve, in some natures, implies merely
+the locking of empty rooms or the dissimulation of awkward encumbrances;
+but Miss Trent's reticence was to Glennard like the closed door to the
+sanctuary, and his certainty of divining the hidden treasure made him
+content to remain outside in the happy expectancy of the neophyte.
+
+"You didn't come to the opera last night," she began, in the tone that
+seemed always rather to record a fact than to offer a reflection on it.
+
+He answered with a discouraged gesture. "What was the use? We couldn't
+have talked."
+
+"Not as well as here," she assented; adding, after a meditative pause,
+"As you didn't come I talked to Aunt Virginia instead."
+
+"Ah!" he returned, the fact being hardly striking enough to detach him
+from the contemplation of her hands, which had fallen, as was their
+wont, into an attitude full of plastic possibilities. One felt them to
+be hands that, moving only to some purpose, were capable of intervals of
+serene inaction.
+
+"We had a long talk," Miss Trent went on; and she waited again before
+adding, with the increased absence of stress that marked her graver
+communications, "Aunt Virginia wants me to go abroad with her."
+
+Glennard looked up with a start. "Abroad? When?"
+
+"Now--next month. To be gone two years."
+
+He permitted himself a movement of tender derision. "Does she really?
+Well, I want you to go abroad with ME--for any number of years. Which
+offer do you accept?"
+
+"Only one of them seems to require immediate consideration," she
+returned, with a smile.
+
+Glennard looked at her again. "You're not thinking of it?"
+
+Her gaze dropped and she unclasped her hands. Her movements were so rare
+that they might have been said to italicize her words. "Aunt Virginia
+talked to me very seriously. It will be a great relief to mother and the
+others to have me provided for in that way for two years. I must
+think of that, you know." She glanced down at her gown which, under a
+renovated surface, dated back to the first days of Glennard's wooing. "I
+try not to cost much--but I do."
+
+"Good Lord!" Glennard groaned.
+
+They sat silent till at length she gently took up the argument. "As the
+eldest, you know, I'm bound to consider these things. Women are such a
+burden. Jim does what he can for mother, but with his own children to
+provide for it isn't very much. You see, we're all poor together."
+
+"Your aunt isn't. She might help your mother."
+
+"She does--in her own way."
+
+"Exactly--that's the rich relation all over! You may be miserable in
+any way you like, but if you're to be happy you've got to be so in her
+way--and in her old gowns."
+
+"I could be very happy in Aunt Virginia's old gowns," Miss Trent
+interposed.
+
+"Abroad, you mean?"
+
+"I mean wherever I felt that I was helping. And my going abroad will
+help."
+
+"Of course--I see that. And I see your considerateness in putting its
+advantages negatively."
+
+"Negatively?"
+
+"In dwelling simply on what the going will take you from, not on what
+it will bring you to. It means a lot to a woman, of course, to get
+away from a life like this." He summed up in a disparaging glance the
+background of indigent furniture. "The question is how you'll like
+coming back to it."
+
+She seemed to accept the full consequences of his thought. "I only know
+I don't like leaving it."
+
+He flung back sombrely, "You don't even put it conditionally then?"
+
+Her gaze deepened. "On what?"
+
+He stood up and walked across the room. Then he came back and paused
+before her. "On the alternative of marrying me."
+
+The slow color--even her blushes seemed deliberate--rose to her lower
+lids; her lips stirred, but the words resolved themselves into a smile
+and she waited.
+
+He took another turn, with the thwarted step of the man whose nervous
+exasperation escapes through his muscles.
+
+"And to think that in fifteen years I shall have a big practice!"
+
+Her eyes triumphed for him. "In less!"
+
+"The cursed irony of it! What do I care for the man I shall be then?
+It's slaving one's life away for a stranger!" He took her hands
+abruptly. "You'll go to Cannes, I suppose, or Monte Carlo? I heard
+Hollingsworth say to-day that he meant to take his yacht over to the
+Mediterranean--"
+
+She released herself. "If you think that--"
+
+"I don't. I almost wish I did. It would be easier, I mean." He broke off
+incoherently. "I believe your Aunt Virginia does, though. She somehow
+connotes Hollingsworth and the Mediterranean." He caught her hands
+again. "Alexa--if we could manage a little hole somewhere out of town?"
+
+"Could we?" she sighed, half yielding.
+
+"In one of those places where they make jokes about the mosquitoes," he
+pressed her. "Could you get on with one servant?"
+
+"Could you get on without varnished boots?"
+
+"Promise me you won't go, then!"
+
+"What are you thinking of, Stephen?"
+
+"I don't know," he stammered, the question giving unexpected form to his
+intention. "It's all in the air yet, of course; but I picked up a tip
+the other day--"
+
+"You're not speculating?" she cried, with a kind of superstitious
+terror.
+
+"Lord, no. This is a sure thing--I almost wish it wasn't; I mean if I
+can work it--" He had a sudden vision of the comprehensiveness of the
+temptation. If only he had been less sure of Dinslow! His assurance gave
+the situation the base element of safety.
+
+"I don't understand you," she faltered.
+
+"Trust me, instead!" he adjured her, with sudden energy; and turning on
+her abruptly, "If you go, you know, you go free," he concluded.
+
+She drew back, paling a little. "Why do you make it harder for me?"
+
+"To make it easier for myself," he retorted.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Glennard, the next afternoon, leaving his office earlier than usual,
+turned, on his way home, into one of the public libraries.
+
+He had the place to himself at that closing hour, and the librarian
+was able to give an undivided attention to his tentative request for
+letters--collections of letters. The librarian suggested Walpole.
+
+"I meant women--women's letters."
+
+The librarian proffered Hannah More and Miss Martineau.
+
+Glennard cursed his own inarticulateness. "I mean letters to--to some
+one person--a man; their husband--or--"
+
+"Ah," said the inspired librarian, "Eloise and Abailard."
+
+"Well--something a little nearer, perhaps," said Glennard, with
+lightness. "Didn't Merimee--"
+
+"The lady's letters, in that case, were not published."
+
+"Of course not," said Glennard, vexed at his blunder.
+
+"There are George Sand's letters to Flaubert."
+
+"Ah!" Glennard hesitated. "Was she--were they--?" He chafed at his own
+ignorance of the sentimental by-paths of literature.
+
+"If you want love-letters, perhaps some of the French eighteenth
+century correspondences might suit you better--Mlle. Aisse or Madame de
+Sabran--"
+
+But Glennard insisted. "I want something modern--English or American. I
+want to look something up," he lamely concluded.
+
+The librarian could only suggest George Eliot.
+
+"Well, give me some of the French things, then--and I'll have Merimee's
+letters. It was the woman who published them, wasn't it?"
+
+He caught up his armful, transferring it, on the doorstep, to a cab
+which carried him to his rooms. He dined alone, hurriedly, at a small
+restaurant near by, and returned at once to his books.
+
+Late that night, as he undressed, he wondered what contemptible impulse
+had forced from him his last words to Alexa Trent. It was bad enough to
+interfere with the girl's chances by hanging about her to the obvious
+exclusion of other men, but it was worse to seem to justify his weakness
+by dressing up the future in delusive ambiguities. He saw himself
+sinking from depth to depth of sentimental cowardice in his reluctance
+to renounce his hold on her; and it filled him with self-disgust to
+think that the highest feeling of which he supposed himself capable was
+blent with such base elements.
+
+His awakening was hardly cheered by the sight of her writing. He tore
+her note open and took in the few lines--she seldom exceeded the first
+page--with the lucidity of apprehension that is the forerunner of evil.
+
+"My aunt sails on Saturday and I must give her my answer the day after
+to-morrow. Please don't come till then--I want to think the question
+over by myself. I know I ought to go. Won't you help me to be
+reasonable?"
+
+It was settled, then. Well, he would be reasonable; he wouldn't stand
+in her way; he would let her go. For two years he had been living some
+other, luckier man's life; the time had come when he must drop back into
+his own. He no longer tried to look ahead, to grope his way through
+the endless labyrinth of his material difficulties; a sense of dull
+resignation closed in on him like a fog.
+
+"Hullo, Glennard!" a voice said, as an electric-car, late that
+afternoon, dropped him at an uptown corner.
+
+He looked up and met the interrogative smile of Barton Flamel, who
+stood on the curbstone watching the retreating car with the eye of a man
+philosophic enough to remember that it will be followed by another.
+
+Glennard felt his usual impulse of pleasure at meeting Flamel; but
+it was not in this case curtailed by the reaction of contempt that
+habitually succeeded it. Probably even the few men who had known Flamel
+since his youth could have given no good reason for the vague mistrust
+that he inspired. Some people are judged by their actions, others by
+their ideas; and perhaps the shortest way of defining Flamel is to say
+that his well-known leniency of view was vaguely divined to include
+himself. Simple minds may have resented the discovery that his opinions
+were based on his perceptions; but there was certainly no more definite
+charge against him than that implied in the doubt as to how he would
+behave in an emergency, and his company was looked upon as one of those
+mildly unwholesome dissipations to which the prudent may occasionally
+yield. It now offered itself to Glennard as an easy escape from the
+obsession of moral problems, which somehow could no more be worn in
+Flamel's presence than a surplice in the street.
+
+"Where are you going? To the club?" Flamel asked; adding, as the younger
+man assented, "Why not come to my studio instead? You'll see one bore
+instead of twenty."
+
+The apartment which Flamel described as his studio showed, as its one
+claim to the designation, a perennially empty easel; the rest of its
+space being filled with the evidences of a comprehensive dilettanteism.
+Against this background, which seemed the visible expression of its
+owner's intellectual tolerance, rows of fine books detached themselves
+with a prominence, showing them to be Flamel's chief care.
+
+Glennard glanced with the eye of untrained curiosity at the lines of
+warm-toned morocco, while his host busied himself with the uncorking of
+Apollinaris.
+
+"You've got a splendid lot of books," he said.
+
+"They're fairly decent," the other assented, in the curt tone of the
+collector who will not talk of his passion for fear of talking of
+nothing else; then, as Glennard, his hands in his pockets, began to
+stroll perfunctorily down the long line of bookcases--"Some men," Flamel
+irresistibly added, "think of books merely as tools, others as tooling.
+I'm between the two; there are days when I use them as scenery, other
+days when I want them as society; so that, as you see, my library
+represents a makeshift compromise between looks and brains, and the
+collectors look down on me almost as much as the students."
+
+Glennard, without answering, was mechanically taking one book after
+another from the shelves. His hands slipped curiously over the smooth
+covers and the noiseless subsidence of opening pages. Suddenly he came
+on a thin volume of faded manuscript.
+
+"What's this?" he asked, with a listless sense of wonder.
+
+"Ah, you're at my manuscript shelf. I've been going in for that sort of
+thing lately." Flamel came up and looked over his shoulders. "That's a
+bit of Stendhal--one of the Italian stories--and here are some letters
+of Balzac to Madame Commanville."
+
+Glennard took the book with sudden eagerness. "Who was Madame
+Commanville?"
+
+"His sister." He was conscious that Flamel was looking at him with the
+smile that was like an interrogation point. "I didn't know you cared for
+this kind of thing."
+
+"I don't--at least I've never had the chance. Have you many collections
+of letters?"
+
+"Lord, no--very few. I'm just beginning, and most of the interesting
+ones are out of my reach. Here's a queer little collection, though--the
+rarest thing I've got--half a dozen of Shelley's letters to Harriet
+Westbrook. I had a devil of a time getting them--a lot of collectors
+were after them."
+
+Glennard, taking the volume from his hand, glanced with a kind of
+repugnance at the interleaving of yellow cris-crossed sheets. "She was
+the one who drowned herself, wasn't she?"
+
+Flamel nodded. "I suppose that little episode adds about fifty per cent.
+to their value," he said, meditatively.
+
+Glennard laid the book down. He wondered why he had joined Flamel.
+He was in no humor to be amused by the older man's talk, and a
+recrudescence of personal misery rose about him like an icy tide.
+
+"I believe I must take myself off," he said. "I'd forgotten an
+engagement."
+
+He turned to go; but almost at the same moment he was conscious of a
+duality of intention wherein his apparent wish to leave revealed itself
+as a last effort of the will against the overmastering desire to stay
+and unbosom himself to Flamel.
+
+The older man, as though divining the conflict, laid a detaining
+pressure on his arm.
+
+"Won't the engagement keep? Sit down and try one of these cigars. I
+don't often have the luck of seeing you here."
+
+"I'm rather driven just now," said Glennard, vaguely. He found himself
+seated again, and Flamel had pushed to his side a low stand holding a
+bottle of Apollinaris and a decanter of cognac.
+
+Flamel, thrown back in his capacious arm-chair, surveyed him through
+a cloud of smoke with the comfortable tolerance of the man to whom no
+inconsistencies need be explained. Connivance was implicit in the air.
+It was the kind of atmosphere in which the outrageous loses its edge.
+Glennard felt a gradual relaxing of his nerves.
+
+"I suppose one has to pay a lot for letters like that?" he heard himself
+asking, with a glance in the direction of the volume he had laid aside.
+
+"Oh, so-so--depends on circumstances." Flamel viewed him thoughtfully.
+"Are you thinking of collecting?"
+
+Glennard laughed. "Lord, no. The other way round."
+
+"Selling?"
+
+"Oh, I hardly know. I was thinking of a poor chap--"
+
+Flamel filled the pause with a nod of interest.
+
+"A poor chap I used to know--who died--he died last year--and who left
+me a lot of letters, letters he thought a great deal of--he was fond
+of me and left 'em to me outright, with the idea, I suppose, that
+they might benefit me somehow--I don't know--I'm not much up on such
+things--" he reached his hand to the tall glass his host had filled.
+
+"A collection of autograph letters, eh? Any big names?"
+
+"Oh, only one name. They're all letters written to him--by one person,
+you understand; a woman, in fact--"
+
+"Oh, a woman," said Flamel, negligently.
+
+Glennard was nettled by his obvious loss of interest. "I rather think
+they'd attract a good deal of notice if they were published."
+
+Flamel still looked uninterested. "Love-letters, I suppose?"
+
+"Oh, just--the letters a woman would write to a man she knew well. They
+were tremendous friends, he and she."
+
+"And she wrote a clever letter?"
+
+"Clever? It was Margaret Aubyn."
+
+A great silence filled the room. It seemed to Glennard that the words
+had burst from him as blood gushes from a wound.
+
+"Great Scott!" said Flamel, sitting up. "A collection of Margaret
+Aubyn's letters? Did you say YOU had them?"
+
+"They were left me--by my friend."
+
+"I see. Was he--well, no matter. You're to be congratulated, at any
+rate. What are you going to do with them?"
+
+Glennard stood up with a sense of weariness in all his bones. "Oh, I
+don't know. I haven't thought much about it. I just happened to see that
+some fellow was writing her life--"
+
+"Joslin; yes. You didn't think of giving them to him?"
+
+Glennard had lounged across the room and stood staring up at a bronze
+Bacchus who drooped his garlanded head above the pediment of an Italian
+cabinet. "What ought I to do? You're just the fellow to advise me." He
+felt the blood in his cheek as he spoke.
+
+Flamel sat with meditative eye. "What do you WANT to do with them?" he
+asked.
+
+"I want to publish them," said Glennard, swinging round with sudden
+energy--"If I can--"
+
+"If you can? They're yours, you say?"
+
+"They're mine fast enough. There's no one to prevent--I mean there are
+no restrictions--" he was arrested by the sense that these accumulated
+proofs of impunity might precisely stand as the strongest check on his
+action.
+
+"And Mrs. Aubyn had no family, I believe?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Then I don't see who's to interfere," said Flamel, studying his
+cigar-tip.
+
+Glennard had turned his unseeing stare on an ecstatic Saint Catherine
+framed in tarnished gilding.
+
+"It's just this way," he began again, with an effort. "When letters are
+as personal as--as these of my friend's.... Well, I don't mind telling
+you that the cash would make a heap of difference to me; such a lot that
+it rather obscures my judgment--the fact is if I could lay my hand on a
+few thousands now I could get into a big thing, and without appreciable
+risk; and I'd like to know whether you think I'd be justified--under the
+circumstances...." He paused, with a dry throat. It seemed to him at the
+moment that it would be impossible for him ever to sink lower in his own
+estimation. He was in truth less ashamed of weighing the temptation than
+of submitting his scruples to a man like Flamel, and affecting to appeal
+to sentiments of delicacy on the absence of which he had consciously
+reckoned. But he had reached a point where each word seemed to compel
+another, as each wave in a stream is forced forward by the pressure
+behind it; and before Flamel could speak he had faltered out--"You don't
+think people could say... could criticise the man...."
+
+"But the man's dead, isn't he?"
+
+"He's dead--yes; but can I assume the responsibility without--"
+
+Flamel hesitated; and almost immediately Glennard's scruples gave way
+to irritation. If at this hour Flamel were to affect an inopportune
+reluctance--!
+
+The older man's answer reassured him. "Why need you assume any
+responsibility? Your name won't appear, of course; and as to your
+friend's, I don't see why his should, either. He wasn't a celebrity
+himself, I suppose?"
+
+"No, no."
+
+"Then the letters can be addressed to Mr. Blank. Doesn't that make it
+all right?"
+
+Glennard's hesitation revived. "For the public, yes. But I don't see
+that it alters the case for me. The question is, ought I to publish them
+at all?"
+
+"Of course you ought to." Flamel spoke with invigorating emphasis. "I
+doubt if you'd be justified in keeping them back. Anything of Margaret
+Aubyn's is more or less public property by this time. She's too great
+for any one of us. I was only wondering how you could use them to the
+best advantage--to yourself, I mean. How many are there?"
+
+"Oh, a lot; perhaps a hundred--I haven't counted. There may be more...."
+
+"Gad! What a haul! When were they written?"
+
+"I don't know--that is--they corresponded for years. What's the odds?"
+He moved toward his hat with a vague impulse of flight.
+
+"It all counts," said Flamel, imperturbably. "A long
+correspondence--one, I mean, that covers a great deal of time--is
+obviously worth more than if the same number of letters had been written
+within a year. At any rate, you won't give them to Joslin? They'd fill a
+book, wouldn't they?"
+
+"I suppose so. I don't know how much it takes to fill a book."
+
+"Not love-letters, you say?"
+
+"Why?" flashed from Glennard.
+
+"Oh, nothing--only the big public is sentimental, and if they WERE--why,
+you could get any money for Margaret Aubyn's love-letters."
+
+Glennard was silent.
+
+"Are the letters interesting in themselves? I mean apart from the
+association with her name?"
+
+"I'm no judge." Glennard took up his hat and thrust himself into his
+overcoat. "I dare say I sha'n't do anything about it. And, Flamel--you
+won't mention this to anyone?"
+
+"Lord, no. Well, I congratulate you. You've got a big thing." Flamel was
+smiling at him from the hearth.
+
+Glennard, on the threshold, forced a response to the smile, while he
+questioned with loitering indifference--"Financially, eh?"
+
+"Rather; I should say so."
+
+Glennard's hand lingered on the knob. "How much--should you say? You
+know about such things."
+
+"Oh, I should have to see the letters; but I should say--well, if you've
+got enough to fill a book and they're fairly readable, and the book is
+brought out at the right time--say ten thousand down from the publisher,
+and possibly one or two more in royalties. If you got the publishers
+bidding against each other you might do even better; but of course I'm
+talking in the dark."
+
+"Of course," said Glennard, with sudden dizziness. His hand had slipped
+from the knob and he stood staring down at the exotic spirals of the
+Persian rug beneath his feet.
+
+"I'd have to see the letters," Flamel repeated.
+
+"Of course--you'd have to see them...." Glennard stammered; and, without
+turning, he flung over his shoulder an inarticulate "Good-by...."
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+The little house, as Glennard strolled up to it between the trees,
+seemed no more than a gay tent pitched against the sunshine. It had the
+crispness of a freshly starched summer gown, and the geraniums on the
+veranda bloomed as simultaneously as the flowers in a bonnet. The garden
+was prospering absurdly. Seed they had sown at random--amid laughing
+counter-charges of incompetence--had shot up in fragrant defiance of
+their blunders. He smiled to see the clematis unfolding its punctual
+wings about the porch. The tiny lawn was smooth as a shaven cheek, and a
+crimson rambler mounted to the nursery-window of a baby who never cried.
+A breeze shook the awning above the tea-table, and his wife, as he drew
+near, could be seen bending above a kettle that was just about to boil.
+So vividly did the whole scene suggest the painted bliss of a stage
+setting, that it would have been hardly surprising to see her step
+forward among the flowers and trill out her virtuous happiness from the
+veranda-rail.
+
+The stale heat of the long day in town, the dusty promiscuity of the
+suburban train were now but the requisite foil to an evening of scented
+breezes and tranquil talk. They had been married more than a year,
+and each home-coming still reflected the freshness of their first day
+together. If, indeed, their happiness had a flaw, it was in resembling
+too closely the bright impermanence of their surroundings. Their love as
+yet was but the gay tent of holiday-makers.
+
+His wife looked up with a smile. The country life suited her, and her
+beauty had gained depth from a stillness in which certain faces might
+have grown opaque.
+
+"Are you very tired?" she asked, pouring his tea.
+
+"Just enough to enjoy this." He rose from the chair in which he had
+thrown himself and bent over the tray for his cream. "You've had a
+visitor?" he commented, noticing a half-empty cup beside her own.
+
+"Only Mr. Flamel," she said, indifferently.
+
+"Flamel? Again?"
+
+She answered without show of surprise. "He left just now. His yacht is
+down at Laurel Bay and he borrowed a trap of the Dreshams to drive over
+here."
+
+Glennard made no comment, and she went on, leaning her head back against
+the cushions of her bamboo-seat, "He wants us to go for a sail with him
+next Sunday."
+
+Glennard meditatively stirred his tea. He was trying to think of the
+most natural and unartificial thing to say, and his voice seemed to come
+from the outside, as though he were speaking behind a marionette. "Do
+you want to?"
+
+"Just as you please," she said, compliantly. No affectation of
+indifference could have been as baffling as her compliance. Glennard, of
+late, was beginning to feel that the surface which, a year ago, he
+had taken for a sheet of clear glass, might, after all, be a mirror
+reflecting merely his own conception of what lay behind it.
+
+"Do you like Flamel?" he suddenly asked; to which, still engaged with
+her tea, she returned the feminine answer--"I thought you did."
+
+"I do, of course," he agreed, vexed at his own incorrigible tendency to
+magnify Flamel's importance by hovering about the topic. "A sail would
+be rather jolly; let's go."
+
+She made no reply and he drew forth the rolled-up evening papers which
+he had thrust into his pocket on leaving the train. As he smoothed them
+out his own countenance seemed to undergo the same process. He ran his
+eye down the list of stocks and Flamel's importunate personality receded
+behind the rows of figures pushing forward into notice like so many
+bearers of good news. Glennard's investments were flowering like his
+garden: the dryest shares blossomed into dividends, and a golden harvest
+awaited his sickle.
+
+He glanced at his wife with the tranquil air of the man who digests
+good luck as naturally as the dry ground absorbs a shower. "Things are
+looking uncommonly well. I believe we shall be able to go to town for
+two or three months next winter if we can find something cheap."
+
+She smiled luxuriously: it was pleasant to be able to say, with an air
+of balancing relative advantages, "Really, on the baby's account I shall
+be almost sorry; but if we do go, there's Kate Erskine's house... she'll
+let us have it for almost nothing...."
+
+"Well, write her about it," he recommended, his eyes travelling on
+in search of the weather report. He had turned to the wrong page; and
+suddenly a line of black characters leapt out at him as from an ambush.
+
+"'Margaret Aubyn's Letters.' Two volumes. Out to-day. First edition of
+five thousand sold out before leaving the press. Second edition ready
+next week. THE BOOK OF THE YEAR...."
+
+He looked up stupidly. His wife still sat with her head thrown back,
+her pure profile detached against the cushions. She was smiling a little
+over the prospect his last words had opened. Behind her head shivers
+of sun and shade ran across the striped awning. A row of maples and
+a privet hedge hid their neighbor's gables, giving them undivided
+possession of their leafy half-acre; and life, a moment before, had
+been like their plot of ground, shut off, hedged in from importunities,
+impenetrably his and hers. Now it seemed to him that every maple-leaf,
+every privet-bud, was a relentless human gaze, pressing close upon their
+privacy. It was as though they sat in a brightly lit room, uncurtained
+from a darkness full of hostile watchers.... His wife still smiled; and
+her unconsciousness of danger seemed, in some horrible way, to put her
+beyond the reach of rescue....
+
+He had not known that it would be like this. After the first odious
+weeks, spent in preparing the letters for publication, in submitting
+them to Flamel, and in negotiating with the publishers, the transaction
+had dropped out of his consciousness into that unvisited limbo to which
+we relegate the deeds we would rather not have done but have no notion
+of undoing. From the moment he had obtained Miss Trent's promise not
+to sail with her aunt he had tried to imagine himself irrevocably
+committed. After that, he argued, his first duty was to her--she had
+become his conscience. The sum obtained from the publishers by Flamel's
+adroit manipulations and opportunely transferred to Dinslow's successful
+venture, already yielded a return which, combined with Glennard's
+professional earnings, took the edge of compulsion from their way of
+living, making it appear the expression of a graceful preference for
+simplicity. It was the mitigated poverty which can subscribe to a review
+or two and have a few flowers on the dinner-table. And already in
+a small way Glennard was beginning to feel the magnetic quality of
+prosperity. Clients who had passed his door in the hungry days sought
+it out now that it bore the name of a successful man. It was understood
+that a small inheritance, cleverly invested, was the source of his
+fortune; and there was a feeling that a man who could do so well for
+himself was likely to know how to turn over other people's money.
+
+But it was in the more intimate reward of his wife's happiness that
+Glennard tasted the full flavor of success. Coming out of conditions so
+narrow that those he offered her seemed spacious, she fitted into her
+new life without any of those manifest efforts at adjustment that are
+as sore to a husband's pride as the critical rearrangement of the bridal
+furniture. She had given him, instead, the delicate pleasure of watching
+her expand like a sea-creature restored to its element, stretching out
+the atrophied tentacles of girlish vanity and enjoyment to the rising
+tide of opportunity. And somehow--in the windowless inner cell of his
+consciousness where self-criticism cowered--Glennard's course seemed
+justified by its merely material success. How could such a crop of
+innocent blessedness have sprung from tainted soil?
+
+
+
+Now he had the injured sense of a man entrapped into a disadvantageous
+bargain. He had not known it would be like this; and a dull anger
+gathered at his heart. Anger against whom? Against his wife, for not
+knowing what he suffered? Against Flamel, for being the unconscious
+instrument of his wrong-doing? Or against that mute memory to which his
+own act had suddenly given a voice of accusation? Yes, that was it;
+and his punishment henceforth would be the presence, the unescapable
+presence, of the woman he had so persistently evaded. She would always
+be there now. It was as though he had married her instead of the other.
+It was what she had always wanted--to be with him--and she had gained
+her point at last....
+
+He sprang up, as though in an impulse of flight.... The sudden movement
+lifted his wife's lids, and she asked, in the incurious voice of the
+woman whose life is enclosed in a magic circle of prosperity--"Any
+news?"
+
+"No--none--" he said, roused to a sense of immediate peril. The papers
+lay scattered at his feet--what if she were to see them? He stretched
+his arm to gather them up, but his next thought showed him the futility
+of such concealment. The same advertisement would appear every day, for
+weeks to come, in every newspaper; how could he prevent her seeing it?
+He could not always be hiding the papers from her.... Well, and what if
+she did see it? It would signify nothing to her, the chances were that
+she would never even read the book.... As she ceased to be an element of
+fear in his calculations the distance between them seemed to lessen
+and he took her again, as it were, into the circle of his conjugal
+protection.... Yet a moment before he had almost hated her!... He
+laughed aloud at his senseless terrors.... He was off his balance,
+decidedly.
+
+"What are you laughing at?" she asked.
+
+He explained, elaborately, that he was laughing at the recollection
+of an old woman in the train, an old woman with a lot of bundles, who
+couldn't find her ticket.... But somehow, in the telling, the humor of
+the story seemed to evaporate, and he felt the conventionality of her
+smile. He glanced at his watch, "Isn't it time to dress?"
+
+She rose with serene reluctance. "It's a pity to go in. The garden looks
+so lovely."
+
+They lingered side by side, surveying their domain. There was not space
+in it, at this hour, for the shadow of the elm-tree in the angle of the
+hedge; it crossed the lawn, cut the flower-border in two, and ran up the
+side of the house to the nursery window. She bent to flick a caterpillar
+from the honey-suckle; then, as they turned indoors, "If we mean to
+go on the yacht next Sunday," she suggested, "oughtn't you to let Mr.
+Flamel know?"
+
+Glennard's exasperation deflected suddenly. "Of course I shall let him
+know. You always seem to imply that I'm going to do something rude to
+Flamel."
+
+The words reverberated through her silence; she had a way of thus
+leaving one space in which to contemplate one's folly at arm's length.
+Glennard turned on his heel and went upstairs. As he dropped into a
+chair before his dressing-table he said to himself that in the last hour
+he had sounded the depths of his humiliation and that the lowest dregs
+of it, the very bottom-slime, was the hateful necessity of having
+always, as long as the two men lived, to be civil to Barton Flamel.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+THE week in town had been sultry, and the men, in the Sunday
+emancipation of white flannel and duck, filled the deck-chairs of the
+yacht with their outstretched apathy, following, through a mist of
+cigarette-smoke, the flitting inconsequences of the women. The party
+was a small one--Flamel had few intimate friends--but composed of more
+heterogeneous atoms than the little pools into which society usually
+runs. The reaction from the chief episode of his earlier life had
+bred in Glennard an uneasy distaste for any kind of personal saliency.
+Cleverness was useful in business; but in society it seemed to him as
+futile as the sham cascades formed by a stream that might have been used
+to drive a mill. He liked the collective point of view that goes with
+the civilized uniformity of dress-clothes, and his wife's attitude
+implied the same preference; yet they found themselves slipping more
+and more into Flamel's intimacy. Alexa had once or twice said that she
+enjoyed meeting clever people; but her enjoyment took the negative form
+of a smiling receptivity; and Glennard felt a growing preference for the
+kind of people who have their thinking done for them by the community.
+
+Still, the deck of the yacht was a pleasant refuge from the heat on
+shore, and his wife's profile, serenely projected against the changing
+blue, lay on his retina like a cool hand on the nerves. He had never
+been more impressed by the kind of absoluteness that lifted her beauty
+above the transient effects of other women, making the most harmonious
+face seem an accidental collocation of features.
+
+The ladies who directly suggested this comparison were of a kind
+accustomed to take similar risks with more gratifying results. Mrs.
+Armiger had in fact long been the triumphant alternative of those who
+couldn't "see" Alexa Glennard's looks; and Mrs. Touchett's claims to
+consideration were founded on that distribution of effects which is the
+wonder of those who admire a highly cultivated country. The third lady
+of the trio which Glennard's fancy had put to such unflattering uses,
+was bound by circumstances to support the claims of the other two. This
+was Mrs. Dresham, the wife of the editor of the RADIATOR. Mrs. Dresham
+was a lady who had rescued herself from social obscurity by assuming the
+role of her husband's exponent and interpreter; and Dresham's leisure
+being devoted to the cultivation of remarkable women, his
+wife's attitude committed her to the public celebration of their
+remarkableness. For the conceivable tedium of this duty, Mrs. Dresham
+was repaid by the fact that there were people who took HER for a
+remarkable woman; and who in turn probably purchased similar distinction
+with the small change of her reflected importance. As to the other
+ladies of the party, they were simply the wives of some of the men--the
+kind of women who expect to be talked to collectively and to have their
+questions left unanswered.
+
+Mrs. Armiger, the latest embodiment of Dresham's instinct for the
+remarkable, was an innocent beauty who for years had distilled
+dulness among a set of people now self-condemned by their inability
+to appreciate her. Under Dresham's tutelage she had developed into a
+"thoughtful woman," who read his leaders in the RADIATOR and bought the
+books he recommended. When a new novel appeared, people wanted to know
+what Mrs. Armiger thought of it; and a young gentleman who had made a
+trip in Touraine had recently inscribed to her the wide-margined result
+of his explorations.
+
+Glennard, leaning back with his head against the rail and a slit of
+fugitive blue between his half-closed lids, vaguely wished she wouldn't
+spoil the afternoon by making people talk; though he reduced his
+annoyance to the minimum by not listening to what was said, there
+remained a latent irritation against the general futility of words.
+
+His wife's gift of silence seemed to him the most vivid commentary on
+the clumsiness of speech as a means of intercourse, and his eyes had
+turned to her in renewed appreciation of this finer faculty when
+Mrs. Armiger's voice abruptly brought home to him the underrated
+potentialities of language.
+
+"You've read them, of course, Mrs. Glennard?" he heard her ask; and, in
+reply to Alexa's vague interrogation--"Why, the 'Aubyn Letters'--it's
+the only book people are talking of this week."
+
+Mrs. Dresham immediately saw her advantage. "You HAVEN'T read them? How
+very extraordinary! As Mrs. Armiger says, the book's in the air; one
+breathes it in like the influenza."
+
+Glennard sat motionless, watching his wife.
+
+"Perhaps it hasn't reached the suburbs yet," she said, with her
+unruffled smile.
+
+"Oh, DO let me come to you, then!" Mrs. Touchett cried; "anything for a
+change of air! I'm positively sick of the book and I can't put it down.
+Can't you sail us beyond its reach, Mr. Flamel?"
+
+Flamel shook his head. "Not even with this breeze. Literature travels
+faster than steam nowadays. And the worst of it is that we can't any
+of us give up reading; it's as insidious as a vice and as tiresome as a
+virtue."
+
+"I believe it IS a vice, almost, to read such a book as the 'Letters,'"
+said Mrs. Touchett. "It's the woman's soul, absolutely torn up by the
+roots--her whole self laid bare; and to a man who evidently didn't care;
+who couldn't have cared. I don't mean to read another line; it's too
+much like listening at a keyhole."
+
+"But if she wanted it published?"
+
+"Wanted it? How do we know she did?"
+
+"Why, I heard she'd left the letters to the man--whoever he is--with
+directions that they should be published after his death--"
+
+"I don't believe it," Mrs. Touchett declared.
+
+"He's dead then, is he?" one of the men asked.
+
+"Why, you don't suppose if he were alive he could ever hold up his
+head again, with these letters being read by everybody?" Mrs. Touchett
+protested. "It must have been horrible enough to know they'd been
+written to him; but to publish them! No man could have done it and no
+woman could have told him to--"
+
+"Oh, come, come," Dresham judicially interposed; "after all, they're not
+love-letters."
+
+"No--that's the worst of it; they're unloved letters," Mrs. Touchett
+retorted.
+
+"Then, obviously, she needn't have written them; whereas the man, poor
+devil, could hardly help receiving them."
+
+"Perhaps he counted on the public to save him the trouble of reading
+them," said young Hartly, who was in the cynical stage.
+
+Mrs. Armiger turned her reproachful loveliness to Dresham. "From the way
+you defend him, I believe you know who he is."
+
+Everyone looked at Dresham, and his wife smiled with the superior air of
+the woman who is in her husband's professional secrets. Dresham shrugged
+his shoulders.
+
+"What have I said to defend him?"
+
+"You called him a poor devil--you pitied him."
+
+"A man who could let Margaret Aubyn write to him in that way? Of course
+I pity him."
+
+"Then you MUST know who he is," cried Mrs. Armiger, with a triumphant
+air of penetration.
+
+Hartly and Flamel laughed and Dresham shook his head. "No one knows; not
+even the publishers; so they tell me at least."
+
+"So they tell you to tell us," Hartly astutely amended; and Mrs. Armiger
+added, with the appearance of carrying the argument a point farther,
+"But even if HE'S dead and SHE'S dead, somebody must have given the
+letters to the publishers."
+
+"A little bird, probably," said Dresham, smiling indulgently on her
+deduction.
+
+"A little bird of prey then--a vulture, I should say--" another man
+interpolated.
+
+"Oh, I'm not with you there," said Dresham, easily. "Those letters
+belonged to the public."
+
+"How can any letters belong to the public that weren't written to the
+public?" Mrs. Touchett interposed.
+
+"Well, these were, in a sense. A personality as big as Margaret Aubyn's
+belongs to the world. Such a mind is part of the general fund of
+thought. It's the penalty of greatness--one becomes a monument
+historique. Posterity pays the cost of keeping one up, but on condition
+that one is always open to the public."
+
+"I don't see that that exonerates the man who gives up the keys of the
+sanctuary, as it were."
+
+"Who WAS he?" another voice inquired.
+
+"Who was he? Oh, nobody, I fancy--the letter-box, the slit in the wall
+through which the letters passed to posterity...."
+
+"But she never meant them for posterity!"
+
+"A woman shouldn't write such letters if she doesn't mean them to be
+published...."
+
+"She shouldn't write them to such a man!" Mrs. Touchett scornfully
+corrected.
+
+"I never keep letters," said Mrs. Armiger, under the obvious impression
+that she was contributing a valuable point to the discussion.
+
+There was a general laugh, and Flamel, who had not spoken, said, lazily,
+"You women are too incurably subjective. I venture to say that most men
+would see in those letters merely their immense literary value, their
+significance as documents. The personal side doesn't count where there's
+so much else."
+
+"Oh, we all know you haven't any principles," Mrs. Armiger declared; and
+Alexa Glennard, lifting an indolent smile, said: "I shall never write
+you a love-letter, Mr. Flamel."
+
+Glennard moved away impatiently. Such talk was as tedious as the buzzing
+of gnats. He wondered why his wife had wanted to drag him on such a
+senseless expedition.... He hated Flamel's crowd--and what business had
+Flamel himself to interfere in that way, standing up for the publication
+of the letters as though Glennard needed his defence?...
+
+Glennard turned his head and saw that Flamel had drawn a seat to Alexa's
+elbow and was speaking to her in a low tone. The other groups had
+scattered, straying in twos along the deck. It came over Glennard that
+he should never again be able to see Flamel speaking to his wife without
+the sense of sick mistrust that now loosened his joints....
+
+
+Alexa, the next morning, over their early breakfast, surprised her
+husband by an unexpected request.
+
+"Will you bring me those letters from town?" she asked.
+
+"What letters?" he said, putting down his cup. He felt himself as
+helplessly vulnerable as a man who is lunged at in the dark.
+
+"Mrs. Aubyn's. The book they were all talking about yesterday."
+
+Glennard, carefully measuring his second cup of tea, said, with
+deliberation, "I didn't know you cared about that sort of thing."
+
+She was, in fact, not a great reader, and a new book seldom reached her
+till it was, so to speak, on the home stretch; but she replied, with a
+gentle tenacity, "I think it would interest me because I read her life
+last year."
+
+"Her life? Where did you get that?"
+
+"Someone lent it to me when it came out--Mr. Flamel, I think."
+
+His first impulse was to exclaim, "Why the devil do you borrow books of
+Flamel? I can buy you all you want--" but he felt himself irresistibly
+forced into an attitude of smiling compliance. "Flamel always has the
+newest books going, hasn't he? You must be careful, by the way, about
+returning what he lends you. He's rather crotchety about his library."
+
+"Oh, I'm always very careful," she said, with a touch of competence that
+struck him; and she added, as he caught up his hat: "Don't forget the
+letters."
+
+Why had she asked for the book? Was her sudden wish to see it the result
+of some hint of Flamel's? The thought turned Glennard sick, but he
+preserved sufficient lucidity to tell himself, a moment later, that his
+last hope of self-control would be lost if he yielded to the temptation
+of seeing a hidden purpose in everything she said and did. How much
+Flamel guessed, he had no means of divining; nor could he predicate,
+from what he knew of the man, to what use his inferences might be put.
+The very qualities that had made Flamel a useful adviser made him the
+most dangerous of accomplices. Glennard felt himself agrope among alien
+forces that his own act had set in motion....
+
+Alexa was a woman of few requirements; but her wishes, even in trifles,
+had a definiteness that distinguished them from the fluid impulses of
+her kind. He knew that, having once asked for the book, she would not
+forget it; and he put aside, as an ineffectual expedient, his momentary
+idea of applying for it at the circulating library and telling her that
+all the copies were out. If the book was to be bought it had better be
+bought at once. He left his office earlier than usual and turned in at
+the first book-shop on his way to the train. The show-window was stacked
+with conspicuously lettered volumes. "Margaret Aubyn" flashed back
+at him in endless repetition. He plunged into the shop and came on a
+counter where the name reiterated itself on row after row of bindings.
+It seemed to have driven the rest of literature to the back shelves. He
+caught up a copy, tossing the money to an astonished clerk who pursued
+him to the door with the unheeded offer to wrap up the volumes.
+
+In the street he was seized with a sudden apprehension. What if he were
+to meet Flamel? The thought was intolerable. He called a cab and drove
+straight to the station where, amid the palm-leaf fans of a perspiring
+crowd, he waited a long half-hour for his train to start.
+
+He had thrust a volume in either pocket and in the train he dared not
+draw them out; but the detested words leaped at him from the folds of
+the evening paper. The air seemed full of Margaret Aubyn's name. The
+motion of the train set it dancing up and down on the page of a magazine
+that a man in front of him was reading....
+
+At the door he was told that Mrs. Glennard was still out, and he went
+upstairs to his room and dragged the books from his pocket. They lay
+on the table before him like live things that he feared to touch.... At
+length he opened the first volume. A familiar letter sprang out at
+him, each word quickened by its glaring garb of type. The little broken
+phrases fled across the page like wounded animals in the open.... It was
+a horrible sight.... A battue of helpless things driven savagely out of
+shelter. He had not known it would be like this....
+
+He understood now that, at the moment of selling the letters, he had
+viewed the transaction solely as it affected himself: as an unfortunate
+blemish on an otherwise presentable record. He had scarcely considered
+the act in relation to Margaret Aubyn; for death, if it hallows,
+also makes innocuous. Glennard's God was a god of the living, of the
+immediate, the actual, the tangible; all his days he had lived in the
+presence of that god, heedless of the divinities who, below the surface
+of our deeds and passions, silently forge the fatal weapons of the dead.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+A knock roused him and looking up he saw his wife. He met her glance in
+silence, and she faltered out, "Are you ill?"
+
+The words restored his self-possession. "Ill? Of course not. They told
+me you were out and I came upstairs."
+
+The books lay between them on the table; he wondered when she would see
+them. She lingered tentatively on the threshold, with the air of leaving
+his explanation on his hands. She was not the kind of woman who could be
+counted on to fortify an excuse by appearing to dispute it.
+
+"Where have you been?" Glennard asked, moving forward so that he
+obstructed her vision of the books.
+
+"I walked over to the Dreshams for tea."
+
+"I can't think what you see in those people," he said with a shrug;
+adding, uncontrollably--"I suppose Flamel was there?"
+
+"No; he left on the yacht this morning."
+
+An answer so obstructing to the natural escape of his irritation left
+Glennard with no momentary resource but that of strolling impatiently to
+the window. As her eyes followed him they lit on the books.
+
+"Ah, you've brought them! I'm so glad," she exclaimed.
+
+He answered over his shoulder, "For a woman who never reads you make the
+most astounding exceptions!"
+
+Her smile was an exasperating concession to the probability that it had
+been hot in town or that something had bothered him.
+
+"Do you mean it's not nice to want to read the book?" she asked. "It was
+not nice to publish it, certainly; but after all, I'm not responsible
+for that, am I?" She paused, and, as he made no answer, went on, still
+smiling, "I do read sometimes, you know; and I'm very fond of Margaret
+Aubyn's books. I was reading 'Pomegranate Seed' when we first met. Don't
+you remember? It was then you told me all about her."
+
+Glennard had turned back into the room and stood staring at his wife.
+"All about her?" he repeated, and with the words remembrance came to
+him. He had found Miss Trent one afternoon with the novel in her hand,
+and moved by the lover's fatuous impulse to associate himself in some
+way with whatever fills the mind of the beloved, had broken through
+his habitual silence about the past. Rewarded by the consciousness of
+figuring impressively in Miss Trent's imagination he had gone on from
+one anecdote to another, reviving dormant details of his old Hillbridge
+life, and pasturing his vanity on the eagerness with which she received
+his reminiscences of a being already clothed in the impersonality of
+greatness.
+
+The incident had left no trace in his mind; but it sprang up now like an
+old enemy, the more dangerous for having been forgotten. The instinct
+of self-preservation--sometimes the most perilous that man can
+exercise--made him awkwardly declare--"Oh, I used to see her at people's
+houses, that was all;" and her silence as usual leaving room for a
+multiplication of blunders, he added, with increased indifference, "I
+simply can't see what you can find to interest you in such a book."
+
+She seemed to consider this intently. "You've read it, then?"
+
+"I glanced at it--I never read such things."
+
+"Is it true that she didn't wish the letters to be published?"
+
+Glennard felt the sudden dizziness of the mountaineer on a narrow ledge,
+and with it the sense that he was lost if he looked more than a step
+ahead.
+
+"I'm sure I don't know," he said; then, summoning a smile, he passed
+his hand through her arm. "I didn't have tea at the Dreshams, you know;
+won't you give me some now?" he suggested.
+
+That evening Glennard, under pretext of work to be done, shut himself
+into the small study opening off the drawing-room. As he gathered up his
+papers he said to his wife: "You're not going to sit indoors on such a
+night as this? I'll join you presently outside."
+
+But she had drawn her armchair to the lamp. "I want to look at my book,"
+she said, taking up the first volume of the "Letters."
+
+Glennard, with a shrug, withdrew into the study. "I'm going to shut
+the door; I want to be quiet," he explained from the threshold; and she
+nodded without lifting her eyes from the book.
+
+He sank into a chair, staring aimlessly at the outspread papers. How was
+he to work, while on the other side of the door she sat with that volume
+in her hand? The door did not shut her out--he saw her distinctly, felt
+her close to him in a contact as painful as the pressure on a bruise.
+
+The sensation was part of the general strangeness that made him feel
+like a man waking from a long sleep to find himself in an unknown
+country among people of alien tongue. We live in our own souls as in
+an unmapped region, a few acres of which we have cleared for our
+habitation; while of the nature of those nearest us we know but the
+boundaries that march with ours. Of the points in his wife's character
+not in direct contact with his own, Glennard now discerned his
+ignorance; and the baffling sense of her remoteness was intensified by
+the discovery that, in one way, she was closer to him than ever before.
+As one may live for years in happy unconsciousness of the possession
+of a sensitive nerve, he had lived beside his wife unaware that her
+individuality had become a part of the texture of his life, ineradicable
+as some growth on a vital organ; and he now felt himself at once
+incapable of forecasting her judgment and powerless to evade its
+effects.
+
+To escape, the next morning, the confidences of the breakfast-table, he
+went to town earlier than usual. His wife, who read slowly, was given to
+talking over what she read, and at present his first object in life was
+to postpone the inevitable discussion of the letters. This instinct of
+protection in the afternoon, on his way uptown, guided him to the club
+in search of a man who might be persuaded to come out to the country to
+dine. The only man in the club was Flamel.
+
+Glennard, as he heard himself almost involuntarily pressing Flamel to
+come and dine, felt the full irony of the situation. To use Flamel as
+a shield against his wife's scrutiny was only a shade less humiliating
+than to reckon on his wife as a defence against Flamel.
+
+He felt a contradictory movement of annoyance at the latter's ready
+acceptance, and the two men drove in silence to the station. As they
+passed the bookstall in the waiting-room Flamel lingered a moment and
+the eyes of both fell on Margaret Aubyn's name, conspicuously displayed
+above a counter stacked with the familiar volumes.
+
+"We shall be late, you know," Glennard remonstrated, pulling out his
+watch.
+
+"Go ahead," said Flamel, imperturbably. "I want to get something--"
+
+Glennard turned on his heel and walked down the platform. Flamel
+rejoined him with an innocent-looking magazine in his hand; but Glennard
+dared not even glance at the cover, lest it should show the syllables he
+feared.
