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 Cornell University Library 
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 The touchstone[a story]by Edith Wharton. 
 
 ill 
 
 3 1924 014 140 903 
 
The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924014140903 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 BY 
 
 EDITH WHARTON 
 
 NEW YORK 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 MDCCCCIX 
 
 V- U \\ \\\ > ' 
 
COPYKIGHT, 1900, BY CHARLES SCRIBNEE's SONS 
 
 P\^J^p^ 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 I 
 
 PROFESSOR JOSLIN, who, as our readers are doubt- 
 less aware, Is engaged in writing the life of Mrs. Au- 
 byn, 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 com- 
 '-' ing 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 Au- 
 " gusta Gardens, Kensington, and he begs us to say that he 
 " will promptly return any documents entrusted to him." 
 
 Glennarb dropped the Spectator and sat look- 
 ing 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 pros- 
 pect 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 sun-ender even the despised privilege 
 of boring himself within those particular four walls. 
 
 [1 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 super- 
 fluous, his cleared horizon was likely to ofler no nearer 
 view of the one prospect toward which he strained. 
 To give up things in order to many 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 Hollings- 
 worth rise with a yawn from the inefiectual solace of 
 a brandy-and-soda and transport his purposeless per- 
 son to the window. Glennard measured his course 
 with a contemptuous eye. It was so like HoUings- 
 worth to get up and look out of the window just as 
 it was growing too dark to see anything ! There was 
 [2 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 dul- 
 ness; 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 con- 
 verted 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 to attainment. 
 
 The Spectator had slipped to his feet, and as he 
 picked it up his eye fell again on the paragraph ad- 
 dressed to the friends of Mrs. Aubyn. He had read 
 it for the first time with a scarcely perceptible quick- 
 ening of attention : her name had so long been pub- 
 lic 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 
 [3] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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, inexplica- 
 bly, 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 ! 
 [4 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 re- 
 membrance 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, derisive evidence of his limita- 
 tions ; 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 
 [51 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 feel- 
 ing, the strange dual impulse that drew him to her 
 voice but drove him from her hand, so that even 
 now, at sight of anjrthing 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 unac- 
 knowledged puerile vanity in the possession of such 
 treasures, seldom came beneath his hand. . . . 
 
 " Her letters will be of special value — " Her let- 
 ters ! 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. 
 [6] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 He stood up and strolled into the other room. 
 HoUingsworth, lounging away from the window, had 
 joined himself to a languidly convivial group of men, 
 to whom, in phrases as halting as though they strug- 
 gled 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 be- 
 ing 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 an- 
 other, where a voice as difierent as possible from 
 HoUingsworth'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 pug- 
 nacity of his smile. "Give it another six months and 
 it '11 be talking about itself," he declared. "It 's pretty 
 nearly articulate now." 
 
 "Can it say papa ? " someone else inquired. 
 [7] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 Dinslow's smile broadened. "You'll be deuced 
 glad to say papa to it a year from now," he retorted. 
 " It '11 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 cata- 
 logue 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 even- 
 ing 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 
 [8] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 up a dinner invitation he might join her there with- 
 out 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 counte- 
 nance that looked like the wrong side of a more 
 finished face. "Sony 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 could n't marry her, it was time 
 [9] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 HoUingsworth. 
 
 [10] 
 
