1 files changed, 3546 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/267.txt b/267.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..02ae24b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/267.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,3546 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Touchstone, by Edith Wharton
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Touchstone
+
+Author: Edith Wharton
+
+Posting Date: July 12, 2008 [EBook #267]
+[Last updated: September 4, 2017]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TOUCHSTONE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Judith Boss
+
+
+
+
+
+THE TOUCHSTONE
+
+By Edith Wharton
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+"Professor Joslin, who, as our readers are doubtless aware, is engaged in
+writing the life of Mrs. Aubyn, asks us to state that he will be greatly
+indebted to any of the famous novelist's friends who will furnish
+him with information concerning the period previous to her coming to
+England. Mrs. Aubyn had so few intimate friends, and consequently so few
+regular correspondents, that letters will be of special value. Professor
+Joslin's address is 10 Augusta Gardens, Kensington, and he begs us to
+say that he will promptly return any documents entrusted to him."
+
+Glennard dropped the SPECTATOR and sat looking into the fire. The club
+was filling up, but he still had to himself the small inner room, with
+its darkening outlook down the rain-streaked prospect of Fifth Avenue.
+It was all dull and dismal enough, yet a moment earlier his boredom had
+been perversely tinged by a sense of resentment at the thought that, as
+things were going, he might in time have to surrender even the despised
+privilege of boring himself within those particular four walls. It was
+not that he cared much for the club, but that the remote contingency of
+having to give it up stood to him, just then, perhaps by very reason
+of its insignificance and remoteness, for the symbol of his increasing
+abnegations; of that perpetual paring-off that was gradually reducing
+existence to the naked business of keeping himself alive. It was the
+futility of his multiplied shifts and privations that made them
+seem unworthy of a high attitude; the sense that, however rapidly he
+eliminated the superfluous, his cleared horizon was likely to offer no
+nearer view of the one prospect toward which he strained. To give up
+things in order to marry the woman one loves is easier than to give them
+up without being brought appreciably nearer to such a conclusion.
+
+Through the open door he saw young Hollingsworth rise with a yawn
+from the ineffectual solace of a brandy-and-soda and transport his
+purposeless person to the window. Glennard measured his course with a
+contemptuous eye. It was so like Hollingsworth to get up and look out of
+the window just as it was growing too dark to see anything! There was
+a man rich enough to do what he pleased--had he been capable of
+being pleased--yet barred from all conceivable achievement by his own
+impervious dulness; while, a few feet off, Glennard, who wanted only
+enough to keep a decent coat on his back and a roof over the head of the
+woman he loved Glennard, who had sweated, toiled, denied himself for
+the scant measure of opportunity that his zeal would have converted into
+a kingdom--sat wretchedly calculating that, even when he had resigned
+from the club, and knocked off his cigars, and given up his Sundays out
+of town, he would still be no nearer attainment.
+
+The SPECTATOR had slipped to his feet and as he picked it up his eye
+fell again on the paragraph addressed to the friends of Mrs. Aubyn. He
+had read it for the first time with a scarcely perceptible quickening of
+attention: her name had so long been public property that his eye passed
+it unseeingly, as the crowd in the street hurries without a glance by
+some familiar monument.
+
+"Information concerning the period previous to her coming to
+England...." The words were an evocation. He saw her again as she had
+looked at their first meeting, the poor woman of genius with her long
+pale face and short-sighted eyes, softened a little by the grace of
+youth and inexperience, but so incapable even then of any hold upon
+the pulses. When she spoke, indeed, she was wonderful, more wonderful,
+perhaps, than when later, to Glennard's fancy at least, the consciousness
+of memorable things uttered seemed to take from even her most intimate
+speech the perfect bloom of privacy. It was in those earliest days, if
+ever, that he had come near loving her; though even then his sentiment
+had lived only in the intervals of its expression. Later, when to
+be loved by her had been a state to touch any man's imagination, the
+physical reluctance had, inexplicably, so overborne the intellectual
+attraction, that the last years had been, to both of them, an agony of
+conflicting impulses. Even now, if, in turning over old papers, his hand
+lit on her letters, the touch filled him with inarticulate misery....
+
+"She had so few intimate friends... that letters will be of special
+value." So few intimate friends! For years she had had but one; one
+who in the last years had requited her wonderful pages, her tragic
+outpourings of love, humility, and pardon, with the scant phrases by
+which a man evades the vulgarest of sentimental importunities. He
+had been a brute in spite of himself, and sometimes, now that the
+remembrance of her face had faded, and only her voice and words remained
+with him, he chafed at his own inadequacy, his stupid inability to rise
+to the height of her passion. His egoism was not of a kind to mirror its
+complacency in the adventure. To have been loved by the most brilliant
+woman of her day, and to have been incapable of loving her, seemed to
+him, in looking back, the most derisive evidence of his limitations; and
+his remorseful tenderness for her memory was complicated with a sense of
+irritation against her for having given him once for all the measure of
+his emotional capacity. It was not often, however, that he thus probed
+the past. The public, in taking possession of Mrs. Aubyn, had eased his
+shoulders of their burden. There was something fatuous in an attitude of
+sentimental apology toward a memory already classic: to reproach one's
+self for not having loved Margaret Aubyn was a good deal like being
+disturbed by an inability to admire the Venus of Milo. From her
+cold niche of fame she looked down ironically enough on his
+self-flagellations.... It was only when he came on something that
+belonged to her that he felt a sudden renewal of the old feeling, the
+strange dual impulse that drew him to her voice but drove him from her
+hand, so that even now, at sight of anything she had touched, his heart
+contracted painfully. It happened seldom nowadays. Her little presents,
+one by one, had disappeared from his rooms, and her letters, kept from
+some unacknowledged puerile vanity in the possession of such treasures,
+seldom came beneath his hand....
+
+"Her letters will be of special value--" Her letters! Why, he must have
+hundreds of them--enough to fill a volume. Sometimes it used to seem
+to him that they came with every post--he used to avoid looking in his
+letter-box when he came home to his rooms--but her writing seemed to
+spring out at him as he put his key in the door--.
+
+He stood up and strolled into the other room. Hollingsworth, lounging
+away from the window, had joined himself to a languidly convivial group
+of men to whom, in phrases as halting as though they struggled to define
+an ultimate idea, he was expounding the cursed nuisance of living in
+a hole with such a damned climate that one had to get out of it by
+February, with the contingent difficulty of there being no place to take
+one's yacht to in winter but that other played-out hole, the Riviera.
+From the outskirts of this group Glennard wandered to another, where
+a voice as different as possible from Hollingsworth's colorless organ
+dominated another circle of languid listeners.
+
+"Come and hear Dinslow talk about his patent: admission free," one of
+the men sang out in a tone of mock resignation.
+
+Dinslow turned to Glennard the confident pugnacity of his smile. "Give
+it another six months and it'll be talking about itself," he declared.
+"It's pretty nearly articulate now."
+
+"Can it say papa?" someone else inquired.
+
+Dinslow's smile broadened. "You'll be deuced glad to say papa to IT
+a year from now," he retorted. "It'll be able to support even you in
+affluence. Look here, now, just let me explain to you--"
+
+Glennard moved away impatiently. The men at the club--all but those who
+were "in it"--were proverbially "tired" of Dinslow's patent, and none
+more so than Glennard, whose knowledge of its merits made it loom large
+in the depressing catalogue of lost opportunities. The relations between
+the two men had always been friendly, and Dinslow's urgent offers to
+"take him in on the ground floor" had of late intensified Glennard's
+sense of his own inability to meet good luck half way. Some of the men
+who had paused to listen were already in evening clothes, others on
+their way home to dress; and Glennard, with an accustomed twinge of
+humiliation, said to himself that if he lingered among them it was in
+the miserable hope that one of the number might ask him to dine. Miss
+Trent had told him that she was to go to the opera that evening with her
+rich aunt; and if he should have the luck to pick up a dinner-invitation
+he might join her there without extra outlay.
+
+He moved about the room, lingering here and there in a tentative
+affectation of interest; but though the men greeted him pleasantly no
+one asked him to dine. Doubtless they were all engaged, these men who
+could afford to pay for their dinners, who did not have to hunt for
+invitations as a beggar rummages for a crust in an ash-barrel! But
+no--as Hollingsworth left the lessening circle about the table an
+admiring youth called out--"Holly, stop and dine!"
+
+Hollingsworth turned on him the crude countenance that looked like the
+wrong side of a more finished face. "Sorry I can't. I'm in for a beastly
+banquet."
+
+Glennard threw himself into an arm-chair. Why go home in the rain to
+dress? It was folly to take a cab to the opera, it was worse folly to go
+there at all. His perpetual meetings with Alexa Trent were as unfair to
+the girl as they were unnerving to himself. Since he couldn't marry her,
+it was time to stand aside and give a better man the chance--and
+his thought admitted the ironical implication that in the terms of
+expediency the phrase might stand for Hollingsworth.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+He dined alone and walked home to his rooms in the rain. As he turned
+into Fifth Avenue he caught the wet gleam of carriages on their way to
+the opera, and he took the first side street, in a moment of irritation
+against the petty restrictions that thwarted every impulse. It was
+ridiculous to give up the opera, not because one might possibly be bored
+there, but because one must pay for the experiment.
+
+In his sitting-room, the tacit connivance of the inanimate had centred
+the lamp-light on a photograph of Alexa Trent, placed, in the obligatory
+silver frame, just where, as memory officiously reminded him, Margaret
+Aubyn's picture had long throned in its stead. Miss Trent's features
+cruelly justified the usurpation. She had the kind of beauty that comes
+of a happy accord of face and spirit. It is not given to many to have
+the lips and eyes of their rarest mood, and some women go through life
+behind a mask expressing only their anxiety about the butcher's bill or
+their inability to see a joke. With Miss Trent, face and mind had the
+same high serious contour. She looked like a throned Justice by some
+grave Florentine painter; and it seemed to Glennard that her most
+salient attribute, or that at least to which her conduct gave most
+consistent expression, was a kind of passionate justice--the intuitive
+feminine justness that is so much rarer than a reasoned impartiality.
+Circumstances had tragically combined to develop this instinct into a
+conscious habit. She had seen more than most girls of the shabby side of
+life, of the perpetual tendency of want to cramp the noblest attitude.
+Poverty and misfortune had overhung her childhood and she had none of
+the pretty delusions about life that are supposed to be the crowning
+grace of girlhood. This very competence, which gave her a touching
+reasonableness, made Glennard's situation more difficult than if he had
+aspired to a princess bred in the purple. Between them they asked
+so little--they knew so well how to make that little do--but they
+understood also, and she especially did not for a moment let him forget,
+that without that little the future they dreamed of was impossible.
+
+The sight of her photograph quickened Glennard's exasperation. He was
+sick and ashamed of the part he was playing. He had loved her now for
+two years, with the tranquil tenderness that gathers depth and volume
+as it nears fulfilment; he knew that she would wait for him--but the
+certitude was an added pang. There are times when the constancy of the
+woman one cannot marry is almost as trying as that of the woman one does
+not want to.
+
+Glennard turned up his reading-lamp and stirred the fire. He had a long
+evening before him and he wanted to crowd out thought with action. He
+had brought some papers from his office and he spread them out on his
+table and squared himself to the task....
+
+It must have been an hour later that he found himself automatically
+fitting a key into a locked drawer. He had no more notion than a
+somnambulist of the mental process that had led up to this action. He
+was just dimly aware of having pushed aside the papers and the heavy
+calf volumes that a moment before had bounded his horizon, and of laying
+in their place, without a trace of conscious volition, the parcel he had
+taken from the drawer.
+
+The letters were tied in packets of thirty or forty. There were a great
+many packets. On some of the envelopes the ink was fading; on others,
+which bore the English post-mark, it was still fresh. She had been dead
+hardly three years, and she had written, at lengthening intervals, to
+the last....
+
+He undid one of the earlier packets--little notes written during their
+first acquaintance at Hillbridge. Glennard, on leaving college, had
+begun life in his uncle's law office in the old university town. It was
+there that, at the house of her father, Professor Forth, he had first
+met the young lady then chiefly distinguished for having, after two
+years of a conspicuously unhappy marriage, returned to the protection of
+the paternal roof.
+
+Mrs. Aubyn was at that time an eager and somewhat tragic young woman,
+of complex mind and undeveloped manners, whom her crude experience of
+matrimony had fitted out with a stock of generalizations that exploded
+like bombs in the academic air of Hillbridge. In her choice of a husband
+she had been fortunate enough, if the paradox be permitted, to light on
+one so signally gifted with the faculty of putting himself in the wrong
+that her leaving him had the dignity of a manifesto--made her, as
+it were, the spokeswoman of outraged wifehood. In this light she was
+cherished by that dominant portion of Hillbridge society which was
+least indulgent to conjugal differences, and which found a proportionate
+pleasure in being for once able to feast openly on a dish liberally
+seasoned with the outrageous. So much did this endear Mrs. Aubyn to the
+university ladies that they were disposed from the first to allow her
+more latitude of speech and action than the ill-used wife was generally
+accorded in Hillbridge, where misfortune was still regarded as a
+visitation designed to put people in their proper place and make them
+feel the superiority of their neighbors. The young woman so privileged
+combined with a kind of personal shyness an intellectual audacity that
+was like a deflected impulse of coquetry: one felt that if she had been
+prettier she would have had emotions instead of ideas. She was in fact
+even then what she had always remained: a genius capable of the
+acutest generalizations, but curiously undiscerning where her personal
+susceptibilities were concerned. Her psychology failed her just where it
+serves most women and one felt that her brains would never be a guide
+to her heart. Of all this, however, Glennard thought little in the first
+year of their acquaintance. He was at an age when all the gifts and
+graces are but so much undiscriminated food to the ravening egoism of
+youth. In seeking Mrs. Aubyn's company he was prompted by an intuitive
+taste for the best as a pledge of his own superiority. The sympathy
+of the cleverest woman in Hillbridge was balm to his craving for
+distinction: it was public confirmation of his secret sense that he was
+cut out for a bigger place. It must not be understood that Glennard was
+vain. Vanity contents itself with the coarsest diet; there is no
+palate so fastidious as that of self-distrust. To a youth of Glennard's
+aspirations the encouragement of a clever woman stood for the symbol
+of all success. Later, when he had begun to feel his way, to gain a
+foothold, he would not need such support; but it served to carry
+him lightly and easily over what is often a period of insecurity and
+discouragement.
+
+It would be unjust, however, to represent his interest in Mrs. Aubyn as
+a matter of calculation. It was as instinctive as love, and it missed
+being love by just such a hair-breadth deflection from the line of
+beauty as had determined the curve of Mrs. Aubyn's lips. When they met
+she had just published her first novel, and Glennard, who afterward had
+an ambitious man's impatience of distinguished women, was young enough
+to be dazzled by the semi-publicity it gave her. It was the kind of book
+that makes elderly ladies lower their voices and call each other "my
+dear" when they furtively discuss it; and Glennard exulted in the
+superior knowledge of the world that enabled him to take as a matter of
+course sentiments over which the university shook its head. Still
+more delightful was it to hear Mrs. Aubyn waken the echoes of academic
+drawing-rooms with audacities surpassing those of her printed page. Her
+intellectual independence gave a touch of comradeship to their intimacy,
+prolonging the illusion of college friendships based on a joyous
+interchange of heresies. Mrs. Aubyn and Glennard represented to each
+other the augur's wink behind the Hillbridge idol: they walked together
+in that light of young omniscience from which fate so curiously excludes
+one's elders.
+
+Husbands who are notoriously inopportune, may even die inopportunely,
+and this was the revenge that Mr. Aubyn, some two years after her return
+to Hillbridge, took upon his injured wife. He died precisely at the
+moment when Glennard was beginning to criticise her. It was not that
+she bored him; she did what was infinitely worse--she made him feel his
+inferiority. The sense of mental equality had been gratifying to his raw
+ambition; but as his self-knowledge defined itself, his understanding of
+her also increased; and if man is at times indirectly flattered by the
+moral superiority of woman, her mental ascendency is extenuated by no
+such oblique tribute to his powers. The attitude of looking up is a
+strain on the muscles; and it was becoming more and more Glennard's
+opinion that brains, in a woman, should be merely the obverse of beauty.
+To beauty Mrs. Aubyn could lay no claim; and while she had enough
+prettiness to exasperate him by her incapacity to make use of it, she
+seemed invincibly ignorant of any of the little artifices whereby women
+contrive to palliate their defects and even to turn them into graces.
+Her dress never seemed a part of her; all her clothes had an impersonal
+air, as though they had belonged to someone else and been borrowed in an
+emergency that had somehow become chronic. She was conscious enough of
+her deficiencies to try to amend them by rash imitations of the most
+approved models; but no woman who does not dress well intuitively will
+ever do so by the light of reason, and Mrs. Aubyn's plagiarisms, to
+borrow a metaphor of her trade, somehow never seemed to be incorporated
+with the text.