+
+The train was full of people they knew, and they were kept apart till
+it dropped them at the little suburban station. As they strolled up the
+shaded hill, Glennard talked volubly, pointing out the improvements
+in the neighborhood, deploring the threatened approach of an electric
+railway, and screening himself by a series of reflex adjustments from
+the imminent risk of any allusion to the "Letters." Flamel suffered his
+discourse with the bland inattention that we accord to the affairs of
+someone else's suburb, and they reached the shelter of Alexa's tea-table
+without a perceptible turn toward the dreaded topic.
+
+The dinner passed off safely. Flamel, always at his best in Alexa's
+presence, gave her the kind of attention which is like a beaconing light
+thrown on the speaker's words: his answers seemed to bring out a latent
+significance in her phrases, as the sculptor draws his statue from the
+block. Glennard, under his wife's composure, detected a sensibility to
+this manoeuvre, and the discovery was like the lightning-flash across a
+nocturnal landscape. Thus far these momentary illuminations had served
+only to reveal the strangeness of the intervening country: each fresh
+observation seemed to increase the sum-total of his ignorance. Her
+simplicity of outline was more puzzling than a complex surface. One may
+conceivably work one's way through a labyrinth; but Alexa's candor
+was like a snow-covered plain where, the road once lost, there are no
+landmarks to travel by.
+
+Dinner over, they returned to the veranda, where a moon, rising behind
+the old elm, was combining with that complaisant tree a romantic
+enlargement of their borders. Glennard had forgotten the cigars. He went
+to his study to fetch them, and in passing through the drawing-room he
+saw the second volume of the "Letters" lying open on his wife's table.
+He picked up the book and looked at the date of the letter she had been
+reading. It was one of the last... he knew the few lines by heart. He
+dropped the book and leaned against the wall. Why had he included that
+one among the others? Or was it possible that now they would all seem
+like that...?
+
+Alexa's voice came suddenly out of the dusk. "May Touchett was right--it
+IS like listening at a key-hole. I wish I hadn't read it!"
+
+Flamel returned, in the leisurely tone of the man whose phrases are
+punctuated by a cigarette, "It seems so to us, perhaps; but to another
+generation the book will be a classic."
+
+"Then it ought not to have been published till it had become a classic.
+It's horrible, it's degrading almost, to read the secrets of a woman one
+might have known." She added, in a lower tone, "Stephen DID know her--"
+
+"Did he?" came from Flamel.
+
+"He knew her very well, at Hillbridge, years ago. The book has made him
+feel dreadfully... he wouldn't read it... he didn't want me to read it.
+I didn't understand at first, but now I can see how horribly disloyal it
+must seem to him. It's so much worse to surprise a friend's secrets than
+a stranger's."
+
+"Oh, Glennard's such a sensitive chap," Flamel said, easily; and Alexa
+almost rebukingly rejoined, "If you'd known her I'm sure you'd feel as
+he does...."
+
+Glennard stood motionless, overcome by the singular infelicity with
+which he had contrived to put Flamel in possession of the two points
+most damaging to his case: the fact that he had been a friend of
+Margaret Aubyn's, and that he had concealed from Alexa his share in the
+publication of the letters. To a man of less than Flamel's astuteness
+it must now be clear to whom the letters were addressed; and the
+possibility once suggested, nothing could be easier than to confirm it
+by discreet research. An impulse of self-accusal drove Glennard to the
+window. Why not anticipate betrayal by telling his wife the truth in
+Flamel's presence? If the man had a drop of decent feeling in him, such
+a course would be the surest means of securing his silence; and above
+all, it would rid Glennard of the necessity of defending himself against
+the perpetual criticism of his wife's belief in him....
+
+The impulse was strong enough to carry him to the window; but there
+a reaction of defiance set in. What had he done, after all, to need
+defence and explanation? Both Dresham and Flamel had, in his hearing,
+declared the publication of the letters to be not only justifiable but
+obligatory; and if the disinterestedness of Flamel's verdict might be
+questioned, Dresham's at least represented the impartial view of the
+man of letters. As to Alexa's words, they were simply the conventional
+utterance of the "nice" woman on a question already decided for her by
+other "nice" women. She had said the proper thing as mechanically as she
+would have put on the appropriate gown or written the correct form of
+dinner-invitation. Glennard had small faith in the abstract judgments
+of the other sex; he knew that half the women who were horrified by
+the publication of Mrs. Aubyn's letters would have betrayed her secrets
+without a scruple.
+
+The sudden lowering of his emotional pitch brought a proportionate
+relief. He told himself that now the worst was over and things would
+fall into perspective again. His wife and Flamel had turned to other
+topics, and coming out on the veranda, he handed the cigars to Flamel,
+saying, cheerfully--and yet he could have sworn they were the last words
+he meant to utter!--"Look here, old man, before you go down to Newport
+you must come out and spend a few days with us--mustn't he, Alexa?"
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+Glennard had, perhaps unconsciously, counted on the continuance of this
+easier mood. He had always taken pride in a certain robustness of fibre
+that enabled him to harden himself against the inevitable, to convert
+his failures into the building materials of success. Though it did not
+even now occur to him that what he called the inevitable had hitherto
+been the alternative he happened to prefer, he was yet obscurely
+aware that his present difficulty was one not to be conjured by any
+affectation of indifference. Some griefs build the soul a spacious
+house--but in this misery of Glennard's he could not stand upright. It
+pressed against him at every turn. He told himself that this was because
+there was no escape from the visible evidences of his act. The "Letters"
+confronted him everywhere. People who had never opened a book discussed
+them with critical reservations; to have read them had become a social
+obligation in circles to which literature never penetrates except in a
+personal guise.
+
+Glennard did himself injustice, it was from the unexpected discovery of
+his own pettiness that he chiefly suffered. Our self-esteem is apt to
+be based on the hypothetical great act we have never had occasion to
+perform; and even the most self-scrutinizing modesty credits itself
+negatively with a high standard of conduct. Glennard had never thought
+himself a hero; but he had been certain that he was incapable of
+baseness. We all like our wrong-doings to have a becoming cut, to be
+made to order, as it were; and Glennard found himself suddenly thrust
+into a garb of dishonor surely meant for a meaner figure.
+
+The immediate result of his first weeks of wretchedness was the resolve
+to go to town for the winter. He knew that such a course was just beyond
+the limit of prudence; but it was easy to allay the fears of Alexa who,
+scrupulously vigilant in the management of the household, preserved
+the American wife's usual aloofness from her husband's business cares.
+Glennard felt that he could not trust himself to a winter's solitude
+with her. He had an unspeakable dread of her learning the truth about
+the letters, yet could not be sure of steeling himself against the
+suicidal impulse of avowal. His very soul was parched for sympathy; he
+thirsted for a voice of pity and comprehension. But would his wife pity?
+Would she understand? Again he found himself brought up abruptly against
+his incredible ignorance of her nature. The fact that he knew well
+enough how she would behave in the ordinary emergencies of life, that
+he could count, in such contingencies, on the kind of high courage and
+directness he had always divined in her, made him the more hopeless of
+her entering into the torturous psychology of an act that he himself
+could no longer explain or understand. It would have been easier had
+she been more complex, more feminine--if he could have counted on
+her imaginative sympathy or her moral obtuseness--but he was sure of
+neither. He was sure of nothing but that, for a time, he must avoid her.
+Glennard could not rid himself of the delusion that by and by his action
+would cease to make its consequences felt. He would not have cared to
+own to himself that he counted on the dulling of his sensibilities: he
+preferred to indulge the vague hypothesis that extraneous circumstances
+would somehow efface the blot upon his conscience. In his worst moments
+of self-abasement he tried to find solace in the thought that Flamel had
+sanctioned his course. Flamel, at the outset, must have guessed to
+whom the letters were addressed; yet neither then nor afterward had he
+hesitated to advise their publication. This thought drew Glennard to
+him in fitful impulses of friendliness, from each of which there was a
+sharper reaction of distrust and aversion. When Flamel was not at the
+house, he missed the support of his tacit connivance; when he was there,
+his presence seemed the assertion of an intolerable claim.
+
+Early in the winter the Glennards took possession of the little house
+that was to cost them almost nothing. The change brought Glennard the
+immediate relief of seeing less of his wife, and of being protected, in
+her presence, by the multiplied preoccupations of town life. Alexa, who
+could never appear hurried, showed the smiling abstraction of a pretty
+woman to whom the social side of married life has not lost its novelty.
+Glennard, with the recklessness of a man fresh from his first financial
+imprudence, encouraged her in such little extravagances as her good
+sense at first resisted. Since they had come to town, he argued, they
+might as well enjoy themselves. He took a sympathetic view of the
+necessity of new gowns, he gave her a set of furs at Christmas, and
+before the New Year they had agreed on the obligation of adding a
+parlour-maid to their small establishment.
+
+Providence the very next day hastened to justify this measure by placing
+on Glennard's breakfast-plate an envelope bearing the name of the
+publishers to whom he had sold Mrs. Aubyn's letters. It happened to be
+the only letter the early post had brought, and he glanced across the
+table at his wife, who had come down before him and had probably
+laid the envelope on his plate. She was not the woman to ask awkward
+questions, but he felt the conjecture of her glance, and he was debating
+whether to affect surprise at the receipt of the letter, or to pass it
+off as a business communication that had strayed to his house, when a
+check fell from the envelope. It was the royalty on the first edition of
+the letters. His first feeling was one of simple satisfaction. The
+money had come with such infernal opportuneness that he could not help
+welcoming it. Before long, too, there would be more; he knew the book
+was still selling far beyond the publisher's previsions. He put the
+check in his pocket and left the room without looking at his wife.
+
+On the way to his office the habitual reaction set in. The money he had
+received was the first tangible reminder that he was living on the
+sale of his self-esteem. The thought of material benefit had been
+overshadowed by his sense of the intrinsic baseness of making the
+letters known; now he saw what an element of sordidness it added to the
+situation and how the fact that he needed the money, and must use it,
+pledged him more irrevocably than ever to the consequences of his act.
+It seemed to him, in that first hour of misery, that he had betrayed his
+friend anew.
+
+When, that afternoon, he reached home earlier than usual, Alexa's
+drawing-room was full of a gayety that overflowed to the stairs. Flamel,
+for a wonder, was not there; but Dresham and young Hartly, grouped about
+the tea-table, were receiving with resonant mirth a narrative delivered
+in the fluttered staccato that made Mrs. Armiger's conversation like the
+ejaculations of a startled aviary.
+
+She paused as Glennard entered, and he had time to notice that his wife,
+who was busied about the tea-tray, had not joined in the laughter of the
+men.
+
+"Oh, go on, go on," young Hartly rapturously groaned; and Mrs. Armiger
+met Glennard's inquiry with the deprecating cry that really she didn't
+see what there was to laugh at. "I'm sure I feel more like crying. I
+don't know what I should have done if Alexa hadn't been home to give me
+a cup of tea. My nerves are in shreds--yes, another, dear, please--" and
+as Glennard looked his perplexity, she went on, after pondering on
+the selection of a second lump of sugar, "Why, I've just come from the
+reading, you know--the reading at the Waldorf."
+
+"I haven't been in town long enough to know anything," said Glennard,
+taking the cup his wife handed him. "Who has been reading what?"
+
+"That lovely girl from the South--Georgie--Georgie what's her name--Mrs.
+Dresham's protegee--unless she's YOURS, Mr. Dresham! Why, the big
+ball-room was PACKED, and all the women were crying like idiots--it was
+the most harrowing thing I ever heard--"
+
+"What DID you hear?" Glennard asked; and his wife interposed: "Won't you
+have another bit of cake, Julia? Or, Stephen, ring for some hot
+toast, please." Her tone betrayed a polite satiety of the topic under
+discussion. Glennard turned to the bell, but Mrs. Armiger pursued him
+with her lovely amazement.
+
+"Why, the 'Aubyn Letters'--didn't you know about it? The girl read them
+so beautifully that it was quite horrible--I should have fainted if
+there'd been a man near enough to carry me out."
+
+Hartly's glee redoubled, and Dresham said, jovially, "How like you women
+to raise a shriek over the book and then do all you can to encourage the
+blatant publicity of the readings!"
+
+Mrs. Armiger met him more than half-way on a torrent of self-accusal.
+"It WAS horrid; it was disgraceful. I told your wife we ought all to
+be ashamed of ourselves for going, and I think Alexa was quite right to
+refuse to take any tickets--even if it was for a charity."
+
+"Oh," her hostess murmured, indifferently, "with me charity begins at
+home. I can't afford emotional luxuries."
+
+"A charity? A charity?" Hartly exulted. "I hadn't seized the full beauty
+of it. Reading poor Margaret Aubyn's love-letters at the Waldorf before
+five hundred people for a charity! WHAT charity, dear Mrs. Armiger?"
+
+"Why, the Home for Friendless Women--"
+
+"It was well chosen," Dresham commented; and Hartly buried his mirth in
+the sofa-cushions.
+
+When they were alone Glennard, still holding his untouched cup of tea,
+turned to his wife, who sat silently behind the kettle. "Who asked you
+to take a ticket for that reading?"
+
+"I don't know, really--Kate Dresham, I fancy. It was she who got it up."
+
+"It's just the sort of damnable vulgarity she's capable of! It's
+loathsome--it's monstrous--"
+
+His wife, without looking up, answered gravely, "I thought so too. It
+was for that reason I didn't go. But you must remember that very few
+people feel about Mrs. Aubyn as you do--"
+
+Glennard managed to set down his cup with a steady hand, but the room
+swung round with him and he dropped into the nearest chair. "As I do?"
+he repeated.
+
+"I mean that very few people knew her when she lived in New York. To
+most of the women who went to the reading she was a mere name, too
+remote to have any personality. With me, of course, it was different--"
+
+Glennard gave her a startled look. "Different? Why different?"
+
+"Since you were her friend--"
+
+"Her friend!" He stood up impatiently. "You speak as if she had had only
+one--the most famous woman of her day!" He moved vaguely about the room,
+bending down to look at some books on the table. "I hope," he added,
+"you didn't give that as a reason, by the way?"
+
+"A reason?"
+
+"For not going. A woman who gives reasons for getting out of social
+obligations is sure to make herself unpopular or ridiculous.
+
+The words were uncalculated; but in an instant he saw that they had
+strangely bridged the distance between his wife and himself. He felt her
+close on him, like a panting foe; and her answer was a flash that showed
+the hand on the trigger.
+
+"I seem," she said from the threshold, "to have done both in giving my
+reason to you."
+
+
+The fact that they were dining out that evening made it easy for him to
+avoid Alexa till she came downstairs in her opera-cloak. Mrs. Touchett,
+who was going to the same dinner, had offered to call for her, and
+Glennard, refusing a precarious seat between the ladies' draperies,
+followed on foot. The evening was interminable. The reading at the
+Waldorf, at which all the women had been present, had revived the
+discussion of the "Aubyn Letters" and Glennard, hearing his wife
+questioned as to her absence, felt himself miserably wishing that she
+had gone, rather than that her staying away should have been remarked.
+He was rapidly losing all sense of proportion where the "Letters" were
+concerned. He could no longer hear them mentioned without suspecting
+a purpose in the allusion; he even yielded himself for a moment to
+the extravagance of imagining that Mrs. Dresham, whom he disliked, had
+organized the reading in the hope of making him betray himself--for he
+was already sure that Dresham had divined his share in the transaction.
+
+The attempt to keep a smooth surface on this inner tumult was as endless
+and unavailing as efforts made in a nightmare. He lost all sense of what
+he was saying to his neighbors and once when he looked up his wife's
+glance struck him cold.
+
+She sat nearly opposite him, at Flamel's side, and it appeared to
+Glennard that they had built about themselves one of those airy barriers
+of talk behind which two people can say what they please. While the
+reading was discussed they were silent. Their silence seemed to Glennard
+almost cynical--it stripped the last disguise from their complicity. A
+throb of anger rose in him, but suddenly it fell, and he felt, with
+a curious sense of relief, that at bottom he no longer cared whether
+Flamel had told his wife or not. The assumption that Flamel knew about
+the letters had become a fact to Glennard; and it now seemed to him
+better that Alexa should know too.
+
+He was frightened at first by the discovery of his own indifference. The
+last barriers of his will seemed to be breaking down before a flood of
+moral lassitude. How could he continue to play his part, to keep his
+front to the enemy, with this poison of indifference stealing through
+his veins? He tried to brace himself with the remembrance of his wife's
+scorn. He had not forgotten the note on which their conversation had
+closed. If he had ever wondered how she would receive the truth
+he wondered no longer--she would despise him. But this lent a new
+insidiousness to his temptation, since her contempt would be a refuge
+from his own. He said to himself that, since he no longer cared for
+the consequences, he could at least acquit himself of speaking in
+self-defence. What he wanted now was not immunity but castigation: his
+wife's indignation might still reconcile him to himself. Therein lay
+his one hope of regeneration; her scorn was the moral antiseptic that he
+needed, her comprehension the one balm that could heal him....
+
+When they left the dinner he was so afraid of speaking that he let her
+drive home alone, and went to the club with Flamel.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+HE rose next morning with the resolve to know what Alexa thought of him.
+It was not anchoring in a haven, but lying to in a storm--he felt the
+need of a temporary lull in the turmoil of his sensations.
+
+He came home late, for they were dining alone and he knew that
+they would have the evening together. When he followed her to the
+drawing-room after dinner he thought himself on the point of speaking;
+but as she handed him his coffee he said, involuntarily: "I shall have
+to carry this off to the study, I've got a lot of work to-night."
+
+Alone in the study he cursed his cowardice. What was it that had
+withheld him? A certain bright unapproachableness seemed to keep him at
+arm's length. She was not the kind of woman whose compassion could be
+circumvented; there was no chance of slipping past the outposts; he
+would never take her by surprise. Well--why not face her, then? What he
+shrank from could be no worse than what he was enduring. He had pushed
+back his chair and turned to go upstairs when a new expedient presented
+itself. What if, instead of telling her, he were to let her find out for
+herself and watch the effect of the discovery before speaking? In this
+way he made over to chance the burden of the revelation.
+
+The idea had been suggested by the sight of the formula enclosing
+the publisher's check. He had deposited the money, but the notice
+accompanying it dropped from his note-case as he cleared his table for
+work. It was the formula usual in such cases and revealed clearly enough
+that he was the recipient of a royalty on Margaret Aubyn's letters. It
+would be impossible for Alexa to read it without understanding at once
+that the letters had been written to him and that he had sold them....
+
+He sat downstairs till he heard her ring for the parlor-maid to put out
+the lights; then he went up to the drawing-room with a bundle of papers
+in his hand. Alexa was just rising from her seat and the lamplight fell
+on the deep roll of hair that overhung her brow like the eaves of a
+temple. Her face had often the high secluded look of a shrine; and it
+was this touch of awe in her beauty that now made him feel himself on
+the brink of sacrilege.
+
+Lest the feeling should dominate him, he spoke at once. "I've brought
+you a piece of work--a lot of old bills and things that I want you to
+sort for me. Some are not worth keeping--but you'll be able to judge of
+that. There may be a letter or two among them--nothing of much account,
+but I don't like to throw away the whole lot without having them looked
+over and I haven't time to do it myself."
+
+He held out the papers and she took them with a smile that seemed to
+recognize in the service he asked the tacit intention of making amends
+for the incident of the previous day.
+
+"Are you sure I shall know which to keep?"
+
+"Oh, quite sure," he answered, easily--"and besides, none are of much
+importance."
+
+The next morning he invented an excuse for leaving the house without
+seeing her, and when he returned, just before dinner, he found a
+visitor's hat and stick in the hall. The visitor was Flamel, who was in
+the act of taking leave.
+
+He had risen, but Alexa remained seated; and their attitude gave the
+impression of a colloquy that had prolonged itself beyond the limits of
+speech. Both turned a surprised eye on Glennard and he had the sense of
+walking into a room grown suddenly empty, as though their thoughts were
+conspirators dispersed by his approach. He felt the clutch of his old
+fear. What if his wife had already sorted the papers and had told Flamel
+of her discovery? Well, it was no news to Flamel that Glennard was in
+receipt of a royalty on the "Aubyn Letters."...
+
+A sudden resolve to know the worst made him lift his eyes to his wife
+as the door closed on Flamel. But Alexa had risen also, and bending over
+her writing-table, with her back to Glennard, was beginning to speak
+precipitately.
+
+"I'm dining out to-night--you don't mind my deserting you? Julia Armiger
+sent me word just now that she had an extra ticket for the last Ambrose
+concert. She told me to say how sorry she was that she hadn't two--but I
+knew YOU wouldn't be sorry!" She ended with a laugh that had the effect
+of being a strayed echo of Mrs. Armiger's; and before Glennard could
+speak she had added, with her hand on the door, "Mr. Flamel stayed so
+late that I've hardly time to dress. The concert begins ridiculously
+early, and Julia dines at half-past seven--"
+
+Glennard stood alone in the empty room that seemed somehow full of
+an ironical consciousness of what was happening. "She hates me," he
+murmured. "She hates me...."
+
+
+The next day was Sunday, and Glennard purposely lingered late in
+his room. When he came downstairs his wife was already seated at the
+breakfast-table. She lifted her usual smile to his entrance and they
+took shelter in the nearest topic, like wayfarers overtaken by a storm.
+While he listened to her account of the concert he began to think that,
+after all, she had not yet sorted the papers, and that her agitation of
+the previous day must be ascribed to another cause, in which perhaps he
+had but an indirect concern. He wondered it had never before occurred to
+him that Flamel was the kind of man who might very well please a woman
+at his own expense, without need of fortuitous assistance. If this
+possibility cleared the outlook it did not brighten it. Glennard merely
+felt himself left alone with his baseness.
+
+Alexa left the breakfast-table before him and when he went up to the
+drawing-room he found her dressed to go out.
+
+"Aren't you a little early for church?" he asked.
+
+She replied that, on the way there, she meant to stop a moment at
+her mother's; and while she drew on her gloves, he fumbled among the
+knick-knacks on the mantel-piece for a match to light his cigarette.
+
+"Well, good-by," she said, turning to go; and from the threshold she
+added: "By the way, I've sorted the papers you gave me. Those that
+I thought you would like to keep are on your study-table." She went
+downstairs and he heard the door close behind her.
+
+She had sorted the papers--she knew, then--she MUST know--and she had
+made no sign!
+
+Glennard, he hardly knew how, found himself once more in the study. On
+the table lay the packet he had given her. It was much smaller--she had
+evidently gone over the papers with care, destroying the greater number.
+He loosened the elastic band and spread the remaining envelopes on his
+desk. The publisher's notice was among them.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+His wife knew and she made no sign. Glennard found himself in the case
+of the seafarer who, closing his eyes at nightfall on a scene he thinks
+to put leagues behind him before day, wakes to a port-hole framing the
+same patch of shore. From the kind of exaltation to which his resolve
+had lifted him he dropped to an unreasoning apathy. His impulse of
+confession had acted as a drug to self-reproach. He had tried to shift
+a portion of his burden to his wife's shoulders and now that she had
+tacitly refused to carry it, he felt the load too heavy to be taken up
+again.
+
+A fortunate interval of hard work brought respite from this phase of
+sterile misery. He went West to argue an important case, won it, and
+came back to fresh preoccupations. His own affairs were thriving enough
+to engross him in the pauses of his professional work, and for over
+two months he had little time to look himself in the face. Not
+unnaturally--for he was as yet unskilled in the subtleties of
+introspection--he mistook his temporary insensibility for a gradual
+revival of moral health.
+
+He told himself that he was recovering his sense of proportion, getting
+to see things in their true light; and if he now thought of his rash
+appeal to his wife's sympathy it was as an act of folly from the
+consequences of which he had been saved by the providence that watches
+over madmen. He had little leisure to observe Alexa; but he concluded
+that the common-sense momentarily denied him had counselled her
+uncritical acceptance of the inevitable. If such a quality was a
+poor substitute for the passionate justness that had once seemed to
+characterize her, he accepted the alternative as a part of that general
+lowering of the key that seems needful to the maintenance of the
+matrimonial duet. What woman ever retained her abstract sense of justice
+where another woman was concerned? Possibly the thought that he had
+profited by Mrs. Aubyn's tenderness was not wholly disagreeable to his
+wife.
+
+When the pressure of work began to lessen, and he found himself, in the
+lengthening afternoons, able to reach home somewhat earlier, he noticed
+that the little drawing-room was always full and that he and his wife
+seldom had an evening alone together. When he was tired, as often
+happened, she went out alone; the idea of giving up an engagement to
+remain with him seemed not to occur to her. She had shown, as a girl,
+little fondness for society, nor had she seemed to regret it during the
+year they had spent in the country. He reflected, however, that he was
+sharing the common lot of husbands, who proverbially mistake the early
+ardors of housekeeping for a sign of settled domesticity. Alexa, at any
+rate, was refuting his theory as inconsiderately as a seedling defeats
+the gardener's expectations. An undefinable change had come over her. In
+one sense it was a happy one, since she had grown, if not handsomer,
+at least more vivid and expressive; her beauty had become more
+communicable: it was as though she had learned the conscious exercise of
+intuitive attributes and now used her effects with the discrimination of
+an artist skilled in values. To a dispassionate critic (as Glennard now
+rated himself) the art may at times have been a little too obvious. Her
+attempts at lightness lacked spontaneity, and she sometimes rasped
+him by laughing like Julia Armiger; but he had enough imagination
+to perceive that, in respect of the wife's social arts, a husband
+necessarily sees the wrong side of the tapestry.
+
+In this ironical estimate of their relation Glennard found himself
+strangely relieved of all concern as to his wife's feelings for Flamel.
+From an Olympian pinnacle of indifference he calmly surveyed their
+inoffensive antics. It was surprising how his cheapening of his wife put
+him at ease with himself. Far as he and she were from each other they
+yet had, in a sense, the tacit nearness of complicity. Yes, they were
+accomplices; he could no more be jealous of her than she could despise
+him. The jealousy that would once have seemed a blur on her whiteness
+now appeared like a tribute to ideals in which he no longer believed....
+
+
+Glennard was little given to exploring the outskirts of literature. He
+always skipped the "literary notices" in the papers and he had small
+leisure for the intermittent pleasures of the periodical. He had
+therefore no notion of the prolonged reverberations which the "Aubyn
+Letters" had awakened in the precincts of criticism. When the book
+ceased to be talked about he supposed it had ceased to be read; and this
+apparent subsidence of the agitation about it brought the reassuring
+sense that he had exaggerated its vitality. The conviction, if it did
+not ease his conscience, at least offered him the relative relief of
+obscurity: he felt like an offender taken down from the pillory and
+thrust into the soothing darkness of a cell.
+
+But one evening, when Alexa had left him to go to a dance, he chanced to
+turn over the magazines on her table, and the copy of the Horoscope, to
+which he settled down with his cigar, confronted him, on its first
+page, with a portrait of Margaret Aubyn. It was a reproduction of the
+photograph that had stood so long on his desk. The desiccating air of
+memory had turned her into the mere abstraction of a woman, and this
+unexpected evocation seemed to bring her nearer than she had ever been
+in life. Was it because he understood her better? He looked long into
+her eyes; little personal traits reached out to him like caresses--the
+tired droop of her lids, her quick way of leaning forward as she spoke,
+the movements of her long expressive hands. All that was feminine
+in her, the quality he had always missed, stole toward him from her
+unreproachful gaze; and now that it was too late life had developed
+in him the subtler perceptions which could detect it in even this poor
+semblance of herself. For a moment he found consolation in the thought
+that, at any cost, they had thus been brought together; then a flood of
+shame rushed over him. Face to face with her, he felt himself laid bare
+to the inmost fold of consciousness. The shame was deep, but it was a
+renovating anguish; he was like a man whom intolerable pain has roused
+from the creeping lethargy of death....
+
+He rose next morning to as fresh a sense of life as though his hour of
+mute communion with Margaret Aubyn had been a more exquisite renewal
+of their earlier meetings. His waking thought was that he must see her
+again; and as consciousness affirmed itself he felt an intense fear of
+losing the sense of her nearness. But she was still close to him; her
+presence remained the sole reality in a world of shadows. All through
+his working hours he was re-living with incredible minuteness every
+incident of their obliterated past; as a man who has mastered the spirit
+of a foreign tongue turns with renewed wonder to the pages his youth has
+plodded over. In this lucidity of retrospection the most trivial detail
+had its significance, and the rapture of recovery was embittered to
+Glennard by the perception of all that he had missed. He had been
+pitiably, grotesquely stupid; and there was irony in the thought that,
+but for the crisis through which he was passing, he might have lived on
+in complacent ignorance of his loss. It was as though she had bought him
+with her blood....
+
+That evening he and Alexa dined alone. After dinner he followed her to
+the drawing-room. He no longer felt the need of avoiding her; he was
+hardly conscious of her presence. After a few words they lapsed into
+silence and he sat smoking with his eyes on the fire. It was not that he
+was unwilling to talk to her; he felt a curious desire to be as kind
+as possible; but he was always forgetting that she was there. Her full
+bright presence, through which the currents of life flowed so warmly,
+had grown as tenuous as a shadow, and he saw so far beyond her--
+
+Presently she rose and began to move about the room. She seemed to be
+looking for something and he roused himself to ask what she wanted.
+
+"Only the last number of the Horoscope. I thought I'd left it on this
+table." He said nothing, and she went on: "You haven't seen it?"
+
+"No," he returned coldly. The magazine was locked in his desk.
+
+His wife had moved to the mantel-piece. She stood facing him and as he
+looked up he met her tentative gaze. "I was reading an article in it--a
+review of Mrs. Aubyn's letters," she added, slowly, with her deep,
+deliberate blush.
+
+Glennard stooped to toss his cigar into the fire. He felt a savage wish
+that she would not speak the other woman's name; nothing else seemed to
+matter. "You seem to do a lot of reading," he said.
+
+She still earnestly confronted him. "I was keeping this for you--I
+thought it might interest you," she said, with an air of gentle
+insistence.
+
+He stood up and turned away. He was sure she knew that he had taken the
+review and he felt that he was beginning to hate her again.
+
+"I haven't time for such things," he said, indifferently. As he moved to
+the door he heard her take a precipitate step forward; then she paused
+and sank without speaking into the chair from which he had risen.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+As Glennard, in the raw February sunlight, mounted the road to the
+cemetery, he felt the beatitude that comes with an abrupt cessation of
+physical pain. He had reached the point where self-analysis ceases;
+the impulse that moved him was purely intuitive. He did not even seek
+a reason for it, beyond the obvious one that his desire to stand by
+Margaret Aubyn's grave was prompted by no attempt at a sentimental
+reparation, but rather by the vague need to affirm in some way the
+reality of the tie between them.
+
+The ironical promiscuity of death had brought Mrs. Aubyn back to
+share the narrow hospitality of her husband's last lodging; but though
+Glennard knew she had been buried near New York he had never visited
+her grave. He was oppressed, as he now threaded the long avenues, by a
+chilling vision of her return. There was no family to follow her hearse;
+she had died alone, as she had lived; and the "distinguished mourners"
+who had formed the escort of the famous writer knew nothing of the woman
+they were committing to the grave. Glennard could not even remember at
+what season she had been buried; but his mood indulged the fancy that it
+must have been on some such day of harsh sunlight, the incisive February
+brightness that gives perspicuity without warmth. The white avenues
+stretched before him interminably, lined with stereotyped emblems of
+affliction, as though all the platitudes ever uttered had been turned to
+marble and set up over the unresisting dead. Here and there, no doubt, a
+frigid urn or an insipid angel imprisoned some fine-fibred grief, as the
+most hackneyed words may become the vehicle of rare meanings; but for
+the most part the endless alignment of monuments seemed to embody those
+easy generalizations about death that do not disturb the repose of the
+living. Glennard's eye, as he followed the way indicated to him, had
+instinctively sought some low mound with a quiet headstone. He had
+forgotten that the dead seldom plan their own houses, and with a pang he
+discovered the name he sought on the cyclopean base of a granite shaft
+rearing its aggressive height at the angle of two avenues.
+
+"How she would have hated it!" he murmured.
+
+A bench stood near and he seated himself. The monument rose before him
+like some pretentious uninhabited dwelling; he could not believe that
+Margaret Aubyn lay there. It was a Sunday morning and black figures
+moved among the paths, placing flowers on the frost-bound hillocks.
+Glennard noticed that the neighboring graves had been thus newly
+dressed; and he fancied a blind stir of expectancy through the sod, as
+though the bare mounds spread a parched surface to that commemorative
+rain. He rose presently and walked back to the entrance of the cemetery.
+Several greenhouses stood near the gates, and turning in at the first he
+asked for some flowers.
+
+"Anything in the emblematic line?" asked the anaemic man behind the
+dripping counter.
+
+Glennard shook his head.
+
+"Just cut flowers? This way, then." The florist unlocked a glass door
+and led him down a moist green aisle. The hot air was choked with the
+scent of white azaleas, white lilies, white lilacs; all the flowers were
+white; they were like a prolongation, a mystical efflorescence, of the
+long rows of marble tombstones, and their perfume seemed to cover an
+odor of decay. The rich atmosphere made Glennard dizzy. As he leaned
+in the doorpost, waiting for the flowers, he had a penetrating sense of
+Margaret Aubyn's nearness--not the imponderable presence of his inner
+vision, but a life that beat warm in his arms....
+
+The sharp air caught him as he stepped out into it again. He walked back
+and scattered the flowers over the grave. The edges of the white petals
+shrivelled like burnt paper in the cold; and as he watched them the
+illusion of her nearness faded, shrank back frozen.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+The motive of his visit to the cemetery remained undefined save as a
+final effort of escape from his wife's inexpressive acceptance of his
+shame. It seemed to him that as long as he could keep himself alive to
+that shame he would not wholly have succumbed to its consequences. His
+chief fear was that he should become the creature of his act. His wife's
+indifference degraded him; it seemed to put him on a level with his
+dishonor. Margaret Aubyn would have abhorred the deed in proportion to
+her pity for the man. The sense of her potential pity drew him back to
+her. The one woman knew but did not understand; the other, it sometimes
+seemed, understood without knowing.
+
+In its last disguise of retrospective remorse, his self-pity affected a
+desire for solitude and meditation. He lost himself in morbid musings,
+in futile visions of what life with Margaret Aubyn might have been.
+There were moments when, in the strange dislocation of his view, the
+wrong he had done her seemed a tie between them.
+
+To indulge these emotions he fell into the habit, on Sunday afternoons,
+of solitary walks prolonged till after dusk. The days were lengthening,
+there was a touch of spring in the air, and his wanderings now usually
+led him to the Park and its outlying regions.
+
+One Sunday, tired of aimless locomotion, he took a cab at the Park gates
+and let it carry him out to the Riverside Drive. It was a gray afternoon
+streaked with east wind. Glennard's cab advanced slowly, and as he
+leaned back, gazing with absent intentness at the deserted paths that
+wound under bare boughs between grass banks of premature vividness, his
+attention was arrested by two figures walking ahead of him. This couple,
+who had the path to themselves, moved at an uneven pace, as though
+adapting their gait to a conversation marked by meditative intervals.
+Now and then they paused, and in one of these pauses the lady, turning
+toward her companion, showed Glennard the outline of his wife's profile.
+The man was Flamel.
+
+The blood rushed to Glennard's forehead. He sat up with a jerk and
+pushed back the lid in the roof of the hansom; but when the cabman bent
+down he dropped into his seat without speaking. Then, becoming
+conscious of the prolonged interrogation of the lifted lid, he called
+out--"Turn--drive back--anywhere--I'm in a hurry--"
+
+As the cab swung round he caught a last glimpse of the two figures. They
+had not moved; Alexa, with bent head, stood listening.
+
+"My God, my God--" he groaned.
+
+It was hideous--it was abominable--he could not understand it. The woman
+was nothing to him--less than nothing--yet the blood hummed in his ears
+and hung a cloud before him. He knew it was only the stirring of the
+primal instinct, that it had no more to do with his reasoning self
+than any reflex impulse of the body; but that merely lowered anguish
+to disgust. Yes, it was disgust he felt--almost a physical nausea. The
+poisonous fumes of life were in his lungs. He was sick, unutterably
+sick....
+
+He drove home and went to his room. They were giving a little dinner
+that night, and when he came down the guests were arriving. He looked at
+his wife: her beauty was extraordinary, but it seemed to him the beauty
+of a smooth sea along an unlit coast. She frightened him.
+
+He sat late that night in his study. He heard the parlor-maid lock the
+front door; then his wife went upstairs and the lights were put out.
+His brain was like some great empty hall with an echo in it; one thought
+reverberated endlessly.... At length he drew his chair to the table and
+began to write. He addressed an envelope and then slowly re-read what he
+had written.
+
+
+"MY DEAR FLAMEL,"
+
+"Many apologies for not sending you sooner the enclosed check, which
+represents the customary percentage on the sale of the Letters."
+
+"Trusting you will excuse the oversight,
+
+"Yours truly,
+
+"STEPHEN GLENNARD."
+
+
+He let himself out of the darkened house and dropped the letter in the
+post-box at the corner.
+
+
+The next afternoon he was detained late at his office, and as he was
+preparing to leave he heard someone asking for him in the outer room. He
+seated himself again and Flamel was shown in.
+
+The two men, as Glennard pushed aside an obstructive chair, had a
+moment to measure each other; then Flamel advanced, and drawing out his
+note-case, laid a slip of paper on the desk.
+
+"My dear fellow, what on earth does this mean?" Glennard recognized his
+check.
+
+"That I was remiss, simply. It ought to have gone to you before."
+
+Flamel's tone had been that of unaffected surprise, but at this his
+accent changed and he asked, quickly: "On what ground?"
+
+Glennard had moved away from the desk and stood leaning against the
+calf-backed volumes of the bookcase. "On the ground that you sold Mrs.
+Aubyn's letters for me, and that I find the intermediary in such cases
+is entitled to a percentage on the sale."
+
+Flamel paused before answering. "You find, you say. It's a recent
+discovery?"
+
+"Obviously, from my not sending the check sooner. You see I'm new to the
+business."
+
+"And since when have you discovered that there was any question of
+business, as far as I was concerned?"
+
+Glennard flushed and his voice rose slightly. "Are you reproaching me
+for not having remembered it sooner?"
+
+Flamel, who had spoken in the rapid repressed tone of a man on the
+verge of anger, stared a moment at this and then, in his natural voice,
+rejoined, good-humoredly, "Upon my soul, I don't understand you!"
+
+The change of key seemed to disconcert Glennard. "It's simple enough--"
+he muttered.
+
+"Simple enough--your offering me money in return for a friendly service?
+I don't know what your other friends expect!"
+
+"Some of my friends wouldn't have undertaken the job. Those who would
+have done so would probably have expected to be paid."
+
+He lifted his eyes to Flamel and the two men looked at each other.
+Flamel had turned white and his lips stirred, but he held his temperate
+note. "If you mean to imply that the job was not a nice one, you lay
+yourself open to the retort that you proposed it. But for my part
+I've never seen, I never shall see, any reason for not publishing the
+letters."
+
+"That's just it!"
+
+"What--?"
+
+"The certainty of your not seeing was what made me go to you. When
+a man's got stolen goods to pawn he doesn't take them to the
+police-station."
+
+"Stolen?" Flamel echoed. "The letters were stolen?"
+
+Glennard burst into a coarse laugh. "How much longer do you expect me to
+keep up that pretence about the letters? You knew well enough they were
+written to me."
+
+Flamel looked at him in silence. "Were they?" he said at length. "I
+didn't know it."
+
+"And didn't suspect it, I suppose," Glennard sneered.
+
+The other was again silent; then he said, "I may remind you that,
+supposing I had felt any curiosity about the matter, I had no way of
+finding out that the letters were written to you. You never showed me
+the originals."
+
+"What does that prove? There were fifty ways of finding out. It's the
+kind of thing one can easily do."
+
+Flamel glanced at him with contempt. "Our ideas probably differ as to
+what a man can easily do. It would not have been easy for me."
+
+Glennard's anger vented itself in the words uppermost in his thought.
+"It may, then, interest you to hear that my wife DOES know about the
+letters--has known for some months...."
+
+"Ah," said the other, slowly. Glennard saw that, in his blind clutch at
+a weapon, he had seized the one most apt to wound. Flamel's muscles were
+under control, but his face showed the undefinable change produced
+by the slow infiltration of poison. Every implication that the words
+contained had reached its mark; but Glennard felt that their obvious
+intention was lost in the anguish of what they suggested. He was sure
+now that Flamel would never have betrayed him; but the inference only
+made a wider outlet for his anger. He paused breathlessly for Flamel to
+speak.
+
+"If she knows, it's not through me." It was what Glennard had waited
+for.
+
+"Through you, by God? Who said it was through you? Do you suppose I
+leave it to you, or to anybody else, for that matter, to keep my wife
+informed of my actions? I didn't suppose even such egregious conceit as
+yours could delude a man to that degree!" Struggling for a foothold in
+the small landslide of his dignity, he added, in a steadier tone, "My
+wife learned the facts from me."
+
+Flamel received this in silence. The other's outbreak seemed to
+have reinforced his self-control, and when he spoke it was with a
+deliberation implying that his course was chosen. "In that case I
+understand still less--"
+
+"Still less--?"
+
+"The meaning of this." He pointed to the check. "When you began to speak
+I supposed you had meant it as a bribe; now I can only infer it was
+intended as a random insult. In either case, here's my answer."
+
+He tore the slip of paper in two and tossed the fragments across the
+desk to Glennard. Then he turned and walked out of the office.
+
+Glennard dropped his head on his hands. If he had hoped to restore his
+self-respect by the simple expedient of assailing Flamel's, the result
+had not justified his expectation. The blow he had struck had blunted
+the edge of his anger, and the unforeseen extent of the hurt inflicted
+did not alter the fact that his weapon had broken in his hands. He
+saw now that his rage against Flamel was only the last projection of a
+passionate self-disgust. This consciousness did not dull his dislike of
+the man; it simply made reprisals ineffectual. Flamel's unwillingness to
+quarrel with him was the last stage of his abasement.
+
+In the light of this final humiliation his assumption of his wife's
+indifference struck him as hardly so fatuous as the sentimental
+resuscitation of his past. He had been living in a factitious world
+wherein his emotions were the sycophants of his vanity, and it was with
+instinctive relief that he felt its ruins crash about his head.
+
+It was nearly dark when he left his office, and he walked slowly
+homeward in the complete mental abeyance that follows on such a crisis.
+He was not aware that he was thinking of his wife; yet when he reached
+his own door he found that, in the involuntary readjustment of his
+vision, she had once more become the central point of consciousness.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+It had never before occurred to him that she might, after all, have
+missed the purport of the document he had put in her way. What if, in
+her hurried inspection of the papers, she had passed it over as related
+to the private business of some client? What, for instance, was to
+prevent her concluding that Glennard was the counsel of the unknown
+person who had sold the "Aubyn Letters." The subject was one not likely
+to fix her attention--she was not a curious woman.
+
+Glennard at this point laid down his fork and glanced at her between the
+candle-shades. The alternative explanation of her indifference was not
+slow in presenting itself. Her head had the same listening droop as
+when he had caught sight of her the day before in Flamel's company; the
+attitude revived the vividness of his impression. It was simple enough,
+after all. She had ceased to care for him because she cared for someone
+else.
+
+As he followed her upstairs he felt a sudden stirring of his dormant
+anger. His sentiments had lost all their factitious complexity. He had
+already acquitted her of any connivance in his baseness, and he felt
+only that he loved her and that she had escaped him. This was now,
+strangely enough, his dominating thought: the consciousness that he and
+she had passed through the fusion of love and had emerged from it as
+incommunicably apart as though the transmutation had never taken place.
+Every other passion, he mused, left some mark upon the nature; but love
+passed like the flight of a ship across the waters.
+
+She sank into her usual seat near the lamp, and he leaned against the
+chimney, moving about with an inattentive hand the knick-knacks on the
+mantel.
+
+Suddenly he caught sight of her reflection in the mirror. She was
+looking at him. He turned and their eyes met.
+
+He moved across the room and stood before her.
+
+"There's something that I want to say to you," he began in a low tone.
+
+She held his gaze, but her color deepened. He noticed again, with a
+jealous pang, how her beauty had gained in warmth and meaning. It was
+as though a transparent cup had been filled with wine. He looked at her
+ironically.
+
+"I've never prevented your seeing your friends here," he broke out. "Why
+do you meet Flamel in out-of-the-way places? Nothing makes a woman so
+cheap--"
+
+She rose abruptly and they faced each other a few feet apart.
+
+"What do you mean?" she asked.
+
+"I saw you with him last Sunday on the Riverside Drive," he went on, the
+utterance of the charge reviving his anger.
+
+"Ah," she murmured. She sank into her chair again and began to play with
+a paper-knife that lay on the table at her elbow.
+
+Her silence exasperated him.
+
+"Well?" he burst out. "Is that all you have to say?"
+
+"Do you wish me to explain?" she asked, proudly.
+
+"Do you imply I haven't the right to?"
+
+"I imply nothing. I will tell you whatever you wish to know. I went for
+a walk with Mr. Flamel because he asked me to."
+
+"I didn't suppose you went uninvited. But there are certain things a
+sensible woman doesn't do. She doesn't slink about in out-of-the-way
+streets with men. Why couldn't you have seen him here?"
+
+She hesitated. "Because he wanted to see me alone."
+
+"Did he, indeed? And may I ask if you gratify all his wishes with equal
+alacrity?"
+
+"I don't know that he has any others where I am concerned." She
+paused again and then continued, in a lower voice that somehow had an
+under-note of warning. "He wished to bid me good-by. He's going away."
+
+Glennard turned on her a startled glance. "Going away?"
+
+"He's going to Europe to-morrow. He goes for a long time. I supposed you
+knew."
+
+The last phrase revived his irritation. "You forget that I depend on you
+for my information about Flamel. He's your friend and not mine. In fact,
+I've sometimes wondered at your going out of your way to be so civil to
+him when you must see plainly enough that I don't like him."
+
+Her answer to this was not immediate. She seemed to be choosing her
+words with care, not so much for her own sake as for his, and his
+exasperation was increased by the suspicion that she was trying to spare
+him.
+
+"He was your friend before he was mine. I never knew him till I was
+married. It was you who brought him to the house and who seemed to wish
+me to like him."
+
+Glennard gave a short laugh. The defence was feebler than he had
+expected: she was certainly not a clever woman.
+
+"Your deference to my wishes is really beautiful; but it's not the first
+time in history that a man has made a mistake in introducing his
+friends to his wife. You must, at any rate, have seen since then that
+my enthusiasm had cooled; but so, perhaps, has your eagerness to oblige
+me."
+
+She met this with a silence that seemed to rob the taunt of half its
+efficacy.
+
+"Is that what you imply?" he pressed her.
+
+"No," she answered with sudden directness. "I noticed some time ago that
+you seemed to dislike him, but since then--"
+
+"Well--since then?"
+
+"I've imagined that you had reasons for still wishing me to be civil to
+him, as you call it."
+
+"Ah," said Glennard, with an effort at lightness; but his irony dropped,
+for something in her voice made him feel that he and she stood at last
+in that naked desert of apprehension where meaning skulks vainly behind
+speech.
+
+"And why did you imagine this?" The blood mounted to his forehead.
+"Because he told you that I was under obligations to him?"
+
+She turned pale. "Under obligations?"
+
+"Oh, don't let's beat about the bush. Didn't he tell you it was I who
+published Mrs. Aubyn's letters? Answer me that."
+
+"No," she said; and after a moment which seemed given to the weighing of
+alternatives, she added: "No one told me."
+
+"You didn't know then?"