. n 
 
 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 lamplight on a photo- 
 graph of Alexa Trent, placed, in the obligatory 
 silver frame, just where, as memory officiously re- 
 minded 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 be- 
 hind a mask expressing only their anxiety about the 
 butcher's bill or their inability to see a joke. With 
 [11] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 justness — the intuitive femi- 
 nine 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 over- 
 hung her childhood, and she had none of the pretty 
 delusions about life that are supposed to be the 
 crowning gi-ace of girlhood. This very competence, 
 which gave her a touching reasonableness, made Glen- 
 nard's situation more difficult than if he had aspired 
 to a princess. 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. 
 [12] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 The sight of her photograph quickened Glen- 
 nard'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 somnambu- 
 list 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 
 [13] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 laying in their place, without a tra^e 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 postmark, 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 early packets — little notes 
 written during their first acquaintance at Hill- 
 bridge. 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, re- 
 tiurned 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 experi- 
 ence of matrimony had fitted out with a stock of 
 generalizations that exploded like bombs in the 
 [14] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 academic air of Hillbridge. In her choice of a hus- 
 band 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 dis- 
 posed from the first to allow her more latitude of 
 speech and action than the ill-used wife was gener- 
 ally accorded in Hillbridge, where misfortune was 
 still regarded as a visitation designed to put people 
 in their proper place and make them feel the superi- 
 ority of their neighbors. The young woman so privi- 
 leged combined with a kind of personal shyness an 
 intellectual audacity that was like a deflected im- 
 pulse of coquetry : one felt that if she had been 
 [15] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 undisceming 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, Glen- 
 nard thought little in the first year of their ac- 
 quaintance. 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 pub- 
 lic 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 as- 
 pirations the encouragement of a clever woman stood 
 [16] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 in- 
 terest 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. Au- 
 byn'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-pub- 
 licity 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 Glen- 
 nard exulted in the superior knowledge of the world 
 that enabled him to take as a matter of coiurse sen- 
 timents over which the university shook its head. 
 Still more delightful was it to hear Mrs. Aubyn 
 waken the echoes of academic drawing-rooms with 
 [17 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 audacities surpassing those of her printed page. Her 
 intellectual independence gave a touch of comrade- 
 ship 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 pre- 
 cisely 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 tmderstanding of her 
 also increased ; and if man is at times indirectly flat- 
 tered by the moral superiority of woman, her mental 
 ascendency is extenuated by no such oblique tribute 
 [18] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 inca- 
 pacity to make use of it, she seemed invincibly igno- 
 rant of any of the little artifices whereby women con- 
 trive to hide 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 in- 
 tuitively 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 
 [19] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 chro- 
 nology 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 accentu- 
 ated his advantage by any betrayal of indilFerence. 
 During the first year of her widowhood their friend- 
 ship 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 compara- 
 tive novelty of correspondence. Her letters, oddly 
 enough, seemed at first to bring her nearer than her 
 [20 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 presence. She had adopted, and she successfully main- 
 tained, 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 senti- 
 ment his heart had rejected, and this factitious emo- 
 tion drove him once or twice to Hillbridge, whence, 
 after scenes of evasive tenderness, he returned dissat- 
 isfied 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 agree- 
 able 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 asso- 
 ciates are able to withdraw their funds at the same 
 [21 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 time ; and Glennard gradually learned that he stood 
 for the venture on which Mrs. Aubyn had irretriev- 
 ably 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 un- 
 considered inroads ; but if he supplied the seed, it 
 was clearly Mrs. Aubyn's business to see to the rais- 
 ing 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 sen- 
 timent ; 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 inexhausti- 
 ble 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 
 [ 22 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 near ties in Hillbridge, and London offered more 
 scope than New York to her expanding personahty. 
 She was already famous, and her laurels were yet un- 
 harvested. 
 
 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 sim- 
 ply meant to let himself drift. They both drifted, for 
 a long time, down the languid current of reminis- 
 cence; 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. 
 
 [ 2& ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 "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 con- 
 sumed so little of his own commemorative oil. The 
 reproach was taken from this thought by Mrs. 
 Aubyn's gradual translation into terms of univer- 
 sality. 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 condi- 
 tions of her life, the vistas of new relationships dis- 
 [M ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 closed by every phrase, made her communications as 
 impersonal as a piece of jom-nalism. 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 reci- 
 procity. 
 
 In the retrospective light shed by the letters he 
 was blinded to their specific meaning. He was not 
 a man who concerned himself with literatiu-e, and 
 they held 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 tender- 
 ness. Sometimes, indeed, he had been oppressed, hu- 
 miliated 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 
 [25 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 production of a distinguished woman ; hfui never 
 measured the literary significance of her oppressive 
 prodigahty. He was almost frightened now at the 
 wealth in his hands ; the K)bligation of her love had 
 never weighed on him like this gift of her imagina- 
 tion: 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 with- 
 out the stirring of sub-conscious 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 es- 
 tablish, 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 pack- 
 ets. He turned back to the table and one by one 
 [26] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 fitted the pages into their envelopes; then he tied 
 up the letters and put them back into the locked 
 drawer. 
 
 [27 ] 
 
Ill 
 
 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 impercep- 
 tibly readjusting his point of view, of making the 
 jumbled phenomena of experience fall 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. Per- 
 haps the only service an unloved woman can render 
 the man she loves is to enhance and prolong his il- 
 lusions 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 
 [28 J 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 com- 
 posure was perhaps her chief grace in Glennard's 
 eyes. Reserve, in some natures, implies merely the 
 locking of empty rooms or the dissimulation of awk- 
 ward encumbrances; but Miss Trent's reticence was 
 to Glennard like the closed door to the sanctuaiy, 
 and his certainty of divining the hidden treasure 
 made him content to remain outside in the happy 
 expectancy of the neophyte. 
 
 "You did n't come to the opera last night," she 
 began, in the tone that seemed always rather to re- 
 cord a fact than to offer a reflection on it. 
 
 He answered with a discouraged gesture. "What 
 was the use ? We could n't have talked." 
 
 "Not as well as here," she assented ; adding, after 
 a meditative pause, "As you did n'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 
 [29 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 pui-pose, 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 commiuiications, 
 "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 deri- 
 sion. "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 think- 
 ing 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 
 [30 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 biu-den. 
 Jim does what he can for mother, but with his own 
 children to provide for it is n't very much. You see 
 we 're all poor together." 
 