+
+Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair.
+The fame that came to Mrs. Aubyn with her second book left Glennard's
+imagination untouched, or had at most the negative effect of removing
+her still farther from the circle of his contracting sympathies. We are
+all the sport of time; and fate had so perversely ordered the chronology
+of Margaret Aubyn's romance that when her husband died Glennard felt as
+though he had lost a friend.
+
+It was not in his nature to be needlessly unkind; and though he was
+in the impregnable position of the man who has given a woman no more
+definable claim on him than that of letting her fancy that he loves
+her, he would not for the world have accentuated his advantage by any
+betrayal of indifference. During the first year of her widowhood their
+friendship dragged on with halting renewals of sentiment, becoming more
+and more a banquet of empty dishes from which the covers were never
+removed; then Glennard went to New York to live and exchanged the faded
+pleasures of intercourse for the comparative novelty of correspondence.
+Her letters, oddly enough, seemed at first to bring her nearer than her
+presence. She had adopted, and she successfully maintained, a note as
+affectionately impersonal as his own; she wrote ardently of her work,
+she questioned him about his, she even bantered him on the inevitable
+pretty girl who was certain before long to divert the current of his
+confidences. To Glennard, who was almost a stranger in New York,
+the sight of Mrs. Aubyn's writing was like a voice of reassurance in
+surroundings as yet insufficiently aware of him. His vanity found a
+retrospective enjoyment in the sentiment his heart had rejected, and
+this factitious emotion drove him once or twice to Hillbridge, whence,
+after scenes of evasive tenderness, he returned dissatisfied with
+himself and her. As he made room for himself in New York and peopled the
+space he had cleared with the sympathies at the disposal of agreeable
+and self-confident young men, it seemed to him natural to infer that
+Mrs. Aubyn had refurnished in the same manner the void he was not
+unwilling his departure should have left. But in the dissolution of
+sentimental partnerships it is seldom that both associates are able to
+withdraw their funds at the same time; and Glennard gradually learned
+that he stood for the venture on which Mrs. Aubyn had irretrievably
+staked her all. It was not the kind of figure he cared to cut. He had
+no fancy for leaving havoc in his wake and would have preferred to sow
+a quick growth of oblivion in the spaces wasted by his unconsidered
+inroads; but if he supplied the seed it was clearly Mrs. Aubyn's
+business to see to the raising of the crop. Her attitude seemed indeed
+to throw his own reasonableness into distincter relief: so that they
+might have stood for thrift and improvidence in an allegory of the
+affections.
+
+It was not that Mrs. Aubyn permitted herself to be a pensioner on his
+bounty. He knew she had no wish to keep herself alive on the small
+change of sentiment; she simply fed on her own funded passion, and the
+luxuries it allowed her made him, even then, dimly aware that she had
+the secret of an inexhaustible alchemy.
+
+Their relations remained thus negatively tender till she suddenly wrote
+him of her decision to go abroad to live. Her father had died, she had
+no near ties in Hillbridge, and London offered more scope than New York
+to her expanding personality. She was already famous and her laurels
+were yet unharvested.
+
+For a moment the news roused Glennard to a jealous sense of lost
+opportunities. He wanted, at any rate, to reassert his power before she
+made the final effort of escape. They had not met for over a year, but
+of course he could not let her sail without seeing her. She came to
+New York the day before her departure, and they spent its last hours
+together. Glennard had planned no course of action--he simply meant to
+let himself drift. They both drifted, for a long time, down the languid
+current of reminiscence; she seemed to sit passive, letting him push
+his way back through the overgrown channels of the past. At length she
+reminded him that they must bring their explorations to an end. He rose
+to leave, and stood looking at her with the same uncertainty in his
+heart. He was tired of her already--he was always tired of her--yet he
+was not sure that he wanted her to go.
+
+"I may never see you again," he said, as though confidently appealing to
+her compassion.
+
+Her look enveloped him. "And I shall see you always--always!"
+
+"Why go then--?" escaped him.
+
+"To be nearer you," she answered; and the words dismissed him like a
+closing door.
+
+The door was never to reopen; but through its narrow crack Glennard, as
+the years went on, became more and more conscious of an inextinguishable
+light directing its small ray toward the past which consumed so little
+of his own commemorative oil. The reproach was taken from this thought
+by Mrs. Aubyn's gradual translation into terms of universality. In
+becoming a personage she so naturally ceased to be a person that
+Glennard could almost look back to his explorations of her spirit as on
+a visit to some famous shrine, immortalized, but in a sense desecrated,
+by popular veneration.
+
+Her letters, from London, continued to come with the same tender
+punctuality; but the altered conditions of her life, the vistas of new
+relationships disclosed by every phrase, made her communications as
+impersonal as a piece of journalism. It was as though the state, the
+world, indeed, had taken her off his hands, assuming the maintenance of
+a temperament that had long exhausted his slender store of reciprocity.
+
+In the retrospective light shed by the letters he was blinded to
+their specific meaning. He was not a man who concerned himself with
+literature, and they had been to him, at first, simply the extension of
+her brilliant talk, later the dreaded vehicle of a tragic importunity.
+He knew, of course, that they were wonderful; that, unlike the authors
+who give their essence to the public and keep only a dry rind for their
+friends, Mrs. Aubyn had stored of her rarest vintage for this hidden
+sacrament of tenderness. Sometimes, indeed, he had been oppressed,
+humiliated almost, by the multiplicity of her allusions, the wide scope
+of her interests, her persistence in forcing her superabundance of
+thought and emotion into the shallow receptacle of his sympathy; but
+he had never thought of the letters objectively, as the production of a
+distinguished woman; had never measured the literary significance of her
+oppressive prodigality. He was almost frightened now at the wealth in
+his hands; the obligation of her love had never weighed on him like
+this gift of her imagination: it was as though he had accepted from her
+something to which even a reciprocal tenderness could not have justified
+his claim.
+
+He sat a long time staring at the scattered pages on his desk; and in
+the sudden realization of what they meant he could almost fancy some
+alchemistic process changing them to gold as he stared. He had the
+sense of not being alone in the room, of the presence of another self
+observing from without the stirring of subconscious impulses that sent
+flushes of humiliation to his forehead. At length he stood up, and
+with the gesture of a man who wishes to give outward expression to his
+purpose--to establish, as it were, a moral alibi--swept the letters into
+a heap and carried them toward the grate. But it would have taken too
+long to burn all the packets. He turned back to the table and one by one
+fitted the pages into their envelopes; then he tied up the letters and
+put them back into the locked drawer.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+It was one of the laws of Glennard's intercourse with Miss Trent that
+he always went to see her the day after he had resolved to give her up.
+There was a special charm about the moments thus snatched from the
+jaws of renunciation; and his sense of their significance was on
+this occasion so keen that he hardly noticed the added gravity of her
+welcome.
+
+His feeling for her had become so vital a part of him that her nearness
+had the quality of imperceptibly readjusting his point of view, so
+that the jumbled phenomena of experience fell at once into a rational
+perspective. In this redistribution of values the sombre retrospect
+of the previous evening shrank to a mere cloud on the edge of
+consciousness. Perhaps the only service an unloved woman can render the
+man she loves is to enhance and prolong his illusions about her rival.
+It was the fate of Margaret Aubyn's memory to serve as a foil to Miss
+Trent's presence, and never had the poor lady thrown her successor into
+more vivid relief.
+
+Miss Trent had the charm of still waters that are felt to be renewed
+by rapid currents. Her attention spread a tranquil surface to the
+demonstrations of others, and it was only in days of storm that one felt
+the pressure of the tides. This inscrutable composure was perhaps her
+chief grace in Glennard's eyes. Reserve, in some natures, implies merely
+the locking of empty rooms or the dissimulation of awkward encumbrances;
+but Miss Trent's reticence was to Glennard like the closed door to the
+sanctuary, and his certainty of divining the hidden treasure made him
+content to remain outside in the happy expectancy of the neophyte.
+
+"You didn't come to the opera last night," she began, in the tone that
+seemed always rather to record a fact than to offer a reflection on it.
+
+He answered with a discouraged gesture. "What was the use? We couldn't
+have talked."
+
+"Not as well as here," she assented; adding, after a meditative pause,
+"As you didn't come I talked to Aunt Virginia instead."
+
+"Ah!" he returned, the fact being hardly striking enough to detach him
+from the contemplation of her hands, which had fallen, as was their
+wont, into an attitude full of plastic possibilities. One felt them to
+be hands that, moving only to some purpose, were capable of intervals of
+serene inaction.
+
+"We had a long talk," Miss Trent went on; and she waited again before
+adding, with the increased absence of stress that marked her graver
+communications, "Aunt Virginia wants me to go abroad with her."
+
+Glennard looked up with a start. "Abroad? When?"
+
+"Now--next month. To be gone two years."
+
+He permitted himself a movement of tender derision. "Does she really?
+Well, I want you to go abroad with ME--for any number of years. Which
+offer do you accept?"
+
+"Only one of them seems to require immediate consideration," she
+returned, with a smile.
+
+Glennard looked at her again. "You're not thinking of it?"
+
+Her gaze dropped and she unclasped her hands. Her movements were so rare
+that they might have been said to italicize her words. "Aunt Virginia
+talked to me very seriously. It will be a great relief to mother and the
+others to have me provided for in that way for two years. I must
+think of that, you know." She glanced down at her gown which, under a
+renovated surface, dated back to the first days of Glennard's wooing. "I
+try not to cost much--but I do."
+
+"Good Lord!" Glennard groaned.
+
+They sat silent till at length she gently took up the argument. "As the
+eldest, you know, I'm bound to consider these things. Women are such a
+burden. Jim does what he can for mother, but with his own children to
+provide for it isn't very much. You see, we're all poor together."
+
+"Your aunt isn't. She might help your mother."
+
+"She does--in her own way."
+
+"Exactly--that's the rich relation all over! You may be miserable in
+any way you like, but if you're to be happy you've got to be so in her
+way--and in her old gowns."
+
+"I could be very happy in Aunt Virginia's old gowns," Miss Trent
+interposed.
+
+"Abroad, you mean?"
+
+"I mean wherever I felt that I was helping. And my going abroad will
+help."
+
+"Of course--I see that. And I see your considerateness in putting its
+advantages negatively."
+
+"Negatively?"
+
+"In dwelling simply on what the going will take you from, not on what
+it will bring you to. It means a lot to a woman, of course, to get
+away from a life like this." He summed up in a disparaging glance the
+background of indigent furniture. "The question is how you'll like
+coming back to it."
+
+She seemed to accept the full consequences of his thought. "I only know
+I don't like leaving it."
+
+He flung back sombrely, "You don't even put it conditionally then?"
+
+Her gaze deepened. "On what?"
+
+He stood up and walked across the room. Then he came back and paused
+before her. "On the alternative of marrying me."
+
+The slow color--even her blushes seemed deliberate--rose to her lower
+lids; her lips stirred, but the words resolved themselves into a smile
+and she waited.
+
+He took another turn, with the thwarted step of the man whose nervous
+exasperation escapes through his muscles.
+
+"And to think that in fifteen years I shall have a big practice!"
+
+Her eyes triumphed for him. "In less!"
+
+"The cursed irony of it! What do I care for the man I shall be then?
+It's slaving one's life away for a stranger!" He took her hands
+abruptly. "You'll go to Cannes, I suppose, or Monte Carlo? I heard
+Hollingsworth say to-day that he meant to take his yacht over to the
+Mediterranean--"
+
+She released herself. "If you think that--"
+
+"I don't. I almost wish I did. It would be easier, I mean." He broke off
+incoherently. "I believe your Aunt Virginia does, though. She somehow
+connotes Hollingsworth and the Mediterranean." He caught her hands
+again. "Alexa--if we could manage a little hole somewhere out of town?"
+
+"Could we?" she sighed, half yielding.
+
+"In one of those places where they make jokes about the mosquitoes," he
+pressed her. "Could you get on with one servant?"
+
+"Could you get on without varnished boots?"
+
+"Promise me you won't go, then!"
+
+"What are you thinking of, Stephen?"
+
+"I don't know," he stammered, the question giving unexpected form to his
+intention. "It's all in the air yet, of course; but I picked up a tip
+the other day--"
+
+"You're not speculating?" she cried, with a kind of superstitious
+terror.
+
+"Lord, no. This is a sure thing--I almost wish it wasn't; I mean if I
+can work it--" He had a sudden vision of the comprehensiveness of the
+temptation. If only he had been less sure of Dinslow! His assurance gave
+the situation the base element of safety.
+
+"I don't understand you," she faltered.
+
+"Trust me, instead!" he adjured her, with sudden energy; and turning on
+her abruptly, "If you go, you know, you go free," he concluded.
+
+She drew back, paling a little. "Why do you make it harder for me?"
+
+"To make it easier for myself," he retorted.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Glennard, the next afternoon, leaving his office earlier than usual,
+turned, on his way home, into one of the public libraries.
+
+He had the place to himself at that closing hour, and the librarian
+was able to give an undivided attention to his tentative request for
+letters--collections of letters. The librarian suggested Walpole.
+
+"I meant women--women's letters."
+
+The librarian proffered Hannah More and Miss Martineau.
+
+Glennard cursed his own inarticulateness. "I mean letters to--to some
+one person--a man; their husband--or--"
+
+"Ah," said the inspired librarian, "Eloise and Abailard."
+
+"Well--something a little nearer, perhaps," said Glennard, with
+lightness. "Didn't Merimee--"
+
+"The lady's letters, in that case, were not published."
+
+"Of course not," said Glennard, vexed at his blunder.
+
+"There are George Sand's letters to Flaubert."
+
+"Ah!" Glennard hesitated. "Was she--were they--?" He chafed at his own
+ignorance of the sentimental by-paths of literature.
+
+"If you want love-letters, perhaps some of the French eighteenth
+century correspondences might suit you better--Mlle. Aisse or Madame de
+Sabran--"
+
+But Glennard insisted. "I want something modern--English or American. I
+want to look something up," he lamely concluded.
+
+The librarian could only suggest George Eliot.
+
+"Well, give me some of the French things, then--and I'll have Merimee's
+letters. It was the woman who published them, wasn't it?"
+
+He caught up his armful, transferring it, on the doorstep, to a cab
+which carried him to his rooms. He dined alone, hurriedly, at a small
+restaurant near by, and returned at once to his books.
+
+Late that night, as he undressed, he wondered what contemptible impulse
+had forced from him his last words to Alexa Trent. It was bad enough to
+interfere with the girl's chances by hanging about her to the obvious
+exclusion of other men, but it was worse to seem to justify his weakness
+by dressing up the future in delusive ambiguities. He saw himself
+sinking from depth to depth of sentimental cowardice in his reluctance
+to renounce his hold on her; and it filled him with self-disgust to
+think that the highest feeling of which he supposed himself capable was
+blent with such base elements.
+
+His awakening was hardly cheered by the sight of her writing. He tore
+her note open and took in the few lines--she seldom exceeded the first
+page--with the lucidity of apprehension that is the forerunner of evil.
+
+"My aunt sails on Saturday and I must give her my answer the day after
+to-morrow. Please don't come till then--I want to think the question
+over by myself. I know I ought to go. Won't you help me to be
+reasonable?"
+
+It was settled, then. Well, he would be reasonable; he wouldn't stand
+in her way; he would let her go. For two years he had been living some
+other, luckier man's life; the time had come when he must drop back into
+his own. He no longer tried to look ahead, to grope his way through
+the endless labyrinth of his material difficulties; a sense of dull
+resignation closed in on him like a fog.
+
+"Hullo, Glennard!" a voice said, as an electric-car, late that
+afternoon, dropped him at an uptown corner.
+
+He looked up and met the interrogative smile of Barton Flamel, who
+stood on the curbstone watching the retreating car with the eye of a man
+philosophic enough to remember that it will be followed by another.
+
+Glennard felt his usual impulse of pleasure at meeting Flamel; but
+it was not in this case curtailed by the reaction of contempt that
+habitually succeeded it. Probably even the few men who had known Flamel
+since his youth could have given no good reason for the vague mistrust
+that he inspired. Some people are judged by their actions, others by
+their ideas; and perhaps the shortest way of defining Flamel is to say
+that his well-known leniency of view was vaguely divined to include
+himself. Simple minds may have resented the discovery that his opinions
+were based on his perceptions; but there was certainly no more definite
+charge against him than that implied in the doubt as to how he would
+behave in an emergency, and his company was looked upon as one of those
+mildly unwholesome dissipations to which the prudent may occasionally
+yield. It now offered itself to Glennard as an easy escape from the
+obsession of moral problems, which somehow could no more be worn in
+Flamel's presence than a surplice in the street.
+
+"Where are you going? To the club?" Flamel asked; adding, as the younger
+man assented, "Why not come to my studio instead? You'll see one bore
+instead of twenty."