+
+She seemed to speak with an effort. "Not until--not until--"
+
+"Till I gave you those papers to sort?"
+
+Her head sank.
+
+"You understood then?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+He looked at her immovable face. "Had you suspected--before?" was slowly
+wrung from him.
+
+"At times--yes--" Her voice dropped to a whisper.
+
+"Why? From anything that was said--?"
+
+There was a shade of pity in her glance. "No one said anything--no one
+told me anything." She looked away from him. "It was your manner--"
+
+"My manner?"
+
+"Whenever the book was mentioned. Things you said--once or twice--your
+irritation--I can't explain--"
+
+Glennard, unconsciously, had moved nearer. He breathed like a man who
+has been running. "You knew, then, you knew"--he stammered. The avowal
+of her love for Flamel would have hurt him less, would have rendered
+her less remote. "You knew--you knew--" he repeated; and suddenly his
+anguish gathered voice. "My God!" he cried, "you suspected it first, you
+say--and then you knew it--this damnable, this accursed thing; you knew
+it months ago--it's months since I put that paper in your way--and yet
+you've done nothing, you've said nothing, you've made no sign, you've
+lived alongside of me as if it had made no difference--no difference in
+either of our lives. What are you made of, I wonder? Don't you see the
+hideous ignominy of it? Don't you see how you've shared in my disgrace?
+Or haven't you any sense of shame?"
+
+He preserved sufficient lucidity, as the words poured from him, to see
+how fatally they invited her derision; but something told him they had
+both passed beyond the phase of obvious retaliations, and that if any
+chord in her responded it would not be that of scorn.
+
+He was right. She rose slowly and moved toward him.
+
+"Haven't you had enough--without that?" she said, in a strange voice of
+pity.
+
+He stared at her. "Enough--?"
+
+"Of misery...."
+
+An iron band seemed loosened from his temples. "You saw then...?" he
+whispered.
+
+"Oh, God----oh, God----" she sobbed. She dropped beside him and hid
+her anguish against his knees. They clung thus in silence, a long time,
+driven together down the same fierce blast of shame.
+
+When at length she lifted her face he averted his. Her scorn would have
+hurt him less than the tears on his hands.
+
+She spoke languidly, like a child emerging from a passion of weeping.
+"It was for the money--?"
+
+His lips shaped an assent.
+
+"That was the inheritance--that we married on?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+She drew back and rose to her feet. He sat watching her as she wandered
+away from him.
+
+"You hate me," broke from him.
+
+She made no answer.
+
+"Say you hate me!" he persisted.
+
+"That would have been so simple," she answered with a strange smile. She
+dropped into a chair near the writing-table and rested a bowed forehead
+on her hand.
+
+"Was it much--?" she began at length.
+
+"Much--?" he returned, vaguely.
+
+"The money."
+
+"The money?" That part of it seemed to count so little that for a moment
+he did not follow her thought.
+
+"It must be paid back," she insisted. "Can you do it?"
+
+"Oh, yes," he returned, listlessly. "I can do it."
+
+"I would make any sacrifice for that!" she urged.
+
+He nodded. "Of course." He sat staring at her in dry-eyed self-contempt.
+"Do you count on its making much difference?"
+
+"Much difference?"
+
+"In the way I feel--or you feel about me?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"It's the least part of it," he groaned.
+
+"It's the only part we can repair."
+
+"Good heavens! If there were any reparation--" He rose quickly and
+crossed the space that divided them. "Why did you never speak?" he
+asked.
+
+"Haven't you answered that yourself?"
+
+"Answered it?"
+
+"Just now--when you told me you did it for me." She paused a moment and
+then went on with a deepening note--"I would have spoken if I could have
+helped you."
+
+"But you must have despised me."
+
+"I've told you that would have been simpler."
+
+"But how could you go on like this--hating the money?"
+
+"I knew you would speak in time. I wanted you, first, to hate it as I
+did."
+
+He gazed at her with a kind of awe. "You're wonderful," he murmured.
+"But you don't yet know the depths I've reached."
+
+She raised an entreating hand. "I don't want to!"
+
+"You're afraid, then, that you'll hate me?"
+
+"No--but that you'll hate ME. Let me understand without your telling
+me."
+
+"You can't. It's too base. I thought you didn't care because you loved
+Flamel."
+
+She blushed deeply. "Don't--don't--" she warned him.
+
+"I haven't the right to, you mean?"
+
+"I mean that you'll be sorry."
+
+He stood imploringly before her. "I want to say something
+worse--something more outrageous. If you don't understand THIS you'll be
+perfectly justified in ordering me out of the house."
+
+She answered him with a glance of divination. "I shall understand--but
+you'll be sorry."
+
+"I must take my chance of that." He moved away and tossed the books
+about the table. Then he swung round and faced her. "Does Flamel care
+for you?" he asked.
+
+Her flush deepened, but she still looked at him without anger. "What
+would be the use?" she said with a note of sadness.
+
+"Ah, I didn't ask THAT," he penitently murmured.
+
+"Well, then--"
+
+To this adjuration he made no response beyond that of gazing at her
+with an eye which seemed now to view her as a mere factor in an immense
+redistribution of meanings.
+
+"I insulted Flamel to-day. I let him see that I suspected him of having
+told you. I hated him because he knew about the letters."
+
+He caught the spreading horror of her eyes, and for an instant he had
+to grapple with the new temptation they lit up. Then he said, with an
+effort--"Don't blame him--he's impeccable. He helped me to get them
+published; but I lied to him too; I pretended they were written to
+another man... a man who was dead...."
+
+She raised her arms in a gesture that seemed to ward off his blows.
+
+"You DO despise me!" he insisted.
+
+"Ah, that poor woman--that poor woman--" he heard her murmur.
+
+"I spare no one, you see!" he triumphed over her. She kept her face
+hidden.
+
+"You do hate me, you do despise me!" he strangely exulted.
+
+"Be silent!" she commanded him; but he seemed no longer conscious of any
+check on his gathering purpose.
+
+"He cared for you--he cared for you," he repeated, "and he never told
+you of the letters--"
+
+She sprang to her feet. "How can you?" she flamed. "How dare you?
+THAT--!"
+
+Glennard was ashy pale. "It's a weapon... like another...."
+
+"A scoundrel's!"
+
+He smiled wretchedly. "I should have used it in his place."
+
+"Stephen! Stephen!" she cried, as though to drown the blasphemy on his
+lips. She swept to him with a rescuing gesture. "Don't say such things.
+I forbid you! It degrades us both."
+
+He put her back with trembling hands. "Nothing that I say of myself can
+degrade you. We're on different levels."
+
+"I'm on yours, whatever it is!"
+
+He lifted his head and their gaze flowed together.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+The great renewals take effect as imperceptibly as the first workings of
+spring. Glennard, though he felt himself brought nearer to his wife,
+was still, as it were, hardly within speaking distance. He was
+but laboriously acquiring the rudiments of their new medium of
+communication; and he had to grope for her through the dense fog of his
+humiliation, the distorting vapor against which his personality loomed
+grotesque and mean.
+
+Only the fact that we are unaware how well our nearest know us
+enables us to live with them. Love is the most impregnable refuge of
+self-esteem, and we hate the eye that reaches to our nakedness. If
+Glennard did not hate his wife it was slowly, sufferingly, that there
+was born in him that profounder passion which made his earlier feeling
+seem a mere commotion of the blood. He was like a child coming back to
+the sense of an enveloping presence: her nearness was a breast on which
+he leaned.
+
+They did not, at first, talk much together, and each beat a devious
+track about the outskirts of the subject that lay between them like a
+haunted wood. But every word, every action, seemed to glance at it,
+to draw toward it, as though a fount of healing sprang in its poisoned
+shade. If only they might cut away through the thicket to that restoring
+spring!
+
+Glennard, watching his wife with the intentness of a wanderer to whom no
+natural sign is negligible, saw that she had taken temporary refuge in
+the purpose of renouncing the money. If both, theoretically, owned the
+inefficacy of such amends, the woman's instinctive subjectiveness made
+her find relief in this crude form of penance. Glennard saw that she
+meant to live as frugally as possible till what she deemed their debt
+was discharged; and he prayed she might not discover how far-reaching,
+in its merely material sense, was the obligation she thus hoped to
+acquit. Her mind was fixed on the sum originally paid for the letters,
+and this he knew he could lay aside in a year or two. He was touched,
+meanwhile, by the spirit that made her discard the petty luxuries which
+she regarded as the signs of their bondage. Their shared renunciations
+drew her nearer to him, helped, in their evidence of her helplessness,
+to restore the full protecting stature of his love. And still they did
+not speak.
+
+It was several weeks later that, one afternoon by the drawing-room fire,
+she handed him a letter that she had been reading when he entered.
+
+"I've heard from Mr. Flamel," she said.
+
+Glennard turned pale. It was as though a latent presence had suddenly
+become visible to both. He took the letter mechanically.
+
+"It's from Smyrna," she said. "Won't you read it?"
+
+He handed it back. "You can tell me about it--his hand's so illegible."
+He wandered to the other end of the room and then turned and stood
+before her. "I've been thinking of writing to Flamel," he said.
+
+She looked up.
+
+"There's one point," he continued, slowly, "that I ought to clear up.
+I told him you'd known about the letters all along; for a long time, at
+least; and I saw it hurt him horribly. It was just what I meant to do,
+of course; but I can't leave him to that false impression; I must write
+him."
+
+She received this without outward movement, but he saw that the depths
+were stirred. At length she returned, in a hesitating tone, "Why do you
+call it a false impression? I did know."
+
+"Yes, but I implied you didn't care."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+He still stood looking down on her. "Don't you want me to set that
+right?" he tentatively pursued.
+
+She lifted her head and fixed him bravely. "It isn't necessary," she
+said.
+
+Glennard flushed with the shock of the retort; then, with a gesture
+of comprehension, "No," he said, "with you it couldn't be; but I might
+still set myself right."
+
+She looked at him gently. "Don't I," she murmured, "do that?"
+
+"In being yourself merely? Alas, the rehabilitation's too complete!
+You make me seem--to myself even--what I'm not; what I can never be.
+I can't, at times, defend myself from the delusion; but I can at least
+enlighten others."
+
+The flood was loosened, and kneeling by her he caught her hands. "Don't
+you see that it's become an obsession with me? That if I could strip
+myself down to the last lie--only there'd always be another one left
+under it!--and do penance naked in the market-place, I should at least
+have the relief of easing one anguish by another? Don't you see that the
+worst of my torture is the impossibility of such amends?"
+
+Her hands lay in his without returning pressure. "Ah, poor woman, poor
+woman," he heard her sigh.
+
+"Don't pity her, pity me! What have I done to her or to you, after all?
+You're both inaccessible! It was myself I sold."
+
+He took an abrupt turn away from her; then halted before her again. "How
+much longer," he burst out, "do you suppose you can stand it? You've
+been magnificent, you've been inspired, but what's the use? You can't
+wipe out the ignominy of it. It's miserable for you and it does HER no
+good!"
+
+She lifted a vivid face. "That's the thought I can't bear!" she cried.
+
+"What thought?"
+
+"That it does her no good--all you're feeling, all you're suffering. Can
+it be that it makes no difference?"
+
+He avoided her challenging glance. "What's done is done," he muttered.
+
+"Is it ever, quite, I wonder?" she mused. He made no answer and they
+lapsed into one of the pauses that are a subterranean channel of
+communication.
+
+It was she who, after awhile, began to speak with a new suffusing
+diffidence that made him turn a roused eye on her.
+
+"Don't they say," she asked, feeling her way as in a kind of tender
+apprehensiveness, "that the early Christians, instead of pulling down
+the heathen temples--the temples of the unclean gods--purified them by
+turning them to their own uses? I've always thought one might do that
+with one's actions--the actions one loathes but can't undo. One can
+make, I mean, a wrong the door to other wrongs or an impassable wall
+against them...." Her voice wavered on the word. "We can't always tear
+down the temples we've built to the unclean gods, but we can put
+good spirits in the house of evil--the spirits of mercy and shame and
+understanding, that might never have come to us if we hadn't been in
+such great need...."
+
+She moved over to him and laid a hesitating hand on his. His head was
+bent and he did not change his attitude. She sat down beside him without
+speaking; but their silences now were fertile as rain-clouds--they
+quickened the seeds of understanding.
+
+At length he looked up. "I don't know," he said, "what spirits have come
+to live in the house of evil that I built--but you're there and that's
+enough for me. It's strange," he went on after another pause, "she
+wished the best for me so often, and now, at last, it's through her that
+it's come to me. But for her I shouldn't have known you--it's through
+her that I've found you. Sometimes, do you know?--that makes it
+hardest--makes me most intolerable to myself. Can't you see that it's
+the worst thing I've got to face? I sometimes think I could have
+borne it better if you hadn't understood! I took everything from
+her--everything--even to the poor shelter of loyalty she'd trusted
+in--the only thing I could have left her!--I took everything from her,
+I deceived her, I despoiled her, I destroyed her--and she's given me YOU
+in return!"
+
+His wife's cry caught him up. "It isn't that she's given ME to you--it
+is that she's given you to yourself." She leaned to him as though swept
+forward on a wave of pity. "Don't you see," she went on, as his eyes
+hung on her, "that that's the gift you can't escape from, the debt
+you're pledged to acquit? Don't you see that you've never before been
+what she thought you, and that now, so wonderfully, she's made you into
+the man she loved? THAT'S worth suffering for, worth dying for, to a
+woman--that's the gift she would have wished to give!"
+
+"Ah," he cried, "but woe to him by whom it cometh. What did I ever give
+her?"
+
+"The happiness of giving," she said.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Touchstone, by Edith Wharton
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #267 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/267)
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+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      The Touchstone, by Edith Wharton
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
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+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
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+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Touchstone, by Edith Wharton
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Touchstone
+
+Author: Edith Wharton
+
+Release Date: July 12, 2008 [EBook #267]
+[Last updated: September 4, 2017]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TOUCHSTONE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Judith Boss, and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      THE TOUCHSTONE
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      By Edith Wharton
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <big><b>CONTENTS</b></big>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> I </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> II </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> III </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> IV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> V </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> VI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0007"> VII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0008"> VIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0009"> IX </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0010"> X </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0011"> XI </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0012"> XII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0013"> XIII </a>
+      </p>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <a href="#link2H_4_0014"> XIV </a>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br />
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      I
+    </h2>
+<div class="blk">
+    <p class="nind">
+      <span class="smcap">“Professor Joslin,</span> who, as our readers are doubtless aware, is engaged in
+      writing the life of Mrs. Aubyn, asks us to state that he will be greatly
+      indebted to any of the famous novelist’s friends who will furnish him with
+      information concerning the period previous to her coming to England. Mrs.
+      Aubyn had so few intimate friends, and consequently so few regular
+      correspondents, that letters will be of special value. Professor Joslin’s
+      address is 10 Augusta Gardens, Kensington, and he begs us to say that he
+      will promptly return any documents entrusted to him.”
+     </p>
+</div>
+    <p class="nind">
+      <span class="smcap">Glennard</span> dropped the <i>Spectator</i> and sat looking into the fire. The club was
+      filling up, but he still had to himself the small inner room, with its
+      darkening outlook down the rain-streaked prospect of Fifth Avenue. It was
+      all dull and dismal enough, yet a moment earlier his boredom had been
+      perversely tinged by a sense of resentment at the thought that, as things
+      were going, he might in time have to surrender even the despised privilege
+      of boring himself within those particular four walls. It was not that he
+      cared much for the club, but that the remote contingency of having to give
+      it up stood to him, just then, perhaps by very reason of its
+      insignificance and remoteness, for the symbol of his increasing
+      abnegations; of that perpetual paring-off that was gradually reducing
+      existence to the naked business of keeping himself alive. It was the
+      futility of his multiplied shifts and privations that made them seem
+      unworthy of a high attitude; the sense that, however rapidly he eliminated
+      the superfluous, his cleared horizon was likely to offer no nearer view of
+      the one prospect toward which he strained. To give up things in order to
+      marry the woman one loves is easier than to give them up without being
+      brought appreciably nearer to such a conclusion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Through the open door he saw young Hollingsworth rise with a yawn from the
+      ineffectual solace of a brandy-and-soda and transport his purposeless
+      person to the window. Glennard measured his course with a contemptuous
+      eye. It was so like Hollingsworth to get up and look out of the window
+      just as it was growing too dark to see anything! There was a man rich
+      enough to do what he pleased&mdash;had he been capable of being pleased&mdash;yet
+      barred from all conceivable achievement by his own impervious dulness;
+      while, a few feet off, Glennard, who wanted only enough to keep a decent
+      coat on his back and a roof over the head of the woman he loved Glennard,
+      who had sweated, toiled, denied himself for the scant measure of
+      opportunity that his zeal would have converted into a kingdom&mdash;sat
+      wretchedly calculating that, even when he had resigned from the club, and
+      knocked off his cigars, and given up his Sundays out of town, he would
+      still be no nearer attainment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The <i>Spectator</i> had slipped to his feet and as he picked it up his eye fell
+      again on the paragraph addressed to the friends of Mrs. Aubyn. He had read
+      it for the first time with a scarcely perceptible quickening of attention:
+      her name had so long been public property that his eye passed it
+      unseeingly, as the crowd in the street hurries without a glance by some
+      familiar monument.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Information concerning the period previous to her coming to England....”
+       The words were an evocation. He saw her again as she had looked at their
+      first meeting, the poor woman of genius with her long pale face and
+      short-sighted eyes, softened a little by the grace of youth and
+      inexperience, but so incapable even then of any hold upon the pulses. When
+      she spoke, indeed, she was wonderful, more wonderful, perhaps, than when
+      later, to Glennard’s fancy at least, the consciousness of memorable things
+      uttered seemed to take from even her most intimate speech the perfect
+      bloom of privacy. It was in those earliest days, if ever, that he had come
+      near loving her; though even then his sentiment had lived only in the
+      intervals of its expression. Later, when to be loved by her had been a
+      state to touch any man’s imagination, the physical reluctance had,
+      inexplicably, so overborne the intellectual attraction, that the last
+      years had been, to both of them, an agony of conflicting impulses. Even
+      now, if, in turning over old papers, his hand lit on her letters, the
+      touch filled him with inarticulate misery....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “She had so few intimate friends... that letters will be of special
+      value.” So few intimate friends! For years she had had but one; one who in
+      the last years had requited her wonderful pages, her tragic outpourings of
+      love, humility, and pardon, with the scant phrases by which a man evades
+      the vulgarest of sentimental importunities. He had been a brute in spite
+      of himself, and sometimes, now that the remembrance of her face had faded,
+      and only her voice and words remained with him, he chafed at his own
+      inadequacy, his stupid inability to rise to the height of her passion. His
+      egoism was not of a kind to mirror its complacency in the adventure. To
+      have been loved by the most brilliant woman of her day, and to have been
+      incapable of loving her, seemed to him, in looking back, the most derisive
+      evidence of his limitations; and his remorseful tenderness for her memory
+      was complicated with a sense of irritation against her for having given
+      him once for all the measure of his emotional capacity. It was not often,
+      however, that he thus probed the past. The public, in taking possession of
+      Mrs. Aubyn, had eased his shoulders of their burden. There was something
+      fatuous in an attitude of sentimental apology toward a memory already
+      classic: to reproach one’s self for not having loved Margaret Aubyn was a
+      good deal like being disturbed by an inability to admire the Venus of
+      Milo. From her cold niche of fame she looked down ironically enough on his
+      self-flagellations.... It was only when he came on something that belonged
+      to her that he felt a sudden renewal of the old feeling, the strange dual
+      impulse that drew him to her voice but drove him from her hand, so that
+      even now, at sight of anything she had touched, his heart contracted
+      painfully. It happened seldom nowadays. Her little presents, one by one,
+      had disappeared from his rooms, and her letters, kept from some
+      unacknowledged puerile vanity in the possession of such treasures, seldom
+      came beneath his hand....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Her letters will be of special value&mdash;” Her letters! Why, he must
+      have hundreds of them&mdash;enough to fill a volume. Sometimes it used to
+      seem to him that they came with every post&mdash;he used to avoid looking
+      in his letter-box when he came home to his rooms&mdash;but her writing
+      seemed to spring out at him as he put his key in the door&mdash;.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood up and strolled into the other room. Hollingsworth, lounging away
+      from the window, had joined himself to a languidly convivial group of men
+      to whom, in phrases as halting as though they struggled to define an
+      ultimate idea, he was expounding the cursed nuisance of living in a hole
+      with such a damned climate that one had to get out of it by February, with
+      the contingent difficulty of there being no place to take one’s yacht to
+      in winter but that other played-out hole, the Riviera. From the outskirts
+      of this group Glennard wandered to another, where a voice as different as
+      possible from Hollingsworth’s colorless organ dominated another circle of
+      languid listeners.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Come and hear Dinslow talk about his patent: admission free,” one of the
+      men sang out in a tone of mock resignation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dinslow turned to Glennard the confident pugnacity of his smile. “Give it
+      another six months and it’ll be talking about itself,” he declared. “It’s
+      pretty nearly articulate now.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Can it say papa?” someone else inquired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dinslow’s smile broadened. “You’ll be deuced glad to say papa to <i>it</i> a year
+      from now,” he retorted. “It’ll be able to support even you in affluence.
+      Look here, now, just let me explain to you&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard moved away impatiently. The men at the club&mdash;all but those
+      who were “in it”&mdash;were proverbially “tired” of Dinslow’s patent, and
+      none more so than Glennard, whose knowledge of its merits made it loom
+      large in the depressing catalogue of lost opportunities. The relations
+      between the two men had always been friendly, and Dinslow’s urgent offers
+      to “take him in on the ground floor” had of late intensified Glennard’s
+      sense of his own inability to meet good luck half way. Some of the men who
+      had paused to listen were already in evening clothes, others on their way
+      home to dress; and Glennard, with an accustomed twinge of humiliation,
+      said to himself that if he lingered among them it was in the miserable
+      hope that one of the number might ask him to dine. Miss Trent had told him
+      that she was to go to the opera that evening with her rich aunt; and if he
+      should have the luck to pick up a dinner-invitation he might join her
+      there without extra outlay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He moved about the room, lingering here and there in a tentative
+      affectation of interest; but though the men greeted him pleasantly no one
+      asked him to dine. Doubtless they were all engaged, these men who could
+      afford to pay for their dinners, who did not have to hunt for invitations
+      as a beggar rummages for a crust in an ash-barrel! But no&mdash;as
+      Hollingsworth left the lessening circle about the table an admiring youth
+      called out&mdash;“Holly, stop and dine!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hollingsworth turned on him the crude countenance that looked like the
+      wrong side of a more finished face. “Sorry I can’t. I’m in for a beastly
+      banquet.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard threw himself into an arm-chair. Why go home in the rain to
+      dress? It was folly to take a cab to the opera, it was worse folly to go
+      there at all. His perpetual meetings with Alexa Trent were as unfair to
+      the girl as they were unnerving to himself. Since he couldn’t marry her,
+      it was time to stand aside and give a better man the chance&mdash;and his
+      thought admitted the ironical implication that in the terms of expediency
+      the phrase might stand for Hollingsworth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II
+    </h2>
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">He</span> dined alone and walked home to his rooms in the rain. As he turned into
+      Fifth Avenue he caught the wet gleam of carriages on their way to the
+      opera, and he took the first side street, in a moment of irritation
+      against the petty restrictions that thwarted every impulse. It was
+      ridiculous to give up the opera, not because one might possibly be bored
+      there, but because one must pay for the experiment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In his sitting-room, the tacit connivance of the inanimate had centred the
+      lamp-light on a photograph of Alexa Trent, placed, in the obligatory
+      silver frame, just where, as memory officiously reminded him, Margaret
+      Aubyn’s picture had long throned in its stead. Miss Trent’s features
+      cruelly justified the usurpation. She had the kind of beauty that comes of
+      a happy accord of face and spirit. It is not given to many to have the
+      lips and eyes of their rarest mood, and some women go through life behind
+      a mask expressing only their anxiety about the butcher’s bill or their
+      inability to see a joke. With Miss Trent, face and mind had the same high
+      serious contour. She looked like a throned Justice by some grave
+      Florentine painter; and it seemed to Glennard that her most salient
+      attribute, or that at least to which her conduct gave most consistent
+      expression, was a kind of passionate justice&mdash;the intuitive feminine
+      justness that is so much rarer than a reasoned impartiality. Circumstances
+      had tragically combined to develop this instinct into a conscious habit.
+      She had seen more than most girls of the shabby side of life, of the
+      perpetual tendency of want to cramp the noblest attitude. Poverty and
+      misfortune had overhung her childhood and she had none of the pretty
+      delusions about life that are supposed to be the crowning grace of
+      girlhood. This very competence, which gave her a touching reasonableness,
+      made Glennard’s situation more difficult than if he had aspired to a
+      princess bred in the purple. Between them they asked so little&mdash;they
+      knew so well how to make that little do&mdash;but they understood also,
+      and she especially did not for a moment let him forget, that without that
+      little the future they dreamed of was impossible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sight of her photograph quickened Glennard’s exasperation. He was sick
+      and ashamed of the part he was playing. He had loved her now for two
+      years, with the tranquil tenderness that gathers depth and volume as it
+      nears fulfilment; he knew that she would wait for him&mdash;but the
+      certitude was an added pang. There are times when the constancy of the
+      woman one cannot marry is almost as trying as that of the woman one does
+      not want to.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard turned up his reading-lamp and stirred the fire. He had a long
+      evening before him and he wanted to crowd out thought with action. He had
+      brought some papers from his office and he spread them out on his table
+      and squared himself to the task....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It must have been an hour later that he found himself automatically
+      fitting a key into a locked drawer. He had no more notion than a
+      somnambulist of the mental process that had led up to this action. He was
+      just dimly aware of having pushed aside the papers and the heavy calf
+      volumes that a moment before had bounded his horizon, and of laying in
+      their place, without a trace of conscious volition, the parcel he had
+      taken from the drawer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The letters were tied in packets of thirty or forty. There were a great
+      many packets. On some of the envelopes the ink was fading; on others,
+      which bore the English post-mark, it was still fresh. She had been dead
+      hardly three years, and she had written, at lengthening intervals, to the
+      last....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He undid one of the earlier packets&mdash;little notes written during
+      their first acquaintance at Hillbridge. Glennard, on leaving college, had
+      begun life in his uncle’s law office in the old university town. It was
+      there that, at the house of her father, Professor Forth, he had first met
+      the young lady then chiefly distinguished for having, after two years of a
+      conspicuously unhappy marriage, returned to the protection of the paternal
+      roof.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Aubyn was at that time an eager and somewhat tragic young woman, of
+      complex mind and undeveloped manners, whom her crude experience of
+      matrimony had fitted out with a stock of generalizations that exploded
+      like bombs in the academic air of Hillbridge. In her choice of a husband
+      she had been fortunate enough, if the paradox be permitted, to light on
+      one so signally gifted with the faculty of putting himself in the wrong
+      that her leaving him had the dignity of a manifesto&mdash;made her, as it
+      were, the spokeswoman of outraged wifehood. In this light she was
+      cherished by that dominant portion of Hillbridge society which was least
+      indulgent to conjugal differences, and which found a proportionate
+      pleasure in being for once able to feast openly on a dish liberally
+      seasoned with the outrageous. So much did this endear Mrs. Aubyn to the
+      university ladies that they were disposed from the first to allow her more
+      latitude of speech and action than the ill-used wife was generally
+      accorded in Hillbridge, where misfortune was still regarded as a
+      visitation designed to put people in their proper place and make them feel
+      the superiority of their neighbors. The young woman so privileged combined
+      with a kind of personal shyness an intellectual audacity that was like a
+      deflected impulse of coquetry: one felt that if she had been prettier she
+      would have had emotions instead of ideas. She was in fact even then what
+      she had always remained: a genius capable of the acutest generalizations,
+      but curiously undiscerning where her personal susceptibilities were
+      concerned. Her psychology failed her just where it serves most women and
+      one felt that her brains would never be a guide to her heart. Of all this,
+      however, Glennard thought little in the first year of their acquaintance.
+      He was at an age when all the gifts and graces are but so much
+      undiscriminated food to the ravening egoism of youth. In seeking Mrs.
+      Aubyn’s company he was prompted by an intuitive taste for the best as a
+      pledge of his own superiority. The sympathy of the cleverest woman in
+      Hillbridge was balm to his craving for distinction: it was public
+      confirmation of his secret sense that he was cut out for a bigger place.
+      It must not be understood that Glennard was vain. Vanity contents itself
+      with the coarsest diet; there is no palate so fastidious as that of
+      self-distrust. To a youth of Glennard’s aspirations the encouragement of a
+      clever woman stood for the symbol of all success. Later, when he had begun
+      to feel his way, to gain a foothold, he would not need such support; but
+      it served to carry him lightly and easily over what is often a period of
+      insecurity and discouragement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It would be unjust, however, to represent his interest in Mrs. Aubyn as a
+      matter of calculation. It was as instinctive as love, and it missed being
+      love by just such a hair-breadth deflection from the line of beauty as had
+      determined the curve of Mrs. Aubyn’s lips. When they met she had just
+      published her first novel, and Glennard, who afterward had an ambitious
+      man’s impatience of distinguished women, was young enough to be dazzled by
+      the semi-publicity it gave her. It was the kind of book that makes elderly
+      ladies lower their voices and call each other “my dear” when they
+      furtively discuss it; and Glennard exulted in the superior knowledge of
+      the world that enabled him to take as a matter of course sentiments over
+      which the university shook its head. Still more delightful was it to hear
+      Mrs. Aubyn waken the echoes of academic drawing-rooms with audacities
+      surpassing those of her printed page. Her intellectual independence gave a
+      touch of comradeship to their intimacy, prolonging the illusion of college
+      friendships based on a joyous interchange of heresies. Mrs. Aubyn and
+      Glennard represented to each other the augur’s wink behind the Hillbridge
+      idol: they walked together in that light of young omniscience from which
+      fate so curiously excludes one’s elders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Husbands who are notoriously inopportune, may even die inopportunely, and
+      this was the revenge that Mr. Aubyn, some two years after her return to
+      Hillbridge, took upon his injured wife. He died precisely at the moment
+      when Glennard was beginning to criticise her. It was not that she bored
+      him; she did what was infinitely worse&mdash;she made him feel his
+      inferiority. The sense of mental equality had been gratifying to his raw
+      ambition; but as his self-knowledge defined itself, his understanding of
+      her also increased; and if man is at times indirectly flattered by the
+      moral superiority of woman, her mental ascendency is extenuated by no such
+      oblique tribute to his powers. The attitude of looking up is a strain on
+      the muscles; and it was becoming more and more Glennard’s opinion that
+      brains, in a woman, should be merely the obverse of beauty. To beauty Mrs.
+      Aubyn could lay no claim; and while she had enough prettiness to
+      exasperate him by her incapacity to make use of it, she seemed invincibly
+      ignorant of any of the little artifices whereby women contrive to palliate
+      their defects and even to turn them into graces. Her dress never seemed a
+      part of her; all her clothes had an impersonal air, as though they had
+      belonged to someone else and been borrowed in an emergency that had
+      somehow become chronic. She was conscious enough of her deficiencies to
+      try to amend them by rash imitations of the most approved models; but no
+      woman who does not dress well intuitively will ever do so by the light of
+      reason, and Mrs. Aubyn’s plagiarisms, to borrow a metaphor of her trade,
+      somehow never seemed to be incorporated with the text.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair.
+      The fame that came to Mrs. Aubyn with her second book left Glennard’s
+      imagination untouched, or had at most the negative effect of removing her
+      still farther from the circle of his contracting sympathies. We are all
+      the sport of time; and fate had so perversely ordered the chronology of
+      Margaret Aubyn’s romance that when her husband died Glennard felt as
+      though he had lost a friend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not in his nature to be needlessly unkind; and though he was in the
+      impregnable position of the man who has given a woman no more definable
+      claim on him than that of letting her fancy that he loves her, he would
+      not for the world have accentuated his advantage by any betrayal of
+      indifference. During the first year of her widowhood their friendship
+      dragged on with halting renewals of sentiment, becoming more and more a
+      banquet of empty dishes from which the covers were never removed; then
+      Glennard went to New York to live and exchanged the faded pleasures of
+      intercourse for the comparative novelty of correspondence. Her letters,
+      oddly enough, seemed at first to bring her nearer than her presence. She
+      had adopted, and she successfully maintained, a note as affectionately
+      impersonal as his own; she wrote ardently of her work, she questioned him
+      about his, she even bantered him on the inevitable pretty girl who was
+      certain before long to divert the current of his confidences. To Glennard,
+      who was almost a stranger in New York, the sight of Mrs. Aubyn’s writing
+      was like a voice of reassurance in surroundings as yet insufficiently
+      aware of him. His vanity found a retrospective enjoyment in the sentiment
+      his heart had rejected, and this factitious emotion drove him once or
+      twice to Hillbridge, whence, after scenes of evasive tenderness, he
+      returned dissatisfied with himself and her. As he made room for himself in
+      New York and peopled the space he had cleared with the sympathies at the
+      disposal of agreeable and self-confident young men, it seemed to him
+      natural to infer that Mrs. Aubyn had refurnished in the same manner the
+      void he was not unwilling his departure should have left. But in the
+      dissolution of sentimental partnerships it is seldom that both associates
+      are able to withdraw their funds at the same time; and Glennard gradually
+      learned that he stood for the venture on which Mrs. Aubyn had
+      irretrievably staked her all. It was not the kind of figure he cared to
+      cut. He had no fancy for leaving havoc in his wake and would have
+      preferred to sow a quick growth of oblivion in the spaces wasted by his
+      unconsidered inroads; but if he supplied the seed it was clearly Mrs.
+      Aubyn’s business to see to the raising of the crop. Her attitude seemed
+      indeed to throw his own reasonableness into distincter relief: so that
+      they might have stood for thrift and improvidence in an allegory of the
+      affections.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not that Mrs. Aubyn permitted herself to be a pensioner on his
+      bounty. He knew she had no wish to keep herself alive on the small change
+      of sentiment; she simply fed on her own funded passion, and the luxuries
+      it allowed her made him, even then, dimly aware that she had the secret of
+      an inexhaustible alchemy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Their relations remained thus negatively tender till she suddenly wrote
+      him of her decision to go abroad to live. Her father had died, she had no
+      near ties in Hillbridge, and London offered more scope than New York to
+      her expanding personality. She was already famous and her laurels were yet
+      unharvested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a moment the news roused Glennard to a jealous sense of lost
+      opportunities. He wanted, at any rate, to reassert his power before she
+      made the final effort of escape. They had not met for over a year, but of
+      course he could not let her sail without seeing her. She came to New York
+      the day before her departure, and they spent its last hours together.
+      Glennard had planned no course of action&mdash;he simply meant to let
+      himself drift. They both drifted, for a long time, down the languid
+      current of reminiscence; she seemed to sit passive, letting him push his
+      way back through the overgrown channels of the past. At length she
+      reminded him that they must bring their explorations to an end. He rose to
+      leave, and stood looking at her with the same uncertainty in his heart. He
+      was tired of her already&mdash;he was always tired of her&mdash;yet he was
+      not sure that he wanted her to go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I may never see you again,” he said, as though confidently appealing to
+      her compassion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her look enveloped him. “And I shall see you always&mdash;always!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Why go then&mdash;?” escaped him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “To be nearer you,” she answered; and the words dismissed him like a
+      closing door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The door was never to reopen; but through its narrow crack Glennard, as
+      the years went on, became more and more conscious of an inextinguishable
+      light directing its small ray toward the past which consumed so little of
+      his own commemorative oil. The reproach was taken from this thought by
+      Mrs. Aubyn’s gradual translation into terms of universality. In becoming a
+      personage she so naturally ceased to be a person that Glennard could
+      almost look back to his explorations of her spirit as on a visit to some
+      famous shrine, immortalized, but in a sense desecrated, by popular
+      veneration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her letters, from London, continued to come with the same tender
+      punctuality; but the altered conditions of her life, the vistas of new
+      relationships disclosed by every phrase, made her communications as
+      impersonal as a piece of journalism. It was as though the state, the
+      world, indeed, had taken her off his hands, assuming the maintenance of a
+      temperament that had long exhausted his slender store of reciprocity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the retrospective light shed by the letters he was blinded to their
+      specific meaning. He was not a man who concerned himself with literature,
+      and they had been to him, at first, simply the extension of her brilliant
+      talk, later the dreaded vehicle of a tragic importunity. He knew, of
+      course, that they were wonderful; that, unlike the authors who give their
+      essence to the public and keep only a dry rind for their friends, Mrs.
+      Aubyn had stored of her rarest vintage for this hidden sacrament of
+      tenderness. Sometimes, indeed, he had been oppressed, humiliated almost,
+      by the multiplicity of her allusions, the wide scope of her interests, her
+      persistence in forcing her superabundance of thought and emotion into the
+      shallow receptacle of his sympathy; but he had never thought of the
+      letters objectively, as the production of a distinguished woman; had never
+      measured the literary significance of her oppressive prodigality. He was
+      almost frightened now at the wealth in his hands; the obligation of her
+      love had never weighed on him like this gift of her imagination: it was as
+      though he had accepted from her something to which even a reciprocal
+      tenderness could not have justified his claim.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat a long time staring at the scattered pages on his desk; and in the
+      sudden realization of what they meant he could almost fancy some
+      alchemistic process changing them to gold as he stared. He had the sense
+      of not being alone in the room, of the presence of another self observing
+      from without the stirring of subconscious impulses that sent flushes of
+      humiliation to his forehead. At length he stood up, and with the gesture
+      of a man who wishes to give outward expression to his purpose&mdash;to
+      establish, as it were, a moral alibi&mdash;swept the letters into a heap
+      and carried them toward the grate. But it would have taken too long to
+      burn all the packets. He turned back to the table and one by one fitted
+      the pages into their envelopes; then he tied up the letters and put them
+      back into the locked drawer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III
+    </h2>
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">It</span> was one of the laws of Glennard’s intercourse with Miss Trent that he
+      always went to see her the day after he had resolved to give her up. There
+      was a special charm about the moments thus snatched from the jaws of
+      renunciation; and his sense of their significance was on this occasion so
+      keen that he hardly noticed the added gravity of her welcome.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His feeling for her had become so vital a part of him that her nearness
+      had the quality of imperceptibly readjusting his point of view, so that
+      the jumbled phenomena of experience fell at once into a rational
+      perspective. In this redistribution of values the sombre retrospect of the
+      previous evening shrank to a mere cloud on the edge of consciousness.
+      Perhaps the only service an unloved woman can render the man she loves is
+      to enhance and prolong his illusions about her rival. It was the fate of
+      Margaret Aubyn’s memory to serve as a foil to Miss Trent’s presence, and
+      never had the poor lady thrown her successor into more vivid relief.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miss Trent had the charm of still waters that are felt to be renewed by
+      rapid currents. Her attention spread a tranquil surface to the
+      demonstrations of others, and it was only in days of storm that one felt
+      the pressure of the tides. This inscrutable composure was perhaps her
+      chief grace in Glennard’s eyes. Reserve, in some natures, implies merely
+      the locking of empty rooms or the dissimulation of awkward encumbrances;
+      but Miss Trent’s reticence was to Glennard like the closed door to the
+      sanctuary, and his certainty of divining the hidden treasure made him
+      content to remain outside in the happy expectancy of the neophyte.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “You didn’t come to the opera last night,” she began, in the tone that
+      seemed always rather to record a fact than to offer a reflection on it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He answered with a discouraged gesture. “What was the use? We couldn’t
+      have talked.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Not as well as here,” she assented; adding, after a meditative pause, “As
+      you didn’t come I talked to Aunt Virginia instead.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ah!” he returned, the fact being hardly striking enough to detach him
+      from the contemplation of her hands, which had fallen, as was their wont,
+      into an attitude full of plastic possibilities. One felt them to be hands
+      that, moving only to some purpose, were capable of intervals of serene
+      inaction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “We had a long talk,” Miss Trent went on; and she waited again before
+      adding, with the increased absence of stress that marked her graver
+      communications, “Aunt Virginia wants me to go abroad with her.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard looked up with a start. “Abroad? When?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Now&mdash;next month. To be gone two years.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He permitted himself a movement of tender derision. “Does she really?
+      Well, I want you to go abroad with <i>me</i>&mdash;for any number of years. Which
+      offer do you accept?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Only one of them seems to require immediate consideration,” she returned,
+      with a smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard looked at her again. “You’re not thinking of it?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her gaze dropped and she unclasped her hands. Her movements were so rare
+      that they might have been said to italicize her words. “Aunt Virginia
+      talked to me very seriously. It will be a great relief to mother and the
+      others to have me provided for in that way for two years. I must think of
+      that, you know.” She glanced down at her gown which, under a renovated
+      surface, dated back to the first days of Glennard’s wooing. “I try not to
+      cost much&mdash;but I do.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Good Lord!” Glennard groaned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They sat silent till at length she gently took up the argument. “As the
+      eldest, you know, I’m bound to consider these things. Women are such a
+      burden. Jim does what he can for mother, but with his own children to
+      provide for it isn’t very much. You see, we’re all poor together.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Your aunt isn’t. She might help your mother.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “She does&mdash;in her own way.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Exactly&mdash;that’s the rich relation all over! You may be miserable in
+      any way you like, but if you’re to be happy you’ve got to be so in her way&mdash;and
+      in her old gowns.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I could be very happy in Aunt Virginia’s old gowns,” Miss Trent
+      interposed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Abroad, you mean?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I mean wherever I felt that I was helping. And my going abroad will
+      help.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Of course&mdash;I see that. And I see your considerateness in putting its
+      advantages negatively.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Negatively?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “In dwelling simply on what the going will take you from, not on what it
+      will bring you to. It means a lot to a woman, of course, to get away from
+      a life like this.” He summed up in a disparaging glance the background of
+      indigent furniture. “The question is how you’ll like coming back to it.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She seemed to accept the full consequences of his thought. “I only know I
+      don’t like leaving it.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He flung back sombrely, “You don’t even put it conditionally then?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her gaze deepened. “On what?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood up and walked across the room. Then he came back and paused
+      before her. “On the alternative of marrying me.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The slow color&mdash;even her blushes seemed deliberate&mdash;rose to her
+      lower lids; her lips stirred, but the words resolved themselves into a
+      smile and she waited.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He took another turn, with the thwarted step of the man whose nervous
+      exasperation escapes through his muscles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “And to think that in fifteen years I shall have a big practice!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her eyes triumphed for him. “In less!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “The cursed irony of it! What do I care for the man I shall be then? It’s
+      slaving one’s life away for a stranger!” He took her hands abruptly.
+      “You’ll go to Cannes, I suppose, or Monte Carlo? I heard Hollingsworth say
+      to-day that he meant to take his yacht over to the Mediterranean&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She released herself. “If you think that&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I don’t. I almost wish I did. It would be easier, I mean.” He broke off
+      incoherently. “I believe your Aunt Virginia does, though. She somehow
+      connotes Hollingsworth and the Mediterranean.” He caught her hands again.
+      “Alexa&mdash;if we could manage a little hole somewhere out of town?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Could we?” she sighed, half yielding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “In one of those places where they make jokes about the mosquitoes,” he
+      pressed her. “Could you get on with one servant?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Could you get on without varnished boots?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Promise me you won’t go, then!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “What are you thinking of, Stephen?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I don’t know,” he stammered, the question giving unexpected form to his
+      intention. “It’s all in the air yet, of course; but I picked up a tip the
+      other day&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “You’re not speculating?” she cried, with a kind of superstitious terror.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Lord, no. This is a sure thing&mdash;I almost wish it wasn’t; I mean if I
+      can work it&mdash;” He had a sudden vision of the comprehensiveness of the
+      temptation. If only he had been less sure of Dinslow! His assurance gave
+      the situation the base element of safety.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I don’t understand you,” she faltered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Trust me, instead!” he adjured her, with sudden energy; and turning on
+      her abruptly, “If you go, you know, you go free,” he concluded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She drew back, paling a little. “Why do you make it harder for me?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “To make it easier for myself,” he retorted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">Glennard</span>, the next afternoon, leaving his office earlier than usual,
+      turned, on his way home, into one of the public libraries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had the place to himself at that closing hour, and the librarian was
+      able to give an undivided attention to his tentative request for letters&mdash;collections
+      of letters. The librarian suggested Walpole.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I meant women&mdash;women’s letters.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The librarian proffered Hannah More and Miss Martineau.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard cursed his own inarticulateness. “I mean letters to&mdash;to some
+      one person&mdash;a man; their husband&mdash;or&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ah,” said the inspired librarian, “Eloise and Abailard.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well&mdash;something a little nearer, perhaps,” said Glennard, with
+      lightness. “Didn’t Merimee&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “The lady’s letters, in that case, were not published.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Of course not,” said Glennard, vexed at his blunder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “There are George Sand’s letters to Flaubert.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ah!” Glennard hesitated. “Was she&mdash;were they&mdash;?” He chafed at
+      his own ignorance of the sentimental by-paths of literature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “If you want love-letters, perhaps some of the French eighteenth century
+      correspondences might suit you better&mdash;Mlle. Aisse or Madame de
+      Sabran&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Glennard insisted. “I want something modern&mdash;English or American.
+      I want to look something up,” he lamely concluded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The librarian could only suggest George Eliot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well, give me some of the French things, then&mdash;and I’ll have
+      Merimee’s letters. It was the woman who published them, wasn’t it?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He caught up his armful, transferring it, on the doorstep, to a cab which
+      carried him to his rooms. He dined alone, hurriedly, at a small restaurant
+      near by, and returned at once to his books.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Late that night, as he undressed, he wondered what contemptible impulse
+      had forced from him his last words to Alexa Trent. It was bad enough to
+      interfere with the girl’s chances by hanging about her to the obvious
+      exclusion of other men, but it was worse to seem to justify his weakness
+      by dressing up the future in delusive ambiguities. He saw himself sinking
+      from depth to depth of sentimental cowardice in his reluctance to renounce
+      his hold on her; and it filled him with self-disgust to think that the
+      highest feeling of which he supposed himself capable was blent with such
+      base elements.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His awakening was hardly cheered by the sight of her writing. He tore her
+      note open and took in the few lines&mdash;she seldom exceeded the first
+      page&mdash;with the lucidity of apprehension that is the forerunner of
+      evil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “My aunt sails on Saturday and I must give her my answer the day after
+      to-morrow. Please don’t come till then&mdash;I want to think the question
+      over by myself. I know I ought to go. Won’t you help me to be reasonable?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was settled, then. Well, he would be reasonable; he wouldn’t stand in
+      her way; he would let her go. For two years he had been living some other,
+      luckier man’s life; the time had come when he must drop back into his own.