 "Your aunt is n'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 must be so in her way — and in her 
 old gowns." 
 
 "I could be very happy in Aunt Virginia's old 
 gowns," Miss Trent interposed. 
 [31 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 "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 consider- 
 ateness 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 fui'niture. "The question 
 is how you '11 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 alterna- 
 tive of marrying me." 
 
 The slow color — even her blushes seemed deliber- 
 ate — rose to her lower lids ; her lips stirred, but the 
 [ 32 J 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 lit- 
 tle hole somewhere out of town .-' " 
 
 "Could we ? " she sighed, half yielding. 
 
 "In one of those places where they make jokes 
 [33 J 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 
 was n'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 assur- 
 ance 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, "K 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. 
 [34 J 
 
IV 
 
 THE next afternoon Glennard, 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 hovu-, 
 and the librarian was able to give an undivided at- 
 tention to his tentative request for letters — collec- 
 tions 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 hus- 
 band — or — " 
 
 "Ah," said the inspired librarian, "Eloise and 
 Abailard." 
 
 "Well — something a little nearer, perhaps," said 
 Glennard, with lightness. " Did n't Merimee — " 
 
 "The lady's letters, in that case, were not pub- 
 lished." 
 
 "Of course not," said Glennard, vexed at hi» 
 blimder. 
 
 [35 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 " 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 literatui'e. 
 
 "If you want love-letters, perhaps some of the 
 French eighteenth-century correspondences might suit 
 you better — Mile. Aisse or Madame de Sabran — " 
 
 But Glennard insisted. "I want something mod- 
 ern — English or American. I want to look some- 
 thing up," he lamely concluded. 
 
 The librarian could only suggest George Eliot. 
 
 " Well, give me some of the French things, then 
 — and I '11 have Merimee's letters. It was the woman 
 who published them, was n'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 in- 
 terfere with the girl's chances by hanging about her 
 [36] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 to the obvious exclusion of other men, but it was 
 worse to seem to justify his weakness by dressing up 
 the futvure in delusive ambiguities. He saw himself 
 sinking from depth to depth of sentimental coward- 
 ice 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 
 w£is 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 help her to be 
 reasonable; he would n'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 
 [37 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 comer. 
 
 He looked up and met the interrogative smile of 
 Barton Flamel, who stood on the curbstone watch- 
 ing the retreating car with the eye of a man philo- 
 sophic enough to remember that it will be followed 
 by another. 
 
 Glennard felt his usual impulse of pleasure at meet- 
 ing 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 
 [38] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 pru- 
 dent 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 '11 see one bore 
 instead of twenty." 
 
 The apartment which Flamel described as his stu- 
 dio 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 dilet- 
 tanteism. Against this backgroimd, which seemed 
 the visible expression of its owner's intellectual toler- 
 ance, rows of fine books detached themselves with a 
 prominence showing them to be Flamel's chief care. 
 [39] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 Glennard glanced with the eye of untrained curi- 
 osity at the lines of warm-toned morocco, while his 
 host busied himself with the uncorking of Apolli- 
 naris. 
 
 "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 compro- 
 mise 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. 
 [40] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 "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 Surville." 
 
 Glennard took the book with sudden eagerness. 
 " Who was Madame SurviUe ? " 
 
 "His sister." He was conscious that Flamel was 
 looking at him with the smile that was like an in- 
 terrogation point. " I did n'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, 
 [41 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 glanced with a kind of repugnance at the interleav- 
 ing of yellow crisscrossed sheets. "She was the one 
 who drowned herself, was n't she ? " 
 
 Flamel nodded. " I suppose that little episode adds 
 about fifty per cent, to their value," he said medi- 
 tatively. 
 
 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." 
 
 [42 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 "I'm rather driven just now," said Glennard 
 vaguely. He found himself seated again, and Flamel 
 had pvished 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 incon- 
 sistencies 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 col- 
 lecting ? " 
 
 Glennard laughed. "Lord, no. The other way 
 round." 
 
 "Selling.?" 
 
 "Oh, I hardly know. I was thinking of a poor 
 chap — " 
 
 [43] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 sup- 
 pose, 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 inter- 
 est. "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." 
 
 [ 44 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 " And she wrote a clever letter ? " 
 
 " Clever ? It was Margaret Aubyn." 
 
 A great silence filled the room. It seemed to Glen- 
 nard that the words had burst from him as blood 
 gushes from a wound. 
 
 "Great Scott!" said Flamel sitting up. «A col- 
 lection 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 did n't think of giving them to 
 him?" 
 