+
+The apartment which Flamel described as his studio showed, as its one
+claim to the designation, a perennially empty easel; the rest of its
+space being filled with the evidences of a comprehensive dilettanteism.
+Against this background, which seemed the visible expression of its
+owner's intellectual tolerance, rows of fine books detached themselves
+with a prominence, showing them to be Flamel's chief care.
+
+Glennard glanced with the eye of untrained curiosity at the lines of
+warm-toned morocco, while his host busied himself with the uncorking of
+Apollinaris.
+
+"You've got a splendid lot of books," he said.
+
+"They're fairly decent," the other assented, in the curt tone of the
+collector who will not talk of his passion for fear of talking of
+nothing else; then, as Glennard, his hands in his pockets, began to
+stroll perfunctorily down the long line of bookcases--"Some men," Flamel
+irresistibly added, "think of books merely as tools, others as tooling.
+I'm between the two; there are days when I use them as scenery, other
+days when I want them as society; so that, as you see, my library
+represents a makeshift compromise between looks and brains, and the
+collectors look down on me almost as much as the students."
+
+Glennard, without answering, was mechanically taking one book after
+another from the shelves. His hands slipped curiously over the smooth
+covers and the noiseless subsidence of opening pages. Suddenly he came
+on a thin volume of faded manuscript.
+
+"What's this?" he asked, with a listless sense of wonder.
+
+"Ah, you're at my manuscript shelf. I've been going in for that sort of
+thing lately." Flamel came up and looked over his shoulders. "That's a
+bit of Stendhal--one of the Italian stories--and here are some letters
+of Balzac to Madame Commanville."
+
+Glennard took the book with sudden eagerness. "Who was Madame
+Commanville?"
+
+"His sister." He was conscious that Flamel was looking at him with the
+smile that was like an interrogation point. "I didn't know you cared for
+this kind of thing."
+
+"I don't--at least I've never had the chance. Have you many collections
+of letters?"
+
+"Lord, no--very few. I'm just beginning, and most of the interesting
+ones are out of my reach. Here's a queer little collection, though--the
+rarest thing I've got--half a dozen of Shelley's letters to Harriet
+Westbrook. I had a devil of a time getting them--a lot of collectors
+were after them."
+
+Glennard, taking the volume from his hand, glanced with a kind of
+repugnance at the interleaving of yellow cris-crossed sheets. "She was
+the one who drowned herself, wasn't she?"
+
+Flamel nodded. "I suppose that little episode adds about fifty per cent.
+to their value," he said, meditatively.
+
+Glennard laid the book down. He wondered why he had joined Flamel.
+He was in no humor to be amused by the older man's talk, and a
+recrudescence of personal misery rose about him like an icy tide.
+
+"I believe I must take myself off," he said. "I'd forgotten an
+engagement."
+
+He turned to go; but almost at the same moment he was conscious of a
+duality of intention wherein his apparent wish to leave revealed itself
+as a last effort of the will against the overmastering desire to stay
+and unbosom himself to Flamel.
+
+The older man, as though divining the conflict, laid a detaining
+pressure on his arm.
+
+"Won't the engagement keep? Sit down and try one of these cigars. I
+don't often have the luck of seeing you here."
+
+"I'm rather driven just now," said Glennard, vaguely. He found himself
+seated again, and Flamel had pushed to his side a low stand holding a
+bottle of Apollinaris and a decanter of cognac.
+
+Flamel, thrown back in his capacious arm-chair, surveyed him through
+a cloud of smoke with the comfortable tolerance of the man to whom no
+inconsistencies need be explained. Connivance was implicit in the air.
+It was the kind of atmosphere in which the outrageous loses its edge.
+Glennard felt a gradual relaxing of his nerves.
+
+"I suppose one has to pay a lot for letters like that?" he heard himself
+asking, with a glance in the direction of the volume he had laid aside.
+
+"Oh, so-so--depends on circumstances." Flamel viewed him thoughtfully.
+"Are you thinking of collecting?"
+
+Glennard laughed. "Lord, no. The other way round."
+
+"Selling?"
+
+"Oh, I hardly know. I was thinking of a poor chap--"
+
+Flamel filled the pause with a nod of interest.
+
+"A poor chap I used to know--who died--he died last year--and who left
+me a lot of letters, letters he thought a great deal of--he was fond
+of me and left 'em to me outright, with the idea, I suppose, that
+they might benefit me somehow--I don't know--I'm not much up on such
+things--" he reached his hand to the tall glass his host had filled.
+
+"A collection of autograph letters, eh? Any big names?"
+
+"Oh, only one name. They're all letters written to him--by one person,
+you understand; a woman, in fact--"
+
+"Oh, a woman," said Flamel, negligently.
+
+Glennard was nettled by his obvious loss of interest. "I rather think
+they'd attract a good deal of notice if they were published."
+
+Flamel still looked uninterested. "Love-letters, I suppose?"
+
+"Oh, just--the letters a woman would write to a man she knew well. They
+were tremendous friends, he and she."
+
+"And she wrote a clever letter?"
+
+"Clever? It was Margaret Aubyn."
+
+A great silence filled the room. It seemed to Glennard that the words
+had burst from him as blood gushes from a wound.
+
+"Great Scott!" said Flamel, sitting up. "A collection of Margaret
+Aubyn's letters? Did you say YOU had them?"
+
+"They were left me--by my friend."
+
+"I see. Was he--well, no matter. You're to be congratulated, at any
+rate. What are you going to do with them?"
+
+Glennard stood up with a sense of weariness in all his bones. "Oh, I
+don't know. I haven't thought much about it. I just happened to see that
+some fellow was writing her life--"
+
+"Joslin; yes. You didn't think of giving them to him?"
+
+Glennard had lounged across the room and stood staring up at a bronze
+Bacchus who drooped his garlanded head above the pediment of an Italian
+cabinet. "What ought I to do? You're just the fellow to advise me." He
+felt the blood in his cheek as he spoke.
+
+Flamel sat with meditative eye. "What do you WANT to do with them?" he
+asked.
+
+"I want to publish them," said Glennard, swinging round with sudden
+energy--"If I can--"
+
+"If you can? They're yours, you say?"
+
+"They're mine fast enough. There's no one to prevent--I mean there are
+no restrictions--" he was arrested by the sense that these accumulated
+proofs of impunity might precisely stand as the strongest check on his
+action.
+
+"And Mrs. Aubyn had no family, I believe?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Then I don't see who's to interfere," said Flamel, studying his
+cigar-tip.
+
+Glennard had turned his unseeing stare on an ecstatic Saint Catherine
+framed in tarnished gilding.
+
+"It's just this way," he began again, with an effort. "When letters are
+as personal as--as these of my friend's.... Well, I don't mind telling
+you that the cash would make a heap of difference to me; such a lot that
+it rather obscures my judgment--the fact is if I could lay my hand on a
+few thousands now I could get into a big thing, and without appreciable
+risk; and I'd like to know whether you think I'd be justified--under the
+circumstances...." He paused, with a dry throat. It seemed to him at the
+moment that it would be impossible for him ever to sink lower in his own
+estimation. He was in truth less ashamed of weighing the temptation than
+of submitting his scruples to a man like Flamel, and affecting to appeal
+to sentiments of delicacy on the absence of which he had consciously
+reckoned. But he had reached a point where each word seemed to compel
+another, as each wave in a stream is forced forward by the pressure
+behind it; and before Flamel could speak he had faltered out--"You don't
+think people could say... could criticise the man...."
+
+"But the man's dead, isn't he?"
+
+"He's dead--yes; but can I assume the responsibility without--"
+
+Flamel hesitated; and almost immediately Glennard's scruples gave way
+to irritation. If at this hour Flamel were to affect an inopportune
+reluctance--!
+
+The older man's answer reassured him. "Why need you assume any
+responsibility? Your name won't appear, of course; and as to your
+friend's, I don't see why his should, either. He wasn't a celebrity
+himself, I suppose?"
+
+"No, no."
+
+"Then the letters can be addressed to Mr. Blank. Doesn't that make it
+all right?"
+
+Glennard's hesitation revived. "For the public, yes. But I don't see
+that it alters the case for me. The question is, ought I to publish them
+at all?"
+
+"Of course you ought to." Flamel spoke with invigorating emphasis. "I
+doubt if you'd be justified in keeping them back. Anything of Margaret
+Aubyn's is more or less public property by this time. She's too great
+for any one of us. I was only wondering how you could use them to the
+best advantage--to yourself, I mean. How many are there?"
+
+"Oh, a lot; perhaps a hundred--I haven't counted. There may be more...."
+
+"Gad! What a haul! When were they written?"
+
+"I don't know--that is--they corresponded for years. What's the odds?"
+He moved toward his hat with a vague impulse of flight.
+
+"It all counts," said Flamel, imperturbably. "A long
+correspondence--one, I mean, that covers a great deal of time--is
+obviously worth more than if the same number of letters had been written
+within a year. At any rate, you won't give them to Joslin? They'd fill a
+book, wouldn't they?"
+
+"I suppose so. I don't know how much it takes to fill a book."
+
+"Not love-letters, you say?"
+
+"Why?" flashed from Glennard.
+
+"Oh, nothing--only the big public is sentimental, and if they WERE--why,
+you could get any money for Margaret Aubyn's love-letters."
+
+Glennard was silent.
+
+"Are the letters interesting in themselves? I mean apart from the
+association with her name?"
+
+"I'm no judge." Glennard took up his hat and thrust himself into his
+overcoat. "I dare say I sha'n't do anything about it. And, Flamel--you
+won't mention this to anyone?"
+
+"Lord, no. Well, I congratulate you. You've got a big thing." Flamel was
+smiling at him from the hearth.
+
+Glennard, on the threshold, forced a response to the smile, while he
+questioned with loitering indifference--"Financially, eh?"
+
+"Rather; I should say so."
+
+Glennard's hand lingered on the knob. "How much--should you say? You
+know about such things."
+
+"Oh, I should have to see the letters; but I should say--well, if you've
+got enough to fill a book and they're fairly readable, and the book is
+brought out at the right time--say ten thousand down from the publisher,
+and possibly one or two more in royalties. If you got the publishers
+bidding against each other you might do even better; but of course I'm
+talking in the dark."
+
+"Of course," said Glennard, with sudden dizziness. His hand had slipped
+from the knob and he stood staring down at the exotic spirals of the
+Persian rug beneath his feet.
+
+"I'd have to see the letters," Flamel repeated.
+
+"Of course--you'd have to see them...." Glennard stammered; and, without
+turning, he flung over his shoulder an inarticulate "Good-by...."
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+The little house, as Glennard strolled up to it between the trees,
+seemed no more than a gay tent pitched against the sunshine. It had the
+crispness of a freshly starched summer gown, and the geraniums on the
+veranda bloomed as simultaneously as the flowers in a bonnet. The garden
+was prospering absurdly. Seed they had sown at random--amid laughing
+counter-charges of incompetence--had shot up in fragrant defiance of
+their blunders. He smiled to see the clematis unfolding its punctual
+wings about the porch. The tiny lawn was smooth as a shaven cheek, and a
+crimson rambler mounted to the nursery-window of a baby who never cried.
+A breeze shook the awning above the tea-table, and his wife, as he drew
+near, could be seen bending above a kettle that was just about to boil.
+So vividly did the whole scene suggest the painted bliss of a stage
+setting, that it would have been hardly surprising to see her step
+forward among the flowers and trill out her virtuous happiness from the
+veranda-rail.
+
+The stale heat of the long day in town, the dusty promiscuity of the
+suburban train were now but the requisite foil to an evening of scented
+breezes and tranquil talk. They had been married more than a year,
+and each home-coming still reflected the freshness of their first day
+together. If, indeed, their happiness had a flaw, it was in resembling
+too closely the bright impermanence of their surroundings. Their love as
+yet was but the gay tent of holiday-makers.
+
+His wife looked up with a smile. The country life suited her, and her
+beauty had gained depth from a stillness in which certain faces might
+have grown opaque.
+
+"Are you very tired?" she asked, pouring his tea.
+
+"Just enough to enjoy this." He rose from the chair in which he had
+thrown himself and bent over the tray for his cream. "You've had a
+visitor?" he commented, noticing a half-empty cup beside her own.
+
+"Only Mr. Flamel," she said, indifferently.
+
+"Flamel? Again?"
+
+She answered without show of surprise. "He left just now. His yacht is
+down at Laurel Bay and he borrowed a trap of the Dreshams to drive over
+here."
+
+Glennard made no comment, and she went on, leaning her head back against
+the cushions of her bamboo-seat, "He wants us to go for a sail with him
+next Sunday."
+
+Glennard meditatively stirred his tea. He was trying to think of the
+most natural and unartificial thing to say, and his voice seemed to come
+from the outside, as though he were speaking behind a marionette. "Do
+you want to?"
+
+"Just as you please," she said, compliantly. No affectation of
+indifference could have been as baffling as her compliance. Glennard, of
+late, was beginning to feel that the surface which, a year ago, he
+had taken for a sheet of clear glass, might, after all, be a mirror
+reflecting merely his own conception of what lay behind it.
+
+"Do you like Flamel?" he suddenly asked; to which, still engaged with
+her tea, she returned the feminine answer--"I thought you did."
+
+"I do, of course," he agreed, vexed at his own incorrigible tendency to
+magnify Flamel's importance by hovering about the topic. "A sail would
+be rather jolly; let's go."
+
+She made no reply and he drew forth the rolled-up evening papers which
+he had thrust into his pocket on leaving the train. As he smoothed them
+out his own countenance seemed to undergo the same process. He ran his
+eye down the list of stocks and Flamel's importunate personality receded
+behind the rows of figures pushing forward into notice like so many
+bearers of good news. Glennard's investments were flowering like his
+garden: the dryest shares blossomed into dividends, and a golden harvest
+awaited his sickle.
+
+He glanced at his wife with the tranquil air of the man who digests
+good luck as naturally as the dry ground absorbs a shower. "Things are
+looking uncommonly well. I believe we shall be able to go to town for
+two or three months next winter if we can find something cheap."
+
+She smiled luxuriously: it was pleasant to be able to say, with an air
+of balancing relative advantages, "Really, on the baby's account I shall
+be almost sorry; but if we do go, there's Kate Erskine's house... she'll
+let us have it for almost nothing...."
+
+"Well, write her about it," he recommended, his eyes travelling on
+in search of the weather report. He had turned to the wrong page; and
+suddenly a line of black characters leapt out at him as from an ambush.
+
+"'Margaret Aubyn's Letters.' Two volumes. Out to-day. First edition of
+five thousand sold out before leaving the press. Second edition ready
+next week. THE BOOK OF THE YEAR...."
+
+He looked up stupidly. His wife still sat with her head thrown back,
+her pure profile detached against the cushions. She was smiling a little
+over the prospect his last words had opened. Behind her head shivers
+of sun and shade ran across the striped awning. A row of maples and
+a privet hedge hid their neighbor's gables, giving them undivided
+possession of their leafy half-acre; and life, a moment before, had
+been like their plot of ground, shut off, hedged in from importunities,
+impenetrably his and hers. Now it seemed to him that every maple-leaf,
+every privet-bud, was a relentless human gaze, pressing close upon their
+privacy. It was as though they sat in a brightly lit room, uncurtained
+from a darkness full of hostile watchers.... His wife still smiled; and
+her unconsciousness of danger seemed, in some horrible way, to put her
+beyond the reach of rescue....
+
+He had not known that it would be like this. After the first odious
+weeks, spent in preparing the letters for publication, in submitting
+them to Flamel, and in negotiating with the publishers, the transaction
+had dropped out of his consciousness into that unvisited limbo to which
+we relegate the deeds we would rather not have done but have no notion
+of undoing. From the moment he had obtained Miss Trent's promise not
+to sail with her aunt he had tried to imagine himself irrevocably
+committed. After that, he argued, his first duty was to her--she had
+become his conscience. The sum obtained from the publishers by Flamel's
+adroit manipulations and opportunely transferred to Dinslow's successful
+venture, already yielded a return which, combined with Glennard's
+professional earnings, took the edge of compulsion from their way of
+living, making it appear the expression of a graceful preference for
+simplicity. It was the mitigated poverty which can subscribe to a review
+or two and have a few flowers on the dinner-table. And already in
+a small way Glennard was beginning to feel the magnetic quality of
+prosperity. Clients who had passed his door in the hungry days sought
+it out now that it bore the name of a successful man. It was understood
+that a small inheritance, cleverly invested, was the source of his
+fortune; and there was a feeling that a man who could do so well for
+himself was likely to know how to turn over other people's money.