+      He no longer tried to look ahead, to grope his way through the endless
+      labyrinth of his material difficulties; a sense of dull resignation closed
+      in on him like a fog.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Hullo, Glennard!” a voice said, as an electric-car, late that afternoon,
+      dropped him at an uptown corner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked up and met the interrogative smile of Barton Flamel, who stood
+      on the curbstone watching the retreating car with the eye of a man
+      philosophic enough to remember that it will be followed by another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard felt his usual impulse of pleasure at meeting Flamel; but it was
+      not in this case curtailed by the reaction of contempt that habitually
+      succeeded it. Probably even the few men who had known Flamel since his
+      youth could have given no good reason for the vague mistrust that he
+      inspired. Some people are judged by their actions, others by their ideas;
+      and perhaps the shortest way of defining Flamel is to say that his
+      well-known leniency of view was vaguely divined to include himself. Simple
+      minds may have resented the discovery that his opinions were based on his
+      perceptions; but there was certainly no more definite charge against him
+      than that implied in the doubt as to how he would behave in an emergency,
+      and his company was looked upon as one of those mildly unwholesome
+      dissipations to which the prudent may occasionally yield. It now offered
+      itself to Glennard as an easy escape from the obsession of moral problems,
+      which somehow could no more be worn in Flamel’s presence than a surplice
+      in the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Where are you going? To the club?” Flamel asked; adding, as the younger
+      man assented, “Why not come to my studio instead? You’ll see one bore
+      instead of twenty.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The apartment which Flamel described as his studio showed, as its one
+      claim to the designation, a perennially empty easel; the rest of its space
+      being filled with the evidences of a comprehensive dilettanteism. Against
+      this background, which seemed the visible expression of its owner’s
+      intellectual tolerance, rows of fine books detached themselves with a
+      prominence, showing them to be Flamel’s chief care.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard glanced with the eye of untrained curiosity at the lines of
+      warm-toned morocco, while his host busied himself with the uncorking of
+      Apollinaris.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “You’ve got a splendid lot of books,” he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “They’re fairly decent,” the other assented, in the curt tone of the
+      collector who will not talk of his passion for fear of talking of nothing
+      else; then, as Glennard, his hands in his pockets, began to stroll
+      perfunctorily down the long line of bookcases&mdash;“Some men,” Flamel
+      irresistibly added, “think of books merely as tools, others as tooling.
+      I’m between the two; there are days when I use them as scenery, other days
+      when I want them as society; so that, as you see, my library represents a
+      makeshift compromise between looks and brains, and the collectors look
+      down on me almost as much as the students.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard, without answering, was mechanically taking one book after
+      another from the shelves. His hands slipped curiously over the smooth
+      covers and the noiseless subsidence of opening pages. Suddenly he came on
+      a thin volume of faded manuscript.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “What’s this?” he asked, with a listless sense of wonder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ah, you’re at my manuscript shelf. I’ve been going in for that sort of
+      thing lately.” Flamel came up and looked over his shoulders. “That’s a bit
+      of Stendhal&mdash;one of the Italian stories&mdash;and here are some
+      letters of Balzac to Madame Commanville.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard took the book with sudden eagerness. “Who was Madame
+      Commanville?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “His sister.” He was conscious that Flamel was looking at him with the
+      smile that was like an interrogation point. “I didn’t know you cared for
+      this kind of thing.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I don’t&mdash;at least I’ve never had the chance. Have you many
+      collections of letters?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Lord, no&mdash;very few. I’m just beginning, and most of the interesting
+      ones are out of my reach. Here’s a queer little collection, though&mdash;the
+      rarest thing I’ve got&mdash;half a dozen of Shelley’s letters to Harriet
+      Westbrook. I had a devil of a time getting them&mdash;a lot of collectors
+      were after them.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard, taking the volume from his hand, glanced with a kind of
+      repugnance at the interleaving of yellow cris-crossed sheets. “She was the
+      one who drowned herself, wasn’t she?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Flamel nodded. “I suppose that little episode adds about fifty per cent.
+      to their value,” he said, meditatively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard laid the book down. He wondered why he had joined Flamel. He was
+      in no humor to be amused by the older man’s talk, and a recrudescence of
+      personal misery rose about him like an icy tide.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I believe I must take myself off,” he said. “I’d forgotten an
+      engagement.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned to go; but almost at the same moment he was conscious of a
+      duality of intention wherein his apparent wish to leave revealed itself as
+      a last effort of the will against the overmastering desire to stay and
+      unbosom himself to Flamel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The older man, as though divining the conflict, laid a detaining pressure
+      on his arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Won’t the engagement keep? Sit down and try one of these cigars. I don’t
+      often have the luck of seeing you here.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I’m rather driven just now,” said Glennard, vaguely. He found himself
+      seated again, and Flamel had pushed to his side a low stand holding a
+      bottle of Apollinaris and a decanter of cognac.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Flamel, thrown back in his capacious arm-chair, surveyed him through a
+      cloud of smoke with the comfortable tolerance of the man to whom no
+      inconsistencies need be explained. Connivance was implicit in the air. It
+      was the kind of atmosphere in which the outrageous loses its edge.
+      Glennard felt a gradual relaxing of his nerves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I suppose one has to pay a lot for letters like that?” he heard himself
+      asking, with a glance in the direction of the volume he had laid aside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, so-so&mdash;depends on circumstances.” Flamel viewed him
+      thoughtfully. “Are you thinking of collecting?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard laughed. “Lord, no. The other way round.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Selling?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, I hardly know. I was thinking of a poor chap&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Flamel filled the pause with a nod of interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “A poor chap I used to know&mdash;who died&mdash;he died last year&mdash;and
+      who left me a lot of letters, letters he thought a great deal of&mdash;he
+      was fond of me and left ’em to me outright, with the idea, I suppose, that
+      they might benefit me somehow&mdash;I don’t know&mdash;I’m not much up on
+      such things&mdash;” he reached his hand to the tall glass his host had
+      filled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “A collection of autograph letters, eh? Any big names?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, only one name. They’re all letters written to him&mdash;by one
+      person, you understand; a woman, in fact&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, a woman,” said Flamel, negligently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard was nettled by his obvious loss of interest. “I rather think
+      they’d attract a good deal of notice if they were published.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Flamel still looked uninterested. “Love-letters, I suppose?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, just&mdash;the letters a woman would write to a man she knew well.
+      They were tremendous friends, he and she.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “And she wrote a clever letter?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Clever? It was Margaret Aubyn.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A great silence filled the room. It seemed to Glennard that the words had
+      burst from him as blood gushes from a wound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Great Scott!” said Flamel, sitting up. “A collection of Margaret Aubyn’s
+      letters? Did you say <i>you</i> had them?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “They were left me&mdash;by my friend.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I see. Was he&mdash;well, no matter. You’re to be congratulated, at any
+      rate. What are you going to do with them?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard stood up with a sense of weariness in all his bones. “Oh, I don’t
+      know. I haven’t thought much about it. I just happened to see that some
+      fellow was writing her life&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Joslin; yes. You didn’t think of giving them to him?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard had lounged across the room and stood staring up at a bronze
+      Bacchus who drooped his garlanded head above the pediment of an Italian
+      cabinet. “What ought I to do? You’re just the fellow to advise me.” He
+      felt the blood in his cheek as he spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Flamel sat with meditative eye. “What do you <i>want</i> to do with them?” he
+      asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I want to publish them,” said Glennard, swinging round with sudden energy&mdash;“If
+      I can&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “If you can? They’re yours, you say?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “They’re mine fast enough. There’s no one to prevent&mdash;I mean there
+      are no restrictions&mdash;” he was arrested by the sense that these
+      accumulated proofs of impunity might precisely stand as the strongest
+      check on his action.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “And Mrs. Aubyn had no family, I believe?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “No.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Then I don’t see who’s to interfere,” said Flamel, studying his
+      cigar-tip.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard had turned his unseeing stare on an ecstatic Saint Catherine
+      framed in tarnished gilding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “It’s just this way,” he began again, with an effort. “When letters are as
+      personal as&mdash;as these of my friend’s.... Well, I don’t mind telling
+      you that the cash would make a heap of difference to me; such a lot that
+      it rather obscures my judgment&mdash;the fact is if I could lay my hand on
+      a few thousands now I could get into a big thing, and without appreciable
+      risk; and I’d like to know whether you think I’d be justified&mdash;under
+      the circumstances....” He paused, with a dry throat. It seemed to him at
+      the moment that it would be impossible for him ever to sink lower in his
+      own estimation. He was in truth less ashamed of weighing the temptation
+      than of submitting his scruples to a man like Flamel, and affecting to
+      appeal to sentiments of delicacy on the absence of which he had
+      consciously reckoned. But he had reached a point where each word seemed to
+      compel another, as each wave in a stream is forced forward by the pressure
+      behind it; and before Flamel could speak he had faltered out&mdash;“You
+      don’t think people could say... could criticise the man....”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But the man’s dead, isn’t he?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “He’s dead&mdash;yes; but can I assume the responsibility without&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Flamel hesitated; and almost immediately Glennard’s scruples gave way to
+      irritation. If at this hour Flamel were to affect an inopportune
+      reluctance&mdash;!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The older man’s answer reassured him. “Why need you assume any
+      responsibility? Your name won’t appear, of course; and as to your
+      friend’s, I don’t see why his should, either. He wasn’t a celebrity
+      himself, I suppose?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “No, no.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Then the letters can be addressed to Mr. Blank. Doesn’t that make it all
+      right?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard’s hesitation revived. “For the public, yes. But I don’t see that
+      it alters the case for me. The question is, ought I to publish them at
+      all?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Of course you ought to.” Flamel spoke with invigorating emphasis. “I
+      doubt if you’d be justified in keeping them back. Anything of Margaret
+      Aubyn’s is more or less public property by this time. She’s too great for
+      any one of us. I was only wondering how you could use them to the best
+      advantage&mdash;to yourself, I mean. How many are there?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, a lot; perhaps a hundred&mdash;I haven’t counted. There may be
+      more....”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Gad! What a haul! When were they written?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I don’t know&mdash;that is&mdash;they corresponded for years. What’s the
+      odds?” He moved toward his hat with a vague impulse of flight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “It all counts,” said Flamel, imperturbably. “A long correspondence&mdash;one,
+      I mean, that covers a great deal of time&mdash;is obviously worth more
+      than if the same number of letters had been written within a year. At any
+      rate, you won’t give them to Joslin? They’d fill a book, wouldn’t they?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I suppose so. I don’t know how much it takes to fill a book.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Not love-letters, you say?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Why?” flashed from Glennard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, nothing&mdash;only the big public is sentimental, and if they <i>were</i>&mdash;why,
+      you could get any money for Margaret Aubyn’s love-letters.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard was silent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Are the letters interesting in themselves? I mean apart from the
+      association with her name?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I’m no judge.” Glennard took up his hat and thrust himself into his
+      overcoat. “I dare say I sha’n’t do anything about it. And, Flamel&mdash;you
+      won’t mention this to anyone?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Lord, no. Well, I congratulate you. You’ve got a big thing.” Flamel was
+      smiling at him from the hearth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard, on the threshold, forced a response to the smile, while he
+      questioned with loitering indifference&mdash;“Financially, eh?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Rather; I should say so.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard’s hand lingered on the knob. “How much&mdash;should you say? You
+      know about such things.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, I should have to see the letters; but I should say&mdash;well, if
+      you’ve got enough to fill a book and they’re fairly readable, and the book
+      is brought out at the right time&mdash;say ten thousand down from the
+      publisher, and possibly one or two more in royalties. If you got the
+      publishers bidding against each other you might do even better; but of
+      course I’m talking in the dark.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Of course,” said Glennard, with sudden dizziness. His hand had slipped
+      from the knob and he stood staring down at the exotic spirals of the
+      Persian rug beneath his feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I’d have to see the letters,” Flamel repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Of course&mdash;you’d have to see them....” Glennard stammered; and,
+      without turning, he flung over his shoulder an inarticulate “Good-by....”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V
+    </h2>
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">The</span> little house, as Glennard strolled up to it between the trees, seemed
+      no more than a gay tent pitched against the sunshine. It had the crispness
+      of a freshly starched summer gown, and the geraniums on the veranda
+      bloomed as simultaneously as the flowers in a bonnet. The garden was
+      prospering absurdly. Seed they had sown at random&mdash;amid laughing
+      counter-charges of incompetence&mdash;had shot up in fragrant defiance of
+      their blunders. He smiled to see the clematis unfolding its punctual wings
+      about the porch. The tiny lawn was smooth as a shaven cheek, and a crimson
+      rambler mounted to the nursery-window of a baby who never cried. A breeze
+      shook the awning above the tea-table, and his wife, as he drew near, could
+      be seen bending above a kettle that was just about to boil. So vividly did
+      the whole scene suggest the painted bliss of a stage setting, that it
+      would have been hardly surprising to see her step forward among the
+      flowers and trill out her virtuous happiness from the veranda-rail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The stale heat of the long day in town, the dusty promiscuity of the
+      suburban train were now but the requisite foil to an evening of scented
+      breezes and tranquil talk. They had been married more than a year, and
+      each home-coming still reflected the freshness of their first day
+      together. If, indeed, their happiness had a flaw, it was in resembling too
+      closely the bright impermanence of their surroundings. Their love as yet
+      was but the gay tent of holiday-makers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His wife looked up with a smile. The country life suited her, and her
+      beauty had gained depth from a stillness in which certain faces might have
+      grown opaque.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Are you very tired?” she asked, pouring his tea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Just enough to enjoy this.” He rose from the chair in which he had thrown
+      himself and bent over the tray for his cream. “You’ve had a visitor?” he
+      commented, noticing a half-empty cup beside her own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Only Mr. Flamel,” she said, indifferently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Flamel? Again?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She answered without show of surprise. “He left just now. His yacht is
+      down at Laurel Bay and he borrowed a trap of the Dreshams to drive over
+      here.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard made no comment, and she went on, leaning her head back against
+      the cushions of her bamboo-seat, “He wants us to go for a sail with him
+      next Sunday.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard meditatively stirred his tea. He was trying to think of the most
+      natural and unartificial thing to say, and his voice seemed to come from
+      the outside, as though he were speaking behind a marionette. “Do you want
+      to?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Just as you please,” she said, compliantly. No affectation of
+      indifference could have been as baffling as her compliance. Glennard, of
+      late, was beginning to feel that the surface which, a year ago, he had
+      taken for a sheet of clear glass, might, after all, be a mirror reflecting
+      merely his own conception of what lay behind it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Do you like Flamel?” he suddenly asked; to which, still engaged with her
+      tea, she returned the feminine answer&mdash;“I thought you did.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I do, of course,” he agreed, vexed at his own incorrigible tendency to
+      magnify Flamel’s importance by hovering about the topic. “A sail would be
+      rather jolly; let’s go.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She made no reply and he drew forth the rolled-up evening papers which he
+      had thrust into his pocket on leaving the train. As he smoothed them out
+      his own countenance seemed to undergo the same process. He ran his eye
+      down the list of stocks and Flamel’s importunate personality receded
+      behind the rows of figures pushing forward into notice like so many
+      bearers of good news. Glennard’s investments were flowering like his
+      garden: the dryest shares blossomed into dividends, and a golden harvest
+      awaited his sickle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He glanced at his wife with the tranquil air of the man who digests good
+      luck as naturally as the dry ground absorbs a shower. “Things are looking
+      uncommonly well. I believe we shall be able to go to town for two or three
+      months next winter if we can find something cheap.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She smiled luxuriously: it was pleasant to be able to say, with an air of
+      balancing relative advantages, “Really, on the baby’s account I shall be
+      almost sorry; but if we do go, there’s Kate Erskine’s house... she’ll let
+      us have it for almost nothing....”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well, write her about it,” he recommended, his eyes travelling on in
+      search of the weather report. He had turned to the wrong page; and
+      suddenly a line of black characters leapt out at him as from an ambush.
+    </p>
+<div class="blk">
+    <p class="c">
+      “‘Margaret Aubyn’s Letters.’</p>
+<p> Two volumes. Out to-day. First edition of
+      five thousand sold out before leaving the press. Second edition ready next
+      week. The Book Of The Year....”
+     </p>
+</div>
+    <p>
+      He looked up stupidly. His wife still sat with her head thrown back, her
+      pure profile detached against the cushions. She was smiling a little over
+      the prospect his last words had opened. Behind her head shivers of sun and
+      shade ran across the striped awning. A row of maples and a privet hedge
+      hid their neighbor’s gables, giving them undivided possession of their
+      leafy half-acre; and life, a moment before, had been like their plot of
+      ground, shut off, hedged in from importunities, impenetrably his and hers.
+      Now it seemed to him that every maple-leaf, every privet-bud, was a
+      relentless human gaze, pressing close upon their privacy. It was as though
+      they sat in a brightly lit room, uncurtained from a darkness full of
+      hostile watchers.... His wife still smiled; and her unconsciousness of
+      danger seemed, in some horrible way, to put her beyond the reach of
+      rescue....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had not known that it would be like this. After the first odious weeks,
+      spent in preparing the letters for publication, in submitting them to
+      Flamel, and in negotiating with the publishers, the transaction had
+      dropped out of his consciousness into that unvisited limbo to which we
+      relegate the deeds we would rather not have done but have no notion of
+      undoing. From the moment he had obtained Miss Trent’s promise not to sail
+      with her aunt he had tried to imagine himself irrevocably committed. After
+      that, he argued, his first duty was to her&mdash;she had become his
+      conscience. The sum obtained from the publishers by Flamel’s adroit
+      manipulations and opportunely transferred to Dinslow’s successful venture,
+      already yielded a return which, combined with Glennard’s professional
+      earnings, took the edge of compulsion from their way of living, making it
+      appear the expression of a graceful preference for simplicity. It was the
+      mitigated poverty which can subscribe to a review or two and have a few
+      flowers on the dinner-table. And already in a small way Glennard was
+      beginning to feel the magnetic quality of prosperity. Clients who had
+      passed his door in the hungry days sought it out now that it bore the name
+      of a successful man. It was understood that a small inheritance, cleverly
+      invested, was the source of his fortune; and there was a feeling that a
+      man who could do so well for himself was likely to know how to turn over
+      other people’s money.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it was in the more intimate reward of his wife’s happiness that
+      Glennard tasted the full flavor of success. Coming out of conditions so
+      narrow that those he offered her seemed spacious, she fitted into her new
+      life without any of those manifest efforts at adjustment that are as sore
+      to a husband’s pride as the critical rearrangement of the bridal
+      furniture. She had given him, instead, the delicate pleasure of watching
+      her expand like a sea-creature restored to its element, stretching out the
+      atrophied tentacles of girlish vanity and enjoyment to the rising tide of
+      opportunity. And somehow&mdash;in the windowless inner cell of his
+      consciousness where self-criticism cowered&mdash;Glennard’s course seemed
+      justified by its merely material success. How could such a crop of
+      innocent blessedness have sprung from tainted soil?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now he had the injured sense of a man entrapped into a disadvantageous
+      bargain. He had not known it would be like this; and a dull anger gathered
+      at his heart. Anger against whom? Against his wife, for not knowing what
+      he suffered? Against Flamel, for being the unconscious instrument of his
+      wrong-doing? Or against that mute memory to which his own act had suddenly
+      given a voice of accusation? Yes, that was it; and his punishment
+      henceforth would be the presence, the unescapable presence, of the woman
+      he had so persistently evaded. She would always be there now. It was as
+      though he had married her instead of the other. It was what she had always
+      wanted&mdash;to be with him&mdash;and she had gained her point at last....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sprang up, as though in an impulse of flight.... The sudden movement
+      lifted his wife’s lids, and she asked, in the incurious voice of the woman
+      whose life is enclosed in a magic circle of prosperity&mdash;“Any news?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “No&mdash;none&mdash;” he said, roused to a sense of immediate peril. The
+      papers lay scattered at his feet&mdash;what if she were to see them? He
+      stretched his arm to gather them up, but his next thought showed him the
+      futility of such concealment. The same advertisement would appear every
+      day, for weeks to come, in every newspaper; how could he prevent her
+      seeing it? He could not always be hiding the papers from her.... Well, and
+      what if she did see it? It would signify nothing to her, the chances were
+      that she would never even read the book.... As she ceased to be an element
+      of fear in his calculations the distance between them seemed to lessen and
+      he took her again, as it were, into the circle of his conjugal
+      protection.... Yet a moment before he had almost hated her!... He laughed
+      aloud at his senseless terrors.... He was off his balance, decidedly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “What are you laughing at?” she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He explained, elaborately, that he was laughing at the recollection of an
+      old woman in the train, an old woman with a lot of bundles, who couldn’t
+      find her ticket.... But somehow, in the telling, the humor of the story
+      seemed to evaporate, and he felt the conventionality of her smile. He
+      glanced at his watch, “Isn’t it time to dress?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She rose with serene reluctance. “It’s a pity to go in. The garden looks
+      so lovely.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They lingered side by side, surveying their domain. There was not space in
+      it, at this hour, for the shadow of the elm-tree in the angle of the
+      hedge; it crossed the lawn, cut the flower-border in two, and ran up the
+      side of the house to the nursery window. She bent to flick a caterpillar
+      from the honey-suckle; then, as they turned indoors, “If we mean to go on
+      the yacht next Sunday,” she suggested, “oughtn’t you to let Mr. Flamel
+      know?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard’s exasperation deflected suddenly. “Of course I shall let him
+      know. You always seem to imply that I’m going to do something rude to
+      Flamel.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The words reverberated through her silence; she had a way of thus leaving
+      one space in which to contemplate one’s folly at arm’s length. Glennard
+      turned on his heel and went upstairs. As he dropped into a chair before
+      his dressing-table he said to himself that in the last hour he had sounded
+      the depths of his humiliation and that the lowest dregs of it, the very
+      bottom-slime, was the hateful necessity of having always, as long as the
+      two men lived, to be civil to Barton Flamel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">The</span> week in town had been sultry, and the men, in the Sunday emancipation
+      of white flannel and duck, filled the deck-chairs of the yacht with their
+      outstretched apathy, following, through a mist of cigarette-smoke, the
+      flitting inconsequences of the women. The party was a small one&mdash;Flamel
+      had few intimate friends&mdash;but composed of more heterogeneous atoms
+      than the little pools into which society usually runs. The reaction from
+      the chief episode of his earlier life had bred in Glennard an uneasy
+      distaste for any kind of personal saliency. Cleverness was useful in
+      business; but in society it seemed to him as futile as the sham cascades
+      formed by a stream that might have been used to drive a mill. He liked the
+      collective point of view that goes with the civilized uniformity of
+      dress-clothes, and his wife’s attitude implied the same preference; yet
+      they found themselves slipping more and more into Flamel’s intimacy. Alexa
+      had once or twice said that she enjoyed meeting clever people; but her
+      enjoyment took the negative form of a smiling receptivity; and Glennard
+      felt a growing preference for the kind of people who have their thinking
+      done for them by the community.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Still, the deck of the yacht was a pleasant refuge from the heat on shore,
+      and his wife’s profile, serenely projected against the changing blue, lay
+      on his retina like a cool hand on the nerves. He had never been more
+      impressed by the kind of absoluteness that lifted her beauty above the
+      transient effects of other women, making the most harmonious face seem an
+      accidental collocation of features.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ladies who directly suggested this comparison were of a kind
+      accustomed to take similar risks with more gratifying results. Mrs.
+      Armiger had in fact long been the triumphant alternative of those who
+      couldn’t “see” Alexa Glennard’s looks; and Mrs. Touchett’s claims to
+      consideration were founded on that distribution of effects which is the
+      wonder of those who admire a highly cultivated country. The third lady of
+      the trio which Glennard’s fancy had put to such unflattering uses, was
+      bound by circumstances to support the claims of the other two. This was
+      Mrs. Dresham, the wife of the editor of the <i>Radiator</i>. Mrs. Dresham was a
+      lady who had rescued herself from social obscurity by assuming the role of
+      her husband’s exponent and interpreter; and Dresham’s leisure being
+      devoted to the cultivation of remarkable women, his wife’s attitude
+      committed her to the public celebration of their remarkableness. For the
+      conceivable tedium of this duty, Mrs. Dresham was repaid by the fact that
+      there were people who took <i>her</i> for a remarkable woman; and who in turn
+      probably purchased similar distinction with the small change of her
+      reflected importance. As to the other ladies of the party, they were
+      simply the wives of some of the men&mdash;the kind of women who expect to
+      be talked to collectively and to have their questions left unanswered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Armiger, the latest embodiment of Dresham’s instinct for the
+      remarkable, was an innocent beauty who for years had distilled dulness
+      among a set of people now self-condemned by their inability to appreciate
+      her. Under Dresham’s tutelage she had developed into a “thoughtful woman,”
+       who read his leaders in the <i>Radiator</i> and bought the books he recommended.
+      When a new novel appeared, people wanted to know what Mrs. Armiger thought
+      of it; and a young gentleman who had made a trip in Touraine had recently
+      inscribed to her the wide-margined result of his explorations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard, leaning back with his head against the rail and a slit of
+      fugitive blue between his half-closed lids, vaguely wished she wouldn’t
+      spoil the afternoon by making people talk; though he reduced his annoyance
+      to the minimum by not listening to what was said, there remained a latent
+      irritation against the general futility of words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His wife’s gift of silence seemed to him the most vivid commentary on the
+      clumsiness of speech as a means of intercourse, and his eyes had turned to
+      her in renewed appreciation of this finer faculty when Mrs. Armiger’s
+      voice abruptly brought home to him the underrated potentialities of
+      language.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “You’ve read them, of course, Mrs. Glennard?” he heard her ask; and, in
+      reply to Alexa’s vague interrogation&mdash;“Why, the ‘Aubyn Letters’&mdash;it’s
+      the only book people are talking of this week.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Dresham immediately saw her advantage. “You <i>haven’t</i> read them? How
+      very extraordinary! As Mrs. Armiger says, the book’s in the air; one
+      breathes it in like the influenza.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard sat motionless, watching his wife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Perhaps it hasn’t reached the suburbs yet,” she said, with her unruffled
+      smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, <i>do</i> let me come to you, then!” Mrs. Touchett cried; “anything for a
+      change of air! I’m positively sick of the book and I can’t put it down.
+      Can’t you sail us beyond its reach, Mr. Flamel?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Flamel shook his head. “Not even with this breeze. Literature travels
+      faster than steam nowadays. And the worst of it is that we can’t any of us
+      give up reading; it’s as insidious as a vice and as tiresome as a virtue.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I believe it <i>is</i> a vice, almost, to read such a book as the ‘Letters,’”
+       said Mrs. Touchett. “It’s the woman’s soul, absolutely torn up by the
+      roots&mdash;her whole self laid bare; and to a man who evidently didn’t
+      care; who couldn’t have cared. I don’t mean to read another line; it’s too
+      much like listening at a keyhole.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But if she wanted it published?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Wanted it? How do we know she did?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Why, I heard she’d left the letters to the man&mdash;whoever he is&mdash;with
+      directions that they should be published after his death&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I don’t believe it,” Mrs. Touchett declared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “He’s dead then, is he?” one of the men asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Why, you don’t suppose if he were alive he could ever hold up his head
+      again, with these letters being read by everybody?” Mrs. Touchett
+      protested. “It must have been horrible enough to know they’d been written
+      to him; but to publish them! No man could have done it and no woman could
+      have told him to&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, come, come,” Dresham judicially interposed; “after all, they’re not
+      love-letters.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “No&mdash;that’s the worst of it; they’re unloved letters,” Mrs. Touchett
+      retorted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Then, obviously, she needn’t have written them; whereas the man, poor
+      devil, could hardly help receiving them.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Perhaps he counted on the public to save him the trouble of reading
+      them,” said young Hartly, who was in the cynical stage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Armiger turned her reproachful loveliness to Dresham. “From the way
+      you defend him, I believe you know who he is.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Everyone looked at Dresham, and his wife smiled with the superior air of
+      the woman who is in her husband’s professional secrets. Dresham shrugged
+      his shoulders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “What have I said to defend him?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “You called him a poor devil&mdash;you pitied him.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “A man who could let Margaret Aubyn write to him in that way? Of course I
+      pity him.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Then you <i>must</i> know who he is,” cried Mrs. Armiger, with a triumphant air
+      of penetration.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hartly and Flamel laughed and Dresham shook his head. “No one knows; not
+      even the publishers; so they tell me at least.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “So they tell you to tell us,” Hartly astutely amended; and Mrs. Armiger
+      added, with the appearance of carrying the argument a point farther, “But
+      even if <i>he’s</i> dead and <i>she’s</i> dead, somebody must have given the letters to
+      the publishers.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “A little bird, probably,” said Dresham, smiling indulgently on her
+      deduction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “A little bird of prey then&mdash;a vulture, I should say&mdash;” another
+      man interpolated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, I’m not with you there,” said Dresham, easily. “Those letters
+      belonged to the public.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “How can any letters belong to the public that weren’t written to the
+      public?” Mrs. Touchett interposed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well, these were, in a sense. A personality as big as Margaret Aubyn’s
+      belongs to the world. Such a mind is part of the general fund of thought.
+      It’s the penalty of greatness&mdash;one becomes a monument historique.
+      Posterity pays the cost of keeping one up, but on condition that one is
+      always open to the public.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I don’t see that that exonerates the man who gives up the keys of the
+      sanctuary, as it were.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Who <i>was</i> he?” another voice inquired.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Who was he? Oh, nobody, I fancy&mdash;the letter-box, the slit in the
+      wall through which the letters passed to posterity....”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But she never meant them for posterity!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “A woman shouldn’t write such letters if she doesn’t mean them to be
+      published....”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “She shouldn’t write them to such a man!” Mrs. Touchett scornfully
+      corrected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I never keep letters,” said Mrs. Armiger, under the obvious impression
+      that she was contributing a valuable point to the discussion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a general laugh, and Flamel, who had not spoken, said, lazily,
+      “You women are too incurably subjective. I venture to say that most men
+      would see in those letters merely their immense literary value, their
+      significance as documents. The personal side doesn’t count where there’s
+      so much else.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, we all know you haven’t any principles,” Mrs. Armiger declared; and
+      Alexa Glennard, lifting an indolent smile, said: “I shall never write you
+      a love-letter, Mr. Flamel.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard moved away impatiently. Such talk was as tedious as the buzzing
+      of gnats. He wondered why his wife had wanted to drag him on such a
+      senseless expedition.... He hated Flamel’s crowd&mdash;and what business
+      had Flamel himself to interfere in that way, standing up for the
+      publication of the letters as though Glennard needed his defence?...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard turned his head and saw that Flamel had drawn a seat to Alexa’s
+      elbow and was speaking to her in a low tone. The other groups had
+      scattered, straying in twos along the deck. It came over Glennard that he
+      should never again be able to see Flamel speaking to his wife without the
+      sense of sick mistrust that now loosened his joints....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alexa, the next morning, over their early breakfast, surprised her husband
+      by an unexpected request.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Will you bring me those letters from town?” she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “What letters?” he said, putting down his cup. He felt himself as
+      helplessly vulnerable as a man who is lunged at in the dark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Mrs. Aubyn’s. The book they were all talking about yesterday.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard, carefully measuring his second cup of tea, said, with
+      deliberation, “I didn’t know you cared about that sort of thing.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was, in fact, not a great reader, and a new book seldom reached her
+      till it was, so to speak, on the home stretch; but she replied, with a
+      gentle tenacity, “I think it would interest me because I read her life
+      last year.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Her life? Where did you get that?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Someone lent it to me when it came out&mdash;Mr. Flamel, I think.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His first impulse was to exclaim, “Why the devil do you borrow books of
+      Flamel? I can buy you all you want&mdash;” but he felt himself
+      irresistibly forced into an attitude of smiling compliance. “Flamel always
+      has the newest books going, hasn’t he? You must be careful, by the way,
+      about returning what he lends you. He’s rather crotchety about his
+      library.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, I’m always very careful,” she said, with a touch of competence that
+      struck him; and she added, as he caught up his hat: “Don’t forget the
+      letters.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Why had she asked for the book? Was her sudden wish to see it the result
+      of some hint of Flamel’s? The thought turned Glennard sick, but he
+      preserved sufficient lucidity to tell himself, a moment later, that his
+      last hope of self-control would be lost if he yielded to the temptation of
+      seeing a hidden purpose in everything she said and did. How much Flamel
+      guessed, he had no means of divining; nor could he predicate, from what he
+      knew of the man, to what use his inferences might be put. The very
+      qualities that had made Flamel a useful adviser made him the most
+      dangerous of accomplices. Glennard felt himself agrope among alien forces
+      that his own act had set in motion....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alexa was a woman of few requirements; but her wishes, even in trifles,
+      had a definiteness that distinguished them from the fluid impulses of her
+      kind. He knew that, having once asked for the book, she would not forget
+      it; and he put aside, as an ineffectual expedient, his momentary idea of
+      applying for it at the circulating library and telling her that all the
+      copies were out. If the book was to be bought it had better be bought at
+      once. He left his office earlier than usual and turned in at the first
+      book-shop on his way to the train. The show-window was stacked with
+      conspicuously lettered volumes. “Margaret Aubyn” flashed back at him in
+      endless repetition. He plunged into the shop and came on a counter where
+      the name reiterated itself on row after row of bindings. It seemed to have
+      driven the rest of literature to the back shelves. He caught up a copy,
+      tossing the money to an astonished clerk who pursued him to the door with
+      the unheeded offer to wrap up the volumes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the street he was seized with a sudden apprehension. What if he were to
+      meet Flamel? The thought was intolerable. He called a cab and drove
+      straight to the station where, amid the palm-leaf fans of a perspiring
+      crowd, he waited a long half-hour for his train to start.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had thrust a volume in either pocket and in the train he dared not draw
+      them out; but the detested words leaped at him from the folds of the
+      evening paper. The air seemed full of Margaret Aubyn’s name. The motion of
+      the train set it dancing up and down on the page of a magazine that a man
+      in front of him was reading....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the door he was told that Mrs. Glennard was still out, and he went
+      upstairs to his room and dragged the books from his pocket. They lay on
+      the table before him like live things that he feared to touch.... At
+      length he opened the first volume. A familiar letter sprang out at him,
+      each word quickened by its glaring garb of type. The little broken phrases
+      fled across the page like wounded animals in the open.... It was a
+      horrible sight.... A battue of helpless things driven savagely out of
+      shelter. He had not known it would be like this....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He understood now that, at the moment of selling the letters, he had
+      viewed the transaction solely as it affected himself: as an unfortunate
+      blemish on an otherwise presentable record. He had scarcely considered the
+      act in relation to Margaret Aubyn; for death, if it hallows, also makes
+      innocuous. Glennard’s God was a god of the living, of the immediate, the
+      actual, the tangible; all his days he had lived in the presence of that
+      god, heedless of the divinities who, below the surface of our deeds and
+      passions, silently forge the fatal weapons of the dead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0007" id="link2H_4_0007">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">A knock</span> roused him and looking up he saw his wife. He met her glance in
+      silence, and she faltered out, “Are you ill?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The words restored his self-possession. “Ill? Of course not. They told me
+      you were out and I came upstairs.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The books lay between them on the table; he wondered when she would see
+      them. She lingered tentatively on the threshold, with the air of leaving
+      his explanation on his hands. She was not the kind of woman who could be
+      counted on to fortify an excuse by appearing to dispute it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Where have you been?” Glennard asked, moving forward so that he
+      obstructed her vision of the books.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I walked over to the Dreshams for tea.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I can’t think what you see in those people,” he said with a shrug;
+      adding, uncontrollably&mdash;“I suppose Flamel was there?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “No; he left on the yacht this morning.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      An answer so obstructing to the natural escape of his irritation left
+      Glennard with no momentary resource but that of strolling impatiently to
+      the window. As her eyes followed him they lit on the books.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ah, you’ve brought them! I’m so glad,” she exclaimed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He answered over his shoulder, “For a woman who never reads you make the
+      most astounding exceptions!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her smile was an exasperating concession to the probability that it had
+      been hot in town or that something had bothered him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Do you mean it’s not nice to want to read the book?” she asked. “It was
+      not nice to publish it, certainly; but after all, I’m not responsible for
+      that, am I?” She paused, and, as he made no answer, went on, still
+      smiling, “I do read sometimes, you know; and I’m very fond of Margaret
+      Aubyn’s books. I was reading ‘Pomegranate Seed’ when we first met. Don’t
+      you remember? It was then you told me all about her.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard had turned back into the room and stood staring at his wife. “All
+      about her?” he repeated, and with the words remembrance came to him. He
+      had found Miss Trent one afternoon with the novel in her hand, and moved
+      by the lover’s fatuous impulse to associate himself in some way with
+      whatever fills the mind of the beloved, had broken through his habitual
+      silence about the past. Rewarded by the consciousness of figuring
+      impressively in Miss Trent’s imagination he had gone on from one anecdote
+      to another, reviving dormant details of his old Hillbridge life, and
+      pasturing his vanity on the eagerness with which she received his
+      reminiscences of a being already clothed in the impersonality of
+      greatness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The incident had left no trace in his mind; but it sprang up now like an
+      old enemy, the more dangerous for having been forgotten. The instinct of
+      self-preservation&mdash;sometimes the most perilous that man can exercise&mdash;made
+      him awkwardly declare&mdash;“Oh, I used to see her at people’s houses,
+      that was all;” and her silence as usual leaving room for a multiplication
+      of blunders, he added, with increased indifference, “I simply can’t see
+      what you can find to interest you in such a book.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She seemed to consider this intently. “You’ve read it, then?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I glanced at it&mdash;I never read such things.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Is it true that she didn’t wish the letters to be published?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard felt the sudden dizziness of the mountaineer on a narrow ledge,
+      and with it the sense that he was lost if he looked more than a step
+      ahead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I’m sure I don’t know,” he said; then, summoning a smile, he passed his
+      hand through her arm. “I didn’t have tea at the Dreshams, you know; won’t
+      you give me some now?” he suggested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That evening Glennard, under pretext of work to be done, shut himself into
+      the small study opening off the drawing-room. As he gathered up his papers
+      he said to his wife: “You’re not going to sit indoors on such a night as
+      this? I’ll join you presently outside.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But she had drawn her armchair to the lamp. “I want to look at my book,”
+       she said, taking up the first volume of the “Letters.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard, with a shrug, withdrew into the study. “I’m going to shut the
+      door; I want to be quiet,” he explained from the threshold; and she nodded
+      without lifting her eyes from the book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sank into a chair, staring aimlessly at the outspread papers. How was
+      he to work, while on the other side of the door she sat with that volume
+      in her hand? The door did not shut her out&mdash;he saw her distinctly,
+      felt her close to him in a contact as painful as the pressure on a bruise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sensation was part of the general strangeness that made him feel like
+      a man waking from a long sleep to find himself in an unknown country among
+      people of alien tongue. We live in our own souls as in an unmapped region,
+      a few acres of which we have cleared for our habitation; while of the
+      nature of those nearest us we know but the boundaries that march with
+      ours. Of the points in his wife’s character not in direct contact with his
+      own, Glennard now discerned his ignorance; and the baffling sense of her
+      remoteness was intensified by the discovery that, in one way, she was
+      closer to him than ever before. As one may live for years in happy
+      unconsciousness of the possession of a sensitive nerve, he had lived
+      beside his wife unaware that her individuality had become a part of the
+      texture of his life, ineradicable as some growth on a vital organ; and he
+      now felt himself at once incapable of forecasting her judgment and
+      powerless to evade its effects.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To escape, the next morning, the confidences of the breakfast-table, he
+      went to town earlier than usual. His wife, who read slowly, was given to
+      talking over what she read, and at present his first object in life was to
+      postpone the inevitable discussion of the letters. This instinct of
+      protection in the afternoon, on his way uptown, guided him to the club in
+      search of a man who might be persuaded to come out to the country to dine.
+      The only man in the club was Flamel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard, as he heard himself almost involuntarily pressing Flamel to come
+      and dine, felt the full irony of the situation. To use Flamel as a shield
+      against his wife’s scrutiny was only a shade less humiliating than to
+      reckon on his wife as a defence against Flamel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He felt a contradictory movement of annoyance at the latter’s ready
+      acceptance, and the two men drove in silence to the station. As they
+      passed the bookstall in the waiting-room Flamel lingered a moment and the
+      eyes of both fell on Margaret Aubyn’s name, conspicuously displayed above
+      a counter stacked with the familiar volumes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “We shall be late, you know,” Glennard remonstrated, pulling out his
+      watch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Go ahead,” said Flamel, imperturbably. “I want to get something&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard turned on his heel and walked down the platform. Flamel rejoined
+      him with an innocent-looking magazine in his hand; but Glennard dared not
+      even glance at the cover, lest it should show the syllables he feared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The train was full of people they knew, and they were kept apart till it
+      dropped them at the little suburban station. As they strolled up the
+      shaded hill, Glennard talked volubly, pointing out the improvements in the
+      neighborhood, deploring the threatened approach of an electric railway,
+      and screening himself by a series of reflex adjustments from the imminent
+      risk of any allusion to the “Letters.” Flamel suffered his discourse with
+      the bland inattention that we accord to the affairs of someone else’s
+      suburb, and they reached the shelter of Alexa’s tea-table without a
+      perceptible turn toward the dreaded topic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The dinner passed off safely. Flamel, always at his best in Alexa’s
+      presence, gave her the kind of attention which is like a beaconing light
+      thrown on the speaker’s words: his answers seemed to bring out a latent
+      significance in her phrases, as the sculptor draws his statue from the
+      block. Glennard, under his wife’s composure, detected a sensibility to
+      this manoeuvre, and the discovery was like the lightning-flash across a
+      nocturnal landscape. Thus far these momentary illuminations had served
+      only to reveal the strangeness of the intervening country: each fresh
+      observation seemed to increase the sum-total of his ignorance. Her
+      simplicity of outline was more puzzling than a complex surface. One may
+      conceivably work one’s way through a labyrinth; but Alexa’s candor was
+      like a snow-covered plain where, the road once lost, there are no
+      landmarks to travel by.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dinner over, they returned to the veranda, where a moon, rising behind the
+      old elm, was combining with that complaisant tree a romantic enlargement
+      of their borders. Glennard had forgotten the cigars. He went to his study
+      to fetch them, and in passing through the drawing-room he saw the second
+      volume of the “Letters” lying open on his wife’s table. He picked up the
+      book and looked at the date of the letter she had been reading. It was one
+      of the last... he knew the few lines by heart. He dropped the book and
+      leaned against the wall. Why had he included that one among the others? Or
+      was it possible that now they would all seem like that...?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alexa’s voice came suddenly out of the dusk. “May Touchett was right&mdash;it
+      <i>is</i> like listening at a key-hole. I wish I hadn’t read it!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Flamel returned, in the leisurely tone of the man whose phrases are
+      punctuated by a cigarette, “It seems so to us, perhaps; but to another
+      generation the book will be a classic.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Then it ought not to have been published till it had become a classic.
+      It’s horrible, it’s degrading almost, to read the secrets of a woman one
+      might have known.” She added, in a lower tone, “Stephen <i>did</i> know her&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Did he?” came from Flamel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “He knew her very well, at Hillbridge, years ago. The book has made him
+      feel dreadfully... he wouldn’t read it... he didn’t want me to read it. I
+      didn’t understand at first, but now I can see how horribly disloyal it
+      must seem to him. It’s so much worse to surprise a friend’s secrets than a
+      stranger’s.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, Glennard’s such a sensitive chap,” Flamel said, easily; and Alexa
+      almost rebukingly rejoined, “If you’d known her I’m sure you’d feel as he
+      does....”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard stood motionless, overcome by the singular infelicity with which
+      he had contrived to put Flamel in possession of the two points most
+      damaging to his case: the fact that he had been a friend of Margaret
+      Aubyn’s, and that he had concealed from Alexa his share in the publication
+      of the letters. To a man of less than Flamel’s astuteness it must now be
+      clear to whom the letters were addressed; and the possibility once
+      suggested, nothing could be easier than to confirm it by discreet
+      research. An impulse of self-accusal drove Glennard to the window. Why not
+      anticipate betrayal by telling his wife the truth in Flamel’s presence? If
+      the man had a drop of decent feeling in him, such a course would be the
+      surest means of securing his silence; and above all, it would rid Glennard
+      of the necessity of defending himself against the perpetual criticism of
+      his wife’s belief in him....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The impulse was strong enough to carry him to the window; but there a
+      reaction of defiance set in. What had he done, after all, to need defence
+      and explanation? Both Dresham and Flamel had, in his hearing, declared the
+      publication of the letters to be not only justifiable but obligatory; and
+      if the disinterestedness of Flamel’s verdict might be questioned,
+      Dresham’s at least represented the impartial view of the man of letters.
+      As to Alexa’s words, they were simply the conventional utterance of the
+      “nice” woman on a question already decided for her by other “nice” women.
+      She had said the proper thing as mechanically as she would have put on the
+      appropriate gown or written the correct form of dinner-invitation.
+      Glennard had small faith in the abstract judgments of the other sex; he
+      knew that half the women who were horrified by the publication of Mrs.
+      Aubyn’s letters would have betrayed her secrets without a scruple.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sudden lowering of his emotional pitch brought a proportionate relief.
+      He told himself that now the worst was over and things would fall into
+      perspective again. His wife and Flamel had turned to other topics, and
+      coming out on the veranda, he handed the cigars to Flamel, saying,
+      cheerfully&mdash;and yet he could have sworn they were the last words he
+      meant to utter!&mdash;“Look here, old man, before you go down to Newport
+      you must come out and spend a few days with us&mdash;mustn’t he, Alexa?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0008" id="link2H_4_0008">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">Glennard</span> had, perhaps unconsciously, counted on the continuance of this
+      easier mood. He had always taken pride in a certain robustness of fibre
+      that enabled him to harden himself against the inevitable, to convert his
+      failures into the building materials of success. Though it did not even
+      now occur to him that what he called the inevitable had hitherto been the
+      alternative he happened to prefer, he was yet obscurely aware that his
+      present difficulty was one not to be conjured by any affectation of
+      indifference. Some griefs build the soul a spacious house&mdash;but in
+      this misery of Glennard’s he could not stand upright. It pressed against
+      him at every turn. He told himself that this was because there was no
+      escape from the visible evidences of his act. The “Letters” confronted him
+      everywhere. People who had never opened a book discussed them with
+      critical reservations; to have read them had become a social obligation in
+      circles to which literature never penetrates except in a personal guise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard did himself injustice, it was from the unexpected discovery of
+      his own pettiness that he chiefly suffered. Our self-esteem is apt to be
+      based on the hypothetical great act we have never had occasion to perform;
+      and even the most self-scrutinizing modesty credits itself negatively with
+      a high standard of conduct. Glennard had never thought himself a hero; but
+      he had been certain that he was incapable of baseness. We all like our
+      wrong-doings to have a becoming cut, to be made to order, as it were; and
+      Glennard found himself suddenly thrust into a garb of dishonor surely
+      meant for a meaner figure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The immediate result of his first weeks of wretchedness was the resolve to
+      go to town for the winter. He knew that such a course was just beyond the
+      limit of prudence; but it was easy to allay the fears of Alexa who,
+      scrupulously vigilant in the management of the household, preserved the
+      American wife’s usual aloofness from her husband’s business cares.
+      Glennard felt that he could not trust himself to a winter’s solitude with
+      her. He had an unspeakable dread of her learning the truth about the
+      letters, yet could not be sure of steeling himself against the suicidal
+      impulse of avowal. His very soul was parched for sympathy; he thirsted for
+      a voice of pity and comprehension. But would his wife pity? Would she
+      understand? Again he found himself brought up abruptly against his
+      incredible ignorance of her nature. The fact that he knew well enough how
+      she would behave in the ordinary emergencies of life, that he could count,
+      in such contingencies, on the kind of high courage and directness he had
+      always divined in her, made him the more hopeless of her entering into the
+      torturous psychology of an act that he himself could no longer explain or
+      understand. It would have been easier had she been more complex, more
+      feminine&mdash;if he could have counted on her imaginative sympathy or her
+      moral obtuseness&mdash;but he was sure of neither. He was sure of nothing
+      but that, for a time, he must avoid her. Glennard could not rid himself of
+      the delusion that by and by his action would cease to make its
+      consequences felt. He would not have cared to own to himself that he
+      counted on the dulling of his sensibilities: he preferred to indulge the
+      vague hypothesis that extraneous circumstances would somehow efface the
+      blot upon his conscience. In his worst moments of self-abasement he tried
+      to find solace in the thought that Flamel had sanctioned his course.