 Glennard had loimged across the room and stood 
 staring up at a bronze Bacchus who drooped his gar- 
 landed head above the pediment of an Italian cabi- 
 net. " What ought I to do ? You 're just the fellow 
 [45] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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, swing- 
 ing round with sudden energy — "If I can — " 
 
 " K 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 beUeve ? " 
 
 "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 ef- 
 fort. "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 
 [46 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 me ; such a lot that it rather obscures my judgment 
 — the fact is, if I could lay my hand on a few thou- 
 sands now I could get into a big thing, and with- 
 out appreciable risk ; and I 'd like to know whether 
 you think I'd be justified — under the circum- 
 stances. . . .^ He paused with a dry throat. It 
 seemed to him at the moment that it would be im- 
 possible for him ever to sink lower in his own esti- 
 mation. 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 senti- 
 ments 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, is n't he ? " 
 
 " He 's dead — yes ; but can I assume the responsi- 
 bility without — " 
 
 Flamel hesitated; and almost immediately Glen- 
 [47] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 nard's scruples gave way to irritation. K 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 was n't a celeb- 
 rity himself, I suppose .'' " 
 
 "No, no." 
 
 " Then the letters can be addressed to Mr. Blank. 
 Does n'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 in- 
 vigorating emphasis. " I doubt if you 'd be justified 
 in keeping them back. Anything of Margaret Au- 
 byn's is more or less public property by this time. 
 She 's too great for any one of us. I was only won- 
 dering how you could use them to the best advan- 
 tage — to yourself, I mean. How many are there ? " 
 
 "Oh, a lot; perhaps a himdred — I haven't 
 counted. There may be more. . . ." 
 [48] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 " 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, would n'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 
 [49] 
 
TH'E TOUCHSTONE 
 
 sha'n't do anything about it. And, Flamel — you 
 won't mention this to any one ? " 
 
 " 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 indif- 
 ference — " Financially, eh ? " 
 
 " Rather ; I should say so." 
 
 Glermard'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 youVe 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 
 [50 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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. . . ." Glen- 
 nard stammered ; and, without turning, he flung over 
 his shoulder an inarticulate " Good-bye. . . ." 
 
 [51 ] 
 
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 crisp- 
 ness of a freshly starched summer gown, and the 
 geraniums on the veranda bloomed as simultaneously 
 as the flowers in a bonnet. The garden was prosper- 
 ing 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 di-ew 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 set- 
 ting, 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 
 [52] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 fresh- 
 ness of their first day together. If, indeed, their hap- 
 piness 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 
 opiique. 
 
 " 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 
 [53 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 try- 
 ing to think of the most natui-al and unartificial 
 thing to say, and his voice seemed to come from the 
 outside, as though he were speaking behind a mario- 
 nette. " Do you want to ? " 
 
 "Just as you please," she said compliantly. No 
 affectation of indifference could have been as baflHing 
 as her compliance. Glennard, of late, was beginning 
 to feel that the smrface 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 in- 
 [54 J 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 corrigible 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 invest- 
 ments were flowering like his garden : the dryest 
 shares blossomed into dividends and a golden har- 
 vest awaited his sickle. 
 
 He glanced at his wife with the tranquil air of 
 a man who digests good luck as naturally as the dry 
 ground absorbs a shower. "Things are looking un- 
 commonly 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, 
 [55] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 "Really, on the baby's account I shall be almost 
 sorry ; but if we do go, there 's Kate Erskine's house 
 . . . she 'II let us have it for almost nothing. . . ." 
 
 " Well, write her about it," he recommended, his 
 eye 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. 
 
 "Maegaeet Aubyn's Leitees. 
 " 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 pros- 
 pect his last words had opened. Behind her head 
 shivers of sun and shade ran across the striped awn- 
 ing. 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 
 [56 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 privet -bud, was a relentless human gaze, pressing 
 close upon their privacy. It was as though they sat in 
 a brightly lit room, unciurtained from a darkness full 
 of hostile watchers. . . . His wife still smiled ; and 
 her unconsciousness of danger seemed in some hor- 
 rible 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 transac- 
 tion 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 
 [57 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 oiFered 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 watch- 
 ing her expand like a sea-creature restored to its 
 [58] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 element, stretching out the atrophied tentacles of girl- 
 ish vanity and enjoyment to the rising tide of op- 
 portunity. 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 inno- 
 cent 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 mar- 
 ried her instead of the other. It was what she had 
 always wanted — to be with him — and she had 
 gained her point at last. . . . 
 [59 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 im- 
 mediate 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 pro- 
 tection. . . . Yet a moment before he had almost 
 hated her ! . . . He laughed aloud at his senseless 
 terrors. . . . He was off his balance, decidedly. . . . 
 [60] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 " 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 could n'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. " Is n'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 do- 
 main. 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 honeysuckle; 
 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 
 coui-se I shall let him know. You always seem to im- 
 ply that I 'm going to do something rude to Flamel." 
 [61 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 him- 
 self 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. 
 