+
+But it was in the more intimate reward of his wife's happiness that
+Glennard tasted the full flavor of success. Coming out of conditions so
+narrow that those he offered her seemed spacious, she fitted into her
+new life without any of those manifest efforts at adjustment that are
+as sore to a husband's pride as the critical rearrangement of the bridal
+furniture. She had given him, instead, the delicate pleasure of watching
+her expand like a sea-creature restored to its element, stretching out
+the atrophied tentacles of girlish vanity and enjoyment to the rising
+tide of opportunity. And somehow--in the windowless inner cell of his
+consciousness where self-criticism cowered--Glennard's course seemed
+justified by its merely material success. How could such a crop of
+innocent blessedness have sprung from tainted soil?
+
+
+
+Now he had the injured sense of a man entrapped into a disadvantageous
+bargain. He had not known it would be like this; and a dull anger
+gathered at his heart. Anger against whom? Against his wife, for not
+knowing what he suffered? Against Flamel, for being the unconscious
+instrument of his wrong-doing? Or against that mute memory to which his
+own act had suddenly given a voice of accusation? Yes, that was it;
+and his punishment henceforth would be the presence, the unescapable
+presence, of the woman he had so persistently evaded. She would always
+be there now. It was as though he had married her instead of the other.
+It was what she had always wanted--to be with him--and she had gained
+her point at last....
+
+He sprang up, as though in an impulse of flight.... The sudden movement
+lifted his wife's lids, and she asked, in the incurious voice of the
+woman whose life is enclosed in a magic circle of prosperity--"Any
+news?"
+
+"No--none--" he said, roused to a sense of immediate peril. The papers
+lay scattered at his feet--what if she were to see them? He stretched
+his arm to gather them up, but his next thought showed him the futility
+of such concealment. The same advertisement would appear every day, for
+weeks to come, in every newspaper; how could he prevent her seeing it?
+He could not always be hiding the papers from her.... Well, and what if
+she did see it? It would signify nothing to her, the chances were that
+she would never even read the book.... As she ceased to be an element of
+fear in his calculations the distance between them seemed to lessen
+and he took her again, as it were, into the circle of his conjugal
+protection.... Yet a moment before he had almost hated her!... He
+laughed aloud at his senseless terrors.... He was off his balance,
+decidedly.
+
+"What are you laughing at?" she asked.
+
+He explained, elaborately, that he was laughing at the recollection
+of an old woman in the train, an old woman with a lot of bundles, who
+couldn't find her ticket.... But somehow, in the telling, the humor of
+the story seemed to evaporate, and he felt the conventionality of her
+smile. He glanced at his watch, "Isn't it time to dress?"
+
+She rose with serene reluctance. "It's a pity to go in. The garden looks
+so lovely."
+
+They lingered side by side, surveying their domain. There was not space
+in it, at this hour, for the shadow of the elm-tree in the angle of the
+hedge; it crossed the lawn, cut the flower-border in two, and ran up the
+side of the house to the nursery window. She bent to flick a caterpillar
+from the honey-suckle; then, as they turned indoors, "If we mean to
+go on the yacht next Sunday," she suggested, "oughtn't you to let Mr.
+Flamel know?"
+
+Glennard's exasperation deflected suddenly. "Of course I shall let him
+know. You always seem to imply that I'm going to do something rude to
+Flamel."
+
+The words reverberated through her silence; she had a way of thus
+leaving one space in which to contemplate one's folly at arm's length.
+Glennard turned on his heel and went upstairs. As he dropped into a
+chair before his dressing-table he said to himself that in the last hour
+he had sounded the depths of his humiliation and that the lowest dregs
+of it, the very bottom-slime, was the hateful necessity of having
+always, as long as the two men lived, to be civil to Barton Flamel.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+THE week in town had been sultry, and the men, in the Sunday
+emancipation of white flannel and duck, filled the deck-chairs of the
+yacht with their outstretched apathy, following, through a mist of
+cigarette-smoke, the flitting inconsequences of the women. The party
+was a small one--Flamel had few intimate friends--but composed of more
+heterogeneous atoms than the little pools into which society usually
+runs. The reaction from the chief episode of his earlier life had
+bred in Glennard an uneasy distaste for any kind of personal saliency.
+Cleverness was useful in business; but in society it seemed to him as
+futile as the sham cascades formed by a stream that might have been used
+to drive a mill. He liked the collective point of view that goes with
+the civilized uniformity of dress-clothes, and his wife's attitude
+implied the same preference; yet they found themselves slipping more
+and more into Flamel's intimacy. Alexa had once or twice said that she
+enjoyed meeting clever people; but her enjoyment took the negative form
+of a smiling receptivity; and Glennard felt a growing preference for the
+kind of people who have their thinking done for them by the community.
+
+Still, the deck of the yacht was a pleasant refuge from the heat on
+shore, and his wife's profile, serenely projected against the changing
+blue, lay on his retina like a cool hand on the nerves. He had never
+been more impressed by the kind of absoluteness that lifted her beauty
+above the transient effects of other women, making the most harmonious
+face seem an accidental collocation of features.
+
+The ladies who directly suggested this comparison were of a kind
+accustomed to take similar risks with more gratifying results. Mrs.
+Armiger had in fact long been the triumphant alternative of those who
+couldn't "see" Alexa Glennard's looks; and Mrs. Touchett's claims to
+consideration were founded on that distribution of effects which is the
+wonder of those who admire a highly cultivated country. The third lady
+of the trio which Glennard's fancy had put to such unflattering uses,
+was bound by circumstances to support the claims of the other two. This
+was Mrs. Dresham, the wife of the editor of the RADIATOR. Mrs. Dresham
+was a lady who had rescued herself from social obscurity by assuming the
+role of her husband's exponent and interpreter; and Dresham's leisure
+being devoted to the cultivation of remarkable women, his
+wife's attitude committed her to the public celebration of their
+remarkableness. For the conceivable tedium of this duty, Mrs. Dresham
+was repaid by the fact that there were people who took HER for a
+remarkable woman; and who in turn probably purchased similar distinction
+with the small change of her reflected importance. As to the other
+ladies of the party, they were simply the wives of some of the men--the
+kind of women who expect to be talked to collectively and to have their
+questions left unanswered.
+
+Mrs. Armiger, the latest embodiment of Dresham's instinct for the
+remarkable, was an innocent beauty who for years had distilled
+dulness among a set of people now self-condemned by their inability
+to appreciate her. Under Dresham's tutelage she had developed into a
+"thoughtful woman," who read his leaders in the RADIATOR and bought the
+books he recommended. When a new novel appeared, people wanted to know
+what Mrs. Armiger thought of it; and a young gentleman who had made a
+trip in Touraine had recently inscribed to her the wide-margined result
+of his explorations.
+
+Glennard, leaning back with his head against the rail and a slit of
+fugitive blue between his half-closed lids, vaguely wished she wouldn't
+spoil the afternoon by making people talk; though he reduced his
+annoyance to the minimum by not listening to what was said, there
+remained a latent irritation against the general futility of words.
+
+His wife's gift of silence seemed to him the most vivid commentary on
+the clumsiness of speech as a means of intercourse, and his eyes had
+turned to her in renewed appreciation of this finer faculty when
+Mrs. Armiger's voice abruptly brought home to him the underrated
+potentialities of language.
+
+"You've read them, of course, Mrs. Glennard?" he heard her ask; and, in
+reply to Alexa's vague interrogation--"Why, the 'Aubyn Letters'--it's
+the only book people are talking of this week."
+
+Mrs. Dresham immediately saw her advantage. "You HAVEN'T read them? How
+very extraordinary! As Mrs. Armiger says, the book's in the air; one
+breathes it in like the influenza."
+
+Glennard sat motionless, watching his wife.
+
+"Perhaps it hasn't reached the suburbs yet," she said, with her
+unruffled smile.
+
+"Oh, DO let me come to you, then!" Mrs. Touchett cried; "anything for a
+change of air! I'm positively sick of the book and I can't put it down.
+Can't you sail us beyond its reach, Mr. Flamel?"
+
+Flamel shook his head. "Not even with this breeze. Literature travels
+faster than steam nowadays. And the worst of it is that we can't any
+of us give up reading; it's as insidious as a vice and as tiresome as a
+virtue."
+
+"I believe it IS a vice, almost, to read such a book as the 'Letters,'"
+said Mrs. Touchett. "It's the woman's soul, absolutely torn up by the
+roots--her whole self laid bare; and to a man who evidently didn't care;
+who couldn't have cared. I don't mean to read another line; it's too
+much like listening at a keyhole."
+
+"But if she wanted it published?"
+
+"Wanted it? How do we know she did?"
+
+"Why, I heard she'd left the letters to the man--whoever he is--with
+directions that they should be published after his death--"
+
+"I don't believe it," Mrs. Touchett declared.
+
+"He's dead then, is he?" one of the men asked.
+
+"Why, you don't suppose if he were alive he could ever hold up his
+head again, with these letters being read by everybody?" Mrs. Touchett
+protested. "It must have been horrible enough to know they'd been
+written to him; but to publish them! No man could have done it and no
+woman could have told him to--"
+
+"Oh, come, come," Dresham judicially interposed; "after all, they're not
+love-letters."
+
+"No--that's the worst of it; they're unloved letters," Mrs. Touchett
+retorted.
+
+"Then, obviously, she needn't have written them; whereas the man, poor
+devil, could hardly help receiving them."
+
+"Perhaps he counted on the public to save him the trouble of reading
+them," said young Hartly, who was in the cynical stage.
+
+Mrs. Armiger turned her reproachful loveliness to Dresham. "From the way
+you defend him, I believe you know who he is."
+
+Everyone looked at Dresham, and his wife smiled with the superior air of
+the woman who is in her husband's professional secrets. Dresham shrugged
+his shoulders.
+
+"What have I said to defend him?"
+
+"You called him a poor devil--you pitied him."
+
+"A man who could let Margaret Aubyn write to him in that way? Of course
+I pity him."
+
+"Then you MUST know who he is," cried Mrs. Armiger, with a triumphant
+air of penetration.
+
+Hartly and Flamel laughed and Dresham shook his head. "No one knows; not
+even the publishers; so they tell me at least."
+
+"So they tell you to tell us," Hartly astutely amended; and Mrs. Armiger
+added, with the appearance of carrying the argument a point farther,
+"But even if HE'S dead and SHE'S dead, somebody must have given the
+letters to the publishers."
+
+"A little bird, probably," said Dresham, smiling indulgently on her
+deduction.
+
+"A little bird of prey then--a vulture, I should say--" another man
+interpolated.
+
+"Oh, I'm not with you there," said Dresham, easily. "Those letters
+belonged to the public."
+
+"How can any letters belong to the public that weren't written to the
+public?" Mrs. Touchett interposed.
+
+"Well, these were, in a sense. A personality as big as Margaret Aubyn's
+belongs to the world. Such a mind is part of the general fund of
+thought. It's the penalty of greatness--one becomes a monument
+historique. Posterity pays the cost of keeping one up, but on condition
+that one is always open to the public."
+
+"I don't see that that exonerates the man who gives up the keys of the
+sanctuary, as it were."
+
+"Who WAS he?" another voice inquired.
+
+"Who was he? Oh, nobody, I fancy--the letter-box, the slit in the wall
+through which the letters passed to posterity...."
+
+"But she never meant them for posterity!"
+
+"A woman shouldn't write such letters if she doesn't mean them to be
+published...."
+
+"She shouldn't write them to such a man!" Mrs. Touchett scornfully
+corrected.
+
+"I never keep letters," said Mrs. Armiger, under the obvious impression
+that she was contributing a valuable point to the discussion.
+
+There was a general laugh, and Flamel, who had not spoken, said, lazily,
+"You women are too incurably subjective. I venture to say that most men
+would see in those letters merely their immense literary value, their
+significance as documents. The personal side doesn't count where there's
+so much else."
+
+"Oh, we all know you haven't any principles," Mrs. Armiger declared; and
+Alexa Glennard, lifting an indolent smile, said: "I shall never write
+you a love-letter, Mr. Flamel."
+
+Glennard moved away impatiently. Such talk was as tedious as the buzzing
+of gnats. He wondered why his wife had wanted to drag him on such a
+senseless expedition.... He hated Flamel's crowd--and what business had
+Flamel himself to interfere in that way, standing up for the publication
+of the letters as though Glennard needed his defence?...
+
+Glennard turned his head and saw that Flamel had drawn a seat to Alexa's
+elbow and was speaking to her in a low tone. The other groups had
+scattered, straying in twos along the deck. It came over Glennard that
+he should never again be able to see Flamel speaking to his wife without
+the sense of sick mistrust that now loosened his joints....
+
+
+Alexa, the next morning, over their early breakfast, surprised her
+husband by an unexpected request.
+
+"Will you bring me those letters from town?" she asked.
+
+"What letters?" he said, putting down his cup. He felt himself as
+helplessly vulnerable as a man who is lunged at in the dark.
+
+"Mrs. Aubyn's. The book they were all talking about yesterday."
+
+Glennard, carefully measuring his second cup of tea, said, with
+deliberation, "I didn't know you cared about that sort of thing."
+
+She was, in fact, not a great reader, and a new book seldom reached her
+till it was, so to speak, on the home stretch; but she replied, with a
+gentle tenacity, "I think it would interest me because I read her life
+last year."
+
+"Her life? Where did you get that?"
+
+"Someone lent it to me when it came out--Mr. Flamel, I think."
+
+His first impulse was to exclaim, "Why the devil do you borrow books of
+Flamel? I can buy you all you want--" but he felt himself irresistibly
+forced into an attitude of smiling compliance. "Flamel always has the
+newest books going, hasn't he? You must be careful, by the way, about
+returning what he lends you. He's rather crotchety about his library."
+
+"Oh, I'm always very careful," she said, with a touch of competence that
+struck him; and she added, as he caught up his hat: "Don't forget the
+letters."
+
+Why had she asked for the book? Was her sudden wish to see it the result
+of some hint of Flamel's? The thought turned Glennard sick, but he
+preserved sufficient lucidity to tell himself, a moment later, that his
+last hope of self-control would be lost if he yielded to the temptation
+of seeing a hidden purpose in everything she said and did. How much
+Flamel guessed, he had no means of divining; nor could he predicate,
+from what he knew of the man, to what use his inferences might be put.
+The very qualities that had made Flamel a useful adviser made him the
+most dangerous of accomplices. Glennard felt himself agrope among alien
+forces that his own act had set in motion....
+
+Alexa was a woman of few requirements; but her wishes, even in trifles,
+had a definiteness that distinguished them from the fluid impulses of
+her kind. He knew that, having once asked for the book, she would not
+forget it; and he put aside, as an ineffectual expedient, his momentary
+idea of applying for it at the circulating library and telling her that
+all the copies were out. If the book was to be bought it had better be
+bought at once. He left his office earlier than usual and turned in at
+the first book-shop on his way to the train. The show-window was stacked
+with conspicuously lettered volumes. "Margaret Aubyn" flashed back
+at him in endless repetition. He plunged into the shop and came on a
+counter where the name reiterated itself on row after row of bindings.
+It seemed to have driven the rest of literature to the back shelves. He
+caught up a copy, tossing the money to an astonished clerk who pursued
+him to the door with the unheeded offer to wrap up the volumes.
+
+In the street he was seized with a sudden apprehension. What if he were
+to meet Flamel? The thought was intolerable. He called a cab and drove
+straight to the station where, amid the palm-leaf fans of a perspiring
+crowd, he waited a long half-hour for his train to start.
+
+He had thrust a volume in either pocket and in the train he dared not
+draw them out; but the detested words leaped at him from the folds of
+the evening paper. The air seemed full of Margaret Aubyn's name. The
+motion of the train set it dancing up and down on the page of a magazine
+that a man in front of him was reading....
+
+At the door he was told that Mrs. Glennard was still out, and he went
+upstairs to his room and dragged the books from his pocket. They lay
+on the table before him like live things that he feared to touch.... At
+length he opened the first volume. A familiar letter sprang out at
+him, each word quickened by its glaring garb of type. The little broken
+phrases fled across the page like wounded animals in the open.... It was
+a horrible sight.... A battue of helpless things driven savagely out of
+shelter. He had not known it would be like this....
+
+He understood now that, at the moment of selling the letters, he had
+viewed the transaction solely as it affected himself: as an unfortunate
+blemish on an otherwise presentable record. He had scarcely considered
+the act in relation to Margaret Aubyn; for death, if it hallows,
+also makes innocuous. Glennard's God was a god of the living, of the
+immediate, the actual, the tangible; all his days he had lived in the
+presence of that god, heedless of the divinities who, below the surface
+of our deeds and passions, silently forge the fatal weapons of the dead.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+A knock roused him and looking up he saw his wife. He met her glance in
+silence, and she faltered out, "Are you ill?"
+
+The words restored his self-possession. "Ill? Of course not. They told
+me you were out and I came upstairs."
+
+The books lay between them on the table; he wondered when she would see
+them. She lingered tentatively on the threshold, with the air of leaving
+his explanation on his hands. She was not the kind of woman who could be
+counted on to fortify an excuse by appearing to dispute it.