+      Flamel, at the outset, must have guessed to whom the letters were
+      addressed; yet neither then nor afterward had he hesitated to advise their
+      publication. This thought drew Glennard to him in fitful impulses of
+      friendliness, from each of which there was a sharper reaction of distrust
+      and aversion. When Flamel was not at the house, he missed the support of
+      his tacit connivance; when he was there, his presence seemed the assertion
+      of an intolerable claim.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Early in the winter the Glennards took possession of the little house that
+      was to cost them almost nothing. The change brought Glennard the immediate
+      relief of seeing less of his wife, and of being protected, in her
+      presence, by the multiplied preoccupations of town life. Alexa, who could
+      never appear hurried, showed the smiling abstraction of a pretty woman to
+      whom the social side of married life has not lost its novelty. Glennard,
+      with the recklessness of a man fresh from his first financial imprudence,
+      encouraged her in such little extravagances as her good sense at first
+      resisted. Since they had come to town, he argued, they might as well enjoy
+      themselves. He took a sympathetic view of the necessity of new gowns, he
+      gave her a set of furs at Christmas, and before the New Year they had
+      agreed on the obligation of adding a parlour-maid to their small
+      establishment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Providence the very next day hastened to justify this measure by placing
+      on Glennard’s breakfast-plate an envelope bearing the name of the
+      publishers to whom he had sold Mrs. Aubyn’s letters. It happened to be the
+      only letter the early post had brought, and he glanced across the table at
+      his wife, who had come down before him and had probably laid the envelope
+      on his plate. She was not the woman to ask awkward questions, but he felt
+      the conjecture of her glance, and he was debating whether to affect
+      surprise at the receipt of the letter, or to pass it off as a business
+      communication that had strayed to his house, when a check fell from the
+      envelope. It was the royalty on the first edition of the letters. His
+      first feeling was one of simple satisfaction. The money had come with such
+      infernal opportuneness that he could not help welcoming it. Before long,
+      too, there would be more; he knew the book was still selling far beyond
+      the publisher’s previsions. He put the check in his pocket and left the
+      room without looking at his wife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the way to his office the habitual reaction set in. The money he had
+      received was the first tangible reminder that he was living on the sale of
+      his self-esteem. The thought of material benefit had been overshadowed by
+      his sense of the intrinsic baseness of making the letters known; now he
+      saw what an element of sordidness it added to the situation and how the
+      fact that he needed the money, and must use it, pledged him more
+      irrevocably than ever to the consequences of his act. It seemed to him, in
+      that first hour of misery, that he had betrayed his friend anew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When, that afternoon, he reached home earlier than usual, Alexa’s
+      drawing-room was full of a gayety that overflowed to the stairs. Flamel,
+      for a wonder, was not there; but Dresham and young Hartly, grouped about
+      the tea-table, were receiving with resonant mirth a narrative delivered in
+      the fluttered staccato that made Mrs. Armiger’s conversation like the
+      ejaculations of a startled aviary.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She paused as Glennard entered, and he had time to notice that his wife,
+      who was busied about the tea-tray, had not joined in the laughter of the
+      men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, go on, go on,” young Hartly rapturously groaned; and Mrs. Armiger met
+      Glennard’s inquiry with the deprecating cry that really she didn’t see
+      what there was to laugh at. “I’m sure I feel more like crying. I don’t
+      know what I should have done if Alexa hadn’t been home to give me a cup of
+      tea. My nerves are in shreds&mdash;yes, another, dear, please&mdash;” and
+      as Glennard looked his perplexity, she went on, after pondering on the
+      selection of a second lump of sugar, “Why, I’ve just come from the
+      reading, you know&mdash;the reading at the Waldorf.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I haven’t been in town long enough to know anything,” said Glennard,
+      taking the cup his wife handed him. “Who has been reading what?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “That lovely girl from the South&mdash;Georgie&mdash;Georgie what’s her
+      name&mdash;Mrs. Dresham’s protegee&mdash;unless she’s <i>yours</i>, Mr. Dresham!
+      Why, the big ball-room was <i>packed</i>, and all the women were crying like
+      idiots&mdash;it was the most harrowing thing I ever heard&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “What <i>did</i> you hear?” Glennard asked; and his wife interposed: “Won’t you
+      have another bit of cake, Julia? Or, Stephen, ring for some hot toast,
+      please.” Her tone betrayed a polite satiety of the topic under discussion.
+      Glennard turned to the bell, but Mrs. Armiger pursued him with her lovely
+      amazement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Why, the ‘Aubyn Letters’&mdash;didn’t you know about it? The girl read
+      them so beautifully that it was quite horrible&mdash;I should have fainted
+      if there’d been a man near enough to carry me out.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hartly’s glee redoubled, and Dresham said, jovially, “How like you women
+      to raise a shriek over the book and then do all you can to encourage the
+      blatant publicity of the readings!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Armiger met him more than half-way on a torrent of self-accusal. “It
+      <i>was</i> horrid; it was disgraceful. I told your wife we ought all to be
+      ashamed of ourselves for going, and I think Alexa was quite right to
+      refuse to take any tickets&mdash;even if it was for a charity.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh,” her hostess murmured, indifferently, “with me charity begins at
+      home. I can’t afford emotional luxuries.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “A charity? A charity?” Hartly exulted. “I hadn’t seized the full beauty
+      of it. Reading poor Margaret Aubyn’s love-letters at the Waldorf before
+      five hundred people for a charity! <i>What</i> charity, dear Mrs. Armiger?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Why, the Home for Friendless Women&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “It was well chosen,” Dresham commented; and Hartly buried his mirth in
+      the sofa-cushions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When they were alone Glennard, still holding his untouched cup of tea,
+      turned to his wife, who sat silently behind the kettle. “Who asked you to
+      take a ticket for that reading?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I don’t know, really&mdash;Kate Dresham, I fancy. It was she who got it
+      up.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “It’s just the sort of damnable vulgarity she’s capable of! It’s loathsome&mdash;it’s
+      monstrous&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His wife, without looking up, answered gravely, “I thought so too. It was
+      for that reason I didn’t go. But you must remember that very few people
+      feel about Mrs. Aubyn as you do&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard managed to set down his cup with a steady hand, but the room
+      swung round with him and he dropped into the nearest chair. “As I do?” he
+      repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I mean that very few people knew her when she lived in New York. To most
+      of the women who went to the reading she was a mere name, too remote to
+      have any personality. With me, of course, it was different&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard gave her a startled look. “Different? Why different?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Since you were her friend&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Her friend!” He stood up impatiently. “You speak as if she had had only
+      one&mdash;the most famous woman of her day!” He moved vaguely about the
+      room, bending down to look at some books on the table. “I hope,” he added,
+      “you didn’t give that as a reason, by the way?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “A reason?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “For not going. A woman who gives reasons for getting out of social
+      obligations is sure to make herself unpopular or ridiculous.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The words were uncalculated; but in an instant he saw that they had
+      strangely bridged the distance between his wife and himself. He felt her
+      close on him, like a panting foe; and her answer was a flash that showed
+      the hand on the trigger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I seem,” she said from the threshold, “to have done both in giving my
+      reason to you.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The fact that they were dining out that evening made it easy for him to
+      avoid Alexa till she came downstairs in her opera-cloak. Mrs. Touchett,
+      who was going to the same dinner, had offered to call for her, and
+      Glennard, refusing a precarious seat between the ladies’ draperies,
+      followed on foot. The evening was interminable. The reading at the
+      Waldorf, at which all the women had been present, had revived the
+      discussion of the “Aubyn Letters” and Glennard, hearing his wife
+      questioned as to her absence, felt himself miserably wishing that she had
+      gone, rather than that her staying away should have been remarked. He was
+      rapidly losing all sense of proportion where the “Letters” were concerned.
+      He could no longer hear them mentioned without suspecting a purpose in the
+      allusion; he even yielded himself for a moment to the extravagance of
+      imagining that Mrs. Dresham, whom he disliked, had organized the reading
+      in the hope of making him betray himself&mdash;for he was already sure
+      that Dresham had divined his share in the transaction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The attempt to keep a smooth surface on this inner tumult was as endless
+      and unavailing as efforts made in a nightmare. He lost all sense of what
+      he was saying to his neighbors and once when he looked up his wife’s
+      glance struck him cold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat nearly opposite him, at Flamel’s side, and it appeared to Glennard
+      that they had built about themselves one of those airy barriers of talk
+      behind which two people can say what they please. While the reading was
+      discussed they were silent. Their silence seemed to Glennard almost
+      cynical&mdash;it stripped the last disguise from their complicity. A throb
+      of anger rose in him, but suddenly it fell, and he felt, with a curious
+      sense of relief, that at bottom he no longer cared whether Flamel had told
+      his wife or not. The assumption that Flamel knew about the letters had
+      become a fact to Glennard; and it now seemed to him better that Alexa
+      should know too.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was frightened at first by the discovery of his own indifference. The
+      last barriers of his will seemed to be breaking down before a flood of
+      moral lassitude. How could he continue to play his part, to keep his front
+      to the enemy, with this poison of indifference stealing through his veins?
+      He tried to brace himself with the remembrance of his wife’s scorn. He had
+      not forgotten the note on which their conversation had closed. If he had
+      ever wondered how she would receive the truth he wondered no longer&mdash;she
+      would despise him. But this lent a new insidiousness to his temptation,
+      since her contempt would be a refuge from his own. He said to himself
+      that, since he no longer cared for the consequences, he could at least
+      acquit himself of speaking in self-defence. What he wanted now was not
+      immunity but castigation: his wife’s indignation might still reconcile him
+      to himself. Therein lay his one hope of regeneration; her scorn was the
+      moral antiseptic that he needed, her comprehension the one balm that could
+      heal him....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When they left the dinner he was so afraid of speaking that he let her
+      drive home alone, and went to the club with Flamel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0009" id="link2H_4_0009">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IX
+    </h2>
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">He</span> rose next morning with the resolve to know what Alexa thought of him.
+      It was not anchoring in a haven, but lying to in a storm&mdash;he felt the
+      need of a temporary lull in the turmoil of his sensations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He came home late, for they were dining alone and he knew that they would
+      have the evening together. When he followed her to the drawing-room after
+      dinner he thought himself on the point of speaking; but as she handed him
+      his coffee he said, involuntarily: “I shall have to carry this off to the
+      study, I’ve got a lot of work to-night.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Alone in the study he cursed his cowardice. What was it that had withheld
+      him? A certain bright unapproachableness seemed to keep him at arm’s
+      length. She was not the kind of woman whose compassion could be
+      circumvented; there was no chance of slipping past the outposts; he would
+      never take her by surprise. Well&mdash;why not face her, then? What he
+      shrank from could be no worse than what he was enduring. He had pushed
+      back his chair and turned to go upstairs when a new expedient presented
+      itself. What if, instead of telling her, he were to let her find out for
+      herself and watch the effect of the discovery before speaking? In this way
+      he made over to chance the burden of the revelation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The idea had been suggested by the sight of the formula enclosing the
+      publisher’s check. He had deposited the money, but the notice accompanying
+      it dropped from his note-case as he cleared his table for work. It was the
+      formula usual in such cases and revealed clearly enough that he was the
+      recipient of a royalty on Margaret Aubyn’s letters. It would be impossible
+      for Alexa to read it without understanding at once that the letters had
+      been written to him and that he had sold them....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat downstairs till he heard her ring for the parlor-maid to put out
+      the lights; then he went up to the drawing-room with a bundle of papers in
+      his hand. Alexa was just rising from her seat and the lamplight fell on
+      the deep roll of hair that overhung her brow like the eaves of a temple.
+      Her face had often the high secluded look of a shrine; and it was this
+      touch of awe in her beauty that now made him feel himself on the brink of
+      sacrilege.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lest the feeling should dominate him, he spoke at once. “I’ve brought you
+      a piece of work&mdash;a lot of old bills and things that I want you to
+      sort for me. Some are not worth keeping&mdash;but you’ll be able to judge
+      of that. There may be a letter or two among them&mdash;nothing of much
+      account, but I don’t like to throw away the whole lot without having them
+      looked over and I haven’t time to do it myself.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He held out the papers and she took them with a smile that seemed to
+      recognize in the service he asked the tacit intention of making amends for
+      the incident of the previous day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Are you sure I shall know which to keep?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, quite sure,” he answered, easily&mdash;“and besides, none are of much
+      importance.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The next morning he invented an excuse for leaving the house without
+      seeing her, and when he returned, just before dinner, he found a visitor’s
+      hat and stick in the hall. The visitor was Flamel, who was in the act of
+      taking leave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had risen, but Alexa remained seated; and their attitude gave the
+      impression of a colloquy that had prolonged itself beyond the limits of
+      speech. Both turned a surprised eye on Glennard and he had the sense of
+      walking into a room grown suddenly empty, as though their thoughts were
+      conspirators dispersed by his approach. He felt the clutch of his old
+      fear. What if his wife had already sorted the papers and had told Flamel
+      of her discovery? Well, it was no news to Flamel that Glennard was in
+      receipt of a royalty on the “Aubyn Letters.”...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A sudden resolve to know the worst made him lift his eyes to his wife as
+      the door closed on Flamel. But Alexa had risen also, and bending over her
+      writing-table, with her back to Glennard, was beginning to speak
+      precipitately.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I’m dining out to-night&mdash;you don’t mind my deserting you? Julia
+      Armiger sent me word just now that she had an extra ticket for the last
+      Ambrose concert. She told me to say how sorry she was that she hadn’t two&mdash;but
+      I knew <i>you</i> wouldn’t be sorry!” She ended with a laugh that had the effect
+      of being a strayed echo of Mrs. Armiger’s; and before Glennard could speak
+      she had added, with her hand on the door, “Mr. Flamel stayed so late that
+      I’ve hardly time to dress. The concert begins ridiculously early, and
+      Julia dines at half-past seven&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard stood alone in the empty room that seemed somehow full of an
+      ironical consciousness of what was happening. “She hates me,” he murmured.
+      “She hates me....”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The next day was Sunday, and Glennard purposely lingered late in his room.
+      When he came downstairs his wife was already seated at the
+      breakfast-table. She lifted her usual smile to his entrance and they took
+      shelter in the nearest topic, like wayfarers overtaken by a storm. While
+      he listened to her account of the concert he began to think that, after
+      all, she had not yet sorted the papers, and that her agitation of the
+      previous day must be ascribed to another cause, in which perhaps he had
+      but an indirect concern. He wondered it had never before occurred to him
+      that Flamel was the kind of man who might very well please a woman at his
+      own expense, without need of fortuitous assistance. If this possibility
+      cleared the outlook it did not brighten it. Glennard merely felt himself
+      left alone with his baseness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alexa left the breakfast-table before him and when he went up to the
+      drawing-room he found her dressed to go out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Aren’t you a little early for church?” he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She replied that, on the way there, she meant to stop a moment at her
+      mother’s; and while she drew on her gloves, he fumbled among the
+      knick-knacks on the mantel-piece for a match to light his cigarette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well, good-by,” she said, turning to go; and from the threshold she
+      added: “By the way, I’ve sorted the papers you gave me. Those that I
+      thought you would like to keep are on your study-table.” She went
+      downstairs and he heard the door close behind her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had sorted the papers&mdash;she knew, then&mdash;she <i>must</i> know&mdash;and
+      she had made no sign!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard, he hardly knew how, found himself once more in the study. On the
+      table lay the packet he had given her. It was much smaller&mdash;she had
+      evidently gone over the papers with care, destroying the greater number.
+      He loosened the elastic band and spread the remaining envelopes on his
+      desk. The publisher’s notice was among them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0010" id="link2H_4_0010">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      X
+    </h2>
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">His</span> wife knew and she made no sign. Glennard found himself in the case of
+      the seafarer who, closing his eyes at nightfall on a scene he thinks to
+      put leagues behind him before day, wakes to a port-hole framing the same
+      patch of shore. From the kind of exaltation to which his resolve had
+      lifted him he dropped to an unreasoning apathy. His impulse of confession
+      had acted as a drug to self-reproach. He had tried to shift a portion of
+      his burden to his wife’s shoulders and now that she had tacitly refused to
+      carry it, he felt the load too heavy to be taken up again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A fortunate interval of hard work brought respite from this phase of
+      sterile misery. He went West to argue an important case, won it, and came
+      back to fresh preoccupations. His own affairs were thriving enough to
+      engross him in the pauses of his professional work, and for over two
+      months he had little time to look himself in the face. Not unnaturally&mdash;for
+      he was as yet unskilled in the subtleties of introspection&mdash;he
+      mistook his temporary insensibility for a gradual revival of moral health.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He told himself that he was recovering his sense of proportion, getting to
+      see things in their true light; and if he now thought of his rash appeal
+      to his wife’s sympathy it was as an act of folly from the consequences of
+      which he had been saved by the providence that watches over madmen. He had
+      little leisure to observe Alexa; but he concluded that the common-sense
+      momentarily denied him had counselled her uncritical acceptance of the
+      inevitable. If such a quality was a poor substitute for the passionate
+      justness that had once seemed to characterize her, he accepted the
+      alternative as a part of that general lowering of the key that seems
+      needful to the maintenance of the matrimonial duet. What woman ever
+      retained her abstract sense of justice where another woman was concerned?
+      Possibly the thought that he had profited by Mrs. Aubyn’s tenderness was
+      not wholly disagreeable to his wife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the pressure of work began to lessen, and he found himself, in the
+      lengthening afternoons, able to reach home somewhat earlier, he noticed
+      that the little drawing-room was always full and that he and his wife
+      seldom had an evening alone together. When he was tired, as often
+      happened, she went out alone; the idea of giving up an engagement to
+      remain with him seemed not to occur to her. She had shown, as a girl,
+      little fondness for society, nor had she seemed to regret it during the
+      year they had spent in the country. He reflected, however, that he was
+      sharing the common lot of husbands, who proverbially mistake the early
+      ardors of housekeeping for a sign of settled domesticity. Alexa, at any
+      rate, was refuting his theory as inconsiderately as a seedling defeats the
+      gardener’s expectations. An undefinable change had come over her. In one
+      sense it was a happy one, since she had grown, if not handsomer, at least
+      more vivid and expressive; her beauty had become more communicable: it was
+      as though she had learned the conscious exercise of intuitive attributes
+      and now used her effects with the discrimination of an artist skilled in
+      values. To a dispassionate critic (as Glennard now rated himself) the art
+      may at times have been a little too obvious. Her attempts at lightness
+      lacked spontaneity, and she sometimes rasped him by laughing like Julia
+      Armiger; but he had enough imagination to perceive that, in respect of the
+      wife’s social arts, a husband necessarily sees the wrong side of the
+      tapestry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In this ironical estimate of their relation Glennard found himself
+      strangely relieved of all concern as to his wife’s feelings for Flamel.
+      From an Olympian pinnacle of indifference he calmly surveyed their
+      inoffensive antics. It was surprising how his cheapening of his wife put
+      him at ease with himself. Far as he and she were from each other they yet
+      had, in a sense, the tacit nearness of complicity. Yes, they were
+      accomplices; he could no more be jealous of her than she could despise
+      him. The jealousy that would once have seemed a blur on her whiteness now
+      appeared like a tribute to ideals in which he no longer believed....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard was little given to exploring the outskirts of literature. He
+      always skipped the “literary notices” in the papers and he had small
+      leisure for the intermittent pleasures of the periodical. He had therefore
+      no notion of the prolonged reverberations which the “Aubyn Letters” had
+      awakened in the precincts of criticism. When the book ceased to be talked
+      about he supposed it had ceased to be read; and this apparent subsidence
+      of the agitation about it brought the reassuring sense that he had
+      exaggerated its vitality. The conviction, if it did not ease his
+      conscience, at least offered him the relative relief of obscurity: he felt
+      like an offender taken down from the pillory and thrust into the soothing
+      darkness of a cell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But one evening, when Alexa had left him to go to a dance, he chanced to
+      turn over the magazines on her table, and the copy of the Horoscope, to
+      which he settled down with his cigar, confronted him, on its first page,
+      with a portrait of Margaret Aubyn. It was a reproduction of the photograph
+      that had stood so long on his desk. The desiccating air of memory had
+      turned her into the mere abstraction of a woman, and this unexpected
+      evocation seemed to bring her nearer than she had ever been in life. Was
+      it because he understood her better? He looked long into her eyes; little
+      personal traits reached out to him like caresses&mdash;the tired droop of
+      her lids, her quick way of leaning forward as she spoke, the movements of
+      her long expressive hands. All that was feminine in her, the quality he
+      had always missed, stole toward him from her unreproachful gaze; and now
+      that it was too late life had developed in him the subtler perceptions
+      which could detect it in even this poor semblance of herself. For a moment
+      he found consolation in the thought that, at any cost, they had thus been
+      brought together; then a flood of shame rushed over him. Face to face with
+      her, he felt himself laid bare to the inmost fold of consciousness. The
+      shame was deep, but it was a renovating anguish; he was like a man whom
+      intolerable pain has roused from the creeping lethargy of death....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He rose next morning to as fresh a sense of life as though his hour of
+      mute communion with Margaret Aubyn had been a more exquisite renewal of
+      their earlier meetings. His waking thought was that he must see her again;
+      and as consciousness affirmed itself he felt an intense fear of losing the
+      sense of her nearness. But she was still close to him; her presence
+      remained the sole reality in a world of shadows. All through his working
+      hours he was re-living with incredible minuteness every incident of their
+      obliterated past; as a man who has mastered the spirit of a foreign tongue
+      turns with renewed wonder to the pages his youth has plodded over. In this
+      lucidity of retrospection the most trivial detail had its significance,
+      and the rapture of recovery was embittered to Glennard by the perception
+      of all that he had missed. He had been pitiably, grotesquely stupid; and
+      there was irony in the thought that, but for the crisis through which he
+      was passing, he might have lived on in complacent ignorance of his loss.
+      It was as though she had bought him with her blood....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That evening he and Alexa dined alone. After dinner he followed her to the
+      drawing-room. He no longer felt the need of avoiding her; he was hardly
+      conscious of her presence. After a few words they lapsed into silence and
+      he sat smoking with his eyes on the fire. It was not that he was unwilling
+      to talk to her; he felt a curious desire to be as kind as possible; but he
+      was always forgetting that she was there. Her full bright presence,
+      through which the currents of life flowed so warmly, had grown as tenuous
+      as a shadow, and he saw so far beyond her&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently she rose and began to move about the room. She seemed to be
+      looking for something and he roused himself to ask what she wanted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Only the last number of the Horoscope. I thought I’d left it on this
+      table.” He said nothing, and she went on: “You haven’t seen it?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “No,” he returned coldly. The magazine was locked in his desk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His wife had moved to the mantel-piece. She stood facing him and as he
+      looked up he met her tentative gaze. “I was reading an article in it&mdash;a
+      review of Mrs. Aubyn’s letters,” she added, slowly, with her deep,
+      deliberate blush.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard stooped to toss his cigar into the fire. He felt a savage wish
+      that she would not speak the other woman’s name; nothing else seemed to
+      matter. “You seem to do a lot of reading,” he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She still earnestly confronted him. “I was keeping this for you&mdash;I
+      thought it might interest you,” she said, with an air of gentle
+      insistence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood up and turned away. He was sure she knew that he had taken the
+      review and he felt that he was beginning to hate her again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I haven’t time for such things,” he said, indifferently. As he moved to
+      the door he heard her take a precipitate step forward; then she paused and
+      sank without speaking into the chair from which he had risen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0011" id="link2H_4_0011">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XI
+    </h2>
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">As</span> Glennard, in the raw February sunlight, mounted the road to the
+      cemetery, he felt the beatitude that comes with an abrupt cessation of
+      physical pain. He had reached the point where self-analysis ceases; the
+      impulse that moved him was purely intuitive. He did not even seek a reason
+      for it, beyond the obvious one that his desire to stand by Margaret
+      Aubyn’s grave was prompted by no attempt at a sentimental reparation, but
+      rather by the vague need to affirm in some way the reality of the tie
+      between them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ironical promiscuity of death had brought Mrs. Aubyn back to share the
+      narrow hospitality of her husband’s last lodging; but though Glennard knew
+      she had been buried near New York he had never visited her grave. He was
+      oppressed, as he now threaded the long avenues, by a chilling vision of
+      her return. There was no family to follow her hearse; she had died alone,
+      as she had lived; and the “distinguished mourners” who had formed the
+      escort of the famous writer knew nothing of the woman they were committing
+      to the grave. Glennard could not even remember at what season she had been
+      buried; but his mood indulged the fancy that it must have been on some
+      such day of harsh sunlight, the incisive February brightness that gives
+      perspicuity without warmth. The white avenues stretched before him
+      interminably, lined with stereotyped emblems of affliction, as though all
+      the platitudes ever uttered had been turned to marble and set up over the
+      unresisting dead. Here and there, no doubt, a frigid urn or an insipid
+      angel imprisoned some fine-fibred grief, as the most hackneyed words may
+      become the vehicle of rare meanings; but for the most part the endless
+      alignment of monuments seemed to embody those easy generalizations about
+      death that do not disturb the repose of the living. Glennard’s eye, as he
+      followed the way indicated to him, had instinctively sought some low mound
+      with a quiet headstone. He had forgotten that the dead seldom plan their
+      own houses, and with a pang he discovered the name he sought on the
+      cyclopean base of a granite shaft rearing its aggressive height at the
+      angle of two avenues.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “How she would have hated it!” he murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A bench stood near and he seated himself. The monument rose before him
+      like some pretentious uninhabited dwelling; he could not believe that
+      Margaret Aubyn lay there. It was a Sunday morning and black figures moved
+      among the paths, placing flowers on the frost-bound hillocks. Glennard
+      noticed that the neighboring graves had been thus newly dressed; and he
+      fancied a blind stir of expectancy through the sod, as though the bare
+      mounds spread a parched surface to that commemorative rain. He rose
+      presently and walked back to the entrance of the cemetery. Several
+      greenhouses stood near the gates, and turning in at the first he asked for
+      some flowers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Anything in the emblematic line?” asked the anaemic man behind the
+      dripping counter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Just cut flowers? This way, then.” The florist unlocked a glass door and
+      led him down a moist green aisle. The hot air was choked with the scent of
+      white azaleas, white lilies, white lilacs; all the flowers were white;
+      they were like a prolongation, a mystical efflorescence, of the long rows
+      of marble tombstones, and their perfume seemed to cover an odor of decay.
+      The rich atmosphere made Glennard dizzy. As he leaned in the doorpost,
+      waiting for the flowers, he had a penetrating sense of Margaret Aubyn’s
+      nearness&mdash;not the imponderable presence of his inner vision, but a
+      life that beat warm in his arms....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sharp air caught him as he stepped out into it again. He walked back
+      and scattered the flowers over the grave. The edges of the white petals
+      shrivelled like burnt paper in the cold; and as he watched them the
+      illusion of her nearness faded, shrank back frozen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0012" id="link2H_4_0012">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">The</span> motive of his visit to the cemetery remained undefined save as a final
+      effort of escape from his wife’s inexpressive acceptance of his shame. It
+      seemed to him that as long as he could keep himself alive to that shame he
+      would not wholly have succumbed to its consequences. His chief fear was
+      that he should become the creature of his act. His wife’s indifference
+      degraded him; it seemed to put him on a level with his dishonor. Margaret
+      Aubyn would have abhorred the deed in proportion to her pity for the man.
+      The sense of her potential pity drew him back to her. The one woman knew
+      but did not understand; the other, it sometimes seemed, understood without
+      knowing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In its last disguise of retrospective remorse, his self-pity affected a
+      desire for solitude and meditation. He lost himself in morbid musings, in
+      futile visions of what life with Margaret Aubyn might have been. There
+      were moments when, in the strange dislocation of his view, the wrong he
+      had done her seemed a tie between them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To indulge these emotions he fell into the habit, on Sunday afternoons, of
+      solitary walks prolonged till after dusk. The days were lengthening, there
+      was a touch of spring in the air, and his wanderings now usually led him
+      to the Park and its outlying regions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One Sunday, tired of aimless locomotion, he took a cab at the Park gates
+      and let it carry him out to the Riverside Drive. It was a gray afternoon
+      streaked with east wind. Glennard’s cab advanced slowly, and as he leaned
+      back, gazing with absent intentness at the deserted paths that wound under
+      bare boughs between grass banks of premature vividness, his attention was
+      arrested by two figures walking ahead of him. This couple, who had the
+      path to themselves, moved at an uneven pace, as though adapting their gait
+      to a conversation marked by meditative intervals. Now and then they
+      paused, and in one of these pauses the lady, turning toward her companion,
+      showed Glennard the outline of his wife’s profile. The man was Flamel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The blood rushed to Glennard’s forehead. He sat up with a jerk and pushed
+      back the lid in the roof of the hansom; but when the cabman bent down he
+      dropped into his seat without speaking. Then, becoming conscious of the
+      prolonged interrogation of the lifted lid, he called out&mdash;“Turn&mdash;drive
+      back&mdash;anywhere&mdash;I’m in a hurry&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As the cab swung round he caught a last glimpse of the two figures. They
+      had not moved; Alexa, with bent head, stood listening.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “My God, my God&mdash;” he groaned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was hideous&mdash;it was abominable&mdash;he could not understand it.
+      The woman was nothing to him&mdash;less than nothing&mdash;yet the blood
+      hummed in his ears and hung a cloud before him. He knew it was only the
+      stirring of the primal instinct, that it had no more to do with his
+      reasoning self than any reflex impulse of the body; but that merely
+      lowered anguish to disgust. Yes, it was disgust he felt&mdash;almost a
+      physical nausea. The poisonous fumes of life were in his lungs. He was
+      sick, unutterably sick....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He drove home and went to his room. They were giving a little dinner that
+      night, and when he came down the guests were arriving. He looked at his
+      wife: her beauty was extraordinary, but it seemed to him the beauty of a
+      smooth sea along an unlit coast. She frightened him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat late that night in his study. He heard the parlor-maid lock the
+      front door; then his wife went upstairs and the lights were put out. His
+      brain was like some great empty hall with an echo in it; one thought
+      reverberated endlessly.... At length he drew his chair to the table and
+      began to write. He addressed an envelope and then slowly re-read what he
+      had written.
+    </p>
+<div class="blk">
+    <p class="nind"><span class="smcap">“<i>My dear Flamel</i>,”</span></p>
+    <p><i>
+      “Many apologies for not sending you sooner the enclosed check, which
+      represents the customary percentage on the sale of the Letters.”</i>
+     </p>
+    <p><i>
+      “Trusting you will excuse the oversight,</i>
+    </p>
+    <p class="r">
+	<i>“Yours truly</i>,&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;
+<br />
+<span class="smcap"><i>“Stephen Glennard.”</i></span>
+     </p>
+</div>
+    <p>
+      He let himself out of the darkened house and dropped the letter in the
+      post-box at the corner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next afternoon he was detained late at his office, and as he was
+      preparing to leave he heard someone asking for him in the outer room. He
+      seated himself again and Flamel was shown in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two men, as Glennard pushed aside an obstructive chair, had a moment
+      to measure each other; then Flamel advanced, and drawing out his
+      note-case, laid a slip of paper on the desk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “My dear fellow, what on earth does this mean?” Glennard recognized his
+      check.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “That I was remiss, simply. It ought to have gone to you before.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Flamel’s tone had been that of unaffected surprise, but at this his accent
+      changed and he asked, quickly: “On what ground?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard had moved away from the desk and stood leaning against the
+      calf-backed volumes of the bookcase. “On the ground that you sold Mrs.
+      Aubyn’s letters for me, and that I find the intermediary in such cases is
+      entitled to a percentage on the sale.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Flamel paused before answering. “You find, you say. It’s a recent
+      discovery?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Obviously, from my not sending the check sooner. You see I’m new to the
+      business.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “And since when have you discovered that there was any question of
+      business, as far as I was concerned?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard flushed and his voice rose slightly. “Are you reproaching me for
+      not having remembered it sooner?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Flamel, who had spoken in the rapid repressed tone of a man on the verge
+      of anger, stared a moment at this and then, in his natural voice,
+      rejoined, good-humoredly, “Upon my soul, I don’t understand you!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The change of key seemed to disconcert Glennard. “It’s simple enough&mdash;”
+       he muttered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Simple enough&mdash;your offering me money in return for a friendly
+      service? I don’t know what your other friends expect!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Some of my friends wouldn’t have undertaken the job. Those who would have
+      done so would probably have expected to be paid.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He lifted his eyes to Flamel and the two men looked at each other. Flamel
+      had turned white and his lips stirred, but he held his temperate note. “If
+      you mean to imply that the job was not a nice one, you lay yourself open
+      to the retort that you proposed it. But for my part I’ve never seen, I
+      never shall see, any reason for not publishing the letters.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “That’s just it!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “What&mdash;?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “The certainty of your not seeing was what made me go to you. When a man’s
+      got stolen goods to pawn he doesn’t take them to the police-station.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Stolen?” Flamel echoed. “The letters were stolen?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard burst into a coarse laugh. “How much longer do you expect me to
+      keep up that pretence about the letters? You knew well enough they were
+      written to me.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Flamel looked at him in silence. “Were they?” he said at length. “I didn’t
+      know it.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “And didn’t suspect it, I suppose,” Glennard sneered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The other was again silent; then he said, “I may remind you that,
+      supposing I had felt any curiosity about the matter, I had no way of
+      finding out that the letters were written to you. You never showed me the
+      originals.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “What does that prove? There were fifty ways of finding out. It’s the kind
+      of thing one can easily do.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Flamel glanced at him with contempt. “Our ideas probably differ as to what
+      a man can easily do. It would not have been easy for me.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard’s anger vented itself in the words uppermost in his thought. “It
+      may, then, interest you to hear that my wife <i>does</i> know about the letters&mdash;has
+      known for some months....”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ah,” said the other, slowly. Glennard saw that, in his blind clutch at a
+      weapon, he had seized the one most apt to wound. Flamel’s muscles were
+      under control, but his face showed the undefinable change produced by the
+      slow infiltration of poison. Every implication that the words contained
+      had reached its mark; but Glennard felt that their obvious intention was
+      lost in the anguish of what they suggested. He was sure now that Flamel
+      would never have betrayed him; but the inference only made a wider outlet
+      for his anger. He paused breathlessly for Flamel to speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “If she knows, it’s not through me.” It was what Glennard had waited for.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Through you, by God? Who said it was through you? Do you suppose I leave
+      it to you, or to anybody else, for that matter, to keep my wife informed
+      of my actions? I didn’t suppose even such egregious conceit as yours could
+      delude a man to that degree!” Struggling for a foothold in the small
+      landslide of his dignity, he added, in a steadier tone, “My wife learned
+      the facts from me.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Flamel received this in silence. The other’s outbreak seemed to have
+      reinforced his self-control, and when he spoke it was with a deliberation
+      implying that his course was chosen. “In that case I understand still less&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Still less&mdash;?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “The meaning of this.” He pointed to the check. “When you began to speak I
+      supposed you had meant it as a bribe; now I can only infer it was intended
+      as a random insult. In either case, here’s my answer.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He tore the slip of paper in two and tossed the fragments across the desk
+      to Glennard. Then he turned and walked out of the office.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard dropped his head on his hands. If he had hoped to restore his
+      self-respect by the simple expedient of assailing Flamel’s, the result had
+      not justified his expectation. The blow he had struck had blunted the edge
+      of his anger, and the unforeseen extent of the hurt inflicted did not
+      alter the fact that his weapon had broken in his hands. He saw now that
+      his rage against Flamel was only the last projection of a passionate
+      self-disgust. This consciousness did not dull his dislike of the man; it
+      simply made reprisals ineffectual. Flamel’s unwillingness to quarrel with
+      him was the last stage of his abasement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the light of this final humiliation his assumption of his wife’s
+      indifference struck him as hardly so fatuous as the sentimental
+      resuscitation of his past. He had been living in a factitious world
+      wherein his emotions were the sycophants of his vanity, and it was with
+      instinctive relief that he felt its ruins crash about his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was nearly dark when he left his office, and he walked slowly homeward
+      in the complete mental abeyance that follows on such a crisis. He was not
+      aware that he was thinking of his wife; yet when he reached his own door
+      he found that, in the involuntary readjustment of his vision, she had once
+      more become the central point of consciousness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0013" id="link2H_4_0013">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XIII
+    </h2>
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">It</span> had never before occurred to him that she might, after all, have missed
+      the purport of the document he had put in her way. What if, in her hurried
+      inspection of the papers, she had passed it over as related to the private
+      business of some client? What, for instance, was to prevent her concluding
+      that Glennard was the counsel of the unknown person who had sold the
+      “Aubyn Letters.” The subject was one not likely to fix her attention&mdash;she
+      was not a curious woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard at this point laid down his fork and glanced at her between the
+      candle-shades. The alternative explanation of her indifference was not
+      slow in presenting itself. Her head had the same listening droop as when
+      he had caught sight of her the day before in Flamel’s company; the
+      attitude revived the vividness of his impression. It was simple enough,
+      after all. She had ceased to care for him because she cared for someone
+      else.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As he followed her upstairs he felt a sudden stirring of his dormant
+      anger. His sentiments had lost all their factitious complexity. He had
+      already acquitted her of any connivance in his baseness, and he felt only
+      that he loved her and that she had escaped him. This was now, strangely
+      enough, his dominating thought: the consciousness that he and she had
+      passed through the fusion of love and had emerged from it as
+      incommunicably apart as though the transmutation had never taken place.
+      Every other passion, he mused, left some mark upon the nature; but love
+      passed like the flight of a ship across the waters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She sank into her usual seat near the lamp, and he leaned against the
+      chimney, moving about with an inattentive hand the knick-knacks on the
+      mantel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly he caught sight of her reflection in the mirror. She was looking
+      at him. He turned and their eyes met.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He moved across the room and stood before her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “There’s something that I want to say to you,” he began in a low tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She held his gaze, but her color deepened. He noticed again, with a
+      jealous pang, how her beauty had gained in warmth and meaning. It was as
+      though a transparent cup had been filled with wine. He looked at her
+      ironically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I’ve never prevented your seeing your friends here,” he broke out. “Why
+      do you meet Flamel in out-of-the-way places? Nothing makes a woman so
+      cheap&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She rose abruptly and they faced each other a few feet apart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “What do you mean?” she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I saw you with him last Sunday on the Riverside Drive,” he went on, the
+      utterance of the charge reviving his anger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ah,” she murmured. She sank into her chair again and began to play with a
+      paper-knife that lay on the table at her elbow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her silence exasperated him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well?” he burst out. “Is that all you have to say?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Do you wish me to explain?” she asked, proudly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Do you imply I haven’t the right to?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I imply nothing. I will tell you whatever you wish to know. I went for a
+      walk with Mr. Flamel because he asked me to.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I didn’t suppose you went uninvited. But there are certain things a
+      sensible woman doesn’t do. She doesn’t slink about in out-of-the-way
+      streets with men. Why couldn’t you have seen him here?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She hesitated. “Because he wanted to see me alone.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Did he, indeed? And may I ask if you gratify all his wishes with equal
+      alacrity?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I don’t know that he has any others where I am concerned.” She paused
+      again and then continued, in a lower voice that somehow had an under-note
+      of warning. “He wished to bid me good-by. He’s going away.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard turned on her a startled glance. “Going away?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “He’s going to Europe to-morrow. He goes for a long time. I supposed you
+      knew.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The last phrase revived his irritation. “You forget that I depend on you
+      for my information about Flamel. He’s your friend and not mine. In fact,
+      I’ve sometimes wondered at your going out of your way to be so civil to
+      him when you must see plainly enough that I don’t like him.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her answer to this was not immediate. She seemed to be choosing her words
+      with care, not so much for her own sake as for his, and his exasperation
+      was increased by the suspicion that she was trying to spare him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “He was your friend before he was mine. I never knew him till I was
+      married. It was you who brought him to the house and who seemed to wish me
+      to like him.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard gave a short laugh. The defence was feebler than he had expected:
+      she was certainly not a clever woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Your deference to my wishes is really beautiful; but it’s not the first
+      time in history that a man has made a mistake in introducing his friends
+      to his wife. You must, at any rate, have seen since then that my
+      enthusiasm had cooled; but so, perhaps, has your eagerness to oblige me.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She met this with a silence that seemed to rob the taunt of half its
+      efficacy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Is that what you imply?” he pressed her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “No,” she answered with sudden directness. “I noticed some time ago that
+      you seemed to dislike him, but since then&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well&mdash;since then?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I’ve imagined that you had reasons for still wishing me to be civil to
+      him, as you call it.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ah,” said Glennard, with an effort at lightness; but his irony dropped,
+      for something in her voice made him feel that he and she stood at last in
+      that naked desert of apprehension where meaning skulks vainly behind
+      speech.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “And why did you imagine this?” The blood mounted to his forehead.
+      “Because he told you that I was under obligations to him?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned pale. “Under obligations?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, don’t let’s beat about the bush. Didn’t he tell you it was I who
+      published Mrs. Aubyn’s letters? Answer me that.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “No,” she said; and after a moment which seemed given to the weighing of
+      alternatives, she added: “No one told me.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “You didn’t know then?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She seemed to speak with an effort. “Not until&mdash;not until&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Till I gave you those papers to sort?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her head sank.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “You understood then?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Yes.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked at her immovable face. “Had you suspected&mdash;before?” was
+      slowly wrung from him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “At times&mdash;yes&mdash;” Her voice dropped to a whisper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Why? From anything that was said&mdash;?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a shade of pity in her glance. “No one said anything&mdash;no
+      one told me anything.” She looked away from him. “It was your manner&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “My manner?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Whenever the book was mentioned. Things you said&mdash;once or twice&mdash;your
+      irritation&mdash;I can’t explain&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard, unconsciously, had moved nearer. He breathed like a man who has
+      been running. “You knew, then, you knew”&mdash;he stammered. The avowal of
+      her love for Flamel would have hurt him less, would have rendered her less
+      remote. “You knew&mdash;you knew&mdash;” he repeated; and suddenly his
+      anguish gathered voice. “My God!” he cried, “you suspected it first, you
+      say&mdash;and then you knew it&mdash;this damnable, this accursed thing;
+      you knew it months ago&mdash;it’s months since I put that paper in your
+      way&mdash;and yet you’ve done nothing, you’ve said nothing, you’ve made no
+      sign, you’ve lived alongside of me as if it had made no difference&mdash;no
+      difference in either of our lives. What are you made of, I wonder? Don’t
+      you see the hideous ignominy of it? Don’t you see how you’ve shared in my
+      disgrace? Or haven’t you any sense of shame?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He preserved sufficient lucidity, as the words poured from him, to see how
+      fatally they invited her derision; but something told him they had both
+      passed beyond the phase of obvious retaliations, and that if any chord in
+      her responded it would not be that of scorn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was right. She rose slowly and moved toward him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Haven’t you had enough&mdash;without that?” she said, in a strange voice
+      of pity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stared at her. “Enough&mdash;?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Of misery....”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      An iron band seemed loosened from his temples. “You saw then...?” he
+      whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, God&mdash;&mdash;oh, God&mdash;&mdash;” she sobbed. She dropped
+      beside him and hid her anguish against his knees. They clung thus in
+      silence, a long time, driven together down the same fierce blast of shame.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When at length she lifted her face he averted his. Her scorn would have
+      hurt him less than the tears on his hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She spoke languidly, like a child emerging from a passion of weeping. “It
+      was for the money&mdash;?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His lips shaped an assent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “That was the inheritance&mdash;that we married on?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Yes.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She drew back and rose to her feet. He sat watching her as she wandered
+      away from him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “You hate me,” broke from him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She made no answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Say you hate me!” he persisted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “That would have been so simple,” she answered with a strange smile. She
+      dropped into a chair near the writing-table and rested a bowed forehead on
+      her hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Was it much&mdash;?” she began at length.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Much&mdash;?” he returned, vaguely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “The money.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “The money?” That part of it seemed to count so little that for a moment
+      he did not follow her thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “It must be paid back,” she insisted. “Can you do it?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Oh, yes,” he returned, listlessly. “I can do it.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I would make any sacrifice for that!” she urged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He nodded. “Of course.” He sat staring at her in dry-eyed self-contempt.
+      “Do you count on its making much difference?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Much difference?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “In the way I feel&mdash;or you feel about me?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shook her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “It’s the least part of it,” he groaned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “It’s the only part we can repair.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Good heavens! If there were any reparation&mdash;” He rose quickly and
+      crossed the space that divided them. “Why did you never speak?” he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Haven’t you answered that yourself?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Answered it?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Just now&mdash;when you told me you did it for me.” She paused a moment
+      and then went on with a deepening note&mdash;“I would have spoken if I
+      could have helped you.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But you must have despised me.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I’ve told you that would have been simpler.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “But how could you go on like this&mdash;hating the money?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I knew you would speak in time. I wanted you, first, to hate it as I
+      did.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He gazed at her with a kind of awe. “You’re wonderful,” he murmured. “But
+      you don’t yet know the depths I’ve reached.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She raised an entreating hand. “I don’t want to!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “You’re afraid, then, that you’ll hate me?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “No&mdash;but that you’ll hate <i>me</i>. Let me understand without your telling
+      me.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “You can’t. It’s too base. I thought you didn’t care because you loved
+      Flamel.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She blushed deeply. “Don’t&mdash;don’t&mdash;” she warned him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I haven’t the right to, you mean?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I mean that you’ll be sorry.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood imploringly before her. “I want to say something worse&mdash;something
+      more outrageous. If you don’t understand <i>this</i> you’ll be perfectly
+      justified in ordering me out of the house.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She answered him with a glance of divination. “I shall understand&mdash;but
+      you’ll be sorry.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I must take my chance of that.” He moved away and tossed the books about
+      the table. Then he swung round and faced her. “Does Flamel care for you?”