 [62] 
 
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 heteroge- 
 neous 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 dis- 
 taste 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 diive 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 them- 
 selves slipping more and more into Flamel's intimacy. 
 Alexa had once or twice said that she enjoyed meet- 
 ing clever people; but her enjoyment took the nega- 
 tive form of a smiling receptivity; and Glennard felt 
 [63] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 ret- 
 ina 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 circum- 
 stances to support the claims of the other two. This 
 was Mrs. Dresham, the wife of the editor of the 
 [64 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 remarkable- 
 ness. For the conceivable tedium of this duty, Mrs. 
 Dresham was repaid by the fact that there were peo- 
 ple 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^ondemned by their inability to ap- 
 preciate her. Under Dresham's tutelage she had 
 developed into a " thoughtful woman," who read his 
 leaders in the Radiator and bought the works he 
 [65 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 recommended. When a new book 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 would n't spoil the afternoon 
 by making people talk ; though he reduced his an- 
 noyance 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." 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 Mrs. Dresham immediately saw her advantage. 
 " You have n'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 has n't reached the suburbs yet," she 
 said with her unruiHed 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.P" 
 
 Flamel shook his head. "Not even with this 
 breeze. Literature travels faster than steam now- 
 adays. 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 wo- 
 man's soul, absolutely torn up by the roots — her 
 whole self laid bare; and to a man who evidently 
 did n't care ; who could n't have cared. I don't mean 
 [67 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 let- 
 ters," Mrs. Touchett retorted. 
 
 " Then, obviously, she need n't have Avritten them ; 
 whereas the man, poor devil, could hardly help re- 
 ceiving them." 
 
 [68] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 "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 txu-ned her reproachful loveliness to 
 Dresham. "From the way you defend him I believe 
 you know who he is." 
 
 Every one 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 rmist 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 ap- 
 pearance of carrying the argument a point farther, 
 [69 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 "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 
 were n't written to the public ? " Mrs. Touchett in- 
 terposed. 
 
 "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- 
 [70 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 
 does n't mean them to be published. . . ." 
 
 " She should n'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 incur- 
 ably subjective. I venture to say that most men 
 would see in those letters merely their immense lit- 
 erary value, their significance as documents. The 
 personal side does n'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 jwrite you a 
 love-letter, Mr. Flamel." 
 
 Glennard moved away impatiently. Such talk was 
 [71 J 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 Glen- 
 nard 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 break- 
 fast, surprised her husband by an unexpected re- 
 quest. 
 
 "Will you bring me those letters from town?" 
 she asked. 
 
 " What letters ? " he said, putting down his cup. 
 He felt himself as vulnerable as a man who is limged 
 at in the dark. 
 
 [72] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 "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 ? " 
 
 " Some one lent it to me when it came out — Mr. 
 Flamel, I think." 
 
 His first impulse was to exclaim, " Why the devU 
 do you borrow books of Flamel .'' I can buy you all 
 you want — " but he felt himself irresistibly forced 
 into an attitude of smiling comphance. "Flamel 
 always has the newest books going, has n't he ? You 
 must be careful, by the way, about returning what 
 he lends you. He's rather crotchety about his li- 
 brary." 
 
 "Oh, I'm always very careful," she said, with a 
 [73 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 him- 
 self 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 distin- 
 guished 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 ineffec- 
 [74 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 tual 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. Mar- 
 garet Aubyn flashed back at him in endless iteration. 
 He plunged into the shop and came on a counter 
 where the name repeated itself on row after row of 
 bindings. It seemed to have driven the rest of litera- 
 ture to the back shelves. He caught up a copy, toss- 
 ing 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 appre- 
 hension. 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 
 [75 J 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 the train he dared not draw them out ; but the de- 
 tested 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 danc- 
 ing 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 vol- 
 ume. 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 con- 
 
 [76 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 sidered 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. 
 
 [ 77 ] 
 
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. "111.'' 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 ex- 
 cuse 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 sup- 
 pose 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 re- 
 [78] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 source but that of sti-oUing impatiently to the win- 
 dow. As her eyes followed him they lit on the books. 
 
 "Ah, you've brought them! I'm so glad," she 
 said. 
 
 He answered over his shoulder, "For a woman 
 who never reads you make the most astoimding ex- 
 ceptions ! " 
 
 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 re- 
 peated, and with the words remembrance came to 
 [79] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 impres- 
 sively in Miss Trent's imagination, he had gone on 
 from one anecdote to another, reviving dormant de- 
 tails of his old Hillbridge life, and pasturing his 
 vanity on the eagerness with which she listened to 
 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 dan- 
 gerous 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 blimders, he added, with increased 
 indifierence, " I simply can't see what you can find 
 to interest you in such a book." 
 [80 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 did n't wish the letters to be 
 pubUshed.?" 
 