+
+"Where have you been?" Glennard asked, moving forward so that he
+obstructed her vision of the books.
+
+"I walked over to the Dreshams for tea."
+
+"I can't think what you see in those people," he said with a shrug;
+adding, uncontrollably--"I suppose Flamel was there?"
+
+"No; he left on the yacht this morning."
+
+An answer so obstructing to the natural escape of his irritation left
+Glennard with no momentary resource but that of strolling impatiently to
+the window. As her eyes followed him they lit on the books.
+
+"Ah, you've brought them! I'm so glad," she exclaimed.
+
+He answered over his shoulder, "For a woman who never reads you make the
+most astounding exceptions!"
+
+Her smile was an exasperating concession to the probability that it had
+been hot in town or that something had bothered him.
+
+"Do you mean it's not nice to want to read the book?" she asked. "It was
+not nice to publish it, certainly; but after all, I'm not responsible
+for that, am I?" She paused, and, as he made no answer, went on, still
+smiling, "I do read sometimes, you know; and I'm very fond of Margaret
+Aubyn's books. I was reading 'Pomegranate Seed' when we first met. Don't
+you remember? It was then you told me all about her."
+
+Glennard had turned back into the room and stood staring at his wife.
+"All about her?" he repeated, and with the words remembrance came to
+him. He had found Miss Trent one afternoon with the novel in her hand,
+and moved by the lover's fatuous impulse to associate himself in some
+way with whatever fills the mind of the beloved, had broken through
+his habitual silence about the past. Rewarded by the consciousness of
+figuring impressively in Miss Trent's imagination he had gone on from
+one anecdote to another, reviving dormant details of his old Hillbridge
+life, and pasturing his vanity on the eagerness with which she received
+his reminiscences of a being already clothed in the impersonality of
+greatness.
+
+The incident had left no trace in his mind; but it sprang up now like an
+old enemy, the more dangerous for having been forgotten. The instinct
+of self-preservation--sometimes the most perilous that man can
+exercise--made him awkwardly declare--"Oh, I used to see her at people's
+houses, that was all;" and her silence as usual leaving room for a
+multiplication of blunders, he added, with increased indifference, "I
+simply can't see what you can find to interest you in such a book."
+
+She seemed to consider this intently. "You've read it, then?"
+
+"I glanced at it--I never read such things."
+
+"Is it true that she didn't wish the letters to be published?"
+
+Glennard felt the sudden dizziness of the mountaineer on a narrow ledge,
+and with it the sense that he was lost if he looked more than a step
+ahead.
+
+"I'm sure I don't know," he said; then, summoning a smile, he passed
+his hand through her arm. "I didn't have tea at the Dreshams, you know;
+won't you give me some now?" he suggested.
+
+That evening Glennard, under pretext of work to be done, shut himself
+into the small study opening off the drawing-room. As he gathered up his
+papers he said to his wife: "You're not going to sit indoors on such a
+night as this? I'll join you presently outside."
+
+But she had drawn her armchair to the lamp. "I want to look at my book,"
+she said, taking up the first volume of the "Letters."
+
+Glennard, with a shrug, withdrew into the study. "I'm going to shut
+the door; I want to be quiet," he explained from the threshold; and she
+nodded without lifting her eyes from the book.
+
+He sank into a chair, staring aimlessly at the outspread papers. How was
+he to work, while on the other side of the door she sat with that volume
+in her hand? The door did not shut her out--he saw her distinctly, felt
+her close to him in a contact as painful as the pressure on a bruise.
+
+The sensation was part of the general strangeness that made him feel
+like a man waking from a long sleep to find himself in an unknown
+country among people of alien tongue. We live in our own souls as in
+an unmapped region, a few acres of which we have cleared for our
+habitation; while of the nature of those nearest us we know but the
+boundaries that march with ours. Of the points in his wife's character
+not in direct contact with his own, Glennard now discerned his
+ignorance; and the baffling sense of her remoteness was intensified by
+the discovery that, in one way, she was closer to him than ever before.
+As one may live for years in happy unconsciousness of the possession
+of a sensitive nerve, he had lived beside his wife unaware that her
+individuality had become a part of the texture of his life, ineradicable
+as some growth on a vital organ; and he now felt himself at once
+incapable of forecasting her judgment and powerless to evade its
+effects.
+
+To escape, the next morning, the confidences of the breakfast-table, he
+went to town earlier than usual. His wife, who read slowly, was given to
+talking over what she read, and at present his first object in life was
+to postpone the inevitable discussion of the letters. This instinct of
+protection in the afternoon, on his way uptown, guided him to the club
+in search of a man who might be persuaded to come out to the country to
+dine. The only man in the club was Flamel.
+
+Glennard, as he heard himself almost involuntarily pressing Flamel to
+come and dine, felt the full irony of the situation. To use Flamel as
+a shield against his wife's scrutiny was only a shade less humiliating
+than to reckon on his wife as a defence against Flamel.
+
+He felt a contradictory movement of annoyance at the latter's ready
+acceptance, and the two men drove in silence to the station. As they
+passed the bookstall in the waiting-room Flamel lingered a moment and
+the eyes of both fell on Margaret Aubyn's name, conspicuously displayed
+above a counter stacked with the familiar volumes.
+
+"We shall be late, you know," Glennard remonstrated, pulling out his
+watch.
+
+"Go ahead," said Flamel, imperturbably. "I want to get something--"
+
+Glennard turned on his heel and walked down the platform. Flamel
+rejoined him with an innocent-looking magazine in his hand; but Glennard
+dared not even glance at the cover, lest it should show the syllables he
+feared.
+
+The train was full of people they knew, and they were kept apart till
+it dropped them at the little suburban station. As they strolled up the
+shaded hill, Glennard talked volubly, pointing out the improvements
+in the neighborhood, deploring the threatened approach of an electric
+railway, and screening himself by a series of reflex adjustments from
+the imminent risk of any allusion to the "Letters." Flamel suffered his
+discourse with the bland inattention that we accord to the affairs of
+someone else's suburb, and they reached the shelter of Alexa's tea-table
+without a perceptible turn toward the dreaded topic.
+
+The dinner passed off safely. Flamel, always at his best in Alexa's
+presence, gave her the kind of attention which is like a beaconing light
+thrown on the speaker's words: his answers seemed to bring out a latent
+significance in her phrases, as the sculptor draws his statue from the
+block. Glennard, under his wife's composure, detected a sensibility to
+this manoeuvre, and the discovery was like the lightning-flash across a
+nocturnal landscape. Thus far these momentary illuminations had served
+only to reveal the strangeness of the intervening country: each fresh
+observation seemed to increase the sum-total of his ignorance. Her
+simplicity of outline was more puzzling than a complex surface. One may
+conceivably work one's way through a labyrinth; but Alexa's candor
+was like a snow-covered plain where, the road once lost, there are no
+landmarks to travel by.
+
+Dinner over, they returned to the veranda, where a moon, rising behind
+the old elm, was combining with that complaisant tree a romantic
+enlargement of their borders. Glennard had forgotten the cigars. He went
+to his study to fetch them, and in passing through the drawing-room he
+saw the second volume of the "Letters" lying open on his wife's table.
+He picked up the book and looked at the date of the letter she had been
+reading. It was one of the last... he knew the few lines by heart. He
+dropped the book and leaned against the wall. Why had he included that
+one among the others? Or was it possible that now they would all seem
+like that...?
+
+Alexa's voice came suddenly out of the dusk. "May Touchett was right--it
+IS like listening at a key-hole. I wish I hadn't read it!"
+
+Flamel returned, in the leisurely tone of the man whose phrases are
+punctuated by a cigarette, "It seems so to us, perhaps; but to another
+generation the book will be a classic."
+
+"Then it ought not to have been published till it had become a classic.
+It's horrible, it's degrading almost, to read the secrets of a woman one
+might have known." She added, in a lower tone, "Stephen DID know her--"
+
+"Did he?" came from Flamel.
+
+"He knew her very well, at Hillbridge, years ago. The book has made him
+feel dreadfully... he wouldn't read it... he didn't want me to read it.
+I didn't understand at first, but now I can see how horribly disloyal it
+must seem to him. It's so much worse to surprise a friend's secrets than
+a stranger's."
+
+"Oh, Glennard's such a sensitive chap," Flamel said, easily; and Alexa
+almost rebukingly rejoined, "If you'd known her I'm sure you'd feel as
+he does...."
+
+Glennard stood motionless, overcome by the singular infelicity with
+which he had contrived to put Flamel in possession of the two points
+most damaging to his case: the fact that he had been a friend of
+Margaret Aubyn's, and that he had concealed from Alexa his share in the
+publication of the letters. To a man of less than Flamel's astuteness
+it must now be clear to whom the letters were addressed; and the
+possibility once suggested, nothing could be easier than to confirm it
+by discreet research. An impulse of self-accusal drove Glennard to the
+window. Why not anticipate betrayal by telling his wife the truth in
+Flamel's presence? If the man had a drop of decent feeling in him, such
+a course would be the surest means of securing his silence; and above
+all, it would rid Glennard of the necessity of defending himself against
+the perpetual criticism of his wife's belief in him....
+
+The impulse was strong enough to carry him to the window; but there
+a reaction of defiance set in. What had he done, after all, to need
+defence and explanation? Both Dresham and Flamel had, in his hearing,
+declared the publication of the letters to be not only justifiable but
+obligatory; and if the disinterestedness of Flamel's verdict might be
+questioned, Dresham's at least represented the impartial view of the
+man of letters. As to Alexa's words, they were simply the conventional
+utterance of the "nice" woman on a question already decided for her by
+other "nice" women. She had said the proper thing as mechanically as she
+would have put on the appropriate gown or written the correct form of
+dinner-invitation. Glennard had small faith in the abstract judgments
+of the other sex; he knew that half the women who were horrified by
+the publication of Mrs. Aubyn's letters would have betrayed her secrets
+without a scruple.
+
+The sudden lowering of his emotional pitch brought a proportionate
+relief. He told himself that now the worst was over and things would
+fall into perspective again. His wife and Flamel had turned to other
+topics, and coming out on the veranda, he handed the cigars to Flamel,
+saying, cheerfully--and yet he could have sworn they were the last words
+he meant to utter!--"Look here, old man, before you go down to Newport
+you must come out and spend a few days with us--mustn't he, Alexa?"
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+Glennard had, perhaps unconsciously, counted on the continuance of this
+easier mood. He had always taken pride in a certain robustness of fibre
+that enabled him to harden himself against the inevitable, to convert
+his failures into the building materials of success. Though it did not
+even now occur to him that what he called the inevitable had hitherto
+been the alternative he happened to prefer, he was yet obscurely
+aware that his present difficulty was one not to be conjured by any
+affectation of indifference. Some griefs build the soul a spacious
+house--but in this misery of Glennard's he could not stand upright. It
+pressed against him at every turn. He told himself that this was because
+there was no escape from the visible evidences of his act. The "Letters"
+confronted him everywhere. People who had never opened a book discussed
+them with critical reservations; to have read them had become a social
+obligation in circles to which literature never penetrates except in a
+personal guise.
+
+Glennard did himself injustice, it was from the unexpected discovery of
+his own pettiness that he chiefly suffered. Our self-esteem is apt to
+be based on the hypothetical great act we have never had occasion to
+perform; and even the most self-scrutinizing modesty credits itself
+negatively with a high standard of conduct. Glennard had never thought
+himself a hero; but he had been certain that he was incapable of
+baseness. We all like our wrong-doings to have a becoming cut, to be
+made to order, as it were; and Glennard found himself suddenly thrust
+into a garb of dishonor surely meant for a meaner figure.
+
+The immediate result of his first weeks of wretchedness was the resolve
+to go to town for the winter. He knew that such a course was just beyond
+the limit of prudence; but it was easy to allay the fears of Alexa who,
+scrupulously vigilant in the management of the household, preserved
+the American wife's usual aloofness from her husband's business cares.
+Glennard felt that he could not trust himself to a winter's solitude
+with her. He had an unspeakable dread of her learning the truth about
+the letters, yet could not be sure of steeling himself against the
+suicidal impulse of avowal. His very soul was parched for sympathy; he
+thirsted for a voice of pity and comprehension. But would his wife pity?
+Would she understand? Again he found himself brought up abruptly against
+his incredible ignorance of her nature. The fact that he knew well
+enough how she would behave in the ordinary emergencies of life, that
+he could count, in such contingencies, on the kind of high courage and
+directness he had always divined in her, made him the more hopeless of
+her entering into the torturous psychology of an act that he himself
+could no longer explain or understand. It would have been easier had
+she been more complex, more feminine--if he could have counted on
+her imaginative sympathy or her moral obtuseness--but he was sure of
+neither. He was sure of nothing but that, for a time, he must avoid her.
+Glennard could not rid himself of the delusion that by and by his action
+would cease to make its consequences felt. He would not have cared to
+own to himself that he counted on the dulling of his sensibilities: he
+preferred to indulge the vague hypothesis that extraneous circumstances
+would somehow efface the blot upon his conscience. In his worst moments
+of self-abasement he tried to find solace in the thought that Flamel had
+sanctioned his course. Flamel, at the outset, must have guessed to
+whom the letters were addressed; yet neither then nor afterward had he
+hesitated to advise their publication. This thought drew Glennard to
+him in fitful impulses of friendliness, from each of which there was a
+sharper reaction of distrust and aversion. When Flamel was not at the
+house, he missed the support of his tacit connivance; when he was there,
+his presence seemed the assertion of an intolerable claim.
+
+Early in the winter the Glennards took possession of the little house
+that was to cost them almost nothing. The change brought Glennard the
+immediate relief of seeing less of his wife, and of being protected, in
+her presence, by the multiplied preoccupations of town life. Alexa, who
+could never appear hurried, showed the smiling abstraction of a pretty
+woman to whom the social side of married life has not lost its novelty.
+Glennard, with the recklessness of a man fresh from his first financial
+imprudence, encouraged her in such little extravagances as her good
+sense at first resisted. Since they had come to town, he argued, they
+might as well enjoy themselves. He took a sympathetic view of the
+necessity of new gowns, he gave her a set of furs at Christmas, and
+before the New Year they had agreed on the obligation of adding a
+parlour-maid to their small establishment.
+
+Providence the very next day hastened to justify this measure by placing
+on Glennard's breakfast-plate an envelope bearing the name of the
+publishers to whom he had sold Mrs. Aubyn's letters. It happened to be
+the only letter the early post had brought, and he glanced across the
+table at his wife, who had come down before him and had probably
+laid the envelope on his plate. She was not the woman to ask awkward
+questions, but he felt the conjecture of her glance, and he was debating
+whether to affect surprise at the receipt of the letter, or to pass it
+off as a business communication that had strayed to his house, when a
+check fell from the envelope. It was the royalty on the first edition of
+the letters. His first feeling was one of simple satisfaction. The
+money had come with such infernal opportuneness that he could not help
+welcoming it. Before long, too, there would be more; he knew the book
+was still selling far beyond the publisher's previsions. He put the
+check in his pocket and left the room without looking at his wife.
+
+On the way to his office the habitual reaction set in. The money he had
+received was the first tangible reminder that he was living on the
+sale of his self-esteem. The thought of material benefit had been
+overshadowed by his sense of the intrinsic baseness of making the
+letters known; now he saw what an element of sordidness it added to the
+situation and how the fact that he needed the money, and must use it,
+pledged him more irrevocably than ever to the consequences of his act.
+It seemed to him, in that first hour of misery, that he had betrayed his
+friend anew.
+
+When, that afternoon, he reached home earlier than usual, Alexa's
+drawing-room was full of a gayety that overflowed to the stairs. Flamel,
+for a wonder, was not there; but Dresham and young Hartly, grouped about
+the tea-table, were receiving with resonant mirth a narrative delivered
+in the fluttered staccato that made Mrs. Armiger's conversation like the
+ejaculations of a startled aviary.
+
+She paused as Glennard entered, and he had time to notice that his wife,
+who was busied about the tea-tray, had not joined in the laughter of the
+men.
+
+"Oh, go on, go on," young Hartly rapturously groaned; and Mrs. Armiger
+met Glennard's inquiry with the deprecating cry that really she didn't
+see what there was to laugh at. "I'm sure I feel more like crying. I
+don't know what I should have done if Alexa hadn't been home to give me
+a cup of tea. My nerves are in shreds--yes, another, dear, please--" and
+as Glennard looked his perplexity, she went on, after pondering on
+the selection of a second lump of sugar, "Why, I've just come from the
+reading, you know--the reading at the Waldorf."
+
+"I haven't been in town long enough to know anything," said Glennard,
+taking the cup his wife handed him. "Who has been reading what?"
+
+"That lovely girl from the South--Georgie--Georgie what's her name--Mrs.