+       he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her flush deepened, but she still looked at him without anger. “What would
+      be the use?” she said with a note of sadness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ah, I didn’t ask <i>that</i>,” he penitently murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Well, then&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      To this adjuration he made no response beyond that of gazing at her with
+      an eye which seemed now to view her as a mere factor in an immense
+      redistribution of meanings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I insulted Flamel to-day. I let him see that I suspected him of having
+      told you. I hated him because he knew about the letters.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He caught the spreading horror of her eyes, and for an instant he had to
+      grapple with the new temptation they lit up. Then he said, with an effort&mdash;“Don’t
+      blame him&mdash;he’s impeccable. He helped me to get them published; but I
+      lied to him too; I pretended they were written to another man... a man who
+      was dead....”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She raised her arms in a gesture that seemed to ward off his blows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “You <i>do</i> despise me!” he insisted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ah, that poor woman&mdash;that poor woman&mdash;” he heard her murmur.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I spare no one, you see!” he triumphed over her. She kept her face
+      hidden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “You do hate me, you do despise me!” he strangely exulted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Be silent!” she commanded him; but he seemed no longer conscious of any
+      check on his gathering purpose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “He cared for you&mdash;he cared for you,” he repeated, “and he never told
+      you of the letters&mdash;”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She sprang to her feet. “How can you?” she flamed. “How dare you? <i>That</i>&mdash;!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard was ashy pale. “It’s a weapon... like another....”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “A scoundrel’s!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled wretchedly. “I should have used it in his place.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Stephen! Stephen!” she cried, as though to drown the blasphemy on his
+      lips. She swept to him with a rescuing gesture. “Don’t say such things. I
+      forbid you! It degrades us both.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He put her back with trembling hands. “Nothing that I say of myself can
+      degrade you. We’re on different levels.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “I’m on yours, whatever it is!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He lifted his head and their gaze flowed together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0014" id="link2H_4_0014">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      XIV
+    </h2>
+<p>
+<span class="smcap">The</span> great renewals take effect as imperceptibly as the first workings of
+      spring. Glennard, though he felt himself brought nearer to his wife, was
+      still, as it were, hardly within speaking distance. He was but laboriously
+      acquiring the rudiments of their new medium of communication; and he had
+      to grope for her through the dense fog of his humiliation, the distorting
+      vapor against which his personality loomed grotesque and mean.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Only the fact that we are unaware how well our nearest know us enables us
+      to live with them. Love is the most impregnable refuge of self-esteem, and
+      we hate the eye that reaches to our nakedness. If Glennard did not hate
+      his wife it was slowly, sufferingly, that there was born in him that
+      profounder passion which made his earlier feeling seem a mere commotion of
+      the blood. He was like a child coming back to the sense of an enveloping
+      presence: her nearness was a breast on which he leaned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They did not, at first, talk much together, and each beat a devious track
+      about the outskirts of the subject that lay between them like a haunted
+      wood. But every word, every action, seemed to glance at it, to draw toward
+      it, as though a fount of healing sprang in its poisoned shade. If only
+      they might cut away through the thicket to that restoring spring!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard, watching his wife with the intentness of a wanderer to whom no
+      natural sign is negligible, saw that she had taken temporary refuge in the
+      purpose of renouncing the money. If both, theoretically, owned the
+      inefficacy of such amends, the woman’s instinctive subjectiveness made her
+      find relief in this crude form of penance. Glennard saw that she meant to
+      live as frugally as possible till what she deemed their debt was
+      discharged; and he prayed she might not discover how far-reaching, in its
+      merely material sense, was the obligation she thus hoped to acquit. Her
+      mind was fixed on the sum originally paid for the letters, and this he
+      knew he could lay aside in a year or two. He was touched, meanwhile, by
+      the spirit that made her discard the petty luxuries which she regarded as
+      the signs of their bondage. Their shared renunciations drew her nearer to
+      him, helped, in their evidence of her helplessness, to restore the full
+      protecting stature of his love. And still they did not speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was several weeks later that, one afternoon by the drawing-room fire,
+      she handed him a letter that she had been reading when he entered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “I’ve heard from Mr. Flamel,” she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard turned pale. It was as though a latent presence had suddenly
+      become visible to both. He took the letter mechanically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “It’s from Smyrna,” she said. “Won’t you read it?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He handed it back. “You can tell me about it&mdash;his hand’s so
+      illegible.” He wandered to the other end of the room and then turned and
+      stood before her. “I’ve been thinking of writing to Flamel,” he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “There’s one point,” he continued, slowly, “that I ought to clear up. I
+      told him you’d known about the letters all along; for a long time, at
+      least; and I saw it hurt him horribly. It was just what I meant to do, of
+      course; but I can’t leave him to that false impression; I must write him.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She received this without outward movement, but he saw that the depths
+      were stirred. At length she returned, in a hesitating tone, “Why do you
+      call it a false impression? I did know.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Yes, but I implied you didn’t care.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ah!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He still stood looking down on her. “Don’t you want me to set that right?”
+       he tentatively pursued.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She lifted her head and fixed him bravely. “It isn’t necessary,” she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Glennard flushed with the shock of the retort; then, with a gesture of
+      comprehension, “No,” he said, “with you it couldn’t be; but I might still
+      set myself right.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked at him gently. “Don’t I,” she murmured, “do that?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “In being yourself merely? Alas, the rehabilitation’s too complete! You
+      make me seem&mdash;to myself even&mdash;what I’m not; what I can never be.
+      I can’t, at times, defend myself from the delusion; but I can at least
+      enlighten others.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The flood was loosened, and kneeling by her he caught her hands. “Don’t
+      you see that it’s become an obsession with me? That if I could strip
+      myself down to the last lie&mdash;only there’d always be another one left
+      under it!&mdash;and do penance naked in the market-place, I should at
+      least have the relief of easing one anguish by another? Don’t you see that
+      the worst of my torture is the impossibility of such amends?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her hands lay in his without returning pressure. “Ah, poor woman, poor
+      woman,” he heard her sigh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Don’t pity her, pity me! What have I done to her or to you, after all?
+      You’re both inaccessible! It was myself I sold.”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He took an abrupt turn away from her; then halted before her again. “How
+      much longer,” he burst out, “do you suppose you can stand it? You’ve been
+      magnificent, you’ve been inspired, but what’s the use? You can’t wipe out
+      the ignominy of it. It’s miserable for you and it does <i>her</i> no good!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She lifted a vivid face. “That’s the thought I can’t bear!” she cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “What thought?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “That it does her no good&mdash;all you’re feeling, all you’re suffering.
+      Can it be that it makes no difference?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He avoided her challenging glance. “What’s done is done,” he muttered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Is it ever, quite, I wonder?” she mused. He made no answer and they
+      lapsed into one of the pauses that are a subterranean channel of
+      communication.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was she who, after awhile, began to speak with a new suffusing
+      diffidence that made him turn a roused eye on her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      “Don’t they say,” she asked, feeling her way as in a kind of tender
+      apprehensiveness, “that the early Christians, instead of pulling down the
+      heathen temples&mdash;the temples of the unclean gods&mdash;purified them
+      by turning them to their own uses? I’ve always thought one might do that
+      with one’s actions&mdash;the actions one loathes but can’t undo. One can
+      make, I mean, a wrong the door to other wrongs or an impassable wall
+      against them....” Her voice wavered on the word. “We can’t always tear
+      down the temples we’ve built to the unclean gods, but we can put good
+      spirits in the house of evil&mdash;the spirits of mercy and shame and
+      understanding, that might never have come to us if we hadn’t been in such
+      great need....”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She moved over to him and laid a hesitating hand on his. His head was bent
+      and he did not change his attitude. She sat down beside him without
+      speaking; but their silences now were fertile as rain-clouds&mdash;they
+      quickened the seeds of understanding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At length he looked up. “I don’t know,” he said, “what spirits have come
+      to live in the house of evil that I built&mdash;but you’re there and
+      that’s enough for me. It’s strange,” he went on after another pause, “she
+      wished the best for me so often, and now, at last, it’s through her that
+      it’s come to me. But for her I shouldn’t have known you&mdash;it’s through
+      her that I’ve found you. Sometimes, do you know?&mdash;that makes it
+      hardest&mdash;makes me most intolerable to myself. Can’t you see that it’s
+      the worst thing I’ve got to face? I sometimes think I could have borne it
+      better if you hadn’t understood! I took everything from her&mdash;everything&mdash;even
+      to the poor shelter of loyalty she’d trusted in&mdash;the only thing I
+      could have left her!&mdash;I took everything from her, I deceived her, I
+      despoiled her, I destroyed her&mdash;and she’s given me <i>you</i> in return!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His wife’s cry caught him up. “It isn’t that she’s given <i>me</i> to you&mdash;it
+      is that she’s given you to yourself.” She leaned to him as though swept
+      forward on a wave of pity. “Don’t you see,” she went on, as his eyes hung
+      on her, “that that’s the gift you can’t escape from, the debt you’re
+      pledged to acquit? Don’t you see that you’ve never before been what she
+      thought you, and that now, so wonderfully, she’s made you into the man she
+      loved? <i>That’s</i> worth suffering for, worth dying for, to a woman&mdash;that’s
+      the gift she would have wished to give!”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “Ah,” he cried, “but woe to him by whom it cometh. What did I ever give
+      her?”
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      “The happiness of giving,” she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Touchstone, by Edith Wharton
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+
+
+
+THE TOUCHSTONE
+By Edith Wharton
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+Professor Joslin, who, as our readers are doubtless aware, is
+engaged in writing the life of Mrs. Aubyn, asks us to state that
+he will be greatly indebted to any of the famous novelist's
+friends who will furnish him with information concerning the
+period previous to her coming to England.  Mrs. Aubyn had so few
+intimate friends, and consequently so few regular correspondents,
+that letters will be of special value.  Professor Joslin's address
+is 10 Augusta Gardens, Kensington, and he begs us to say that he
+will promptly return any documents entrusted to him."
+
+Glennard dropped the Spectator and sat looking into the fire.  The
+club was filling up, but he still had to himself the small inner
+room, with its darkening outlook down the rainstreaked prospect of
+Fifth Avenue.  It was all dull and dismal enough, yet a moment
+earlier his boredom had been perversely tinged by a sense of
+resentment at the thought that, as things were going, he might in
+time have to surrender even the despised privilege of boring
+himself within those particular four walls.  It was not that he
+cared much for the club, but that the remote contingency of having
+to give it up stood to him, just then, perhaps by very reason of
+its insignificance and remoteness, for the symbol of his
+increasing abnegations; of that perpetual paring-off that was
+gradually reducing existence to the naked business of keeping
+himself alive.  It was the futility of his multiplied shifts and
+privations that made them seem unworthy of a high attitude; the
+sense that, however rapidly he eliminated the superfluous, his
+cleared horizon was likely to offer no nearer view of the one
+prospect toward which he strained.  To give up things in order to
+marry the woman one loves is easier than to give them up without
+being brought appreciably nearer to such a conclusion.
+
+Through the open door he saw young Hollingsworth rise with a yawn
+from the ineffectual solace of a brandy-and-soda and transport his
+purposeless person to the window.  Glennard measured his course
+with a contemptuous eye.  It was so like Hollingsworth to get up
+and look out of the window just as it was growing too dark to see
+anything!  There was a man rich enough to do what he pleased--had
+he been capable of being pleased--yet barred from all conceivable
+achievement by his own impervious dulness; while, a few feet off,
+Glennard, who wanted only enough to keep a decent coat on his back
+and a roof over the head of the woman he loved, Glennard, who had
+sweated, toiled, denied himself for the scant measure of
+opportunity that his zeal would have converted into a kingdom--sat
+wretchedly calculating that, even when he had resigned from the
+club, and knocked off his cigars, and given up his Sundays out of
+town, he would still be no nearer attainment.
+
+The Spectator had slipped to his feet and as he picked it up his
+eye fell again on the paragraph addressed to the friends of Mrs.
+Aubyn.  He had read it for the first time with a scarcely
+perceptible quickening of attention: her name had so long been
+public property that his eye passed it unseeingly, as the crowd in
+the street hurries without a glance by some familiar monument.
+
+"Information concerning the period previous to her coming to
+England. . . ."  The words were an evocation.  He saw her again as
+she had looked at their first meeting, the poor woman of genius
+with her long pale face and short-sighted eyes, softened a little
+by the grace of youth and inexperience, but so incapable even then
+of any hold upon the pulses.  When she spoke, indeed, she was
+wonderful, more wonderful, perhaps, than when later, to Glennard's
+fancy at least, the conscious of memorable things uttered seemed
+to take from even her most intimate speech the perfect bloom of
+privacy.  It was in those earliest days, if ever, that he had come
+near loving her; though even then his sentiment had lived only in
+the intervals of its expression.  Later, when to be loved by her
+had been a state to touch any man's imagination, the physical
+reluctance had, inexplicably, so overborne the intellectual
+attraction, that the last years had been, to both of them, an
+agony of conflicting impulses.  Even now, if, in turning over old
+papers, his hand lit on her letters, the touch filled him with
+inarticulate misery. . . .
+
+"She had so few intimate friends . . . that letters will be of
+special value."  So few intimate friends!  For years she had had
+but one; one who in the last years had requited her wonderful
+pages, her tragic outpourings of love, humility, and pardon, with
+the scant phrases by which a man evades the vulgarest of
+sentimental importunities.  He had been a brute in spite of
+himself, and sometimes, now that the remembrance of her face had
+faded, and only her voice and words remained with him, he chafed
+at his own inadequacy, his stupid inability to rise to the height
+of her passion.  His egoism was not of a kind to mirror its
+complacency in the adventure.  To have been loved by the most
+brilliant woman of her day, and to have been incapable of loving
+her, seemed to him, in looking back, the most derisive evidence of
+his limitations; and his remorseful tenderness for her memory was
+complicated with a sense of irritation against her for having
+given him once for all the measure of his emotional capacity.  It
+was not often, however, that he thus probed the past.  The public,
+in taking possession of Mrs. Aubyn, had eased his shoulders of
+their burden.  There was something fatuous in an attitude of
+sentimental apology toward a memory already classic: to reproach
+one's self for not having loved Margaret Aubyn was a good deal
+like being disturbed by an inability to admire the Venus of Milo.
+From her cold niche of fame she looked down ironically enough on
+his self-flagellations. . . .  It was only when he came on
+something that belonged to her that he felt a sudden renewal of
+the old feeling, the strange dual impulse that drew him to her
+voice but drove him from her hand, so that even now, at sight of
+anything she had touched, his heart contracted painfully.  It
+happened seldom nowadays.  Her little presents, one by one, had
+disappeared from his rooms, and her letters, kept from some
+unacknowledged puerile vanity in the possession of such treasures,
+seldom came beneath his hand. . . .
+
+"Her letters will be of special value--"  Her letters!  Why, he
+must have hundreds of them--enough to fill a volume.  Sometimes it
+used to seem to him that they came with every post--he used to
+avoid looking in his letter-box when he came home to his rooms--
+but her writing seemed to spring out at him as he put his key in
+the door--.
+
+He stood up and strolled into the other room.  Hollingsworth,
+lounging away from the window, had joined himself to a languidly
+convivial group of men to whom, in phrases as halting as though
+they struggled to define an ultimate idea, he was expounding the
+cursed nuisance of living in a hole with such a damned climate
+that one had to get out of it by February, with the contingent
+difficulty of there being no place to take one's yacht to in
+winter but that other played-out hole, the Riviera.  From the
+outskirts of this group Glennard wandered to another, where a
+voice as different as possible from Hollingsworth's colorless
+organ dominated another circle of languid listeners.
+
+"Come and hear Dinslow talk about his patent: admission free," one
+of the men sang out in a tone of mock resignation.
+
+Dinslow turned to Glennard the confident pugnacity of his smile.
+"Give it another six months and it'll be talking about itself," he
+declared.  "It's pretty nearly articulate now."
+
+"Can it say papa?" someone else inquired.
+
+Dinslow's smile broadened.  "You'll be deuced glad to say papa to
+IT a year from now," he retorted.  "It'll be able to support even
+you in affluence.  Look here, now, just let me explain to you--"
+
+Glennard moved away impatiently.  The men at the club--all but
+those who were "in it"--were proverbially "tired" of Dinslow's
+patent, and none more so than Glennard, whose knowledge of its
+merits made it loom large in the depressing catalogue of lost
+opportunities.  The relations between the two men had always been
+friendly, and Dinslow's urgent offers to "take him in on the
+ground floor" had of late intensified Glennard's sense of his own
+inability to meet good luck half way.  Some of the men who had
+paused to listen were already in evening clothes, others on their
+way home to dress; and Glennard, with an accustomed twinge of
+humiliation, said to himself that if he lingered among them it was
+in the miserable hope that one of the number might ask him to
+dine.  Miss Trent had told him that she was to go to the opera
+that evening with her rich aunt; and if he should have the luck to
+pick up a dinner-invitation he might join her there without extra
+outlay.
+
+He moved about the room, lingering here and there in a tentative
+affectation of interest; but though the men greeted him pleasantly
+no one asked him to dine.  Doubtless they were all engaged, these
+men who could afford to pay for their dinners, who did not have to
+hunt for invitations as a beggar rummages for a crust in an ash-
+barrel!  But no--as Hollingsworth left the lessening circle about
+the table an admiring youth called out--"Holly, stop and dine!"
+
+Hollingsworth turned on him the crude countenance that looked like
+the wrong side of a more finished face.  "Sorry I can't.  I'm in
+for a beastly banquet."
+
+Glennard threw himself into an arm-chair.  Why go home in the rain
+to dress?  It was folly to take a cab to the opera, it was worse
+folly to go there at all.  His perpetual meetings with Alexa Trent
+were as unfair to the girl as they were unnerving to himself.
+Since he couldn't marry her, it was time to stand aside and give a
+better man the chance--and his thought admitted the ironical
+implication that in the terms of expediency the phrase might stand
+for Hollingsworth.
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+He dined alone and walked home to his rooms in the rain.  As he
+turned into Fifth Avenue he caught the wet gleam of carriages on
+their way to the opera, and he took the first side street, in a
+moment of irritation against the petty restrictions that thwarted
+every impulse.  It was ridiculous to give up the opera, not
+because one might possibly be bored there, but because one must
+pay for the experiment.
+
+In his sitting-room, the tacit connivance of the inanimate had
+centred the lamp-light on a photograph of Alexa Trent, placed, in
+the obligatory silver frame, just where, as memory officiously
+reminded him, Margaret Aubyn's picture had long throned in its
+stead.  Miss Trent's features cruelly justified the usurpation.
+She had the kind of beauty that comes of a happy accord of face
+and spirit.  It is not given to many to have the lips and eyes of
+their rarest mood, and some women go through life behind a mask
+expressing only their anxiety about the butcher's bill or their
+inability to see a joke.  With Miss Trent, face and mind had the
+same high serious contour.  She looked like a throned Justice by
+some grave Florentine painter; and it seemed to Glennard that her
+most salient attribute, or that at least to which her conduct gave
+most consistent expression, was a kind of passionate justice--the
+intuitive feminine justness that is so much rarer than a reasoned
+impartiality.  Circumstances had tragically combined to develop
+this instinct into a conscious habit.  She had seen more than most
+girls of the shabby side of life, of the perpetual tendency of
+want to cramp the noblest attitude.  Poverty and misfortune had
+overhung her childhood and she had none of the pretty delusions
+about life that are supposed to be the crowning grace of girlhood.
+This very competence, which gave her a touching reasonableness,
+made Glennard's situation more difficult than if he had aspired to
+a princess bred in the purple.  Between them they asked so little--
+they knew so well how to make that little do--but they understood
+also, and she especially did not for a moment let him forget, that
+without that little the future they dreamed of was impossible.
+
+The sight of her photograph quickened Glennard's exasperation.  He
+was sick and ashamed of the part he was playing.  He had loved her
+now for two years, with the tranquil tenderness that gathers depth
+and volume as it nears fulfilment; he knew that she would wait for
+him--but the certitude was an added pang.  There are times when
+the constancy of the woman one cannot marry is almost as trying as
+that of the woman one does not want to.
+
+Glennard turned up his reading-lamp and stirred the fire.  He had
+a long evening before him and he wanted to crowd out thought with
+action.  He had brought some papers from his office and he spread
+them out on his table and squared himself to the task. . . .
+
+It must have been an hour later that he found himself
+automatically fitting a key into a locked drawer.  He had no more
+notion than a somnambulist of the mental process that had led up
+to this action.  He was just dimly aware of having pushed aside
+the papers and the heavy calf volumes that a moment before had
+bounded his horizon, and of laying in their place, without a trace
+of conscious volition, the parcel he had taken from the drawer.
+
+The letters were tied in packets of thirty or forty.  There were a
+great many packets.  On some of the envelopes the ink was fading;
+on others, which bore the English post-mark, it was still fresh.
+She had been dead hardly three years, and she had written, at
+lengthening intervals, to the last. . . .
+
+He undid one of the earlier packets--little notes written during
+their first acquaintance at Hillbridge.  Glennard, on leaving
+college, had begun life in his uncle's law office in the old
+university town.  It was there that, at the house of her father,
+Professor Forth, he had first met the young lady then chiefly
+distinguished for having, after two years of a conspicuously
+unhappy marriage, returned to the protection of the paternal roof.
+
+Mrs. Aubyn was at that time an eager and somewhat tragic young
+woman, of complex mind and undeveloped manners, whom her crude
+experience of matrimony had fitted out with a stock of
+generalizations that exploded like bombs in the academic air of
+Hillbridge.  In her choice of a husband she had been fortunate
+enough, if the paradox be permitted, to light on one so signally
+gifted with the faculty of putting himself in the wrong that her
+leaving him had the dignity of a manifesto--made her, as it were,
+the spokeswoman of outraged wifehood.  In this light she was
+cherished by that dominant portion of Hillbridge society which was
+least indulgent to conjugal differences, and which found a
+proportionate pleasure in being for once able to feast openly on a
+dish liberally seasoned with the outrageous.  So much did this
+endear Mrs. Aubyn to the university ladies that they were disposed
+from the first to allow her more latitude of speech and action
+than the ill-used wife was generally accorded in Hillbridge, where
+misfortune was still regarded as a visitation designed to put
+people in their proper place and make them feel the superiority of
+their neighbors.  The young woman so privileged combined with a
+kind of personal shyness an intellectual audacity that was like a
+deflected impulse of coquetry: one felt that if she had been
+prettier she would have had emotions instead of ideas.  She was in
+fact even then what she had always remained: a genius capable of
+the acutest generalizations, but curiously undiscerning where her
+personal susceptibilities were concerned.  Her psychology failed
+her just where it serves most women and one felt that her brains
+would never be a guide to her heart.  Of all this, however,
+Glennard thought little in the first year of their acquaintance.
+He was at an age when all the gifts and graces are but so much
+undiscriminated food to the ravening egoism of youth.  In seeking
+Mrs. Aubyn's company he was prompted by an intuitive taste for the
+best as a pledge of his own superiority.  The sympathy of the
+cleverest woman in Hillbridge was balm to his craving for
+distinction: it was public confirmation of his secret sense that
+he was cut out for a bigger place.  It must not be understood that
+Glennard was vain.  Vanity contents itself with the coarsest diet;
+there is no palate so fastidious as that of self-distrust.  To a
+youth of Glennard's aspirations the encouragement of a clever
+woman stood for the symbol of all success.  Later, when he had
+begun to feel his way, to gain a foothold, he would not need such
+support; but it served to carry him lightly and easily over what
+is often a period of insecurity and discouragement.
+
+It would be unjust, however, to represent his interest in Mrs.
+Aubyn as a matter of calculation.  It was as instinctive as love,
+and it missed being love by just such a hair-breadth deflection
+from the line of beauty as had determined the curve of Mrs.
+Aubyn's lips.  When they met she had just published her first
+novel, and Glennard, who afterward had an ambitious man's
+impatience of distinguished women, was young enough to be dazzled
+by the semi-publicity it gave her.  It was the kind of book that
+makes elderly ladies lower their voices and call each other "my
+dear" when they furtively discuss it; and Glennard exulted in the
+superior knowledge of the world that enabled him to take as a
+matter of course sentiments over which the university shook its
+head.  Still more delightful was it to hear Mrs. Aubyn waken the
+echoes of academic drawing-rooms with audacities surpassing those
+of her printed page.  Her intellectual independence gave a touch
+of comradeship to their intimacy, prolonging the illusion of
+college friendships based on a joyous interchange of heresies.
+Mrs. Aubyn and Glennard represented to each other the augur's wink
+behind the Hillbridge idol: they walked together in that light of
+young omniscience from which fate so curiously excludes one's
+elders.
+
+Husbands who are notoriously inopportune, may even die
+inopportunely, and this was the revenge that Mr. Aubyn, some two
+years after her return to Hillbridge, took upon his injured wife.
+He died precisely at the moment when Glennard was beginning to
+criticise her.  It was not that she bored him; she did what was
+infinitely worse--she made him feel his inferiority.  The sense of
+mental equality had been gratifying to his raw ambition; but as
+his self-knowledge defined itself, his understanding of her also
+increased; and if man is at times indirectly flattered by the
+moral superiority of woman, her mental ascendency is extenuated by
+no such oblique tribute to his powers.  The attitude of looking up
+is a strain on the muscles; and it was becoming more and more
+Glennard's opinion that brains, in a woman, should be merely the
+obverse of beauty.  To beauty Mrs. Aubyn could lay no claim; and
+while she had enough prettiness to exasperate him by her
+incapacity to make use of it, she seemed invincibly ignorant of
+any of the little artifices whereby women contrive to palliate
+their defects and even to turn them into graces.  Her dress never
+seemed a part of her; all her clothes had an impersonal air, as
+though they had belonged to someone else and been borrowed in an
+emergency that had somehow become chronic.  She was conscious
+enough of her deficiencies to try to amend them by rash imitations
+of the most approved models; but no woman who does not dress well
+intuitively will ever do so by the light of reason, and Mrs.
+Aubyn's plagiarisms, to borrow a metaphor of her trade, somehow
+never seemed to be incorporated with the text.
+
+Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her
+hair.  The fame that came to Mrs. Aubyn with her second book left
+Glennard's imagination untouched, or had at most the negative
+effect of removing her still farther from the circle of his
+contracting sympathies.  We are all the sport of time; and fate
+had so perversely ordered the chronology of Margaret Aubyn's
+romance that when her husband died Glennard felt as though he had
+lost a friend.
+
+It was not in his nature to be needlessly unkind; and though he
+was in the impregnable position of the man who has given a woman
+no more definable claim on him than that of letting her fancy that
+he loves her, he would not for the world have accentuated his
+advantage by any betrayal of indifference.  During the first year
+of her widowhood their friendship dragged on with halting renewals
+of sentiment, becoming more and more a banquet of empty dishes
+from which the covers were never removed; then Glennard went to
+New York to live and exchanged the faded pleasures of intercourse
+for the comparative novelty of correspondence.  Her letters, oddly
+enough, seemed at first to bring her nearer than her presence.
+She had adopted, and she successfully maintained, a note as
+affectionately impersonal as his own; she wrote ardently of her
+work, she questioned him about his, she even bantered him on the
+inevitable pretty girl who was certain before long to divert the
+current of his confidences.  To Glennard, who was almost a
+stranger in New York, the sight of Mrs. Aubyn's writing was like a
+voice of reassurance in surroundings as yet insufficiently aware
+of him.  His vanity found a retrospective enjoyment in the
+sentiment his heart had rejected, and this factitious emotion
+drove him once or twice to Hillbridge, whence, after scenes of
+evasive tenderness, he returned dissatisfied with himself and her.
+As he made room for himself in New York and peopled the space he
+had cleared with the sympathies at the disposal of agreeable and
+self-confident young men, it seemed to him natural to infer that
+Mrs. Aubyn had refurnished in the same manner the void he was not
+unwilling his departure should have left.  But in the dissolution
+of sentimental partnerships it is seldom that both associates are
+able to withdraw their funds at the same time; and Glennard
+gradually learned that he stood for the venture on which Mrs.
+Aubyn had irretrievably staked her all.  It was not the kind of
+figure he cared to cut.  He had no fancy for leaving havoc in his
+wake and would have preferred to sow a quick growth of oblivion in
+the spaces wasted by his unconsidered inroads; but if he supplied
+the seed it was clearly Mrs. Aubyn's business to see to the
+raising of the crop.  Her attitude seemed indeed to throw his own
+reasonableness into distincter relief: so that they might have
+stood for thrift and improvidence in an allegory of the
+affections.
+
+It was not that Mrs. Aubyn permitted herself to be a pensioner on
+his bounty.  He knew she had no wish to keep herself alive on the
+small change of sentiment; she simply fed on her own funded
+passion, and the luxuries it allowed her made him, even then,
+dimly aware that she had the secret of an inexhaustible alchemy.
+
+Their relations remained thus negatively tender till she suddenly
+wrote him of her decision to go abroad to live.  Her father had
+died, she had no near ties in Hillbridge, and London offered more
+scope than New York to her expanding personality.  She was already
+famous and her laurels were yet unharvested.
+
+For a moment the news roused Glennard to a jealous sense of lost
+opportunities.  He wanted, at any rate, to reassert his power
+before she made the final effort of escape.  They had not met for
+over a year, but of course he could not let her sail without
+seeing her.  She came to New York the day before her departure,
+and they spent its last hours together.  Glennard had planned no
+course of action--he simply meant to let himself drift.  They both
+drifted, for a long time, down the languid current of
+reminiscence; she seemed to sit passive, letting him push his way
+back through the overgrown channels of the past.  At length she
+reminded him that they must bring their explorations to an end.
+He rose to leave, and stood looking at her with the same
+uncertainty in his heart.  He was tired of her already--he was
+always tired of her--yet he was not sure that he wanted her to go.
+
+"I may never see you again," he said, as though confidently
+appealing to her compassion.
+
+Her look enveloped him.  "And I shall see you always--always!"
+
+"Why go then--?" escaped him.
+
+"To be nearer you," she answered; and the words dismissed him like
+a closing door.
+
+The door was never to reopen; but through its narrow crack
+Glennard, as the years went on, became more and more conscious of
+an inextinguishable light directing its small ray toward the past
+which consumed so little of his own commemorative oil.  The
+reproach was taken from this thought by Mrs. Aubyn's gradual
+translation into terms of universality.  In becoming a personage
+she so naturally ceased to be a person that Glennard could almost
+look back to his explorations of her spirit as on a visit to some
+famous shrine, immortalized, but in a sense desecrated, by popular
+veneration.
+
+Her letters, from London, continued to come with the same tender
+punctuality; but the altered conditions of her life, the vistas of
+new relationships disclosed by every phrase, made her
+communications as impersonal as a piece of journalism.  It was as
+though the state, the world, indeed, had taken her off his hands,
+assuming the maintenance of a temperament that had long exhausted
+his slender store of reciprocity.
+
+In the retrospective light shed by the letters he was blinded to
+their specific meaning.  He was not a man who concerned himself
+with literature, and they had been to him, at first, simply the
+extension of her brilliant talk, later the dreaded vehicle of a
+tragic importunity.  He knew, of course, that they were wonderful;
+that, unlike the authors who give their essence to the public and
+keep only a dry rind for their friends, Mrs. Aubyn had stored of
+her rarest vintage for this hidden sacrament of tenderness.
+Sometimes, indeed, he had been oppressed, humiliated almost, by
+the multiplicity of her allusions, the wide scope of her
+interests, her persistence in forcing her superabundance of
+thought and emotion into the shallow receptacle of his sympathy;
+but he had never thought of the letters objectively, as the
+production of a distinguished woman; had never measured the
+literary significance of her oppressive prodigality.  He was
+almost frightened now at the wealth in his hands; the obligation
+of her love had never weighed on him like this gift of her
+imagination: it was as though he had accepted from her something
+to which even a reciprocal tenderness could not have justified his
+claim.
+
+He sat a long time staring at the scattered pages on his desk; and
+in the sudden realization of what they meant he could almost fancy
+some alchemistic process changing them to gold as he stared.  He
+had the sense of not being alone in the room, of the presence of
+another self observing from without the stirring of subconscious
+impulses that sent flushes of humiliation to his forehead.  At
+length he stood up, and with the gesture of a man who wishes to
+give outward expression to his purpose--to establish, as it were,
+a moral alibi--swept the letters into a heap and carried them
+toward the grate.  But it would have taken too long to burn all
+the packets.  He turned back to the table and one by one fitted
+the pages into their envelopes; then he tied up the letters and
+put them back into the locked drawer.
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+It was one of the laws of Glennard's intercourse with Miss Trent
+that he always went to see her the day after he had resolved to
+give her up.  There was a special charm about the moments thus
+snatched from the jaws of renunciation; and his sense of their
+significance was on this occasion so keen that he hardly noticed
+the added gravity of her welcome.
+
+His feeling for her had become so vital a part of him that her
+nearness had the quality of imperceptibly readjusting his point of
+view, so that the jumbled phenomena of experience fell at once
+into a rational perspective.  In this redistribution of values the
+sombre retrospect of the previous evening shrank to a mere cloud
+on the edge of consciousness.  Perhaps the only service an unloved
+woman can render the man she loves is to enhance and prolong his
+illusions about her rival.  It was the fate of Margaret Aubyn's
+memory to serve as a foil to Miss Trent's presence, and never had
+the poor lady thrown her successor into more vivid relief.
+
+Miss Trent had the charm of still waters that are felt to be
+renewed by rapid currents.  Her attention spread a tranquil
+surface to the demonstrations of others, and it was only in days
+of storm that one felt the pressure of the tides.  This
+inscrutable composure was perhaps her chief grace in Glennard's
+eyes.  Reserve, in some natures, implies merely the locking of
+empty rooms or the dissimulation of awkward encumbrances; but Miss
+Trent's reticence was to Glennard like the closed door to the
+sanctuary, and his certainty of divining the hidden treasure made
+him content to remain outside in the happy expectancy of the
+neophyte.
+
+"You didn't come to the opera last night," she began, in the tone
+that seemed always rather to record a fact than to offer a
+reflection on it.
+
+He answered with a discouraged gesture.  "What was the use?  We
+couldn't have talked."
+
+"Not as well as here," she assented; adding, after a meditative
+pause, "As you didn't come I talked to Aunt Virginia instead."
+
+"Ah!" he returned, the fact being hardly striking enough to detach
+him from the contemplation of her hands, which had fallen, as was
+their wont, into an attitude full of plastic possibilities.  One
+felt them to be hands that, moving only to some purpose, were
+capable of intervals of serene inaction.
+
+"We had a long talk," Miss Trent went on; and she waited again
+before adding, with the increased absence of stress that marked
+her graver communications, "Aunt Virginia wants me to go abroad
+with her."
+
+Glennard looked up with a start.  "Abroad?  When?"
+
+"Now--next month.  To be gone two years."
+
+He permitted himself a movement of tender derision.  "Does she
+really?  Well, I want you to go abroad with ME--for any number of
+years.  Which offer do you accept?"
+
+"Only one of them seems to require immediate consideration," she
+returned, with a smile.
+
+Glennard looked at her again.  "You're not thinking of it?"
+
+Her gaze dropped and she unclasped her hands.  Her movements were
+so rare that they might have been said to italicize her words.
+"Aunt Virginia talked to me very seriously.  It will be a great
+relief to mother and the others to have me provided for in that
+way for two years.  I must think of that, you know."  She glanced
+down at her gown which, under a renovated surface, dated back to
+the first days of Glennard's wooing.  "I try not to cost much--but
+I do."
+
+"Good Lord!" Glennard groaned.
+
+They sat silent till at length she gently took up the argument.
+"As the eldest, you know, I'm bound to consider these things.
+Women are such a burden.  Jim does what he can for mother, but
+with his own children to provide for it isn't very much.  You see,
+we're all poor together."
+
+"Your aunt isn't.  She might help your mother."
+
+"She does--in her own way."
+
+"Exactly--that's the rich relation all over!  You may be miserable
+in any way you like, but if you're to be happy you've got to be so
+in her way--and in her old gowns."
+
+"I could be very happy in Aunt Virginia's old gowns," Miss Trent
+interposed.
+
+"Abroad, you mean?"
+
+"I mean wherever I felt that I was helping.  And my going abroad
+will help."
+
+"Of course--I see that.  And I see your considerateness in putting
+its advantages negatively."
+
+"Negatively?"
+
+"In dwelling simply on what the going will take you from, not on
+what it will bring you to.  It means a lot to a woman, of course,
+to get away from a life like this."  He summed up in a disparaging
+glance the background of indigent furniture.  "The question is how
+you'll like coming back to it."
+
+She seemed to accept the full consequences of his thought.  "I
+only know I don't like leaving it."
+
+He flung back sombrely, "You don't even put it conditionally
+then?"
+
+Her gaze deepened.  "On what?"
+
+He stood up and walked across the room.  Then he came back and
+paused before her.  "On the alternative of marrying me."
+
+The slow color--even her blushes seemed deliberate--rose to her
+lower lids; her lips stirred, but the words resolved themselves
+into a smile and she waited.
+
+He took another turn, with the thwarted step of the man whose
+nervous exasperation escapes through his muscles.
+
+"And to think that in fifteen years I shall have a big practice!"
+
+Her eyes triumphed for him.  "In less!"
+
+"The cursed irony of it!  What do I care for the man I shall be
+then?  It's slaving one's life away for a stranger!"  He took her
+hands abruptly.  "You'll go to Cannes, I suppose, or Monte Carlo?
+I heard Hollingsworth say to-day that he meant to take his yacht
+over to the Mediterranean--"
+
+She released herself.  "If you think that--"
+
+"I don't.  I almost wish I did.  It would be easier, I mean."  He
+broke off incoherently.  "I believe your Aunt Virginia does,
+though.  She somehow connotes Hollingsworth and the
+Mediterranean."  He caught her hands again.  "Alexa--if we could
+manage a little hole somewhere out of town?"
+
+"Could we?" she sighed, half yielding.
+
+"In one of those places where they make jokes about the
+mosquitoes," he pressed her.  "Could you get on with one servant?"
+
+"Could you get on without varnished boots?"
+
+"Promise me you won't go, then!"
+
+"What are you thinking of, Stephen?"
+
+"I don't know," he stammered, the question giving unexpected form
+to his intention.  "It's all in the air yet, of course; but I
+picked up a tip the other day--"
+
+"You're not speculating?" she cried, with a kind of superstitious
+terror.
+
+"Lord, no.  This is a sure thing--I almost wish it wasn't; I mean
+if I can work it--"  He had a sudden vision of the
+comprehensiveness of the temptation.  If only he had been less
+sure of Dinslow!  His assurance gave the situation the base
+element of safety.
+
+"I don't understand you," she faltered.
+
+"Trust me, instead!" he adjured her, with sudden energy; and
+turning on her abruptly, "If you go, you know, you go free," he
+concluded.
+
+She drew back, paling a little.  "Why do you make it harder for
+me?"
+
+"To make it easier for myself," he retorted.
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Glennard, the next afternoon, leaving his office earlier than
+usual, turned, on his way home, into one of the public libraries.
+
+He had the place to himself at that closing hour, and the
+librarian was able to give an undivided attention to his tentative
+request for letters--collections of letters.  The librarian
+suggested Walpole.
+
+"I meant women--women's letters."
+
+The librarian proffered Hannah More and Miss Martineau.
+
+Glennard cursed his own inarticulateness.  "I mean letters to--to
+some one person--a man; their husband--or--"
+
+"Ah," said the inspired librarian, "Eloise and Abailard."
+
+"Well--something a little nearer, perhaps," said Glennard, with
+lightness.  "Didn't Merimee--"
+
+"The lady's letters, in that case, were not published."
+
+"Of course not," said Glennard, vexed at his blunder.
+
+"There are George Sand's letters to Flaubert."
+
+"Ah!"  Glennard hesitated.  "Was she--were they--?"  He chafed at
+his own ignorance of the sentimental by-paths of literature.
+
+"If you want love-letters, perhaps some of the French eighteenth
+century correspondences might suit you better--Mlle. Aisse or
+Madame de Sabran--"
+
+But Glennard insisted.  "I want something modern--English or
+American.  I want to look something up," he lamely concluded.
+
+The librarian could only suggest George Eliot.
+
+"Well, give me some of the French things, then--and I'll have
+Merimee's letters.  It was the woman who published them, wasn't
+it?"
+
+He caught up his armful, transferring it, on the doorstep, to a
+cab which carried him to his rooms.  He dined alone, hurriedly, at
+a small restaurant near by, and returned at once to his books.
+
+Late that night, as he undressed, he wondered what contemptible
+impulse had forced from him his last words to Alexa Trent.  It was
+bad enough to interfere with the girl's chances by hanging about
+her to the obvious exclusion of other men, but it was worse to
+seem to justify his weakness by dressing up the future in delusive
+ambiguities.  He saw himself sinking from depth to depth of
+sentimental cowardice in his reluctance to renounce his hold on
+her; and it filled him with self-disgust to think that the highest
+feeling of which he supposed himself capable was blent with such
+base elements.
+
+His awakening was hardly cheered by the sight of her writing.  He
+tore her note open and took in the few lines--she seldom exceeded
+the first page--with the lucidity of apprehension that is the
+forerunner of evil.
+
+"My aunt sails on Saturday and I must give her my answer the day
+after to-morrow.  Please don't come till then--I want to think the
+question over by myself.  I know I ought to go.  Won't you help me
+to be reasonable?"
+
+It was settled, then.  Well, he would be reasonable; he wouldn't
+stand in her way; he would let her go.  For two years he had been
+living some other, luckier man's life; the time had come when he
+must drop back into his own.  He no longer tried to look ahead, to
+grope his way through the endless labyrinth of his material
+difficulties; a sense of dull resignation closed in on him like a
+fog.
+
+"Hullo, Glennard!" a voice said, as an electric-car, late that
+afternoon, dropped him at an uptown corner.
+
+He looked up and met the interrogative smile of Barton Flamel, who
+stood on the curbstone watching the retreating car with the eye of
+a man philosophic enough to remember that it will be followed by
+another.
+
+Glennard felt his usual impulse of pleasure at meeting Flamel; but
+it was not in this case curtailed by the reaction of contempt that
+habitually succeeded it.  Probably even the few men who had known
+Flamel since his youth could have given no good reason for the
+vague mistrust that he inspired.  Some people are judged by their
+actions, others by their ideas; and perhaps the shortest way of
+defining Flamel is to say that his well-known leniency of view was
+vaguely divined to include himself.  Simple minds may have
+resented the discovery that his opinions were based on his
+perceptions; but there was certainly no more definite charge
+against him than that implied in the doubt as to how he would
+behave in an emergency, and his company was looked upon as one of
+those mildly unwholesome dissipations to which the prudent may
+occasionally yield.  It now offered itself to Glennard as an easy
+escape from the obsession of moral problems, which somehow could
+no more be worn in Flamel's presence than a surplice in the
+street.
+
+"Where are you going?  To the club?" Flamel asked; adding, as the
+younger man assented, "Why not come to my studio instead?  You'll
+see one bore instead of twenty."
+
+The apartment which Flamel described as his studio showed, as its
+one claim to the designation, a perennially empty easel; the rest
+of its space being filled with the evidences of a comprehensive
+dilettanteism.  Against this background, which seemed the visible
+expression of its owner's intellectual tolerance, rows of fine
+books detached themselves with a prominence, showing them to be
+Flamel's chief care.
+
+Glennard glanced with the eye of untrained curiosity at the lines
+of warm-toned morocco, while his host busied himself with the
+uncorking of Apollinaris.
+
+"You've got a splendid lot of books," he said.
+
+"They're fairly decent," the other assented, in the curt tone of
+the collector who will not talk of his passion for fear of talking
+of nothing else; then, as Glennard, his hands in his pockets,
+began to stroll perfunctorily down the long line of bookcases--
+"Some men," Flamel irresistibly added, "think of books merely as
+tools, others as tooling.  I'm between the two; there are days
+when I use them as scenery, other days when I want them as
+society; so that, as you see, my library represents a makeshift
+compromise between looks and brains, and the collectors look down
+on me almost as much as the students."
+
+Glennard, without answering, was mechanically taking one book
+after another from the shelves.  His hands slipped curiously over
+the smooth covers and the noiseless subsidence of opening pages.
+Suddenly he came on a thin volume of faded manuscript.
+
+"What's this?" he asked, with a listless sense of wonder.
+
+"Ah, you're at my manuscript shelf.  I've been going in for that
+sort of thing lately."  Flamel came up and looked over his
+shoulders.  "That's a bit of Stendhal--one of the Italian stories--
+and here are some letters of Balzac to Madame Commanville."
+
+Glennard took the book with sudden eagerness.  "Who was Madame
+Commanville?"
+
+"His sister."  He was conscious that Flamel was looking at him
+with the smile that was like an interrogation point.  "I didn't
+know you cared for this kind of thing."
+
+"I don't--at least I've never had the chance.  Have you many
+collections of letters?"
+
+"Lord, no--very few.  I'm just beginning, and most of the
+interesting ones are out of my reach.  Here's a queer little
+collection, though--the rarest thing I've got--half a dozen of
+Shelley's letters to Harriet Westbrook.  I had a devil of a time
+getting them--a lot of collectors were after them."
+
+Glennard, taking the volume from his hand, glanced with a kind of
+repugnance at the interleaving of yellow cris-crossed sheets.
+"She was the one who drowned herself, wasn't she?"
+
+Flamel nodded.  "I suppose that little episode adds about fifty
+per cent. to their value," he said, meditatively.
+
+Glennard laid the book down.  He wondered why he had joined
+Flamel.  He was in no humor to be amused by the older man's talk,
+and a recrudescence of personal misery rose about him like an icy
+tide.
+
+"I believe I must take myself off," he said.  "I'd forgotten an
+engagement."
+
+He turned to go; but almost at the same moment he was conscious of
+a duality of intention wherein his apparent wish to leave revealed
+itself as a last effort of the will against the overmastering
+desire to stay and unbosom himself to Flamel.
+
+The older man, as though divining the conflict, laid a detaining
+pressure on his arm.
+
+"Won't the engagement keep?  Sit down and try one of these cigars.
+I don't often have the luck of seeing you here."
+
+"I'm rather driven just now," said Glennard, vaguely.  He found
+himself seated again, and Flamel had pushed to his side a low
+stand holding a bottle of Apollinaris and a decanter of cognac.
+
+Flamel, thrown back in his capacious arm-chair, surveyed him
+through a cloud of smoke with the comfortable tolerance of the man
+to whom no inconsistencies need be explained.  Connivance was
+implicit in the air.  It was the kind of atmosphere in which the
+outrageous loses its edge.  Glennard felt a gradual relaxing of
+his nerves.
+
+"I suppose one has to pay a lot for letters like that?" he heard
+himself asking, with a glance in the direction of the volume he
+had laid aside.
+
+"Oh, so-do--depends on circumstances."  Flamel viewed him
+thoughtfully.  "Are you thinking of collecting?"
+
+Glennard laughed.  "Lord, no.  The other way round."
+
+"Selling?"
+
+"Oh, I hardly know.  I was thinking of a poor chap--"
+
+Flamel filled the pause with a nod of interest.
+
+"A poor chap I used to know--who died--he died last year--and who
+left me a lot of letters, letters he thought a great deal of--he
+was fond of me and left 'em to me outright, with the idea, I
+suppose, that they might benefit me somehow--I don't know--I'm not
+much up on such things--" he reached his hand to the tall glass
+his host had filled.
+
+"A collection of autograph letters, eh?  Any big names?"
+
+"Oh, only one name.  They're all letters written to him--by one
+person, you understand; a woman, in fact--"
+
+"Oh, a woman," said Flamel, negligently.
+
+Glennard was nettled by his obvious loss of interest.  "I rather
+think they'd attract a good deal of notice if they were
+published."
+
+Flamel still looked uninterested.  "Love-letters, I suppose?"
+
+"Oh, just--the letters a woman would write to a man she knew well.
+They were tremendous friends, he and she."
+
+"And she wrote a clever letter?"
+
+"Clever?  It was Margaret Aubyn."
+
+A great silence filled the room.  It seemed to Glennard that the
+words had burst from him as blood gushes from a wound.
+
+"Great Scott!" said Flamel, sitting up.  "A collection of Margaret
+Aubyn's letters?  Did you say YOU had them?"
+
+"They were left me--by my friend."
+
+"I see.  Was he--well, no matter.  You're to be congratulated, at
+any rate.  What are you going to do with them?"
+
+Glennard stood up with a sense of weariness in all his bones.
+"Oh, I don't know.  I haven't thought much about it.  I just
+happened to see that some fellow was writing her life--"
+
+"Joslin; yes.  You didn't think of giving them to him?"
+
+Glennard had lounged across the room and stood staring up at a
+bronze Bacchus who drooped his garlanded head above the pediment
+of an Italian cabinet.  "What ought I to do?  You're just the
+fellow to advise me."  He felt the blood in his cheek as he spoke.
+
+Flamel sat with meditative eye.  "What do you WANT to do with
+them?" he asked.
+
+"I want to publish them," said Glennard, swinging round with
+sudden energy--"If I can--"
+
+"If you can?  They're yours, you say?"
+
+"They're mine fast enough.  There's no one to prevent--I mean
+there are no restrictions--" he was arrested by the sense that
+these accumulated proofs of impunity might precisely stand as the
+strongest check on his action.
+
+"And Mrs. Aubyn had no family, I believe?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Then I don't see who's to interfere," said Flamel, studying his
+cigar-tip.
+
+Glennard had turned his unseeing stare on an ecstatic Saint
+Catherine framed in tarnished gilding.
+
+"It's just this way," he began again, with an effort.  "When
+letters are as personal as--as these of my friend's. . . .  Well,
+I don't mind telling you that the cash would make a heap of
+difference to me; such a lot that it rather obscures my judgment--
+the fact is if I could lay my hand on a few thousands now I could
+get into a big thing, and without appreciable risk; and I'd like
+to know whether you think I'd be justified--under the
+circumstances. . . ."  He paused, with a dry throat.  It seemed to
+him at the moment that it would be impossible for him ever to sink
+lower in his own estimation.  He was in truth less ashamed of
+weighing the temptation than of submitting his scruples to a man
+like Flamel, and affecting to appeal to sentiments of delicacy on
+the absence of which he had consciously reckoned.  But he had
+reached a point where each word seemed to compel another, as each
+wave in a stream is forced forward by the pressure behind it; and
+before Flamel could speak he had faltered out--"You don't think
+people could say . . . could criticise the man. . . ."