 Glennard felt the sudden dizziness of the moun- 
 taineer on a naiTow ledge, and with it the sense that 
 he was lost if he looked more than a step ahead. 
 
 " I 'm sm^e I don't know," he said ; then, summon- 
 ing a smile, he passed his hand through her arm. " I 
 did n'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 in- 
 doors on such a night as this ? I '11 join you presently 
 outside." 
 
 But she had drawn her arm-chair to the lamp. "I 
 want to look at my book," she said, taking up the 
 first volume of the Letters. 
 
 [81 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 out- 
 spread 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 char- 
 acter not in direct contact with his own, Glennard 
 now discerned his ignorance; and the baflSing sense 
 of her remoteness was intensified by the discovery 
 that, in one way, she was closer to him than ever 
 [82 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 before. As one may live for years in happy uncon- 
 sciousness of the possession of a sensitive nerve, he 
 had lived beside his wife unaware that her individu- 
 ality 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 talk- 
 ing over what she read, and at present his first ob- 
 ject in life was to postpone the inevitable discussion 
 of the letters. This instinct of protection, in the af- 
 ternoon, on his way up town, 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. 
 [83] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 book- 
 stall 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 remon- 
 strated, 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 tiU 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 
 [84 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 screening himself by a series of reflex adjustments 
 from the risk of any allusion to the Letters. Flamel 
 suffered his discourse with the bland inattention that 
 we accord to the affairs of some one 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 atten- 
 tion which is like a becoming 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 composiure, 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 coimtry: 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 conceiv- 
 ably work one's way through a labyrinth ; but Alexa's 
 [85 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 in- 
 cluded that one among the others ? Or was it possi- 
 ble 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 
 keyhole. I wish I had n't read it ! " 
 
 Hamel returned, in the leisurely tone of the man 
 whose phrases are pmictuated by a cigarette, "It 
 seems so to us, perhaps ; but to another generation 
 the book will be a classic." 
 
 [86] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 "Then it ought not to have been published till 
 it had time to 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 
 would n't read it ... he did n't want me to read it. 
 I did n'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 sin- 
 gular infelicity with which he had contrived to put 
 Flamel in possession of the two points most damag- 
 ing 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 let- 
 [87] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 ters. To a man of less than Flamel's astuteness it 
 must now be clear to whom the letters were ad- 
 dressed ; and the possibility once suggested, nothing 
 could be easier than to confirm it by discreet re- 
 search. 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 Mamel had, in his 
 hearing, declared the publication of the letters to be 
 not only justifiable but obligatory ; and if the disin- 
 terestedness 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 " wo- 
 [88] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 man 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 appro- 
 priate 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 rehef. 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.?" 
 
 [89] 
 
vni 
 
 GLENN ARD, perhaps unconsciously, had 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 in- 
 evitable, 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 diffi- 
 culty was one not to be conjured by any affectation 
 of indiflFerence. Some griefs build the soul a spacious 
 house, but in this misery of Glennard's he conld 
 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 criti- 
 cal reservations; to have read them had become a 
 social obligation in circles to which literatiure never 
 penetrates except in a personal guise. 
 
 Glennard did himself injustice. It was from the 
 [90] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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-scruti- 
 nizing 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 aU like our wrong- 
 doings to have a becoming cut, to be made to or- 
 der, as it were; and Glennard found himself sud- 
 denly thrust into a garb of dishonor siu-ely meant 
 for a meaner figure. 
 
 The immediate result of his first weeks of wretch- 
 edness 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 manage- 
 ment 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 unspeak- 
 able dread of her learning the truth about the let- 
 [91 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 ters, 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 .J" Again he found himself 
 brought up abruptly against his incredible igno- 
 rance of her nature. The fact that he knew well 
 enough how she would behave in the ordinary emer- 
 gencies of life, that he could count, in such contin- 
 gencies, on the kind of high courage and directness 
 he had always divined in her, made him the more 
 hopeless of her entering into the tortuous psychol- 
 ogy of an act that he himself cpuld no longer ex- 
 plain 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 
 [92] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 his sensibilities : he preferred to indulge the vague hy- 
 pothesis that extraneous circumstances would some- 
 how 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 publi- 
 cation. This thought drew Glennard to him in fit- 
 ful impulses of friendliness, from each of which 
 there was a sharper reaction of distrust and aver- 
 sion. 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 in- 
 tolerable 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 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 
 [93 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 be- 
 fore the New Year they had agreed on the necessity 
 of adding a parlor-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 hap- 
 pened 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 wo- 
 man to ask awkward questions, but he felt the con- 
 jecture 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 
 [94] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 satis- 
 faction. 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 publishers' pre- 
 visions. 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 Kving 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 
 [95] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 than usual, Alexa's drawing-room was full of a gay- 
 ety that overflowed to the stairs. Flamel, for a won- 
 der, 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 had n't been at 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." 
 [96] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 "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 prote- 
 gee — 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 weariness of the 
 topic under discussion. Glennard turned to the bell, 
 but Mrs. Armiger pursued him with her lovely 
 amazement. 
 