+Dresham's protegee--unless she's YOURS, Mr. Dresham! Why, the big
+ball-room was PACKED, and all the women were crying like idiots--it was
+the most harrowing thing I ever heard--"
+
+"What DID you hear?" Glennard asked; and his wife interposed: "Won't you
+have another bit of cake, Julia? Or, Stephen, ring for some hot
+toast, please." Her tone betrayed a polite satiety of the topic under
+discussion. Glennard turned to the bell, but Mrs. Armiger pursued him
+with her lovely amazement.
+
+"Why, the 'Aubyn Letters'--didn't you know about it? The girl read them
+so beautifully that it was quite horrible--I should have fainted if
+there'd been a man near enough to carry me out."
+
+Hartly's glee redoubled, and Dresham said, jovially, "How like you women
+to raise a shriek over the book and then do all you can to encourage the
+blatant publicity of the readings!"
+
+Mrs. Armiger met him more than half-way on a torrent of self-accusal.
+"It WAS horrid; it was disgraceful. I told your wife we ought all to
+be ashamed of ourselves for going, and I think Alexa was quite right to
+refuse to take any tickets--even if it was for a charity."
+
+"Oh," her hostess murmured, indifferently, "with me charity begins at
+home. I can't afford emotional luxuries."
+
+"A charity? A charity?" Hartly exulted. "I hadn't seized the full beauty
+of it. Reading poor Margaret Aubyn's love-letters at the Waldorf before
+five hundred people for a charity! WHAT charity, dear Mrs. Armiger?"
+
+"Why, the Home for Friendless Women--"
+
+"It was well chosen," Dresham commented; and Hartly buried his mirth in
+the sofa-cushions.
+
+When they were alone Glennard, still holding his untouched cup of tea,
+turned to his wife, who sat silently behind the kettle. "Who asked you
+to take a ticket for that reading?"
+
+"I don't know, really--Kate Dresham, I fancy. It was she who got it up."
+
+"It's just the sort of damnable vulgarity she's capable of! It's
+loathsome--it's monstrous--"
+
+His wife, without looking up, answered gravely, "I thought so too. It
+was for that reason I didn't go. But you must remember that very few
+people feel about Mrs. Aubyn as you do--"
+
+Glennard managed to set down his cup with a steady hand, but the room
+swung round with him and he dropped into the nearest chair. "As I do?"
+he repeated.
+
+"I mean that very few people knew her when she lived in New York. To
+most of the women who went to the reading she was a mere name, too
+remote to have any personality. With me, of course, it was different--"
+
+Glennard gave her a startled look. "Different? Why different?"
+
+"Since you were her friend--"
+
+"Her friend!" He stood up impatiently. "You speak as if she had had only
+one--the most famous woman of her day!" He moved vaguely about the room,
+bending down to look at some books on the table. "I hope," he added,
+"you didn't give that as a reason, by the way?"
+
+"A reason?"
+
+"For not going. A woman who gives reasons for getting out of social
+obligations is sure to make herself unpopular or ridiculous.
+
+The words were uncalculated; but in an instant he saw that they had
+strangely bridged the distance between his wife and himself. He felt her
+close on him, like a panting foe; and her answer was a flash that showed
+the hand on the trigger.
+
+"I seem," she said from the threshold, "to have done both in giving my
+reason to you."
+
+
+The fact that they were dining out that evening made it easy for him to
+avoid Alexa till she came downstairs in her opera-cloak. Mrs. Touchett,
+who was going to the same dinner, had offered to call for her, and
+Glennard, refusing a precarious seat between the ladies' draperies,
+followed on foot. The evening was interminable. The reading at the
+Waldorf, at which all the women had been present, had revived the
+discussion of the "Aubyn Letters" and Glennard, hearing his wife
+questioned as to her absence, felt himself miserably wishing that she
+had gone, rather than that her staying away should have been remarked.
+He was rapidly losing all sense of proportion where the "Letters" were
+concerned. He could no longer hear them mentioned without suspecting
+a purpose in the allusion; he even yielded himself for a moment to
+the extravagance of imagining that Mrs. Dresham, whom he disliked, had
+organized the reading in the hope of making him betray himself--for he
+was already sure that Dresham had divined his share in the transaction.
+
+The attempt to keep a smooth surface on this inner tumult was as endless
+and unavailing as efforts made in a nightmare. He lost all sense of what
+he was saying to his neighbors and once when he looked up his wife's
+glance struck him cold.
+
+She sat nearly opposite him, at Flamel's side, and it appeared to
+Glennard that they had built about themselves one of those airy barriers
+of talk behind which two people can say what they please. While the
+reading was discussed they were silent. Their silence seemed to Glennard
+almost cynical--it stripped the last disguise from their complicity. A
+throb of anger rose in him, but suddenly it fell, and he felt, with
+a curious sense of relief, that at bottom he no longer cared whether
+Flamel had told his wife or not. The assumption that Flamel knew about
+the letters had become a fact to Glennard; and it now seemed to him
+better that Alexa should know too.
+
+He was frightened at first by the discovery of his own indifference. The
+last barriers of his will seemed to be breaking down before a flood of
+moral lassitude. How could he continue to play his part, to keep his
+front to the enemy, with this poison of indifference stealing through
+his veins? He tried to brace himself with the remembrance of his wife's
+scorn. He had not forgotten the note on which their conversation had
+closed. If he had ever wondered how she would receive the truth
+he wondered no longer--she would despise him. But this lent a new
+insidiousness to his temptation, since her contempt would be a refuge
+from his own. He said to himself that, since he no longer cared for
+the consequences, he could at least acquit himself of speaking in
+self-defence. What he wanted now was not immunity but castigation: his
+wife's indignation might still reconcile him to himself. Therein lay
+his one hope of regeneration; her scorn was the moral antiseptic that he
+needed, her comprehension the one balm that could heal him....
+
+When they left the dinner he was so afraid of speaking that he let her
+drive home alone, and went to the club with Flamel.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+HE rose next morning with the resolve to know what Alexa thought of him.
+It was not anchoring in a haven, but lying to in a storm--he felt the
+need of a temporary lull in the turmoil of his sensations.
+
+He came home late, for they were dining alone and he knew that
+they would have the evening together. When he followed her to the
+drawing-room after dinner he thought himself on the point of speaking;
+but as she handed him his coffee he said, involuntarily: "I shall have
+to carry this off to the study, I've got a lot of work to-night."
+
+Alone in the study he cursed his cowardice. What was it that had
+withheld him? A certain bright unapproachableness seemed to keep him at
+arm's length. She was not the kind of woman whose compassion could be
+circumvented; there was no chance of slipping past the outposts; he
+would never take her by surprise. Well--why not face her, then? What he
+shrank from could be no worse than what he was enduring. He had pushed
+back his chair and turned to go upstairs when a new expedient presented
+itself. What if, instead of telling her, he were to let her find out for
+herself and watch the effect of the discovery before speaking? In this
+way he made over to chance the burden of the revelation.
+
+The idea had been suggested by the sight of the formula enclosing
+the publisher's check. He had deposited the money, but the notice
+accompanying it dropped from his note-case as he cleared his table for
+work. It was the formula usual in such cases and revealed clearly enough
+that he was the recipient of a royalty on Margaret Aubyn's letters. It
+would be impossible for Alexa to read it without understanding at once
+that the letters had been written to him and that he had sold them....
+
+He sat downstairs till he heard her ring for the parlor-maid to put out
+the lights; then he went up to the drawing-room with a bundle of papers
+in his hand. Alexa was just rising from her seat and the lamplight fell
+on the deep roll of hair that overhung her brow like the eaves of a
+temple. Her face had often the high secluded look of a shrine; and it
+was this touch of awe in her beauty that now made him feel himself on
+the brink of sacrilege.
+
+Lest the feeling should dominate him, he spoke at once. "I've brought
+you a piece of work--a lot of old bills and things that I want you to
+sort for me. Some are not worth keeping--but you'll be able to judge of
+that. There may be a letter or two among them--nothing of much account,
+but I don't like to throw away the whole lot without having them looked
+over and I haven't time to do it myself."
+
+He held out the papers and she took them with a smile that seemed to
+recognize in the service he asked the tacit intention of making amends
+for the incident of the previous day.
+
+"Are you sure I shall know which to keep?"
+
+"Oh, quite sure," he answered, easily--"and besides, none are of much
+importance."
+
+The next morning he invented an excuse for leaving the house without
+seeing her, and when he returned, just before dinner, he found a
+visitor's hat and stick in the hall. The visitor was Flamel, who was in
+the act of taking leave.
+
+He had risen, but Alexa remained seated; and their attitude gave the
+impression of a colloquy that had prolonged itself beyond the limits of
+speech. Both turned a surprised eye on Glennard and he had the sense of
+walking into a room grown suddenly empty, as though their thoughts were
+conspirators dispersed by his approach. He felt the clutch of his old
+fear. What if his wife had already sorted the papers and had told Flamel
+of her discovery? Well, it was no news to Flamel that Glennard was in
+receipt of a royalty on the "Aubyn Letters."...
+
+A sudden resolve to know the worst made him lift his eyes to his wife
+as the door closed on Flamel. But Alexa had risen also, and bending over
+her writing-table, with her back to Glennard, was beginning to speak
+precipitately.
+
+"I'm dining out to-night--you don't mind my deserting you? Julia Armiger
+sent me word just now that she had an extra ticket for the last Ambrose
+concert. She told me to say how sorry she was that she hadn't two--but I
+knew YOU wouldn't be sorry!" She ended with a laugh that had the effect
+of being a strayed echo of Mrs. Armiger's; and before Glennard could
+speak she had added, with her hand on the door, "Mr. Flamel stayed so
+late that I've hardly time to dress. The concert begins ridiculously
+early, and Julia dines at half-past seven--"
+
+Glennard stood alone in the empty room that seemed somehow full of
+an ironical consciousness of what was happening. "She hates me," he
+murmured. "She hates me...."
+
+
+The next day was Sunday, and Glennard purposely lingered late in
+his room. When he came downstairs his wife was already seated at the
+breakfast-table. She lifted her usual smile to his entrance and they
+took shelter in the nearest topic, like wayfarers overtaken by a storm.
+While he listened to her account of the concert he began to think that,
+after all, she had not yet sorted the papers, and that her agitation of
+the previous day must be ascribed to another cause, in which perhaps he
+had but an indirect concern. He wondered it had never before occurred to
+him that Flamel was the kind of man who might very well please a woman
+at his own expense, without need of fortuitous assistance. If this
+possibility cleared the outlook it did not brighten it. Glennard merely
+felt himself left alone with his baseness.
+
+Alexa left the breakfast-table before him and when he went up to the
+drawing-room he found her dressed to go out.
+
+"Aren't you a little early for church?" he asked.
+
+She replied that, on the way there, she meant to stop a moment at
+her mother's; and while she drew on her gloves, he fumbled among the
+knick-knacks on the mantel-piece for a match to light his cigarette.
+
+"Well, good-by," she said, turning to go; and from the threshold she
+added: "By the way, I've sorted the papers you gave me. Those that
+I thought you would like to keep are on your study-table." She went
+downstairs and he heard the door close behind her.
+
+She had sorted the papers--she knew, then--she MUST know--and she had
+made no sign!
+
+Glennard, he hardly knew how, found himself once more in the study. On
+the table lay the packet he had given her. It was much smaller--she had
+evidently gone over the papers with care, destroying the greater number.
+He loosened the elastic band and spread the remaining envelopes on his
+desk. The publisher's notice was among them.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+His wife knew and she made no sign. Glennard found himself in the case
+of the seafarer who, closing his eyes at nightfall on a scene he thinks
+to put leagues behind him before day, wakes to a port-hole framing the
+same patch of shore. From the kind of exaltation to which his resolve
+had lifted him he dropped to an unreasoning apathy. His impulse of
+confession had acted as a drug to self-reproach. He had tried to shift
+a portion of his burden to his wife's shoulders and now that she had
+tacitly refused to carry it, he felt the load too heavy to be taken up
+again.
+
+A fortunate interval of hard work brought respite from this phase of
+sterile misery. He went West to argue an important case, won it, and
+came back to fresh preoccupations. His own affairs were thriving enough
+to engross him in the pauses of his professional work, and for over
+two months he had little time to look himself in the face. Not
+unnaturally--for he was as yet unskilled in the subtleties of
+introspection--he mistook his temporary insensibility for a gradual
+revival of moral health.
+
+He told himself that he was recovering his sense of proportion, getting
+to see things in their true light; and if he now thought of his rash
+appeal to his wife's sympathy it was as an act of folly from the
+consequences of which he had been saved by the providence that watches
+over madmen. He had little leisure to observe Alexa; but he concluded
+that the common-sense momentarily denied him had counselled her
+uncritical acceptance of the inevitable. If such a quality was a
+poor substitute for the passionate justness that had once seemed to
+characterize her, he accepted the alternative as a part of that general
+lowering of the key that seems needful to the maintenance of the
+matrimonial duet. What woman ever retained her abstract sense of justice
+where another woman was concerned? Possibly the thought that he had
+profited by Mrs. Aubyn's tenderness was not wholly disagreeable to his
+wife.
+
+When the pressure of work began to lessen, and he found himself, in the
+lengthening afternoons, able to reach home somewhat earlier, he noticed
+that the little drawing-room was always full and that he and his wife
+seldom had an evening alone together. When he was tired, as often
+happened, she went out alone; the idea of giving up an engagement to
+remain with him seemed not to occur to her. She had shown, as a girl,
+little fondness for society, nor had she seemed to regret it during the
+year they had spent in the country. He reflected, however, that he was
+sharing the common lot of husbands, who proverbially mistake the early
+ardors of housekeeping for a sign of settled domesticity. Alexa, at any
+rate, was refuting his theory as inconsiderately as a seedling defeats
+the gardener's expectations. An undefinable change had come over her. In
+one sense it was a happy one, since she had grown, if not handsomer,
+at least more vivid and expressive; her beauty had become more
+communicable: it was as though she had learned the conscious exercise of
+intuitive attributes and now used her effects with the discrimination of
+an artist skilled in values. To a dispassionate critic (as Glennard now
+rated himself) the art may at times have been a little too obvious. Her
+attempts at lightness lacked spontaneity, and she sometimes rasped
+him by laughing like Julia Armiger; but he had enough imagination
+to perceive that, in respect of the wife's social arts, a husband
+necessarily sees the wrong side of the tapestry.
+
+In this ironical estimate of their relation Glennard found himself
+strangely relieved of all concern as to his wife's feelings for Flamel.
+From an Olympian pinnacle of indifference he calmly surveyed their
+inoffensive antics. It was surprising how his cheapening of his wife put
+him at ease with himself. Far as he and she were from each other they
+yet had, in a sense, the tacit nearness of complicity. Yes, they were
+accomplices; he could no more be jealous of her than she could despise
+him. The jealousy that would once have seemed a blur on her whiteness
+now appeared like a tribute to ideals in which he no longer believed....
+
+
+Glennard was little given to exploring the outskirts of literature. He
+always skipped the "literary notices" in the papers and he had small
+leisure for the intermittent pleasures of the periodical. He had
+therefore no notion of the prolonged reverberations which the "Aubyn
+Letters" had awakened in the precincts of criticism. When the book
+ceased to be talked about he supposed it had ceased to be read; and this
+apparent subsidence of the agitation about it brought the reassuring
+sense that he had exaggerated its vitality. The conviction, if it did
+not ease his conscience, at least offered him the relative relief of
+obscurity: he felt like an offender taken down from the pillory and
+thrust into the soothing darkness of a cell.
+
+But one evening, when Alexa had left him to go to a dance, he chanced to
+turn over the magazines on her table, and the copy of the Horoscope, to
+which he settled down with his cigar, confronted him, on its first
+page, with a portrait of Margaret Aubyn. It was a reproduction of the
+photograph that had stood so long on his desk. The desiccating air of
+memory had turned her into the mere abstraction of a woman, and this
+unexpected evocation seemed to bring her nearer than she had ever been
+in life. Was it because he understood her better? He looked long into
+her eyes; little personal traits reached out to him like caresses--the
+tired droop of her lids, her quick way of leaning forward as she spoke,
+the movements of her long expressive hands. All that was feminine
+in her, the quality he had always missed, stole toward him from her
+unreproachful gaze; and now that it was too late life had developed
+in him the subtler perceptions which could detect it in even this poor
+semblance of herself. For a moment he found consolation in the thought
+that, at any cost, they had thus been brought together; then a flood of
+shame rushed over him. Face to face with her, he felt himself laid bare
+to the inmost fold of consciousness. The shame was deep, but it was a
+renovating anguish; he was like a man whom intolerable pain has roused
+from the creeping lethargy of death....