+
+"But the man's dead, isn't he?"
+
+"He's dead--yes; but can I assume the responsibility without--"
+
+Flamel hesitated; and almost immediately Glennard's scruples gave
+way to irritation.  If at this hour Flamel were to affect an
+inopportune reluctance--!
+
+The older man's answer reassured him.  "Why need you assume any
+responsibility?  Your name won't appear, of course; and as to your
+friend's, I don't see why his should, either.  He wasn't a
+celebrity himself, I suppose?"
+
+"No, no."
+
+"Then the letters can be addressed to Mr. Blank.  Doesn't that
+make it all right?"
+
+Glennard's hesitation revived.  "For the public, yes.  But I don't
+see that it alters the case for me.  The question is, ought I to
+publish them at all?"
+
+"Of course you ought to."  Flamel spoke with invigorating
+emphasis.  "I doubt if you'd be justified in keeping them back.
+Anything of Margaret Aubyn's is more or less public property by
+this time.  She's too great for any one of us.  I was only
+wondering how you could use them to the best advantage--to
+yourself, I mean.  How many are there?"
+
+"Oh, a lot; perhaps a hundred--I haven't counted.  There may be
+more. . . ."
+
+"Gad!  What a haul!  When were they written?"
+
+"I don't know--that is--they corresponded for years.  What's the
+odds?"  He moved toward his hat with a vague impulse of flight.
+
+"It all counts," said Flamel, imperturbably.  "A long
+correspondence--one, I mean, that covers a great deal of time--is
+obviously worth more than if the same number of letters had been
+written within a year.  At any rate, you won't give them to
+Joslin?  They'd fill a book, wouldn't they?"
+
+"I suppose so.  I don't know how much it takes to fill a book."
+
+"Not love-letters, you say?"
+
+"Why?" flashed from Glennard.
+
+"Oh, nothing--only the big public is sentimental, and if they
+WERE--why, you could get any money for Margaret Aubyn's love-
+letters."
+
+Glennard was silent.
+
+"Are the letters interesting in themselves?  I mean apart from the
+association with her name?"
+
+"I'm no judge."  Glennard took up his hat and thrust himself into
+his overcoat.  "I dare say I sha'n't do anything about it.  And,
+Flamel--you won't mention this to anyone?"
+
+"Lord, no.  Well, I congratulate you.  You've got a big thing."
+Flamel was smiling at him from the hearth.
+
+Glennard, on the threshold, forced a response to the smile, while
+he questioned with loitering indifference--"Financially, eh?"
+
+"Rather; I should say so."
+
+Glennard's hand lingered on the knob.  "How much--should you say?
+You know about such things."
+
+"Oh, I should have to see the letters; but I should say--well, if
+you've got enough to fill a book and they're fairly readable, and
+the book is brought out at the right time--say ten thousand down
+from the publisher, and possibly one or two more in royalties.  If
+you got the publishers bidding against each other you might do
+even better; but of course I'm talking in the dark."
+
+"Of course," said Glennard, with sudden dizziness.  His hand had
+slipped from the knob and he stood staring down at the exotic
+spirals of the Persian rug beneath his feet.
+
+"I'd have to see the letters," Flamel repeated.
+
+"Of course--you'd have to see them. . . ." Glennard stammered;
+and, without turning, he flung over his shoulder an inarticulate
+"Good-by. . . ."
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+The little house, as Glennard strolled up to it between the trees,
+seemed no more than a gay tent pitched against the sunshine.  It
+had the crispness of a freshly starched summer gown, and the
+geraniums on the veranda bloomed as simultaneously as the flowers
+in a bonnet.  The garden was prospering absurdly.  Seed they had
+sown at random--amid laughing counter-charges of incompetence--had
+shot up in fragrant defiance of their blunders.  He smiled to see
+the clematis unfolding its punctual wings about the porch.  The
+tiny lawn was smooth as a shaven cheek, and a crimson rambler
+mounted to the nursery-window of a baby who never cried.  A breeze
+shook the awning above the tea-table, and his wife, as he drew
+near, could be seen bending above a kettle that was just about to
+boil.  So vividly did the whole scene suggest the painted bliss of
+a stage setting, that it would have been hardly surprising to see
+her step forward among the flowers and trill out her virtuous
+happiness from the veranda-rail.
+
+The stale heat of the long day in town, the dusty promiscuity of
+the suburban train were now but the requisite foil to an evening
+of scented breezes and tranquil talk.  They had been married more
+than a year, and each home-coming still reflected the freshness of
+their first day together.  If, indeed, their happiness had a flaw,
+it was in resembling too closely the bright impermanence of their
+surroundings.  Their love as yet was but the gay tent of holiday-
+makers.
+
+His wife looked up with a smile.  The country life suited her, and
+her beauty had gained depth from a stillness in which certain
+faces might have grown opaque.
+
+"Are you very tired?" she asked, pouring his tea.
+
+"Just enough to enjoy this."  He rose from the chair in which he
+had thrown himself and bent over the tray for his cream.  "You've
+had a visitor?" he commented, noticing a half-empty cup beside her
+own.
+
+"Only Mr. Flamel," she said, indifferently.
+
+"Flamel?  Again?"
+
+She answered without show of surprise.  "He left just now.  His
+yacht is down at Laurel Bay and he borrowed a trap of the Dreshams
+to drive over here."
+
+Glennard made no comment, and she went on, leaning her head back
+against the cushions of her bamboo-seat, "He wants us to go for a
+sail with him next Sunday."
+
+Glennard meditatively stirred his tea.  He was trying to think of
+the most natural and unartificial thing to say, and his voice
+seemed to come from the outside, as though he were speaking behind
+a marionette.  "Do you want to?"
+
+"Just as you please," she said, compliantly.  No affectation of
+indifference could have been as baffling as her compliance.
+Glennard, of late, was beginning to feel that the surface which, a
+year ago, he had taken for a sheet of clear glass, might, after
+all, be a mirror reflecting merely his own conception of what lay
+behind it.
+
+"Do you like Flamel?" he suddenly asked; to which, still engaged
+with her tea, she returned the feminine answer--"I thought you
+did."
+
+"I do, of course," he agreed, vexed at his own incorrigible
+tendency to magnify Flamel's importance by hovering about the
+topic.  "A sail would be rather jolly; let's go."
+
+She made no reply and he drew forth the rolled-up evening papers
+which he had thrust into his pocket on leaving the train.  As he
+smoothed them out his own countenance seemed to undergo the same
+process.  He ran his eye down the list of stocks and Flamel's
+importunate personality receded behind the rows of figures pushing
+forward into notice like so many bearers of good news.  Glennard's
+investments were flowering like his garden: the dryest shares
+blossomed into dividends, and a golden harvest awaited his sickle.
+
+He glanced at his wife with the tranquil air of the man who
+digests good luck as naturally as the dry ground absorbs a shower.
+"Things are looking uncommonly well.  I believe we shall be able
+to go to town for two or three months next winter if we can find
+something cheap."
+
+She smiled luxuriously: it was pleasant to be able to say, with an
+air of balancing relative advantages, "Really, on the baby's
+account I shall be almost sorry; but if we do go, there's Kate
+Erskine's house . . . she'll let us have it for almost nothing. . . ."
+
+"Well, write her about it," he recommended, his eyes travelling on
+in search of the weather report.  He had turned to the wrong page;
+and suddenly a line of black characters leapt out at him as from
+an ambush.
+
+"'Margaret Aubyn's Letters.'  Two volumes.  Out to-day.  First
+edition of five thousand sold out before leaving the press.
+Second edition ready next week.  THE BOOK OF THE YEAR. . . ."
+
+He looked up stupidly.  His wife still sat with her head thrown
+back, her pure profile detached against the cushions.  She was
+smiling a little over the prospect his last words had opened.
+Behind her head shivers of sun and shade ran across the striped
+awning.  A row of maples and a privet hedge hid their neighbor's
+gables, giving them undivided possession of their leafy half-acre;
+and life, a moment before, had been like their plot of ground,
+shut off, hedged in from importunities, impenetrably his and hers.
+Now it seemed to him that every maple-leaf, every privet-bud, was
+a relentless human gaze, pressing close upon their privacy.  It
+was as though they sat in a brightly lit room, uncurtained from a
+darkness full of hostile watchers. . . .  His wife still smiled;
+and her unconsciousness of danger seemed, in some horrible way, to
+put her beyond the reach of rescue. . . .
+
+He had not known that it would be like this.  After the first
+odious weeks, spent in preparing the letters for publication, in
+submitting them to Flamel, and in negotiating with the publishers,
+the transaction had dropped out of his consciousness into that
+unvisited limbo to which we relegate the deeds we would rather not
+have done but have no notion of undoing.  From the moment he had
+obtained Miss Trent's promise not to sail with her aunt he had
+tried to imagine himself irrevocably committed.  After that, he
+argued, his first duty was to her--she had become his conscience.
+The sum obtained from the publishers by Flamel's adroit
+manipulations and opportunely transferred to Dinslow's successful
+venture, already yielded a return which, combined with Glennard's
+professional earnings, took the edge of compulsion from their way
+of living, making it appear the expression of a graceful
+preference for simplicity.  It was the mitigated poverty which can
+subscribe to a review or two and have a few flowers on the dinner-
+table.  And already in a small way Glennard was beginning to feel
+the magnetic quality of prosperity.  Clients who had passed his
+door in the hungry days sought it out now that it bore the name of
+a successful man.  It was understood that a small inheritance,
+cleverly invested, was the source of his fortune; and there was a
+feeling that a man who could do so well for himself was likely to
+know how to turn over other people's money.
+
+But it was in the more intimate reward of his wife's happiness
+that Glennard tasted the full flavor of success.  Coming out of
+conditions so narrow that those he offered her seemed spacious,
+she fitted into her new life without any of those manifest efforts
+at adjustment that are as sore to a husband's pride as the
+critical rearrangement of the bridal furniture.  She had given
+him, instead, the delicate pleasure of watching her expand like a
+sea-creature restored to its element, stretching out the atrophied
+tentacles of girlish vanity and enjoyment to the rising tide of
+opportunity.  And somehow--in the windowless inner cell of his
+consciousness where self-criticism cowered--Glennard's course
+seemed justified by its merely material success.  How could such a
+crop of innocent blessedness have sprung from tainted soil?
+
+
+
+Now he had the injured sense of a man entrapped into a
+disadvantageous bargain.  He had not known it would be like this;
+and a dull anger gathered at his heart.  Anger against whom?
+Against his wife, for not knowing what he suffered?  Against
+Flamel, for being the unconscious instrument of his wrong-doing?
+Or against that mute memory to which his own act had suddenly
+given a voice of accusation?  Yes, that was it; and his punishment
+henceforth would be the presence, the unescapable presence, of the
+woman he had so persistently evaded.  She would always be there
+now.  It was as though he had married her instead of the other.
+It was what she had always wanted--to be with him--and she had
+gained her point at last. . . .
+
+He sprang up, as though in an impulse of flight. . . .  The sudden
+movement lifted his wife's lids, and she asked, in the incurious
+voice of the woman whose life is enclosed in a magic circle of
+prosperity--"Any news?"
+
+"No--none--" he said, roused to a sense of immediate peril.  The
+papers lay scattered at his feet--what if she were to see them?
+He stretched his arm to gather them up, but his next thought
+showed him the futility of such concealment.  The same
+advertisement would appear every day, for weeks to come, in every
+newspaper; how could he prevent her seeing it?  He could not
+always be hiding the papers from her. . . .  Well, and what if she
+did see it?  It would signify nothing to her, the chances were
+that she would never even read the book. . . .  As she ceased to
+be an element of fear in his calculations the distance between
+them seemed to lessen and he took her again, as it were, into the
+circle of his conjugal protection. . . .  Yet a moment before he
+had almost hated her! . . .  He laughed aloud at his senseless
+terrors. . . .  He was off his balance, decidedly.
+
+"What are you laughing at?" she asked.
+
+He explained, elaborately, that he was laughing at the
+recollection of an old woman in the train, an old woman with a lot
+of bundles, who couldn't find her ticket. . . .  But somehow, in
+the telling, the humor of the story seemed to evaporate, and he
+felt the conventionality of her smile.  He glanced at his watch,
+"Isn't it time to dress?"
+
+She rose with serene reluctance.  "It's a pity to go in.  The
+garden looks so lovely."
+
+They lingered side by side, surveying their domain.  There was not
+space in it, at this hour, for the shadow of the elm-tree in the
+angle of the hedge; it crossed the lawn, cut the flower-border in
+two, and ran up the side of the house to the nursery window.  She
+bent to flick a caterpillar from the honey-suckle; then, as they
+turned indoors, "If we mean to go on the yacht next Sunday," she
+suggested, "oughtn't you to let Mr. Flamel know?"
+
+Glennard's exasperation deflected suddenly.  "Of course I shall
+let him know.  You always seem to imply that I'm going to do
+something rude to Flamel."
+
+The words reverberated through her silence; she had a way of thus
+leaving one space in which to contemplate one's folly at arm's
+length.  Glennard turned on his heel and went upstairs.  As he
+dropped into a chair before his dressing-table he said to himself
+that in the last hour he had sounded the depths of his humiliation
+and that the lowest dregs of it, the very bottom-slime, was the
+hateful necessity of having always, as long as the two men lived,
+to be civil to Barton Flamel.
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+THE week in town had been sultry, and the men, in the Sunday
+emancipation of white flannel and duck, filled the deck-chairs of
+the yacht with their outstretched apathy, following, through a
+mist of cigarette-smoke, the flitting inconsequences of the women.
+The part was a small one--Flamel had few intimate friends--but
+composed of more heterogeneous atoms than the little pools into
+which society usually runs.  The reaction from the chief episode
+of his earlier life had bred in Glennard an uneasy distaste for
+any kind of personal saliency.  Cleverness was useful in business;
+but in society it seemed to him as futile as the sham cascades
+formed by a stream that might have been used to drive a mill.  He
+liked the collective point of view that goes with the civilized
+uniformity of dress-clothes, and his wife's attitude implied the
+same preference; yet they found themselves slipping more and more
+into Flamel's intimacy.  Alexa had once or twice said that she
+enjoyed meeting clever people; but her enjoyment took the negative
+form of a smiling receptivity; and Glennard felt a growing
+preference for the kind of people who have their thinking done for
+them by the community.
+
+Still, the deck of the yacht was a pleasant refuge from the heat
+on shore, and his wife's profile, serenely projected against the
+changing blue, lay on his retina like a cool hand on the nerves.
+He had never been more impressed by the kind of absoluteness that
+lifted her beauty above the transient effects of other women,
+making the most harmonious face seem an accidental collocation of
+features.
+
+The ladies who directly suggested this comparison were of a kind
+accustomed to take similar risks with more gratifying results.
+Mrs. Armiger had in fact long been the triumphant alternative of
+those who couldn't "see" Alexa Glennard's looks; and Mrs.
+Touchett's claims to consideration were founded on that
+distribution of effects which is the wonder of those who admire a
+highly cultivated country.  The third lady of the trio which
+Glennard's fancy had put to such unflattering uses, was bound by
+circumstances to support the claims of the other two.  This was
+Mrs. Dresham, the wife of the editor of the Radiator.  Mrs.
+Dresham was a lady who had rescued herself from social obscurity
+by assuming the role of her husband's exponent and interpreter;
+and Dresham's leisure being devoted to the cultivation of
+remarkable women, his wife's attitude committed her to the public
+celebration of their remarkableness.  For the conceivable tedium
+of this duty, Mrs. Dresham was repaid by the fact that there were
+people who took HER for a remarkable woman; and who in turn
+probably purchased similar distinction with the small change of
+her reflected importance.  As to the other ladies of the party,
+they were simply the wives of some of the men--the kind of women
+who expect to be talked to collectively and to have their
+questions left unanswered.
+
+Mrs. Armiger, the latest embodiment of Dresham's instinct for the
+remarkable, was an innocent beauty who for years had distilled
+dulness among a set of people now self-condemned by their
+inability to appreciate her.  Under Dresham's tutelage she had
+developed into a "thoughtful woman," who read his leaders in the
+Radiator and bought the books he recommended.  When a new novel
+appeared, people wanted to know what Mrs. Armiger thought of it;
+and a young gentleman who had made a trip in Touraine had recently
+inscribed to her the wide-margined result of his explorations.
+
+Glennard, leaning back with his head against the rail and a slit
+of fugitive blue between his half-closed lids, vaguely wished she
+wouldn't spoil the afternoon by making people talk; though he
+reduced his annoyance to the minimum by not listening to what was
+said, there remained a latent irritation against the general
+futility of words.
+
+His wife's gift of silence seemed to him the most vivid commentary
+on the clumsiness of speech as a means of intercourse, and his
+eyes had turned to her in renewed appreciation of this finer
+faculty when Mrs. Armiger's voice abruptly brought home to him the
+underrated potentialities of language.
+
+"You've read them, of course, Mrs. Glennard?" he heard her ask;
+and, in reply to Alexa's vague interrogation--"Why, the 'Aubyn
+Letters'--it's the only book people are talking of this week."
+
+Mrs. Dresham immediately saw her advantage.  "You HAVEN'T read
+them?  How very extraordinary!  As Mrs. Armiger says, the book's
+in the air; one breathes it in like the influenza."
+
+Glennard sat motionless, watching his wife.
+
+"Perhaps it hasn't reached the suburbs yet," she said, with her
+unruffled smile.
+
+"Oh, DO let me come to you, then!" Mrs. Touchett cried; "anything
+for a change of air!  I'm positively sick of the book and I can't
+put it down.  Can't you sail us beyond its reach, Mr. Flamel?"
+
+Flamel shook his head.  "Not even with this breeze.  Literature
+travels faster than steam nowadays.  And the worst of it is that
+we can't any of us give up reading; it's as insidious as a vice
+and as tiresome as a virtue."
+
+"I believe it IS a vice, almost, to read such a book as the
+'Letters,'" said Mrs. Touchett.  "It's the woman's soul,
+absolutely torn up by the roots--her whole self laid bare; and to
+a man who evidently didn't care; who couldn't have cared.  I don't
+mean to read another line; it's too much like listening at a
+keyhole."
+
+"But if she wanted it published?"
+
+"Wanted it?  How do we know she did?"
+
+"Why, I heard she'd left the letters to the man--whoever he is--
+with directions that they should be published after his death--"
+
+"I don't believe it," Mrs. Touchett declared.
+
+"He's dead then, is he?" one of the men asked.
+
+"Why, you don't suppose if he were alive he could ever hold up his
+head again, with these letters being read by everybody?" Mrs.
+Touchett protested.  "It must have been horrible enough to know
+they'd been written to him; but to publish them!  No man could
+have done it and no woman could have told him to--"
+
+"Oh, come, come," Dresham judicially interposed; "after all,
+they're not love-letters."
+
+"No--that's the worst of it; they're unloved letters," Mrs.
+Touchett retorted.
+
+"Then, obviously, she needn't have written them; whereas the man,
+poor devil, could hardly help receiving them."
+
+"Perhaps he counted on the public to save him the trouble of
+reading them," said young Hartly, who was in the cynical stage.
+
+Mrs. Armiger turned her reproachful loveliness to Dresham.  "From
+the way you defend him, I believe you know who he is."
+
+Everyone looked at Dresham, and his wife smiled with the superior
+air of the woman who is in her husband's professional secrets.
+Dresham shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"What have I said to defend him?"
+
+"You called him a poor devil--you pitied him."
+
+"A man who could let Margaret Aubyn write to him in that way?  Of
+course I pity him."
+
+"Then you MUST know who he is," cried Mrs. Armiger, with a
+triumphant air of penetration.
+
+Hartly and Flamel laughed and Dresham shook his head.  "No one
+knows; not even the publishers; so they tell me at least."
+
+"So they tell you to tell us," Hartly astutely amended; and Mrs.
+Armiger added, with the appearance of carrying the argument a
+point farther, "But even if HE'S dead and SHE'S dead, somebody
+must have given the letters to the publishers."
+
+"A little bird, probably," said Dresham, smiling indulgently on
+her deduction.
+
+"A little bird of prey then--a vulture, I should say--" another
+man interpolated.
+
+"Oh, I'm not with you there," said Dresham, easily.  "Those
+letters belonged to the public."
+
+"How can any letters belong to the public that weren't written to
+the public?" Mrs. Touchett interposed.
+
+"Well, these were, in a sense.  A personality as big as Margaret
+Aubyn's belongs to the world.  Such a mind is part of the general
+fund of thought.  It's the penalty of greatness--one becomes a
+monument historique.  Posterity pays the cost of keeping one up,
+but on condition that one is always open to the public."
+
+"I don't see that that exonerates the man who gives up the keys of
+the sanctuary, as it were."
+
+"Who WAS he?" another voice inquired.
+
+"Who was he?  Oh, nobody, I fancy--the letter-box, the slit in the
+wall through which the letters passed to posterity. . . ."
+
+"But she never meant them for posterity!"
+
+"A woman shouldn't write such letters if she doesn't mean them to
+be published. . . ."
+
+"She shouldn't write them to such a man!" Mrs. Touchett scornfully
+corrected.
+
+"I never keep letters," said Mrs. Armiger, under the obvious
+impression that she was contributing a valuable point to the
+discussion.
+
+There was a general laugh, and Flamel, who had not spoken, said,
+lazily, "You women are too incurably subjective.  I venture to say
+that most men would see in those letters merely their immense
+literary value, their significance as documents.  The personal
+side doesn't count where there's so much else."
+
+"Oh, we all know you haven't any principles," Mrs. Armiger
+declared; and Alexa Glennard, lifting an indolent smile, said: "I
+shall never write you a love-letter, Mr. Flamel."
+
+Glennard moved away impatiently.  Such talk was as tedious as the
+buzzing of gnats.  He wondered why his wife had wanted to drag him
+on such a senseless expedition. . . .  He hated Flamel's crowd--
+and what business had Flamel himself to interfere in that way,
+standing up for the publication of the letters as though Glennard
+needed his defence? . . .
+
+Glennard turned his head and saw that Flamel had drawn a seat to
+Alexa's elbow and was speaking to her in a low tone.  The other
+groups had scattered, straying in twos along the deck.  It came
+over Glennard that he should never again be able to see Flamel
+speaking to his wife without the sense of sick mistrust that now
+loosened his joints. . . .
+
+
+Alexa, the next morning, over their early breakfast, surprised her
+husband by an unexpected request.
+
+"Will you bring me those letters from town?" she asked.
+
+"What letters?" he said, putting down his cup.  He felt himself as
+helplessly vulnerable as a man who is lunged at in the dark.
+
+"Mrs. Aubyn's.  The book they were all talking about yesterday."
+
+Glennard, carefully measuring his second cup of tea, said, with
+deliberation, "I didn't know you cared about that sort of thing."
+
+She was, in fact, not a great reader, and a new book seldom
+reached her till it was, so to speak, on the home stretch; but she
+replied, with a gentle tenacity, "I think it would interest me
+because I read her life last year."
+
+"Her life?  Where did you get that?"
+
+"Someone lent it to me when it came out--Mr. Flamel, I think."
+
+His first impulse was to exclaim, "Why the devil do you borrow
+books of Flamel?  I can buy you all you want--" but he felt
+himself irresistibly forced into an attitude of smiling
+compliance.  "Flamel always has the newest books going, hasn't he?
+You must be careful, by the way, about returning what he lends
+you.  He's rather crotchety about his library."
+
+"Oh, I'm always very careful," she said, with a touch of
+competence that struck him; and she added, as he caught up his
+hat: "Don't forget the letters."
+
+Why had she asked for the book?  Was her sudden wish to see it the
+result of some hint of Flamel's?  The thought turned Glennard
+sick, but he preserved sufficient lucidity to tell himself, a
+moment later, that his last hope of self-control would be lost if
+he yielded to the temptation of seeing a hidden purpose in
+everything she said and did.  How much Flamel guessed, he had no
+means of divining; nor could he predicate, from what he knew of
+the man, to what use his inferences might be put.  The very
+qualities that had made Flamel a useful adviser made him the most
+dangerous of accomplices.  Glennard felt himself agrope among
+alien forces that his own act had set in motion. . . .
+
+Alexa was a woman of few requirements; but her wishes, even in
+trifles, had a definiteness that distinguished them from the fluid
+impulses of her kind.  He knew that, having once asked for the
+book, she would not forget it; and he put aside, as an ineffectual
+expedient, his momentary idea of applying for it at the
+circulating library and telling her that all the copies were out.
+If the book was to be bought it had better be bought at once.  He
+left his office earlier than usual and turned in at the first
+book-shop on his way to the train.  The show-window was stacked
+with conspicuously lettered volumes.  "Margaret Aubyn" flashed
+back at him in endless repetition.  He plunged into the shop and
+came on a counter where the name reiterated itself on row after
+row of bindings.  It seemed to have driven the rest of literature
+to the back shelves.  He caught up a copy, tossing the money to an
+astonished clerk who pursued him to the door with the unheeded
+offer to wrap up the volumes.
+
+In the street he was seized with a sudden apprehension.  What if
+he were to meet Flamel?  The thought was intolerable.  He called a
+cab and drove straight to the station where, amid the palm-leaf
+fans of a perspiring crowd, he waited a long half-hour for his
+train to start.
+
+He had thrust a volume in either pocket and in the train he dared
+not draw them out; but the detested words leaped at him from the
+folds of the evening paper.  The air seemed full of Margaret
+Aubyn's name.  The motion of the train set it dancing up and down
+on the page of a magazine that a man in front of him was reading. . . .
+
+At the door he was told that Mrs. Glennard was still out, and he
+went upstairs to his room and dragged the books from his pocket.
+They lay on the table before him like live things that he feared
+to touch. . . .  At length he opened the first volume.  A familiar
+letter sprang out at him, each word quickened by its glaring garb
+of type.  The little broken phrases fled across the page like
+wounded animals in the open. . . .  It was a horrible sight. . . .
+A battue of helpless things driven savagely out of shelter.  He
+had not known it would be like this. . . .
+
+He understood now that, at the moment of selling the letters, he
+had viewed the transaction solely as it affected himself: as an
+unfortunate blemish on an otherwise presentable record.  He had
+scarcely considered the act in relation to Margaret Aubyn; for
+death, if it hallows, also makes innocuous.  Glennard's God was a
+god of the living, of the immediate, the actual, the tangible; all
+his days he had lived in the presence of that god, heedless of the
+divinities who, below the surface of our deeds and passions,
+silently forge the fatal weapons of the dead.
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+A knock roused him and looking up he saw his wife.  He met her
+glance in silence, and she faltered out, "Are you ill?"
+
+The words restored his self-possession.  "Ill?  Of course not.
+They told me you were out and I came upstairs."
+
+The books lay between them on the table; he wondered when she
+would see them.  She lingered tentatively on the threshold, with
+the air of leaving his explanation on his hands.  She was not the
+kind of woman who could be counted on to fortify an excuse by
+appearing to dispute it.
+
+"Where have you been?" Glennard asked, moving forward so that he
+obstructed her vision of the books.
+
+"I walked over to the Dreshams for tea."
+
+"I can't think what you see in those people," he said with a
+shrug; adding, uncontrollably--"I suppose Flamel was there?"
+
+"No; he left on the yacht this morning."
+
+An answer so obstructing to the natural escape of his irritation
+left Glennard with no momentary resource but that of strolling
+impatiently to the window.  As her eyes followed him they lit on
+the books.
+
+"Ah, you've brought them!  I'm so glad," she exclaimed.
+
+He answered over his shoulder, "For a woman who never reads you
+make the most astounding exceptions!"
+
+Her smile was an exasperating concession to the probability that
+it had been hot in town or that something had bothered him.
+
+"Do you mean it's not nice to want to read the book?" she asked.
+"It was not nice to publish it, certainly; but after all, I'm not
+responsible for that, am I?"  She paused, and, as he made no
+answer, went on, still smiling, "I do read sometimes, you know;
+and I'm very fond of Margaret Aubyn's books.  I was reading
+'Pomegranate Seed' when we first met.  Don't you remember?  It was
+then you told me all about her."
+
+Glennard had turned back into the room and stood staring at his
+wife.  "All about her?" he repeated, and with the words
+remembrance came to him.  He had found Miss Trent one afternoon
+with the novel in her hand, and moved by the lover's fatuous
+impulse to associate himself in some way with whatever fills the
+mind of the beloved, had broken through his habitual silence about
+the past.  Rewarded by the consciousness of figuring impressively
+in Miss Trent's imagination he had gone on from one anecdote to
+another, reviving dormant details of his old Hillbridge life, and
+pasturing his vanity on the eagerness with which she received his
+reminiscences of a being already clothed in the impersonality of
+greatness.
+
+The incident had left no trace in his mind; but it sprang up now
+like an old enemy, the more dangerous for having been forgotten.
+The instinct of self-preservation--sometimes the most perilous
+that man can exercise--made him awkwardly declare--"Oh, I used to
+see her at people's houses, that was all;" and her silence as
+usual leaving room for a multiplication of blunders, he added,
+with increased indifference, "I simply can't see what you can find
+to interest you in such a book."
+
+She seemed to consider this intently.  "You've read it, then?"
+
+"I glanced at it--I never read such things."
+
+"Is it true that she didn't wish the letters to be published?"
+
+Glennard felt the sudden dizziness of the mountaineer on a narrow
+ledge, and with it the sense that he was lost if he looked more
+than a step ahead.
+
+"I'm sure I don't know," he said; then, summoning a smile, he
+passed his hand through her arm.  "I didn't have tea at the
+Dreshams, you know; won't you give me some now?" he suggested.
+
+That evening Glennard, under pretext of work to be done, shut
+himself into the small study opening off the drawing-room.  As he
+gathered up his papers he said to his wife: "You're not going to
+sit indoors on such a night as this?  I'll join you presently
+outside."
+
+But she had drawn her armchair to the lamp.  "I want to look at my
+book," she said, taking up the first volume of the "Letters."
+
+Glennard, with a shrug, withdrew into the study.  "I'm going to
+shut the door; I want to be quiet," he explained from the
+threshold; and she nodded without lifting her eyes from the book.
+
+He sank into a chair, staring aimlessly at the outspread papers.
+How was he to work, while on the other side of the door she sat
+with that volume in her hand?  The door did not shut her out--he
+saw her distinctly, felt her close to him in a contact as painful
+as the pressure on a bruise.
+
+The sensation was part of the general strangeness that made him
+feel like a man waking from a long sleep to find himself in an
+unknown country among people of alien tongue.  We live in our own
+souls as in an unmapped region, a few acres of which we have
+cleared for our habitation; while of the nature of those nearest
+us we know but the boundaries that march with ours.  Of the points
+in his wife's character not in direct contact with his own,
+Glennard now discerned his ignorance; and the baffling sense of
+her remoteness was intensified by the discovery that, in one way,
+she was closer to him than ever before.  As one may live for years
+in happy unconsciousness of the possession of a sensitive nerve,
+he had lived beside his wife unaware that her individuality had
+become a part of the texture of his life, ineradicable as some
+growth on a vital organ; and he now felt himself at once incapable
+of forecasting her judgment and powerless to evade its effects.
+
+To escape, the next morning, the confidences of the breakfast-
+table, he went to town earlier than usual.  His wife, who read
+slowly, was given to talking over what she read, and at present
+his first object in life was to postpone the inevitable discussion
+of the letters.  This instinct of protection in the afternoon, on
+his way uptown, guided him to the club in search of a man who
+might be persuaded to come out to the country to dine.  The only
+man in the club was Flamel.
+
+Glennard, as he heard himself almost involuntarily pressing Flamel
+to come and dine, felt the full irony of the situation.  To use
+Flamel as a shield against his wife's scrutiny was only a shade
+less humiliating than to reckon on his wife as a defence against
+Flamel.
+
+He felt a contradictory movement of annoyance at the latter's
+ready acceptance, and the two men drove in silence to the station.
+As they passed the bookstall in the waiting-room Flamel lingered a
+moment and the eyes of both fell on Margaret Aubyn's name,
+conspicuously displayed above a counter stacked with the familiar
+volumes.
+
+"We shall be late, you know," Glennard remonstrated, pulling out
+his watch.
+
+"Go ahead," said Flamel, imperturbably.  "I want to get something--"
+
+Glennard turned on his heel and walked down the platform.  Flamel
+rejoined him with an innocent-looking magazine in his hand; but
+Glennard dared not even glance at the cover, lest it should show
+the syllables he feared.
+
+The train was full of people they knew, and they were kept apart
+till it dropped them at the little suburban station.  As they
+strolled up the shaded hill, Glennard talked volubly, pointing out
+the improvements in the neighborhood, deploring the threatened
+approach of an electric railway, and screening himself by a series
+of reflex adjustments from the imminent risk of any allusion to
+the "Letters."  Flamel suffered his discourse with the bland
+inattention that we accord to the affairs of someone else's
+suburb, and they reached the shelter of Alexa's tea-table without
+a perceptible turn toward the dreaded topic.
+
+The dinner passed off safely.  Flamel, always at his best in
+Alexa's presence, gave her the kind of attention which is like a
+beaconing light thrown on the speaker's words: his answers seemed
+to bring out a latent significance in her phrases, as the sculptor
+draws his statue from the block.  Glennard, under his wife's
+composure, detected a sensibility to this manoeuvre, and the
+discovery was like the lightning-flash across a nocturnal
+landscape.  Thus far these momentary illuminations had served only
+to reveal the strangeness of the intervening country: each fresh
+observation seemed to increase the sum-total of his ignorance.
+Her simplicity of outline was more puzzling than a complex
+surface.  One may conceivably work one's way through a labyrinth;
+but Alexa's candor was like a snow-covered plain where, the road
+once lost, there are no landmarks to travel by.
+
+Dinner over, they returned to the veranda, where a moon, rising
+behind the old elm, was combining with that complaisant tree a
+romantic enlargement of their borders.  Glennard had forgotten the
+cigars.  He went to his study to fetch them, and in passing
+through the drawing-room he saw the second volume of the "Letters"
+lying open on his wife's table.  He picked up the book and looked
+at the date of the letter she had been reading.  It was one of the
+last . . . he knew the few lines by heart.  He dropped the book
+and leaned against the wall.  Why had he included that one among
+the others?  Or was it possible that now they would all seem like
+that . . .?
+
+Alexa's voice came suddenly out of the dusk.  "May Touchett was
+right--it IS like listening at a key-hole.  I wish I hadn't read
+it!"
+
+Flamel returned, in the leisurely tone of the man whose phrases
+are punctuated by a cigarette, "It seems so to us, perhaps; but to
+another generation the book will be a classic."
+
+"Then it ought not to have been published till it had become a
+classic.  It's horrible, it's degrading almost, to read the
+secrets of a woman one might have known."  She added, in a lower
+tone, "Stephen DID know her--"
+
+"Did he?" came from Flamel.
+
+"He knew her very well, at Hillbridge, years ago.  The book has
+made him feel dreadfully . . . he wouldn't read it . . . he didn't
+want me to read it.  I didn't understand at first, but now I can
+see how horribly disloyal it must seem to him.  It's so much worse
+to surprise a friend's secrets than a stranger's."
+
+"Oh, Glennard's such a sensitive chap," Flamel said, easily; and
+Alexa almost rebukingly rejoined, "If you'd known her I'm sure
+you'd feel as he does. . . ."
+
+Glennard stood motionless, overcome by the singular infelicity
+with which he had contrived to put Flamel in possession of the two
+points most damaging to his case: the fact that he had been a
+friend of Margaret Aubyn's, and that he had concealed from Alexa
+his share in the publication of the letters.  To a man of less
+than Flamel's astuteness it must now be clear to whom the letters
+were addressed; and the possibility once suggested, nothing could
+be easier than to confirm it by discreet research.  An impulse of
+self-accusal drove Glennard to the window.  Why not anticipate
+betrayal by telling his wife the truth in Flamel's presence?  If
+the man had a drop of decent feeling in him, such a course would
+be the surest means of securing his silence; and above all, it
+would rid Glennard of the necessity of defending himself against
+the perpetual criticism of his wife's belief in him. . . .
+
+The impulse was strong enough to carry him to the window; but
+there a reaction of defiance set in.  What had he done, after all,
+to need defence and explanation?  Both Dresham and Flamel had, in
+his hearing, declared the publication of the letters to be not
+only justifiable but obligatory; and if the disinterestedness of
+Flamel's verdict might be questioned, Dresham's at least
+represented the impartial view of the man of letters.  As to
+Alexa's words, they were simply the conventional utterance of the
+"nice" woman on a question already decided for her by other "nice"
+women.  She had said the proper thing as mechanically as she would
+have put on the appropriate gown or written the correct form of
+dinner-invitation.  Glennard had small faith in the abstract
+judgments of the other sex; he knew that half the women who were
+horrified by the publication of Mrs. Aubyn's letters would have
+betrayed her secrets without a scruple.
+
+The sudden lowering of his emotional pitch brought a proportionate
+relief.  He told himself that now the worst was over and things
+would fall into perspective again.  His wife and Flamel had turned
+to other topics, and coming out on the veranda, he handed the
+cigars to Flamel, saying, cheerfully--and yet he could have sworn
+they were the last words he meant to utter!--"Look here, old man,
+before you go down to Newport you must come out and spend a few
+days with us--mustn't he, Alexa?"
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+Glennard had, perhaps unconsciously, counted on the continuance of
+this easier mood.  He had always taken pride in a certain
+robustness of fibre that enabled him to harden himself against the
+inevitable, to convert his failures into the building materials of
+success.  Though it did not even now occur to him that what he
+called the inevitable had hitherto been the alternative he
+happened to prefer, he was yet obscurely aware that his present
+difficulty was one not to be conjured by any affectation of
+indifference.  Some griefs build the soul a spacious house--but in
+this misery of Glennard's he could not stand upright.  It pressed
+against him at every turn.  He told himself that this was because
+there was no escape from the visible evidences of his act.  The
+"Letters" confronted him everywhere.  People who had never opened
+a book discussed them with critical reservations; to have read
+them had become a social obligation in circles to which literature
+never penetrates except in a personal guise.
+
+Glennard did himself injustice.  it was from the unexpected
+discovery of his own pettiness that he chiefly suffered.  Our
+self-esteem is apt to be based on the hypothetical great act we
+have never had occasion to perform; and even the most self-
+scrutinizing modesty credits itself negatively with a high
+standard of conduct.  Glennard had never thought himself a hero;
+but he had been certain that he was incapable of baseness.  We all
+like our wrong-doings to have a becoming cut, to be made to order,
+as it were; and Glennard found himself suddenly thrust into a garb
+of dishonor surely meant for a meaner figure.
+
+The immediate result of his first weeks of wretchedness was the
+resolve to go to town for the winter.  He knew that such a course
+was just beyond the limit of prudence; but it was easy to allay
+the fears of Alexa who, scrupulously vigilant in the management of
+the household, preserved the American wife's usual aloofness from
+her husband's business cares.  Glennard felt that he could not
+trust himself to a winter's solitude with her.  He had an
+unspeakable dread of her learning the truth about the letters, yet
+could not be sure of steeling himself against the suicidal impulse
+of avowal.  His very soul was parched for sympathy; he thirsted
+for a voice of pity and comprehension.  But would his wife pity?
+Would she understand?  Again he found himself brought up abruptly
+against his incredible ignorance of her nature.  The fact that he
+knew well enough how she would behave in the ordinary emergencies
+of life, that he could count, in such contingencies, on the kind
+of high courage and directness he had always divined in her, made
+him the more hopeless of her entering into the torturous
+psychology of an act that he himself could no longer explain or
+understand.  It would have been easier had she been more complex,
+more feminine--if he could have counted on her imaginative
+sympathy or her moral obtuseness--but he was sure of neither.  He
+was sure of nothing but that, for a time, he must avoid her.
+Glennard could not rid himself of the delusion that by and by his
+action would cease to make its consequences felt.  He would not
+have cared to own to himself that he counted on the dulling of his
+sensibilities: he preferred to indulge the vague hypothesis that
+extraneous circumstances would somehow efface the blot upon his
+conscience.  In his worst moments of self-abasement he tried to
+find solace in the thought that Flamel had sanctioned his course.
+Flamel, at the outset, must have guessed to whom the letters were
+addressed; yet neither then nor afterward had he hesitated to
+advise their publication.  This thought drew Glennard to him in
+fitful impulses of friendliness, from each of which there was a
+sharper reaction of distrust and aversion.  When Flamel was not at
+the house, he missed the support of his tacit connivance; when he
+was there, his presence seemed the assertion of an intolerable
+claim.
+
+Early in the winter the Glennards took possession of the little
+house that was to cost them almost nothing.  The change brought
+Glennard the immediate relief of seeing less of his wife, and of
+being protected, in her presence, by the multiplied preoccupations
+of town life.  Alexa, who could never appear hurried, showed the
+smiling abstraction of a pretty woman to whom the social side of
+married life has not lost its novelty.  Glennard, with the
+recklessness of a man fresh from his first financial imprudence,
+encouraged her in such little extravagances as her good sense at
+first resisted.  Since they had come to town, he argued, they
+might as well enjoy themselves.  He took a sympathetic view of the
+necessity of new gowns, he gave her a set of furs at Christmas,
+and before the New Year they had agreed on the obligation of
+adding a parlour-maid to their small establishment.
+
+Providence the very next day hastened to justify this measure by
+placing on Glennard's breakfast-plate an envelope bearing the name
+of the publishers to whom he had sold Mrs. Aubyn's letters.  It
+happened to be the only letter the early post had brought, and he
+glanced across the table at his wife, who had come down before him
+and had probably laid the envelope on his plate.  She was not the
+woman to ask awkward questions, but he felt the conjecture of her
+glance, and he was debating whether to affect surprise at the
+receipt of the letter, or to pass it off as a business
+communication that had strayed to his house, when a check fell
+from the envelope.  It was the royalty on the first edition of the
+letters.  His first feeling was one of simple satisfaction.  The
+money had come with such infernal opportuneness that he could not
+help welcoming it.  Before long, too, there would be more; he knew
+the book was still selling far beyond the publisher's previsions.
+He put the check in his pocket and left the room without looking
+at his wife.
+
+On the way to his office the habitual reaction set in.  The money
+he had received was the first tangible reminder that he was living
+on the sale of his self-esteem.  The thought of material benefit
+had been overshadowed by his sense of the intrinsic baseness of
+making the letters known; now he saw what an element of sordidness
+it added to the situation and how the fact that he needed the
+money, and must use it, pledged him more irrevocably than ever to
+the consequences of his act.  It seemed to him, in that first hour
+of misery, that he had betrayed his friend anew.
+
+When, that afternoon, he reached home earlier than usual, Alexa's
+drawing-room was full of a gayety that overflowed to the stairs.
+Flamel, for a wonder, was not there; but Dresham and young Hartly,
+grouped about the tea-table, were receiving with resonant mirth a
+narrative delivered in the fluttered staccato that made Mrs.
+Armiger's conversation like the ejaculations of a startled aviary.
+
+She paused as Glennard entered, and he had time to notice that his
+wife, who was busied about the tea-tray, had not joined in the
+laughter of the men.
+
+"Oh, go on, go on," young Hartly rapturously groaned; and Mrs.
+Armiger met Glennard's inquiry with the deprecating cry that
+really she didn't see what there was to laugh at.  "I'm sure I
+feel more like crying.  I don't know what I should have done if
+Alexa hadn't been home to give me a cup of tea.  My nerves are in
+shreds--yes, another, dear, please--" and as Glennard looked his
+perplexity, she went on, after pondering on the selection of a
+second lump of sugar, "Why, I've just come from the reading, you
+know--the reading at the Waldorf."
+
+"I haven't been in town long enough to know anything," said
+Glennard, taking the cup his wife handed him.  "Who has been
+reading what?"
+
+"That lovely girl from the South--Georgie--Georgie what's her
+name--Mrs. Dresham's protegee--unless she's YOURS, Mr. Dresham!
+Why, the big ball-room was PACKED, and all the women were crying
+like idiots--it was the most harrowing thing I ever heard--"
+
+"What DID you hear?" Glennard asked; and his wife interposed:
+"Won't you have another bit of cake, Julia?  Or, Stephen, ring for
+some hot toast, please."  Her tone betrayed a polite satiety of
+the topic under discussion.  Glennard turned to the bell, but Mrs.
+Armiger pursued him with her lovely amazement.
+
+"Why, the "Aubyn Letters"--didn't you know about it?  The girl
+read them so beautifully that it was quite horrible--I should have
+fainted if there'd been a man near enough to carry me out."
+
+Hartly's glee redoubled, and Dresham said, jovially, "How like you
+women to raise a shriek over the book and then do all you can to
+encourage the blatant publicity of the readings!"
+
+Mrs. Armiger met him more than half-way on a torrent of self-
+accusal.  "It WAS horrid; it was disgraceful.  I told your wife we
+ought all to be ashamed of ourselves for going, and I think Alexa
+was quite right to refuse to take any tickets--even if it was for
+a charity."
+
+"Oh," her hostess murmured, indifferently, "with me charity begins
+at home.  I can't afford emotional luxuries."
+
+"A charity?  A charity?" Hartly exulted.  "I hadn't seized the
+full beauty of it.  Reading poor Margaret Aubyn's love-letters at
+the Waldorf before five hundred people for a charity!  WHAT
+charity, dear Mrs. Armiger?"
+
+"Why, the Home for Friendless Women--"
+
+"It was well chosen," Dresham commented; and Hartly buried his
+mirth in the sofa-cushions.
+
+When they were alone Glennard, still holding his untouched cup of
+tea, turned to his wife, who sat silently behind the kettle.  "Who
+asked you to take a ticket for that reading?"
+
+"I don't know, really--Kate Dresham, I fancy.  It was she who got
+it up."
+
+"It's just the sort of damnable vulgarity she's capable of!  It's
+loathsome--it's monstrous--"
+
+His wife, without looking up, answered gravely, "I thought so too.
+It was for that reason I didn't go.  But you must remember that
+very few people feel about Mrs. Aubyn as you do--"
+
+Glennard managed to set down his cup with a steady hand, but the
+room swung round with him and he dropped into the nearest chair.
+"As I do?" he repeated.
+
+"I mean that very few people knew her when she lived in New York.
+To most of the women who went to the reading she was a mere name,
+too remote to have any personality.  With me, of course, it was
+different--"
+
+Glennard gave her a startled look.  "Different?  Why different?"
+
+"Since you were her friend--"
+
+"Her friend!"  He stood up impatiently.  "You speak as if she had
+had only one--the most famous woman of her day!"  He moved vaguely
+about the room, bending down to look at some books on the table.
+"I hope," he added, "you didn't give that as a reason, by the
+way?"
+
+"A reason?"
+
+"For not going.  A woman who gives reasons for getting out of
+social obligations is sure to make herself unpopular or
+ridiculous.
+
+The words were uncalculated; but in an instant he saw that they
+had strangely bridged the distance between his wife and himself.
+He felt her close on him, like a panting foe; and her answer was a
+flash that showed the hand on the trigger.
+
+"I seem," she said from the threshold, "to have done both in
+giving my reason to you."
+
+
+The fact that they were dining out that evening made it easy for
+him to avoid Alexa till she came downstairs in her opera-cloak.