 "Why, the Auhyn Letters — didn't you know 
 about it.-* She 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 
 [97] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 dis- 
 graceful. 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 murmm"ed 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 
 [98] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 did n'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 roimd with him 
 and he dropped into the nearest chair. " As I do .f " 
 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 — " 
 [99] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 "Her friend!" He stood up. "You speak as if 
 she had had only one — the most famous woman of 
 her day ! " He moved vaguely about the room, bend- 
 ing down to look at some books on the table. " I 
 hope," he added, "you didn't give that as a reason.?" 
 
 " A reason ? " 
 
 "For not going. A woman who gives reasons for 
 getting out of social obligations is sure to make her- 
 self 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 be- 
 [ 100 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 tween the ladies' draperies, followed on foot. The 
 evening was interminable. The reading at the Wal- 
 dorf, 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 sus- 
 pecting a pinrpose in the allusion; he even yielded 
 himself for a moment to the extravagance of im- 
 agining that Mrs. Dresham, whom he disliked, had 
 organized the reading in the hope of making him be- 
 tray himself — for he was already sure that Dresham 
 had divined his share in the transaxjtion. 
 
 The attempt to keep a smooth surface on this 
 inner tumult was as endless and imavailing 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 
 [101 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 si- 
 lence 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 indiiFerence. The last barriers of his will seemed 
 to be breaking down before a flood of moral lassi- 
 tude. How could he continue to play his part, how 
 keep his front to the enemy, with this poison of in- 
 difference 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 
 [ 102 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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. 
 
 [ 103 ] 
 
IX 
 
 HE rose next morning with the resolve to know 
 what Alexa thought of him. It was not an- 
 choring 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 to- 
 gether. When he followed her to the dra^^ing-room 
 after dinner he thought himself on the point of 
 speaking; but as she handed him his coffee he said 
 involimtarily: "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 
 imapproachableness seemed to keep him at arm's 
 length. She was not the kind of woman whose com- 
 passion could be circumvented ; there was no chance 
 of slipping past the outposts — he would never take 
 her by surprise. WeU — 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 
 [ 104 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 turned to go upstairs when a new expedient pre- 
 sented 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 understand- 
 ing 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 overhimg 
 her brow like the eaves of a temple. Her face had 
 often the high secluded look of a shrine ; and it was 
 [105 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 this touch of awe in her beauty that now made him 
 feel himself on the brink of sacrilege. 
 
 Lest the feeling should control 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 11 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 have n'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 be- 
 sides, none are of much importance." 
 
 The next morning he invented an excuse for leav- 
 ing the house without seeing her, and when he re- 
 turned, just before dinner, he found a visitor's hat 
 and stick in the hall. The visitor was Flamel, who 
 was just taking leave. 
 
 [106] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 re- 
 ceipt 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 be- 
 ginning 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 sony !" She ended with a laugh that had the 
 [107] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 be- 
 gins 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 Stmday, and Glennard pvu-- 
 posely lingered late in his room. When he came 
 downstairs his wife was already seated at the break- 
 fast-table. She lifted her usual smile to his entrance 
 and they took shelter in the nearest topic, like way- 
 farers 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 
 [108] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 occurred to him that Flamel was the kind of man 
 who might very well please a woman at his own ex- 
 pense, without need of fortuitous assistance. If this 
 possibility cleared the outlook it did not brighten it. 
 Gleimard merely felt himself left alone with his base- 
 ness. 
 
 Alexa left the breakfast-table before him, and 
 when he went up to the drawing-room he found her 
 dressed to go out. 
 
 " Are n'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 mantelpiece for a match to light his cigarette. 
 
 "Well, good-bye," 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 ! 
 [109] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 Gleimard, 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 evi- 
 dently 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. 
 
 [110] 
 
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 ex- 
 altation 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. 
 
 A fortimate 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 profes- 
 sional work, and for over two months he had little 
 time to look himself in the face. Not unnaturally — 
 for he was sis yet unskilled in the subtleties of intro- 
 spection — he mistook his temporary insensibility for 
 a gradual revival of moral health. 
 [Ill ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 coun- 
 selled her silent acceptance of the inevitable. If 
 such a quality was a poor substitute for the passion- 
 ate justness that had once seemed to distinguish 
 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 ten- 
 derness 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 
 
 [112 J 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 pro- 
 verbially mistake the early ardors of housekeeping 
 for a sign of settled domesticity. Alexa, at any rate, 
 was refuting his theory as inconsiderately as a seed- 
 ling defeats the gardener's expectations. An undefi- 
 nable 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 attri- 
 butes and now used her effects with the discrimina- 
 tion 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 
 [113 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 rasped him by laughing like Jxilia Armiger ; but he 
 had enough imagination to perceive that, in respect 
 of his wife's social arts, a husband necessarily sees 
 the wrong side of the tapestry. 
 