+
+He rose next morning to as fresh a sense of life as though his hour of
+mute communion with Margaret Aubyn had been a more exquisite renewal
+of their earlier meetings. His waking thought was that he must see her
+again; and as consciousness affirmed itself he felt an intense fear of
+losing the sense of her nearness. But she was still close to him; her
+presence remained the sole reality in a world of shadows. All through
+his working hours he was re-living with incredible minuteness every
+incident of their obliterated past; as a man who has mastered the spirit
+of a foreign tongue turns with renewed wonder to the pages his youth has
+plodded over. In this lucidity of retrospection the most trivial detail
+had its significance, and the rapture of recovery was embittered to
+Glennard by the perception of all that he had missed. He had been
+pitiably, grotesquely stupid; and there was irony in the thought that,
+but for the crisis through which he was passing, he might have lived on
+in complacent ignorance of his loss. It was as though she had bought him
+with her blood....
+
+That evening he and Alexa dined alone. After dinner he followed her to
+the drawing-room. He no longer felt the need of avoiding her; he was
+hardly conscious of her presence. After a few words they lapsed into
+silence and he sat smoking with his eyes on the fire. It was not that he
+was unwilling to talk to her; he felt a curious desire to be as kind
+as possible; but he was always forgetting that she was there. Her full
+bright presence, through which the currents of life flowed so warmly,
+had grown as tenuous as a shadow, and he saw so far beyond her--
+
+Presently she rose and began to move about the room. She seemed to be
+looking for something and he roused himself to ask what she wanted.
+
+"Only the last number of the Horoscope. I thought I'd left it on this
+table." He said nothing, and she went on: "You haven't seen it?"
+
+"No," he returned coldly. The magazine was locked in his desk.
+
+His wife had moved to the mantel-piece. She stood facing him and as he
+looked up he met her tentative gaze. "I was reading an article in it--a
+review of Mrs. Aubyn's letters," she added, slowly, with her deep,
+deliberate blush.
+
+Glennard stooped to toss his cigar into the fire. He felt a savage wish
+that she would not speak the other woman's name; nothing else seemed to
+matter. "You seem to do a lot of reading," he said.
+
+She still earnestly confronted him. "I was keeping this for you--I
+thought it might interest you," she said, with an air of gentle
+insistence.
+
+He stood up and turned away. He was sure she knew that he had taken the
+review and he felt that he was beginning to hate her again.
+
+"I haven't time for such things," he said, indifferently. As he moved to
+the door he heard her take a precipitate step forward; then she paused
+and sank without speaking into the chair from which he had risen.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+As Glennard, in the raw February sunlight, mounted the road to the
+cemetery, he felt the beatitude that comes with an abrupt cessation of
+physical pain. He had reached the point where self-analysis ceases;
+the impulse that moved him was purely intuitive. He did not even seek
+a reason for it, beyond the obvious one that his desire to stand by
+Margaret Aubyn's grave was prompted by no attempt at a sentimental
+reparation, but rather by the vague need to affirm in some way the
+reality of the tie between them.
+
+The ironical promiscuity of death had brought Mrs. Aubyn back to
+share the narrow hospitality of her husband's last lodging; but though
+Glennard knew she had been buried near New York he had never visited
+her grave. He was oppressed, as he now threaded the long avenues, by a
+chilling vision of her return. There was no family to follow her hearse;
+she had died alone, as she had lived; and the "distinguished mourners"
+who had formed the escort of the famous writer knew nothing of the woman
+they were committing to the grave. Glennard could not even remember at
+what season she had been buried; but his mood indulged the fancy that it
+must have been on some such day of harsh sunlight, the incisive February
+brightness that gives perspicuity without warmth. The white avenues
+stretched before him interminably, lined with stereotyped emblems of
+affliction, as though all the platitudes ever uttered had been turned to
+marble and set up over the unresisting dead. Here and there, no doubt, a
+frigid urn or an insipid angel imprisoned some fine-fibred grief, as the
+most hackneyed words may become the vehicle of rare meanings; but for
+the most part the endless alignment of monuments seemed to embody those
+easy generalizations about death that do not disturb the repose of the
+living. Glennard's eye, as he followed the way indicated to him, had
+instinctively sought some low mound with a quiet headstone. He had
+forgotten that the dead seldom plan their own houses, and with a pang he
+discovered the name he sought on the cyclopean base of a granite shaft
+rearing its aggressive height at the angle of two avenues.
+
+"How she would have hated it!" he murmured.
+
+A bench stood near and he seated himself. The monument rose before him
+like some pretentious uninhabited dwelling; he could not believe that
+Margaret Aubyn lay there. It was a Sunday morning and black figures
+moved among the paths, placing flowers on the frost-bound hillocks.
+Glennard noticed that the neighboring graves had been thus newly
+dressed; and he fancied a blind stir of expectancy through the sod, as
+though the bare mounds spread a parched surface to that commemorative
+rain. He rose presently and walked back to the entrance of the cemetery.
+Several greenhouses stood near the gates, and turning in at the first he
+asked for some flowers.
+
+"Anything in the emblematic line?" asked the anaemic man behind the
+dripping counter.
+
+Glennard shook his head.
+
+"Just cut flowers? This way, then." The florist unlocked a glass door
+and led him down a moist green aisle. The hot air was choked with the
+scent of white azaleas, white lilies, white lilacs; all the flowers were
+white; they were like a prolongation, a mystical efflorescence, of the
+long rows of marble tombstones, and their perfume seemed to cover an
+odor of decay. The rich atmosphere made Glennard dizzy. As he leaned
+in the doorpost, waiting for the flowers, he had a penetrating sense of
+Margaret Aubyn's nearness--not the imponderable presence of his inner
+vision, but a life that beat warm in his arms....
+
+The sharp air caught him as he stepped out into it again. He walked back
+and scattered the flowers over the grave. The edges of the white petals
+shrivelled like burnt paper in the cold; and as he watched them the
+illusion of her nearness faded, shrank back frozen.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+The motive of his visit to the cemetery remained undefined save as a
+final effort of escape from his wife's inexpressive acceptance of his
+shame. It seemed to him that as long as he could keep himself alive to
+that shame he would not wholly have succumbed to its consequences. His
+chief fear was that he should become the creature of his act. His wife's
+indifference degraded him; it seemed to put him on a level with his
+dishonor. Margaret Aubyn would have abhorred the deed in proportion to
+her pity for the man. The sense of her potential pity drew him back to
+her. The one woman knew but did not understand; the other, it sometimes
+seemed, understood without knowing.
+
+In its last disguise of retrospective remorse, his self-pity affected a
+desire for solitude and meditation. He lost himself in morbid musings,
+in futile visions of what life with Margaret Aubyn might have been.
+There were moments when, in the strange dislocation of his view, the
+wrong he had done her seemed a tie between them.
+
+To indulge these emotions he fell into the habit, on Sunday afternoons,
+of solitary walks prolonged till after dusk. The days were lengthening,
+there was a touch of spring in the air, and his wanderings now usually
+led him to the Park and its outlying regions.
+
+One Sunday, tired of aimless locomotion, he took a cab at the Park gates
+and let it carry him out to the Riverside Drive. It was a gray afternoon
+streaked with east wind. Glennard's cab advanced slowly, and as he
+leaned back, gazing with absent intentness at the deserted paths that
+wound under bare boughs between grass banks of premature vividness, his
+attention was arrested by two figures walking ahead of him. This couple,
+who had the path to themselves, moved at an uneven pace, as though
+adapting their gait to a conversation marked by meditative intervals.
+Now and then they paused, and in one of these pauses the lady, turning
+toward her companion, showed Glennard the outline of his wife's profile.
+The man was Flamel.
+
+The blood rushed to Glennard's forehead. He sat up with a jerk and
+pushed back the lid in the roof of the hansom; but when the cabman bent
+down he dropped into his seat without speaking. Then, becoming
+conscious of the prolonged interrogation of the lifted lid, he called
+out--"Turn--drive back--anywhere--I'm in a hurry--"
+
+As the cab swung round he caught a last glimpse of the two figures. They
+had not moved; Alexa, with bent head, stood listening.
+
+"My God, my God--" he groaned.
+
+It was hideous--it was abominable--he could not understand it. The woman
+was nothing to him--less than nothing--yet the blood hummed in his ears
+and hung a cloud before him. He knew it was only the stirring of the
+primal instinct, that it had no more to do with his reasoning self
+than any reflex impulse of the body; but that merely lowered anguish
+to disgust. Yes, it was disgust he felt--almost a physical nausea. The
+poisonous fumes of life were in his lungs. He was sick, unutterably
+sick....
+
+He drove home and went to his room. They were giving a little dinner
+that night, and when he came down the guests were arriving. He looked at
+his wife: her beauty was extraordinary, but it seemed to him the beauty
+of a smooth sea along an unlit coast. She frightened him.
+
+He sat late that night in his study. He heard the parlor-maid lock the
+front door; then his wife went upstairs and the lights were put out.
+His brain was like some great empty hall with an echo in it; one thought
+reverberated endlessly.... At length he drew his chair to the table and
+began to write. He addressed an envelope and then slowly re-read what he
+had written.
+
+
+"MY DEAR FLAMEL,"
+
+"Many apologies for not sending you sooner the enclosed check, which
+represents the customary percentage on the sale of the Letters."
+
+"Trusting you will excuse the oversight,
+
+"Yours truly,
+
+"STEPHEN GLENNARD."
+
+
+He let himself out of the darkened house and dropped the letter in the
+post-box at the corner.
+
+
+The next afternoon he was detained late at his office, and as he was
+preparing to leave he heard someone asking for him in the outer room. He
+seated himself again and Flamel was shown in.
+
+The two men, as Glennard pushed aside an obstructive chair, had a
+moment to measure each other; then Flamel advanced, and drawing out his
+note-case, laid a slip of paper on the desk.
+
+"My dear fellow, what on earth does this mean?" Glennard recognized his
+check.
+
+"That I was remiss, simply. It ought to have gone to you before."
+
+Flamel's tone had been that of unaffected surprise, but at this his
+accent changed and he asked, quickly: "On what ground?"
+
+Glennard had moved away from the desk and stood leaning against the
+calf-backed volumes of the bookcase. "On the ground that you sold Mrs.
+Aubyn's letters for me, and that I find the intermediary in such cases
+is entitled to a percentage on the sale."
+
+Flamel paused before answering. "You find, you say. It's a recent
+discovery?"
+
+"Obviously, from my not sending the check sooner. You see I'm new to the
+business."
+
+"And since when have you discovered that there was any question of
+business, as far as I was concerned?"
+
+Glennard flushed and his voice rose slightly. "Are you reproaching me
+for not having remembered it sooner?"
+
+Flamel, who had spoken in the rapid repressed tone of a man on the
+verge of anger, stared a moment at this and then, in his natural voice,
+rejoined, good-humoredly, "Upon my soul, I don't understand you!"
+
+The change of key seemed to disconcert Glennard. "It's simple enough--"
+he muttered.
+
+"Simple enough--your offering me money in return for a friendly service?
+I don't know what your other friends expect!"
+
+"Some of my friends wouldn't have undertaken the job. Those who would
+have done so would probably have expected to be paid."
+
+He lifted his eyes to Flamel and the two men looked at each other.
+Flamel had turned white and his lips stirred, but he held his temperate
+note. "If you mean to imply that the job was not a nice one, you lay
+yourself open to the retort that you proposed it. But for my part
+I've never seen, I never shall see, any reason for not publishing the
+letters."
+
+"That's just it!"
+
+"What--?"
+
+"The certainty of your not seeing was what made me go to you. When
+a man's got stolen goods to pawn he doesn't take them to the
+police-station."
+
+"Stolen?" Flamel echoed. "The letters were stolen?"
+
+Glennard burst into a coarse laugh. "How much longer do you expect me to
+keep up that pretence about the letters? You knew well enough they were
+written to me."
+
+Flamel looked at him in silence. "Were they?" he said at length. "I
+didn't know it."
+
+"And didn't suspect it, I suppose," Glennard sneered.
+
+The other was again silent; then he said, "I may remind you that,
+supposing I had felt any curiosity about the matter, I had no way of
+finding out that the letters were written to you. You never showed me
+the originals."
+
+"What does that prove? There were fifty ways of finding out. It's the
+kind of thing one can easily do."
+
+Flamel glanced at him with contempt. "Our ideas probably differ as to
+what a man can easily do. It would not have been easy for me."
+
+Glennard's anger vented itself in the words uppermost in his thought.
+"It may, then, interest you to hear that my wife DOES know about the
+letters--has known for some months...."
+
+"Ah," said the other, slowly. Glennard saw that, in his blind clutch at
+a weapon, he had seized the one most apt to wound. Flamel's muscles were
+under control, but his face showed the undefinable change produced
+by the slow infiltration of poison. Every implication that the words
+contained had reached its mark; but Glennard felt that their obvious
+intention was lost in the anguish of what they suggested. He was sure
+now that Flamel would never have betrayed him; but the inference only
+made a wider outlet for his anger. He paused breathlessly for Flamel to
+speak.
+
+"If she knows, it's not through me." It was what Glennard had waited
+for.
+
+"Through you, by God? Who said it was through you? Do you suppose I
+leave it to you, or to anybody else, for that matter, to keep my wife
+informed of my actions? I didn't suppose even such egregious conceit as
+yours could delude a man to that degree!" Struggling for a foothold in
+the small landslide of his dignity, he added, in a steadier tone, "My
+wife learned the facts from me."
+
+Flamel received this in silence. The other's outbreak seemed to
+have reinforced his self-control, and when he spoke it was with a
+deliberation implying that his course was chosen. "In that case I
+understand still less--"
+
+"Still less--?"
+
+"The meaning of this." He pointed to the check. "When you began to speak
+I supposed you had meant it as a bribe; now I can only infer it was
+intended as a random insult. In either case, here's my answer."
+
+He tore the slip of paper in two and tossed the fragments across the
+desk to Glennard. Then he turned and walked out of the office.
+
+Glennard dropped his head on his hands. If he had hoped to restore his
+self-respect by the simple expedient of assailing Flamel's, the result
+had not justified his expectation. The blow he had struck had blunted
+the edge of his anger, and the unforeseen extent of the hurt inflicted
+did not alter the fact that his weapon had broken in his hands. He
+saw now that his rage against Flamel was only the last projection of a
+passionate self-disgust. This consciousness did not dull his dislike of
+the man; it simply made reprisals ineffectual. Flamel's unwillingness to
+quarrel with him was the last stage of his abasement.
+
+In the light of this final humiliation his assumption of his wife's
+indifference struck him as hardly so fatuous as the sentimental
+resuscitation of his past. He had been living in a factitious world
+wherein his emotions were the sycophants of his vanity, and it was with
+instinctive relief that he felt its ruins crash about his head.
+
+It was nearly dark when he left his office, and he walked slowly
+homeward in the complete mental abeyance that follows on such a crisis.
+He was not aware that he was thinking of his wife; yet when he reached
+his own door he found that, in the involuntary readjustment of his
+vision, she had once more become the central point of consciousness.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+It had never before occurred to him that she might, after all, have
+missed the purport of the document he had put in her way. What if, in
+her hurried inspection of the papers, she had passed it over as related
+to the private business of some client? What, for instance, was to
+prevent her concluding that Glennard was the counsel of the unknown
+person who had sold the "Aubyn Letters." The subject was one not likely
+to fix her attention--she was not a curious woman.
+
+Glennard at this point laid down his fork and glanced at her between the
+candle-shades. The alternative explanation of her indifference was not
+slow in presenting itself. Her head had the same listening droop as
+when he had caught sight of her the day before in Flamel's company; the
+attitude revived the vividness of his impression. It was simple enough,
+after all. She had ceased to care for him because she cared for someone
+else.
+
+As he followed her upstairs he felt a sudden stirring of his dormant
+anger. His sentiments had lost all their factitious complexity. He had
+already acquitted her of any connivance in his baseness, and he felt
+only that he loved her and that she had escaped him. This was now,
+strangely enough, his dominating thought: the consciousness that he and
+she had passed through the fusion of love and had emerged from it as
+incommunicably apart as though the transmutation had never taken place.
+Every other passion, he mused, left some mark upon the nature; but love
+passed like the flight of a ship across the waters.
+
+She sank into her usual seat near the lamp, and he leaned against the
+chimney, moving about with an inattentive hand the knick-knacks on the
+mantel.
+
+Suddenly he caught sight of her reflection in the mirror. She was
+looking at him. He turned and their eyes met.
+
+He moved across the room and stood before her.
+
+"There's something that I want to say to you," he began in a low tone.
+
+She held his gaze, but her color deepened. He noticed again, with a
+jealous pang, how her beauty had gained in warmth and meaning. It was
+as though a transparent cup had been filled with wine. He looked at her
+ironically.
+
+"I've never prevented your seeing your friends here," he broke out. "Why
+do you meet Flamel in out-of-the-way places? Nothing makes a woman so
+cheap--"
+
+She rose abruptly and they faced each other a few feet apart.
+
+"What do you mean?" she asked.
+
+"I saw you with him last Sunday on the Riverside Drive," he went on, the
+utterance of the charge reviving his anger.