+Mrs. Touchett, who was going to the same dinner, had offered to
+call for her, and Glennard, refusing a precarious seat between the
+ladies' draperies, followed on foot.  The evening was
+interminable.  The reading at the Waldorf, at which all the women
+had been present, had revived the discussion of the "Aubyn
+Letters" and Glennard, hearing his wife questioned as to her
+absence, felt himself miserably wishing that she had gone, rather
+than that her staying away should have been remarked.  He was
+rapidly losing all sense of proportion where the "Letters" were
+concerned.  He could no longer hear them mentioned without
+suspecting a purpose in the allusion; he even yielded himself for
+a moment to the extravagance of imagining that Mrs. Dresham, whom
+he disliked, had organized the reading in the hope of making him
+betray himself--for he was already sure that Dresham had divined
+his share in the transaction.
+
+The attempt to keep a smooth surface on this inner tumult was as
+endless and unavailing as efforts made in a nightmare.  He lost
+all sense of what he was saying to his neighbors and once when he
+looked up his wife's glance struck him cold.
+
+She sat nearly opposite him, at Flamel's side, and it appeared to
+Glennard that they had built about themselves one of those airy
+barriers of talk behind which two people can say what they please.
+While the reading was discussed they were silent.  Their silence
+seemed to Glennard almost cynical--it stripped the last disguise
+from their complicity.  A throb of anger rose in him, but suddenly
+it fell, and he felt, with a curious sense of relief, that at
+bottom he no longer cared whether Flamel had told his wife or not.
+The assumption that Flamel knew about the letters had become a
+fact to Glennard; and it now seemed to him better that Alexa
+should know too.
+
+He was frightened at first by the discovery of his own
+indifference.  The last barriers of his will seemed to be breaking
+down before a flood of moral lassitude.  How could he continue to
+play his part, to keep his front to the enemy, with this poison of
+indifference stealing through his veins?  He tried to brace
+himself with the remembrance of his wife's scorn.  He had not
+forgotten the note on which their conversation had closed.  If he
+had ever wondered how she would receive the truth he wondered no
+longer--she would despise him.  But this lent a new insidiousness
+to his temptation, since her contempt would be a refuge from his
+own.  He said to himself that, since he no longer cared for the
+consequences, he could at least acquit himself of speaking in
+self-defence.  What he wanted now was not immunity but
+castigation: his wife's indignation might still reconcile him to
+himself.  Therein lay his one hope of regeneration; her scorn was
+the moral antiseptic that he needed, her comprehension the one
+balm that could heal him. . . .
+
+When they left the dinner he was so afraid of speaking that he let
+her drive home alone, and went to the club with Flamel.
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+HE rose next morning with the resolve to know what Alexa thought
+of him.  It was not anchoring in a haven, but lying to in a storm--
+he felt the need of a temporary lull in the turmoil of his
+sensations.
+
+He came home late, for they were dining alone and he knew that
+they would have the evening together.  When he followed her to the
+drawing-room after dinner he thought himself on the point of
+speaking; but as she handed him his coffee he said, involuntarily:
+"I shall have to carry this off to the study, I've got a lot of
+work to-night."
+
+Alone in the study he cursed his cowardice.  What was it that had
+withheld him?  A certain bright unapproachableness seemed to keep
+him at arm's length.  She was not the kind of woman whose
+compassion could be circumvented; there was no chance of slipping
+past the outposts; he would never take her by surprise.  Well--why
+not face her, then?  What he shrank from could be no worse than
+what he was enduring.  He had pushed back his chair and turned to
+go upstairs when a new expedient presented itself.  What if,
+instead of telling her, he were to let her find out for herself
+and watch the effect of the discovery before speaking?  In this
+way he made over to chance the burden of the revelation.
+
+The idea had been suggested by the sight of the formula enclosing
+the publisher's check.  He had deposited the money, but the notice
+accompanying it dropped from his note-case as he cleared his table
+for work.  It was the formula usual in such cases and revealed
+clearly enough that he was the recipient of a royalty on Margaret
+Aubyn's letters.  It would be impossible for Alexa to read it
+without understanding at once that the letters had been written to
+him and that he had sold them. . . .
+
+He sat downstairs till he heard her ring for the parlor-maid to
+put out the lights; then he went up to the drawing-room with a
+bundle of papers in his hand.  Alexa was just rising from her seat
+and the lamplight fell on the deep roll of hair that overhung her
+brow like the eaves of a temple.  Her face had often the high
+secluded look of a shrine; and it was this touch of awe in her
+beauty that now made him feel himself on the brink of sacrilege.
+
+Lest the feeling should dominate him, he spoke at once.  "I've
+brought you a piece of work--a lot of old bills and things that I
+want you to sort for me.  Some are not worth keeping--but you'll
+be able to judge of that.  There may be a letter or two among
+them--nothing of much account, but I don't like to throw away the
+whole lot without having them looked over and I haven't time to do
+it myself."
+
+He held out the papers and she took them with a smile that seemed
+to recognize in the service he asked the tacit intention of making
+amends for the incident of the previous day.
+
+"Are you sure I shall know which to keep?"
+
+"Oh, quite sure," he answered, easily--"and besides, none are of
+much importance."
+
+The next morning he invented an excuse for leaving the house
+without seeing her, and when he returned, just before dinner, he
+found a visitor's hat and stick in the hall.  The visitor was
+Flamel, who was in the act of taking leave.
+
+He had risen, but Alexa remained seated; and their attitude gave
+the impression of a colloquy that had prolonged itself beyond the
+limits of speech.  Both turned a surprised eye on Glennard and he
+had the sense of walking into a room grown suddenly empty, as
+though their thoughts were conspirators dispersed by his approach.
+He felt the clutch of his old fear.  What if his wife had already
+sorted the papers and had told Flamel of her discovery?  Well, it
+was no news to Flamel that Glennard was in receipt of a royalty on
+the "Aubyn Letters." . . .
+
+A sudden resolve to know the worst made him lift his eyes to his
+wife as the door closed on Flamel.  But Alexa had risen also, and
+bending over her writing-table, with her back to Glennard, was
+beginning to speak precipitately.
+
+"I'm dining out to-night--you don't mind my deserting you?  Julia
+Armiger sent me word just now that she had an extra ticket for the
+last Ambrose concert.  She told me to say how sorry she was that
+she hadn't two--but I knew YOU wouldn't be sorry!"  She ended with
+a laugh that had the effect of being a strayed echo of Mrs.
+Armiger's; and before Glennard could speak she had added, with her
+hand on the door, "Mr. Flamel stayed so late that I've hardly time
+to dress.  The concert begins ridiculously early, and Julia dines
+at half-past seven--"
+
+Glennard stood alone in the empty room that seemed somehow full of
+an ironical consciousness of what was happening.  "She hates me,"
+he murmured.  "She hates me. . . ."
+
+
+The next day was Sunday, and Glennard purposely lingered late in
+his room.  When he came downstairs his wife was already seated at
+the breakfast-table.  She lifted her usual smile to his entrance
+and they took shelter in the nearest topic, like wayfarers
+overtaken by a storm.  While he listened to her account of the
+concert he began to think that, after all, she had not yet sorted
+the papers, and that her agitation of the previous day must be
+ascribed to another cause, in which perhaps he had but an indirect
+concern.  He wondered it had never before occurred to him that
+Flamel was the kind of man who might very well please a woman at
+his own expense, without need of fortuitous assistance.  If this
+possibility cleared the outlook it did not brighten it.  Glennard
+merely felt himself left alone with his baseness.
+
+Alexa left the breakfast-table before him and when he went up to
+the drawing-room he found her dressed to go out.
+
+"Aren't you a little early for church?" he asked.
+
+She replied that, on the way there, she meant to stop a moment at
+her mother's; and while she drew on her gloves, he fumbled among
+the knick-knacks on the mantel-piece for a match to light his
+cigarette.
+
+"Well, good-by," she said, turning to go; and from the threshold
+she added: "By the way, I've sorted the papers you gave me.  Those
+that I thought you would like to keep are on your study-table."
+She went downstairs and he heard the door close behind her.
+
+She had sorted the papers--she knew, then--she MUST know--and she
+had made no sign!
+
+Glennard, he hardly knew how, found himself once more in the
+study.  On the table lay the packet he had given her.  It was much
+smaller--she had evidently gone over the papers with care,
+destroying the greater number.  He loosened the elastic band and
+spread the remaining envelopes on his desk.  The publisher's
+notice was among them.
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+His wife knew and she made no sign.  Glennard found himself in the
+case of the seafarer who, closing his eyes at nightfall on a scene
+he thinks to put leagues behind him before day, wakes to a port-
+hole framing the same patch of shore.  From the kind of exaltation
+to which his resolve had lifted him he dropped to an unreasoning
+apathy.  His impulse of confession had acted as a drug to self-
+reproach.  He had tried to shift a portion of his burden to his
+wife's shoulders and now that she had tacitly refused to carry it,
+he felt the load too heavy to be taken up again.
+
+A fortunate interval of hard work brought respite from this phase
+of sterile misery.  He went West to argue an important case, won
+it, and came back to fresh preoccupations.  His own affairs were
+thriving enough to engross him in the pauses of his professional
+work, and for over two months he had little time to look himself
+in the face.  Not unnaturally--for he was as yet unskilled in the
+subtleties of introspection--he mistook his temporary
+insensibility for a gradual revival of moral health.
+
+He told himself that he was recovering his sense of proportion,
+getting to see things in their true light; and if he now thought
+of his rash appeal to his wife's sympathy it was as an act of
+folly from the consequences of which he had been saved by the
+providence that watches over madmen.  He had little leisure to
+observe Alexa; but he concluded that the common-sense momentarily
+denied him had counselled her uncritical acceptance of the
+inevitable.  If such a quality was a poor substitute for the
+passionate justness that had once seemed to characterize her, he
+accepted the alternative as a part of that general lowering of the
+key that seems needful to the maintenance of the matrimonial duet.
+What woman ever retained her abstract sense of justice where
+another woman was concerned?  Possibly the thought that he had
+profited by Mrs. Aubyn's tenderness was not wholly disagreeable to
+his wife.
+
+When the pressure of work began to lessen, and he found himself,
+in the lengthening afternoons, able to reach home somewhat
+earlier, he noticed that the little drawing-room was always full
+and that he and his wife seldom had an evening alone together.
+When he was tired, as often happened, she went out alone; the idea
+of giving up an engagement to remain with him seemed not to occur
+to her.  She had shown, as a girl, little fondness for society,
+nor had she seemed to regret it during the year they had spent in
+the country.  He reflected, however, that he was sharing the
+common lot of husbands, who proverbially mistake the early ardors
+of housekeeping for a sign of settled domesticity.  Alexa, at any
+rate, was refuting his theory as inconsiderately as a seedling
+defeats the gardener's expectations.  An undefinable change had
+come over her.  In one sense it was a happy one, since she had
+grown, if not handsomer, at least more vivid and expressive; her
+beauty had become more communicable: it was as though she had
+learned the conscious exercise of intuitive attributes and now
+used her effects with the discrimination of an artist skilled in
+values.  To a dispassionate critic (as Glennard now rated himself)
+the art may at times have been a little too obvious.  Her attempts
+at lightness lacked spontaneity, and she sometimes rasped him by
+laughing like Julia Armiger; but he had enough imagination to
+perceive that, in respect of the wife's social arts, a husband
+necessarily sees the wrong side of the tapestry.
+
+In this ironical estimate of their relation Glennard found himself
+strangely relieved of all concern as to his wife's feelings for
+Flamel.  From an Olympian pinnacle of indifference he calmly
+surveyed their inoffensive antics.  It was surprising how his
+cheapening of his wife put him at ease with himself.  Far as he
+and she were from each other they yet had, in a sense, the tacit
+nearness of complicity.  Yes, they were accomplices; he could no
+more be jealous of her than she could despise him.  The jealousy
+that would once have seemed a blur on her whiteness now appeared
+like a tribute to ideals in which he no longer believed. . . .
+
+
+Glennard was little given to exploring the outskirts of
+literature.  He always skipped the "literary notices" in the
+papers and he had small leisure for the intermittent pleasures of
+the periodical.  He had therefore no notion of the prolonged
+reverberations which the "Aubyn Letters" had awakened in the
+precincts of criticism.  When the book ceased to be talked about
+he supposed it had ceased to be read; and this apparent subsidence
+of the agitation about it brought the reassuring sense that he had
+exaggerated its vitality.  The conviction, if it did not ease his
+conscience, at least offered him the relative relief of obscurity:
+he felt like an offender taken down from the pillory and thrust
+into the soothing darkness of a cell.
+
+But one evening, when Alexa had left him to go to a dance, he
+chanced to turn over the magazines on her table, and the copy of
+the Horoscope, to which he settled down with his cigar, confronted
+him, on its first page, with a portrait of Margaret Aubyn.  It was
+a reproduction of the photograph that had stood so long on his
+desk.  The desiccating air of memory had turned her into the mere
+abstraction of a woman, and this unexpected evocation seemed to
+bring her nearer than she had ever been in life.  Was it because
+he understood her better?  He looked long into her eyes; little
+personal traits reached out to him like caresses--the tired droop
+of her lids, her quick way of leaning forward as she spoke, the
+movements of her long expressive hands.  All that was feminine in
+her, the quality he had always missed, stole toward him from her
+unreproachful gaze; and now that it was too late life had
+developed in him the subtler perceptions which could detect it in
+even this poor semblance of herself.  For a moment he found
+consolation in the thought that, at any cost, they had thus been
+brought together; then a flood of shame rushed over him.  Face to
+face with her, he felt himself laid bare to the inmost fold of
+consciousness.  The shame was deep, but it was a renovating
+anguish; he was like a man whom intolerable pain has roused from
+the creeping lethargy of death. . . .
+
+He rose next morning to as fresh a sense of life as though his
+hour of mute communion with Margaret Aubyn had been a more
+exquisite renewal of their earlier meetings.  His waking thought
+was that he must see her again; and as consciousness affirmed
+itself he felt an intense fear of losing the sense of her
+nearness.  But she was still close to him; her presence remained
+the sole reality in a world of shadows.  All through his working
+hours he was re-living with incredible minuteness every incident
+of their obliterated past; as a man who has mastered the spirit of
+a foreign tongue turns with renewed wonder to the pages his youth
+has plodded over.  In this lucidity of retrospection the most
+trivial detail had its significance, and the rapture of recovery
+was embittered to Glennard by the perception of all that he had
+missed.  He had been pitiably, grotesquely stupid; and there was
+irony in the thought that, but for the crisis through which he was
+passing, he might have lived on in complacent ignorance of his
+loss.  It was as though she had bought him with her blood. . . .
+
+That evening he and Alexa dined alone.  After dinner he followed
+her to the drawing-room.  He no longer felt the need of avoiding
+her; he was hardly conscious of her presence.  After a few words
+they lapsed into silence and he sat smoking with his eyes on the
+fire.  It was not that he was unwilling to talk to her; he felt a
+curious desire to be as kind as possible; but he was always
+forgetting that she was there.  Her full bright presence, through
+which the currents of life flowed so warmly, had grown as tenuous
+as a shadow, and he saw so far beyond her--
+
+Presently she rose and began to move about the room.  She seemed
+to be looking for something and he roused himself to ask what she
+wanted.
+
+"Only the last number of the Horoscope.  I thought I'd left it on
+this table."  He said nothing, and she went on: "You haven't seen
+it?"
+
+"No," he returned coldly.  The magazine was locked in his desk.
+
+His wife had moved to the mantel-piece.  She stood facing him and
+as he looked up he met her tentative gaze.  "I was reading an
+article in it--a review of Mrs. Aubyn's letters," she added,
+slowly, with her deep, deliberate blush.
+
+Glennard stooped to toss his cigar into the fire.  He felt a
+savage wish that she would not speak the other woman's name;
+nothing else seemed to matter.  "You seem to do a lot of reading,"
+he said.
+
+She still earnestly confronted him.  "I was keeping this for you--
+I thought it might interest you," she said, with an air of gentle
+insistence.
+
+He stood up and turned away.  He was sure she knew that he had
+taken the review and he felt that he was beginning to hate her
+again.
+
+"I haven't time for such things," he said, indifferently.  As he
+moved to the door he heard her take a precipitate step forward;
+then she paused and sank without speaking into the chair from
+which he had risen.
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+As Glennard, in the raw February sunlight, mounted the road to the
+cemetery, he felt the beatitude that comes with an abrupt
+cessation of physical pain.  He had reached the point where self-
+analysis ceases; the impulse that moved him was purely intuitive.
+He did not even seek a reason for it, beyond the obvious one that
+his desire to stand by Margaret Aubyn's grave was prompted by no
+attempt at a sentimental reparation, but rather by the vague need
+to affirm in some way the reality of the tie between them.
+
+The ironical promiscuity of death had brought Mrs. Aubyn back to
+share the narrow hospitality of her husband's last lodging; but
+though Glennard knew she had been buried near New York he had
+never visited her grave.  He was oppressed, as he now threaded the
+long avenues, by a chilling vision of her return.  There was no
+family to follow her hearse; she had died alone, as she had lived;
+and the "distinguished mourners" who had formed the escort of the
+famous writer knew nothing of the woman they were committing to
+the grave.  Glennard could not even remember at what season she
+had been buried; but his mood indulged the fancy that it must have
+been on some such day of harsh sunlight, the incisive February
+brightness that gives perspicuity without warmth.  The white
+avenues stretched before him interminably, lined with stereotyped
+emblems of affliction, as though all the platitudes ever uttered
+had been turned to marble and set up over the unresisting dead.
+Here and there, no doubt, a frigid urn or an insipid angel
+imprisoned some fine-fibred grief, as the most hackneyed words may
+become the vehicle of rare meanings; but for the most part the
+endless alignment of monuments seemed to embody those easy
+generalizations about death that do not disturb the repose of the
+living.  Glennard's eye, as he followed the way indicated to him,
+had instinctively sought some low mound with a quiet headstone.
+He had forgotten that the dead seldom plan their own houses, and
+with a pang he discovered the name he sought on the cyclopean base
+of a granite shaft rearing its aggressive height at the angle of
+two avenues.
+
+"How she would have hated it!" he murmured.
+
+A bench stood near and he seated himself.  The monument rose
+before him like some pretentious uninhabited dwelling; he could
+not believe that Margaret Aubyn lay there.  It was a Sunday
+morning and black figures moved among the paths, placing flowers
+on the frost-bound hillocks.  Glennard noticed that the
+neighboring graves had been thus newly dressed; and he fancied a
+blind stir of expectancy through the sod, as though the bare
+mounds spread a parched surface to that commemorative rain.  He
+rose presently and walked back to the entrance of the cemetery.
+Several greenhouses stood near the gates, and turning in at the
+first he asked for some flowers.
+
+"Anything in the emblematic line?" asked the anaemic man behind
+the dripping counter.
+
+Glennard shook his head.
+
+"Just cut flowers?  This way, then."  The florist unlocked a glass
+door and led him down a moist green aisle.  The hot air was choked
+with the scent of white azaleas, white lilies, white lilacs; all
+the flowers were white; they were like a prolongation, a mystical
+efflorescence, of the long rows of marble tombstones, and their
+perfume seemed to cover an odor of decay.  The rich atmosphere
+made Glennard dizzy.  As he leaned in the doorpost, waiting for
+the flowers, he had a penetrating sense of Margaret Aubyn's
+nearness--not the imponderable presence of his inner vision, but a
+life that beat warm in his arms. . . .
+
+The sharp air caught him as he stepped out into it again.  He
+walked back and scattered the flowers over the grave.  The edges
+of the white petals shrivelled like burnt paper in the cold; and
+as he watched them the illusion of her nearness faded, shrank back
+frozen.
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+The motive of his visit to the cemetery remained undefined save as
+a final effort of escape from his wife's inexpressive acceptance
+of his shame.  It seemed to him that as long as he could keep
+himself alive to that shame he would not wholly have succumbed to
+its consequences.  His chief fear was that he should become the
+creature of his act.  His wife's indifference degraded him; it
+seemed to put him on a level with his dishonor.  Margaret Aubyn
+would have abhorred the deed in proportion to her pity for the
+man.  The sense of her potential pity drew him back to her.  The
+one woman knew but did not understand; the other, it sometimes
+seemed, understood without knowing.
+
+In its last disguise of retrospective remorse, his self-pity
+affected a desire for solitude and meditation.  He lost himself in
+morbid musings, in futile visions of what life with Margaret Aubyn
+might have been.  There were moments when, in the strange
+dislocation of his view, the wrong he had done her seemed a tie
+between them.
+
+To indulge these emotions he fell into the habit, on Sunday
+afternoons, of solitary walks prolonged till after dusk.  The days
+were lengthening, there was a touch of spring in the air, and his
+wanderings now usually led him to the Park and its outlying
+regions.
+
+One Sunday, tired of aimless locomotion, he took a cab at the Park
+gates and let it carry him out to the Riverside Drive.  It was a
+gray afternoon streaked with east wind.  Glennard's cab advanced
+slowly, and as he leaned back, gazing with absent intentness at
+the deserted paths that wound under bare boughs between grass
+banks of premature vividness, his attention was arrested by two
+figures walking ahead of him.  This couple, who had the path to
+themselves,moved at an uneven pace, as though adapting their gait
+to a conversation marked by meditative intervals.  Now and then
+they paused, and in one of these pauses the lady, turning toward
+her companion, showed Glennard the outline of his wife's profile.
+The man was Flamel.
+
+The blood rushed to Glennard's forehead.  He sat up with a jerk
+and pushed back the lid in the roof of the hansom; but when the
+cabman bent down he dropped into his seat without speaking.  Then,
+becoming conscious of the prolonged interrogation of the lifted
+lid, he called out--"Turn--drive back--anywhere--I'm in a hurry--"
+
+As the cab swung round he caught a last glimpse of the two
+figures.  They had not moved; Alexa, with bent head, stood
+listening.
+
+"My God, my God--" he groaned.
+
+It was hideous--it was abominable--he could not understand it.
+The woman was nothing to him--less than nothing--yet the blood
+hummed in his ears and hung a cloud before him.  He knew it was
+only the stirring of the primal instinct, that it had no more to
+do with his reasoning self than any reflex impulse of the body;
+but that merely lowered anguish to disgust.  Yes, it was disgust
+he felt--almost a physical nausea.  The poisonous fumes of life
+were in his lungs.  He was sick, unutterably sick. . . .
+
+He drove home and went to his room.  They were giving a little
+dinner that night, and when he came down the guests were arriving.
+He looked at his wife: her beauty was extraordinary, but it seemed
+to him the beauty of a smooth sea along an unlit coast.  She
+frightened him.
+
+He sat late that night in his study.  He heard the parlor-maid
+lock the front door; then his wife went upstairs and the lights
+were put out.  His brain was like some great empty hall with an
+echo in it; one thought reverberated endlessly. . . .  At length
+he drew his chair to the table and began to write.  He addressed
+an envelope and then slowly re-read what he had written.
+
+
+"MY DEAR FLAMEL"
+
+"Many apologies for not sending you sooner the enclosed check,
+which represents the customary percentage on the sale of the
+Letters."
+
+"Trusting you will excuse the oversight,
+          "Yours truly,
+               "STEPHEN GLENNARD."
+
+
+He let himself out of the darkened house and dropped the letter in
+the post-box at the corner.
+
+
+The next afternoon he was detained late at his office, and as he
+was preparing to leave he heard someone asking for him in the
+outer room.  He seated himself again and Flamel was shown in.
+
+The two men, as Glennard pushed aside an obstructive chair, had a
+moment to measure each other; then Flamel advanced, and drawing
+out his note-case, laid a slip of paper on the desk.
+
+"My dear fellow, what on earth does this mean?"  Glennard
+recognized his check.
+
+"That I was remiss, simply.  It ought to have gone to you before."
+
+Flamel's tone had been that of unaffected surprise, but at this
+his accent changed and he asked, quickly: "On what ground?"
+
+Glennard had moved away from the desk and stood leaning against
+the calf-backed volumes of the bookcase.  "On the ground that you
+sold Mrs. Aubyn's letters for me, and that I find the intermediary
+in such cases is entitled to a percentage on the sale."
+
+Flamel paused before answering.  "You find, you say.  It's a
+recent discovery?"
+
+"Obviously, from my not sending the check sooner.  You see I'm new
+to the business."
+
+"And since when have you discovered that there was any question of
+business, as far as I was concerned?"
+
+Glennard flushed and his voice rose slightly.  "Are you
+reproaching me for not having remembered it sooner?"
+
+Flamel, who had spoken in the rapid repressed tone of a man on the
+verge of anger, stared a moment at this and then, in his natural
+voice, rejoined, good-humoredly, "Upon my soul, I don't understand
+you!"
+
+The change of key seemed to disconcert Glennard.  "It's simple
+enough--" he muttered.
+
+"Simple enough--your offering me money in return for a friendly
+service?  I don't know what your other friends expect!"
+
+"Some of my friends wouldn't have undertaken the job.  Those who
+would have done so would probably have expected to be paid."
+
+He lifted his eyes to Flamel and the two men looked at each other.
+Flamel had turned white and his lips stirred, but he held his
+temperate note.  "If you mean to imply that the job was not a nice
+one, you lay yourself open to the retort that you proposed it.
+But for my part I've never seen, I never shall see, any reason for
+not publishing the letters."
+
+"That's just it!"
+
+"What--?"
+
+"The certainty of your not seeing was what made me go to you.
+When a man's got stolen goods to pawn he doesn't take them to the
+police-station."
+
+"Stolen?" Flamel echoed.  "The letters were stolen?"
+
+Glennard burst into a coarse laugh.  "How much longer to you
+expect me to keep up that pretence about the letters?  You knew
+well enough they were written to me."
+
+Flamel looked at him in silence.  "Were they?" he said at length.
+"I didn't know it."
+
+"And didn't suspect it, I suppose," Glennard sneered.
+
+The other was again silent; then he said, "I may remind you that,
+supposing I had felt any curiosity about the matter, I had no way
+of finding out that the letters were written to you.  You never
+showed me the originals."
+
+"What does that prove?  There were fifty ways of finding out.
+It's the kind of thing one can easily do."
+
+Flamel glanced at him with contempt.  "Our ideas probably differ
+as to what a man can easily do.  It would not have been easy for
+me."
+
+Glennard's anger vented itself in the words uppermost in his
+thought.  "It may, then, interest you to hear that my wife DOES
+know about the letters--has known for some months. . . ."
+
+"Ah," said the other, slowly.  Glennard saw that, in his blind
+clutch at a weapon, he had seized the one most apt to wound.
+Flamel's muscles were under control, but his face showed the
+undefinable change produced by the slow infiltration of poison.
+Every implication that the words contained had reached its mark;
+but Glennard felt that their obvious intention was lost in the
+anguish of what they suggested.  He was sure now that Flamel would
+never have betrayed him; but the inference only made a wider
+outlet for his anger.  He paused breathlessly for Flamel to speak.
+
+"If she knows, it's not through me."  It was what Glennard had
+waited for.
+
+"Through you, by God?  Who said it was through you?  Do you
+suppose I leave it to you, or to anybody else, for that matter, to
+keep my wife informed of my actions?  I didn't suppose even such
+egregious conceit as yours could delude a man to that degree!"
+Struggling for a foothold in the small landslide of his dignity,
+he added, in a steadier tone, "My wife learned the facts from me."
+
+Flamel received this in silence.  The other's outbreak seemed to
+have reinforced his self-control, and when he spoke it was with a
+deliberation implying that his course was chosen.  "In that case I
+understand still less--"
+
+"Still less--?"
+
+"The meaning of this."  He pointed to the check.  "When you began
+to speak I supposed you had meant it as a bribe; now I can only
+infer it was intended as a random insult.  In either case, here's
+my answer."
+
+He tore the slip of paper in two and tossed the fragments across
+the desk to Glennard.  Then he turned and walked out of the
+office.
+
+Glennard dropped his head on his hands.  If he had hoped to
+restore his self-respect by the simple expedient of assailing
+Flamel's, the result had not justified his expectation.  The blow
+he had struck had blunted the edge of his anger, and the
+unforeseen extent of the hurt inflicted did not alter the fact
+that his weapon had broken in his hands.  He saw now that his rage
+against Flamel was only the last projection of a passionate self-
+disgust.  This consciousness did not dull his dislike of the man;
+it simply made reprisals ineffectual.  Flamel's unwillingness to
+quarrel with him was the last stage of his abasement.
+
+In the light of this final humiliation his assumption of his
+wife's indifference struck him as hardly so fatuous as the
+sentimental resuscitation of his past.  He had been living in a
+factitious world wherein his emotions were the sycophants of his
+vanity, and it was with instinctive relief that he felt its ruins
+crash about his head.
+
+It was nearly dark when he left his office, and he walked slowly
+homeward in the complete mental abeyance that follows on such a
+crisis.  He was not aware that he was thinking of his wife; yet
+when he reached his own door he found that, in the involuntary
+readjustment of his vision, she had once more become the central
+point of consciousness.
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+It had never before occurred to him that she might, after all,
+have missed the purport of the document he had put in her way.
+What if, in her hurried inspection of the papers, she had passed
+it over as related to the private business of some client?  What,
+for instance, was to prevent her concluding that Glennard was the
+counsel of the unknown person who had sold the "Aubyn Letters."
+The subject was one not likely to fix her attention--she was not a
+curious woman.
+
+Glennard at this point laid down his fork and glanced at her
+between the candle-shades.  The alternative explanation of her
+indifference was not slow in presenting itself.  Her head had the
+same listening droop as when he had caught sight of her the day
+before in Flamel's company; the attitude revived the vividness of
+his impression.  It was simple enough, after all.  She had ceased
+to care for him because she cared for someone else.
+
+As he followed her upstairs he felt a sudden stirring of his
+dormant anger.  His sentiments had lost all their factitious
+complexity.  He had already acquitted her of any connivance in his
+baseness, and he felt only that he loved her and that she had
+escaped him.  This was now, strangely enough, his dominating
+thought: the consciousness that he and she had passed through the
+fusion of love and had emerged from it as incommunicably apart as
+though the transmutation had never taken place.  Every other
+passion, he mused, left some mark upon the nature; but love passed
+like the flight of a ship across the waters.
+
+She sank into her usual seat near the lamp, and he leaned against
+the chimney, moving about with an inattentive hand the knick-
+knacks on the mantel.
+
+Suddenly he caught sight of her reflection in the mirror.  She was
+looking at him.  He turned and their eyes met.
+
+He moved across the room and stood before her.
+
+"There's something that I want to say to you," he began in a low
+tone.
+
+She held his gaze, but her color deepened.  He noticed again, with
+a jealous pang, how her beauty had gained in warmth and meaning.
+It was as though a transparent cup had been filled with wine.  He
+looked at her ironically.
+
+"I've never prevented your seeing your friends here," he broke
+out.  "Why do you meet Flamel in out-of-the-way places?  Nothing
+makes a woman so cheap--"
+
+She rose abruptly and they faced each other a few feet apart.
+
+"What do you mean?" she asked.
+
+"I saw you with him last Sunday on the Riverside Drive," he went
+on, the utterance of the charge reviving his anger.
+
+"Ah," she murmured.  She sank into her chair again and began to
+play with a paper-knife that lay on the table at her elbow.
+
+Her silence exasperated him.
+
+"Well?" he burst out.  "Is that all you have to say?"
+
+"Do you wish me to explain?" she asked, proudly.
+
+"Do you imply I haven't the right to?"
+
+"I imply nothing.  I will tell you whatever you wish to know.  I
+went for a walk with Mr. Flamel because he asked me to."
+
+"I didn't suppose you went uninvited.  But there are certain
+things a sensible woman doesn't do.  She doesn't slink about in
+out-of-the-way streets with men.  Why couldn't you have seen him
+here?"
+
+She hesitated.  "Because he wanted to see me alone."
+
+"Did he, indeed?  And may I ask if you gratify all his wishes with
+equal alacrity?"
+
+"I don't know that he has any others where I am concerned."  She
+paused again and then continued, in a lower voice that somehow had
+an under-note of warning.  "He wished to bid me good-by.  He's
+going away."
+
+Glennard turned on her a startled glance.  "Going away?"
+
+"He's going to Europe to-morrow.  He goes for a long time.  I
+supposed you knew."
+
+The last phrase revived his irritation.  "You forget that I depend
+on you for my information about Flamel.  He's your friend and not
+mine.  In fact, I've sometimes wondered at your going out of your
+way to be so civil to him when you must see plainly enough that I
+don't like him."
+
+Her answer to this was not immediate.  She seemed to be choosing
+her words with care, not so much for her own sake as for his, and
+his exasperation was increased by the suspicion that she was
+trying to spare him.
+
+"He was your friend before he was mine.  I never knew him till I
+was married.  It was you who brought him to the house and who
+seemed to wish me to like him."
+
+Glennard gave a short laugh.  The defence was feebler than he had
+expected: she was certainly not a clever woman.
+
+"Your deference to my wishes is really beautiful; but it's not the
+first time in history that a man has made a mistake in introducing
+his friends to his wife.  You must, at any rate, have seen since
+then that my enthusiasm had cooled; but so, perhaps, has your
+eagerness to oblige me."
+
+She met this with a silence that seemed to rob the taunt of half
+its efficacy.
+
+"Is that what you imply?" he pressed her.
+
+"No," she answered with sudden directness.  "I noticed some time
+ago that you seemed to dislike him, but since then--"
+
+"Well--since then?"
+
+"I've imagined that you had reasons for still wishing me to be
+civil to him, as you call it."
+
+"Ah," said Glennard, with an effort at lightness; but his irony
+dropped, for something in her voice made him feel that he and she
+stood at last in that naked desert of apprehension where meaning
+skulks vainly behind speech.
+
+"And why did you imagine this?"  The blood mounted to his
+forehead.  "Because he told you that I was under obligations to
+him?"
+
+She turned pale.  "Under obligations?"
+
+"Oh, don't let's beat about the bush.  Didn't he tell you it was I
+who published Mrs. Aubyn's letters?  Answer me that."
+
+"No," she said; and after a moment which seemed given to the
+weighing of alternatives, she added: "No one told me."
+
+"You didn't know then?"
+
+She seemed to speak with an effort.  "Not until--not until--"
+
+"Till I gave you those papers to sort?"
+
+Her head sank.
+
+"You understood then?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+He looked at her immovable face.  "Had you suspected--before?" was
+slowly wrung from him.
+
+"At times--yes--"  Her voice dropped to a whisper.
+
+"Why?  From anything that was said--?"
+
+There was a shade of pity in her glance.  "No one said anything--
+no one told me anything."  She looked away from him.  "It was your
+manner--"
+
+"My manner?"
+
+"Whenever the book was mentioned.  Things you said--once or twice--
+your irritation--I can't explain--"
+
+Glennard, unconsciously, had moved nearer.  He breathed like a man
+who has been running.  "You knew, then, you knew"--he stammered.
+The avowal of her love for Flamel would have hurt him less, would
+have rendered her less remote.  "You knew--you knew--" he
+repeated; and suddenly his anguish gathered voice.  "My God!" he
+cried, "you suspected it first, you say--and then you knew it--
+this damnable, this accursed thing; you knew it months ago--it's
+months since I put that paper in your way--and yet you've done
+nothing, you've said nothing, you've made no sign, you've lived
+alongside of me as if it had made no difference--no difference in
+either of our lives.  What are you made of, I wonder?  Don't you
+see the hideous ignominy of it?  Don't you see how you've shared
+in my disgrace?  Or haven't you any sense of shame?"
+
+He preserved sufficient lucidity, as the words poured from him, to
+see how fatally they invited her derision; but something told him
+they had both passed beyond the phase of obvious retaliations, and
+that if any chord in her responded it would not be that of scorn.
+
+He was right.  She rose slowly and moved toward him.
+
+"Haven't you had enough--without that?" she said, in a strange
+voice of pity.
+
+He stared at her.  "Enough--?"
+
+"Of misery. . . ."
+
+An iron band seemed loosened from his temples.  "You saw then . . .?"
+he whispered.
+
+"Oh, God----oh, God----" she sobbed.  She dropped beside him and
+hid her anguish against his knees.  They clung thus in silence, a
+long time, driven together down the same fierce blast of shame.
+
+When at length she lifted her face he averted his.  Her scorn
+would have hurt him less than the tears on his hands.
+
+She spoke languidly, like a child emerging from a passion of
+weeping.  "It was for the money--?"
+
+His lips shaped an assent.
+
+"That was the inheritance--that we married on?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+She drew back and rose to her feet.  He sat watching her as she
+wandered away from him.
+
+"You hate me," broke from him.
+
+She made no answer.
+
+"Say you hate me!" he persisted.
+
+"That would have been so simple," she answered with a strange
+smile.  She dropped into a chair near the writing-table and rested
+a bowed forehead on her hand.
+
+"Was it much--?" she began at length.
+
+"Much--?" he returned, vaguely.
+
+"The money."
+
+"The money?"  That part of it seemed to count so little that for a
+moment he did not follow her thought.
+
+"It must be paid back," she insisted.  "Can you do it?"
+
+"Oh, yes," he returned, listlessly.  "I can do it."
+
+"I would make any sacrifice for that!" she urged.
+
+He nodded.  "Of course."  He sat staring at her in dry-eyed self-
+contempt.  "Do you count on its making much difference?"
+
+"Much difference?"
+
+"In the way I feel--or you feel about me?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"It's the least part of it," he groaned.
+
+"It's the only part we can repair."
+
+"Good heavens!  If there were any reparation--"  He rose quickly
+and crossed the space that divided them.  "Why did you never
+speak?" he asked.
+
+"Haven't you answered that yourself?"
+
+"Answered it?"
+
+"Just now--when you told me you did it for me."  She paused a
+moment and then went on with a deepening note--"I would have
+spoken if I could have helped you."
+
+"But you must have despised me."
+
+"I've told you that would have been simpler."
+
+"But how could you go on like this--hating the money?"
+
+"I knew you would speak in time.  I wanted you, first, to hate it
+as I did."
+
+He gazed at her with a kind of awe.  "You're wonderful," he
+murmured.  "But you don't yet know the depths I've reached."
+
+She raised an entreating hand.  "I don't want to!"
+
+"You're afraid, then, that you'll hate me?"
+
+"No--but that you'll hate ME.  Let me understand without your
+telling me."
+
+"You can't.  It's too base.  I thought you didn't care because you
+loved Flamel."
+
+She blushed deeply.  "Don't--don't--" she warned him.
+
+"I haven't the right to, you mean?"
+
+"I mean that you'll be sorry."
+
+He stood imploringly before her.  "I want to say something worse--
+something more outrageous.  If you don't understand THIS you'll be
+perfectly justified in ordering me out of the house."
+
+She answered him with a glance of divination.  "I shall
+understand--but you'll be sorry."
+
+"I must take my chance of that."  He moved away and tossed the
+books about the table.  Then he swung round and faced her.  "Does
+Flamel care for you?" he asked.
+
+Her flush deepened, but she still looked at him without anger.
+"What would be the use?" she said with a note of sadness.
+
+"Ah, I didn't ask THAT," he penitently murmured.
+
+"Well, then--"
+
+To this adjuration he made no response beyond that of gazing at
+her with an eye which seemed now to view her as a mere factor in
+an immense redistribution of meanings.
+
+"I insulted Flamel to-day.  I let him see that I suspected him of
+having told you.  I hated him because he knew about the letters."
+
+He caught the spreading horror of her eyes, and for an instant he
+had to grapple with the new temptation they lit up.  Then he said,
+with an effort--"Don't blame him--he's impeccable.  He helped me
+to get them published; but I lied to him too; I pretended they
+were written to another man . . . a man who was dead. . . ."
+
+She raised her arms in a gesture that seemed to ward off his
+blows.
+
+"You DO despise me!" he insisted.
+
+"Ah, that poor woman--that poor woman--" he heard her murmur.
+
+"I spare no one, you see!" he triumphed over her.  She kept her
+face hidden.
+
+"You do hate me, you do despise me!" he strangely exulted.
+
+"Be silent!" she commanded him; but he seemed no longer conscious
+of any check on his gathering purpose.
+
+"He cared for you--he cared for you," he repeated, "and he never
+told you of the letters--"
+
+She sprang to her feet.  "How can you?" she flamed.  "How dare
+you?  THAT--!"
+
+Glennard was ashy pale.  "It's a weapon . . . like another. . . ."
+
+"A scoundrel's!"
+
+He smiled wretchedly.  "I should have used it in his place."
+
+"Stephen!  Stephen!" she cried, as though to drown the blasphemy
+on his lips.  She swept to him with a rescuing gesture.  "Don't
+say such things.  I forbid you!  It degrades us both."
+
+He put her back with trembling hands.  "Nothing that I say of
+myself can degrade you.  We're on different levels."
+
+"I'm on yours, whatever it is!"
+
+He lifted his head and their gaze flowed together.
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+The great renewals take effect as imperceptibly as the first
+workings of spring.  Glennard, though he felt himself brought
+nearer to his wife, was still, as it were, hardly within speaking
+distance.  He was but laboriously acquiring the rudiments of their
+new medium of communication; and he had to grope for her through
+the dense fog of his humiliation, the distorting vapor against
+which his personality loomed grotesque and mean.
+
+Only the fact that we are unaware how well our nearest know us
+enables us to live with them.  Love is the most impregnable refuge
+of self-esteem, and we hate the eye that reaches to our nakedness.
+If Glennard did not hate his wife it was slowly, sufferingly, that
+there was born in him that profounder passion which made his
+earlier feeling seem a mere commotion of the blood.  He was like a
+child coming back to the sense of an enveloping presence: her
+nearness was a breast on which he leaned.
+
+They did not, at first, talk much together, and each beat a
+devious track about the outskirts of the subject that lay between
+them like a haunted wood.  But every word, every action, seemed to
+glance at it, to draw toward it, as though a fount of healing
+sprang in its poisoned shade.  If only they might cut away through
+the thicket to that restoring spring!
+
+Glennard, watching his wife with the intentness of a wanderer to
+whom no natural sign is negligible, saw that she had taken
+temporary refuge in the purpose of renouncing the money.  If both,
+theoretically, owned the inefficacy of such amends, the woman's
+instinctive subjectiveness made her find relief in this crude form
+of penance.  Glennard saw that she meant to live as frugally as
+possible till what she deemed their debt was discharged; and he
+prayed she might not discover how far-reaching, in its merely
+material sense, was the obligation she thus hoped to acquit.  Her
+mind was fixed on the sum originally paid for the letters, and
+this he knew he could lay aside in a year or two.  He was touched,
+meanwhile, by the spirit that made her discard the petty luxuries
+which she regarded as the signs of their bondage.  Their shared
+renunciations drew her nearer to him, helped, in their evidence of
+her helplessness, to restore the full protecting stature of his
+love.  And still they did not speak.
+
+It was several weeks later that, one afternoon by the drawing-room
+fire, she handed him a letter that she had been reading when he
+entered.
+
+"I've heard from Mr. Flamel," she said.
+
+Glennard turned pale.  It was as though a latent presence had
+suddenly become visible to both.  He took the letter mechanically.
+
+"It's from Smyrna," she said.  "Won't you read it?"
+
+He handed it back.  "You can tell me about it--his hand's so
+illegible."  He wandered to the other end of the room and then
+turned and stood before her.  "I've been thinking of writing to
+Flamel," he said.
+
+She looked up.
+
+"There's one point," he continued, slowly, "that I ought to clear
+up.  I told him you'd known about the letters all along; for a
+long time, at least; and I saw it hurt him horribly.  It was just
+what I meant to do, of course; but I can't leave him to that false
+impression; I must write him."
+
+She received this without outward movement, but he saw that the
+depths were stirred.  At length she returned, in a hesitating
+tone, "Why do you call it a false impression?  I did know."
+
+"Yes, but I implied you didn't care."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+He still stood looking down on her.  "Don't you want me to set
+that right?" he tentatively pursued.
+
+She lifted her head and fixed him bravely.  "It isn't necessary,"
+she said.
+
+Glennard flushed with the shock of the retort; then, with a
+gesture of comprehension, "No," he said, "with you it couldn't be;
+but I might still set myself right."
+
+She looked at him gently.  "Don't I," she murmured, "do that?"
+
+"In being yourself merely?  Alas, the rehabilitation's too
+complete!  You make me seem--to myself even--what I'm not; what I
+can never be.  I can't, at times, defend myself from the delusion;
+but I can at least enlighten others."
+
+The flood was loosened, and kneeling by her he caught her hands.
+"Don't you see that it's become an obsession with me?  That if I
+could strip myself down to the last lie--only there'd always be
+another one left under it!--and do penance naked in the market-
+place, I should at least have the relief of easing one anguish by
+another?  Don't you see that the worst of my torture is the
+impossibility of such amends?"
+
+Her hands lay in his without returning pressure.  "Ah, poor woman,
+poor woman," he heard her sigh.
+
+"Don't pity her, pity me!  What have I done to her or to you,
+after all?  You're both inaccessible!  It was myself I sold."
+
+He took an abrupt turn away from her; then halted before her
+again.  "How much longer," he burst out, "do you suppose you can
+stand it?  You've been magnificent, you've been inspired, but
+what's the use?  You can't wipe out the ignominy of it.  It's
+miserable for you and it does HER no good!"
+
+She lifted a vivid face.  "That's the thought I can't bear!" she
+cried.
+
+"What thought?"
+
+"That it does her no good--all you're feeling, all you're
+suffering.  Can it be that it makes no difference?"
+
+He avoided her challenging glance.  "What's done is done," he
+muttered.
+
+"Is it ever, quite, I wonder?" she mused.  He made no answer and
+they lapsed into one of the pauses that are a subterranean channel
+of communication.
+
+It was she who, after awhile, began to speak with a new suffusing
+diffidence that made him turn a roused eye on her.
+
+"Don't they say," she asked, feeling her way as in a kind of
+tender apprehensiveness, "that the early Christians, instead of
+pulling down the heathen temples--the temples of the unclean gods--
+purified them by turning them to their own uses?  I've always
+thought one might do that with one's actions--the actions one
+loathes but can't undo.  One can make, I mean, a wrong the door to
+other wrongs or an impassable wall against them. . . ."  Her voice
+wavered on the word.  "We can't always tear down the temples we've
+built to the unclean gods, but we can put good spirits in the
+house of evil--the spirits of mercy and shame and understanding,
+that might never have come to us if we hadn't been in such great
+need. . . ."
+
+She moved over to him and laid a hesitating hand on his.  His head
+was bent and he did not change his attitude.  She sat down beside
+him without speaking; but their silences now were fertile as rain-
+clouds--they quickened the seeds of understanding.
+
+At length he looked up.  "I don't know," he said, "what spirits
+have come to live in the house of evil that I built--but you're
+there and that's enough for me.  It's strange," he went on after
+another pause, "she wished the best for me so often, and now, at
+last, it's through her that it's come to me.  But for her I
+shouldn't have known you--it's through her that I've found you.
+Sometimes, do you know?--that makes it hardest--makes me most
+intolerable to myself.  Can't you see that it's the worst thing
+I've got to face?  I sometimes think I could have borne it better
+if you hadn't understood!  I took everything from her--everything--
+even to the poor shelter of loyalty she'd trusted in--the only
+thing I could have left her!--I took everything from her, I
+deceived her, I despoiled her, I destroyed her--and she's given me
+YOU in return!"
+
+His wife's cry caught him up.  "It isn't that she's given ME to
+you--it is that she's given you to yourself."  She leaned to him
+as though swept forward on a wave of pity.  "Don't you see," she
+went on, as his eyes hung on her, "that that's the gift you can't
+escape from, the debt you're pledged to acquit?  Don't you see
+that you've never before been what she thought you, and that now,
+so wonderfully, she's made you into the man she loved? THAT'S
+worth suffering for, worth dying for, to a woman--that's the gift
+she would have wished to give!"
+
+"Ah," he cried, "but woe to him by whom it cometh.  What did I
+ever give her?"
+
+"The happiness of giving," she said.
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Touchstone by Edith Wharton
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