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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Touchstone, by Edith Wharton
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+The Touchstone, by Edith Wharton
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+May, 1995  [Etext #267]
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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