+
+"Ah," she murmured. She sank into her chair again and began to play with
+a paper-knife that lay on the table at her elbow.
+
+Her silence exasperated him.
+
+"Well?" he burst out. "Is that all you have to say?"
+
+"Do you wish me to explain?" she asked, proudly.
+
+"Do you imply I haven't the right to?"
+
+"I imply nothing. I will tell you whatever you wish to know. I went for
+a walk with Mr. Flamel because he asked me to."
+
+"I didn't suppose you went uninvited. But there are certain things a
+sensible woman doesn't do. She doesn't slink about in out-of-the-way
+streets with men. Why couldn't you have seen him here?"
+
+She hesitated. "Because he wanted to see me alone."
+
+"Did he, indeed? And may I ask if you gratify all his wishes with equal
+alacrity?"
+
+"I don't know that he has any others where I am concerned." She
+paused again and then continued, in a lower voice that somehow had an
+under-note of warning. "He wished to bid me good-by. He's going away."
+
+Glennard turned on her a startled glance. "Going away?"
+
+"He's going to Europe to-morrow. He goes for a long time. I supposed you
+knew."
+
+The last phrase revived his irritation. "You forget that I depend on you
+for my information about Flamel. He's your friend and not mine. In fact,
+I've sometimes wondered at your going out of your way to be so civil to
+him when you must see plainly enough that I don't like him."
+
+Her answer to this was not immediate. She seemed to be choosing her
+words with care, not so much for her own sake as for his, and his
+exasperation was increased by the suspicion that she was trying to spare
+him.
+
+"He was your friend before he was mine. I never knew him till I was
+married. It was you who brought him to the house and who seemed to wish
+me to like him."
+
+Glennard gave a short laugh. The defence was feebler than he had
+expected: she was certainly not a clever woman.
+
+"Your deference to my wishes is really beautiful; but it's not the first
+time in history that a man has made a mistake in introducing his
+friends to his wife. You must, at any rate, have seen since then that
+my enthusiasm had cooled; but so, perhaps, has your eagerness to oblige
+me."
+
+She met this with a silence that seemed to rob the taunt of half its
+efficacy.
+
+"Is that what you imply?" he pressed her.
+
+"No," she answered with sudden directness. "I noticed some time ago that
+you seemed to dislike him, but since then--"
+
+"Well--since then?"
+
+"I've imagined that you had reasons for still wishing me to be civil to
+him, as you call it."
+
+"Ah," said Glennard, with an effort at lightness; but his irony dropped,
+for something in her voice made him feel that he and she stood at last
+in that naked desert of apprehension where meaning skulks vainly behind
+speech.
+
+"And why did you imagine this?" The blood mounted to his forehead.
+"Because he told you that I was under obligations to him?"
+
+She turned pale. "Under obligations?"
+
+"Oh, don't let's beat about the bush. Didn't he tell you it was I who
+published Mrs. Aubyn's letters? Answer me that."
+
+"No," she said; and after a moment which seemed given to the weighing of
+alternatives, she added: "No one told me."
+
+"You didn't know then?"
+
+She seemed to speak with an effort. "Not until--not until--"
+
+"Till I gave you those papers to sort?"
+
+Her head sank.
+
+"You understood then?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+He looked at her immovable face. "Had you suspected--before?" was slowly
+wrung from him.
+
+"At times--yes--" Her voice dropped to a whisper.
+
+"Why? From anything that was said--?"
+
+There was a shade of pity in her glance. "No one said anything--no one
+told me anything." She looked away from him. "It was your manner--"
+
+"My manner?"
+
+"Whenever the book was mentioned. Things you said--once or twice--your
+irritation--I can't explain--"
+
+Glennard, unconsciously, had moved nearer. He breathed like a man who
+has been running. "You knew, then, you knew"--he stammered. The avowal
+of her love for Flamel would have hurt him less, would have rendered
+her less remote. "You knew--you knew--" he repeated; and suddenly his
+anguish gathered voice. "My God!" he cried, "you suspected it first, you
+say--and then you knew it--this damnable, this accursed thing; you knew
+it months ago--it's months since I put that paper in your way--and yet
+you've done nothing, you've said nothing, you've made no sign, you've
+lived alongside of me as if it had made no difference--no difference in
+either of our lives. What are you made of, I wonder? Don't you see the
+hideous ignominy of it? Don't you see how you've shared in my disgrace?
+Or haven't you any sense of shame?"
+
+He preserved sufficient lucidity, as the words poured from him, to see
+how fatally they invited her derision; but something told him they had
+both passed beyond the phase of obvious retaliations, and that if any
+chord in her responded it would not be that of scorn.
+
+He was right. She rose slowly and moved toward him.
+
+"Haven't you had enough--without that?" she said, in a strange voice of
+pity.
+
+He stared at her. "Enough--?"
+
+"Of misery...."
+
+An iron band seemed loosened from his temples. "You saw then...?" he
+whispered.
+
+"Oh, God----oh, God----" she sobbed. She dropped beside him and hid
+her anguish against his knees. They clung thus in silence, a long time,
+driven together down the same fierce blast of shame.
+
+When at length she lifted her face he averted his. Her scorn would have
+hurt him less than the tears on his hands.
+
+She spoke languidly, like a child emerging from a passion of weeping.
+"It was for the money--?"
+
+His lips shaped an assent.
+
+"That was the inheritance--that we married on?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+She drew back and rose to her feet. He sat watching her as she wandered
+away from him.
+
+"You hate me," broke from him.
+
+She made no answer.
+
+"Say you hate me!" he persisted.
+
+"That would have been so simple," she answered with a strange smile. She
+dropped into a chair near the writing-table and rested a bowed forehead
+on her hand.
+
+"Was it much--?" she began at length.
+
+"Much--?" he returned, vaguely.
+
+"The money."
+
+"The money?" That part of it seemed to count so little that for a moment
+he did not follow her thought.
+
+"It must be paid back," she insisted. "Can you do it?"
+
+"Oh, yes," he returned, listlessly. "I can do it."
+
+"I would make any sacrifice for that!" she urged.
+
+He nodded. "Of course." He sat staring at her in dry-eyed self-contempt.
+"Do you count on its making much difference?"
+
+"Much difference?"
+
+"In the way I feel--or you feel about me?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"It's the least part of it," he groaned.
+
+"It's the only part we can repair."
+
+"Good heavens! If there were any reparation--" He rose quickly and
+crossed the space that divided them. "Why did you never speak?" he
+asked.
+
+"Haven't you answered that yourself?"
+
+"Answered it?"
+
+"Just now--when you told me you did it for me." She paused a moment and
+then went on with a deepening note--"I would have spoken if I could have
+helped you."
+
+"But you must have despised me."
+
+"I've told you that would have been simpler."
+
+"But how could you go on like this--hating the money?"
+
+"I knew you would speak in time. I wanted you, first, to hate it as I
+did."
+
+He gazed at her with a kind of awe. "You're wonderful," he murmured.
+"But you don't yet know the depths I've reached."
+
+She raised an entreating hand. "I don't want to!"
+
+"You're afraid, then, that you'll hate me?"
+
+"No--but that you'll hate ME. Let me understand without your telling
+me."
+
+"You can't. It's too base. I thought you didn't care because you loved
+Flamel."
+
+She blushed deeply. "Don't--don't--" she warned him.
+
+"I haven't the right to, you mean?"
+
+"I mean that you'll be sorry."
+
+He stood imploringly before her. "I want to say something
+worse--something more outrageous. If you don't understand THIS you'll be
+perfectly justified in ordering me out of the house."
+
+She answered him with a glance of divination. "I shall understand--but
+you'll be sorry."
+
+"I must take my chance of that." He moved away and tossed the books
+about the table. Then he swung round and faced her. "Does Flamel care
+for you?" he asked.
+
+Her flush deepened, but she still looked at him without anger. "What
+would be the use?" she said with a note of sadness.
+
+"Ah, I didn't ask THAT," he penitently murmured.
+
+"Well, then--"
+
+To this adjuration he made no response beyond that of gazing at her
+with an eye which seemed now to view her as a mere factor in an immense
+redistribution of meanings.
+
+"I insulted Flamel to-day. I let him see that I suspected him of having
+told you. I hated him because he knew about the letters."
+
+He caught the spreading horror of her eyes, and for an instant he had
+to grapple with the new temptation they lit up. Then he said, with an
+effort--"Don't blame him--he's impeccable. He helped me to get them
+published; but I lied to him too; I pretended they were written to
+another man... a man who was dead...."
+
+She raised her arms in a gesture that seemed to ward off his blows.
+
+"You DO despise me!" he insisted.
+
+"Ah, that poor woman--that poor woman--" he heard her murmur.
+
+"I spare no one, you see!" he triumphed over her. She kept her face
+hidden.
+
+"You do hate me, you do despise me!" he strangely exulted.
+
+"Be silent!" she commanded him; but he seemed no longer conscious of any
+check on his gathering purpose.
+
+"He cared for you--he cared for you," he repeated, "and he never told
+you of the letters--"
+
+She sprang to her feet. "How can you?" she flamed. "How dare you?
+THAT--!"
+
+Glennard was ashy pale. "It's a weapon... like another...."
+
+"A scoundrel's!"
+
+He smiled wretchedly. "I should have used it in his place."
+
+"Stephen! Stephen!" she cried, as though to drown the blasphemy on his
+lips. She swept to him with a rescuing gesture. "Don't say such things.
+I forbid you! It degrades us both."
+
+He put her back with trembling hands. "Nothing that I say of myself can
+degrade you. We're on different levels."
+
+"I'm on yours, whatever it is!"
+
+He lifted his head and their gaze flowed together.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+The great renewals take effect as imperceptibly as the first workings of
+spring. Glennard, though he felt himself brought nearer to his wife,
+was still, as it were, hardly within speaking distance. He was
+but laboriously acquiring the rudiments of their new medium of
+communication; and he had to grope for her through the dense fog of his
+humiliation, the distorting vapor against which his personality loomed
+grotesque and mean.
+
+Only the fact that we are unaware how well our nearest know us
+enables us to live with them. Love is the most impregnable refuge of
+self-esteem, and we hate the eye that reaches to our nakedness. If
+Glennard did not hate his wife it was slowly, sufferingly, that there
+was born in him that profounder passion which made his earlier feeling
+seem a mere commotion of the blood. He was like a child coming back to
+the sense of an enveloping presence: her nearness was a breast on which
+he leaned.
+
+They did not, at first, talk much together, and each beat a devious
+track about the outskirts of the subject that lay between them like a
+haunted wood. But every word, every action, seemed to glance at it,
+to draw toward it, as though a fount of healing sprang in its poisoned
+shade. If only they might cut away through the thicket to that restoring
+spring!
+
+Glennard, watching his wife with the intentness of a wanderer to whom no
+natural sign is negligible, saw that she had taken temporary refuge in
+the purpose of renouncing the money. If both, theoretically, owned the
+inefficacy of such amends, the woman's instinctive subjectiveness made
+her find relief in this crude form of penance. Glennard saw that she
+meant to live as frugally as possible till what she deemed their debt
+was discharged; and he prayed she might not discover how far-reaching,
+in its merely material sense, was the obligation she thus hoped to
+acquit. Her mind was fixed on the sum originally paid for the letters,
+and this he knew he could lay aside in a year or two. He was touched,
+meanwhile, by the spirit that made her discard the petty luxuries which
+she regarded as the signs of their bondage. Their shared renunciations
+drew her nearer to him, helped, in their evidence of her helplessness,
+to restore the full protecting stature of his love. And still they did
+not speak.
+
+It was several weeks later that, one afternoon by the drawing-room fire,
+she handed him a letter that she had been reading when he entered.
+
+"I've heard from Mr. Flamel," she said.
+
+Glennard turned pale. It was as though a latent presence had suddenly
+become visible to both. He took the letter mechanically.
+
+"It's from Smyrna," she said. "Won't you read it?"
+
+He handed it back. "You can tell me about it--his hand's so illegible."
+He wandered to the other end of the room and then turned and stood
+before her. "I've been thinking of writing to Flamel," he said.
+
+She looked up.
+
+"There's one point," he continued, slowly, "that I ought to clear up.
+I told him you'd known about the letters all along; for a long time, at
+least; and I saw it hurt him horribly. It was just what I meant to do,
+of course; but I can't leave him to that false impression; I must write
+him."
+
+She received this without outward movement, but he saw that the depths
+were stirred. At length she returned, in a hesitating tone, "Why do you
+call it a false impression? I did know."
+
+"Yes, but I implied you didn't care."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+He still stood looking down on her. "Don't you want me to set that
+right?" he tentatively pursued.
+
+She lifted her head and fixed him bravely. "It isn't necessary," she
+said.
+
+Glennard flushed with the shock of the retort; then, with a gesture
+of comprehension, "No," he said, "with you it couldn't be; but I might
+still set myself right."
+
+She looked at him gently. "Don't I," she murmured, "do that?"
+
+"In being yourself merely? Alas, the rehabilitation's too complete!
+You make me seem--to myself even--what I'm not; what I can never be.
+I can't, at times, defend myself from the delusion; but I can at least
+enlighten others."
+
+The flood was loosened, and kneeling by her he caught her hands. "Don't
+you see that it's become an obsession with me? That if I could strip
+myself down to the last lie--only there'd always be another one left
+under it!--and do penance naked in the market-place, I should at least
+have the relief of easing one anguish by another? Don't you see that the
+worst of my torture is the impossibility of such amends?"
+
+Her hands lay in his without returning pressure. "Ah, poor woman, poor
+woman," he heard her sigh.
+
+"Don't pity her, pity me! What have I done to her or to you, after all?
+You're both inaccessible! It was myself I sold."
+
+He took an abrupt turn away from her; then halted before her again. "How
+much longer," he burst out, "do you suppose you can stand it? You've
+been magnificent, you've been inspired, but what's the use? You can't
+wipe out the ignominy of it. It's miserable for you and it does HER no
+good!"
+
+She lifted a vivid face. "That's the thought I can't bear!" she cried.
+
+"What thought?"
+
+"That it does her no good--all you're feeling, all you're suffering. Can
+it be that it makes no difference?"
+
+He avoided her challenging glance. "What's done is done," he muttered.
+
+"Is it ever, quite, I wonder?" she mused. He made no answer and they
+lapsed into one of the pauses that are a subterranean channel of
+communication.
+
+It was she who, after awhile, began to speak with a new suffusing
+diffidence that made him turn a roused eye on her.
+
+"Don't they say," she asked, feeling her way as in a kind of tender
+apprehensiveness, "that the early Christians, instead of pulling down
+the heathen temples--the temples of the unclean gods--purified them by
+turning them to their own uses? I've always thought one might do that
+with one's actions--the actions one loathes but can't undo. One can
+make, I mean, a wrong the door to other wrongs or an impassable wall
+against them...." Her voice wavered on the word. "We can't always tear
+down the temples we've built to the unclean gods, but we can put
+good spirits in the house of evil--the spirits of mercy and shame and
+understanding, that might never have come to us if we hadn't been in
+such great need...."
+
+She moved over to him and laid a hesitating hand on his. His head was
+bent and he did not change his attitude. She sat down beside him without
+speaking; but their silences now were fertile as rain-clouds--they
+quickened the seeds of understanding.
+
+At length he looked up. "I don't know," he said, "what spirits have come
+to live in the house of evil that I built--but you're there and that's
+enough for me. It's strange," he went on after another pause, "she
+wished the best for me so often, and now, at last, it's through her that
+it's come to me. But for her I shouldn't have known you--it's through
+her that I've found you. Sometimes, do you know?--that makes it
+hardest--makes me most intolerable to myself. Can't you see that it's
+the worst thing I've got to face? I sometimes think I could have
+borne it better if you hadn't understood! I took everything from
+her--everything--even to the poor shelter of loyalty she'd trusted
+in--the only thing I could have left her!--I took everything from her,
+I deceived her, I despoiled her, I destroyed her--and she's given me YOU
+in return!"
+
+His wife's cry caught him up. "It isn't that she's given ME to you--it
+is that she's given you to yourself." She leaned to him as though swept
+forward on a wave of pity. "Don't you see," she went on, as his eyes
+hung on her, "that that's the gift you can't escape from, the debt
+you're pledged to acquit? Don't you see that you've never before been
+what she thought you, and that now, so wonderfully, she's made you into
+the man she loved? THAT'S worth suffering for, worth dying for, to a
+woman--that's the gift she would have wished to give!"
+
+"Ah," he cried, "but woe to him by whom it cometh. What did I ever give
+her?"
+
+"The happiness of giving," she said.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Touchstone, by Edith Wharton
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TOUCHSTONE ***
+
+***** This file should be named 267.txt or 267.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        http://www.gutenberg.org/2/6/267/
+
+Produced by Judith Boss
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+http://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit: http://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.