 In this ironical estimate of their relation Glen- 
 nard found himself strangely relieved of all concern 
 as to his wife's feelings for Flamel. From an Olym- 
 pian pinnacle of indifference he calmly surveyed their 
 inoffensive antics. It was surprising how his cheap- 
 ening 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 literatiu:e. He always skipped the " literary notices" 
 in the papers, and he had small leisure for the inter- 
 mittent pleasm-es of the periodical. He had therefore 
 [114 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 no notion of the prolonged reverberations which the 
 Auhyn Letters had awakened. 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 timi 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 abstrac- 
 tion 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 
 [115 J 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 unre- 
 proachful 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 her- 
 self. For a moment he found consolation in the 
 thought that, at any cost, they had thus been 
 brought together; then a sense 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 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 
 [116 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 her nearness. But she was still close to him: her 
 presence remained the one 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 de- 
 tail had its meaning, and the joy 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 AJexa 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 
 [ 117 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 on the fire. It was not that he was unwilling to talk 
 to her ; he felt a curious desire to be as kind as possi- 
 ble ; 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 have n't seen it ? " 
 
 "No," he returned coldly. The magazine was 
 locked in his desk. 
 
 His wife had moved to the mantelpiece. 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. 
 [118] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 " You seem to do a lot of reading,'" he said. 
 
 She still 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 indif- 
 ferently. As he moved to the door he heard her take 
 a hurried step forward; then she paused, and sank 
 without speaking into the chair from which he had 
 risen. 
 
 [ 119 1 
 
XI 
 
 AS Glennard, in the raw February sunlight, 
 ■i- ■*■ 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 at- 
 tempt at a sentimental reparation, but rather by the 
 need to affirm in some way the reality of the tie be- 
 tween them. 
 
 The ironical promiscuity of death had brought 
 Mrs. Aubyn back to share the 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 rettun. There was no family to follow her hearse ; 
 she had died alone, as she had lived ; and the " dis- 
 tinguished mourners " who had formed the escort of 
 the famous writer knew nothing of the woman they 
 [ 120 J 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 in- 
 terminably, lined with stereotyped emblems of afflic- 
 tion, as though all the platitudes ever uttered had 
 been turned to marble and set up over the unresist- 
 ing 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 fol- 
 lowed the way pointed out 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 shaft rearing its 
 aggressive height at the angle of two avenues. 
 
 [m ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 " How she would have hated it ! " he murmured. 
 
 A bench stood near and he seated himself. The 
 monument rose before him like some pretentious un- 
 inhabited dwelling : he could not believe that Mar- 
 garet Aubyn lay there. It was a Sunday morning, and 
 black figures moved among the paths, placing flow- 
 ers 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 pres- 
 ently and walked back to the entrance of the ceme- 
 tery. 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, 
 [ 122 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 a mystic 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 doorway, waiting for the 
 flowers, he had a penetrating sense of Margaret 
 Aubjoi'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 shriv- 
 elled like burnt paper in the cold ; and as he watched 
 them the illusion of her nearness faded, shrank back 
 frozen. 
 
 [ 123 ] 
 
XII 
 
 THE motive of his visit to the cemetery re- 
 mained undefined save as a final eiFort 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 woiild not 
 whoUy have succumbed to its consequences. His 
 chief fear was that he should become the creature 
 of his act. His wife's indiiFerence 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, imderstood without knowing. 
 
 In its last disguise of retrospective remorse, his 
 self-pity affected a desire for solitude and medita- 
 tion. 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. 
 
 [ 124 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 at- 
 tention w£is arrested by two figures walking ahead 
 of him. This couple, who had the path to them- 
 selves, 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 compan- 
 ion, showed Glennard the outline of his wife's pro- 
 file. 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 
 [125 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 of the hansom ; but when the cabman bent down he 
 dropped into his seat without speaking. Then, be- 
 coming conscious of the prolonged interrogation of 
 the lifted lid, he called out — " Turn — drive back — 
 anywhere — I 'm in a hiury — " 
 
 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 an- 
 guish 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 
 [ 126 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 in his study. He heard the parlor- 
 maid lock the front door; then his wife went up- 
 stairs 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 per- 
 " centage on the sale of the 'Letters.'' 
 
 " Trusting you will excuse the oversight, 
 " Yours truly 
 
 " Stephen GlennardP 
 
 He let himself out of the darkened house and 
 dropped the letter in the post-box at the comer. 
 
 The next afternoon he was detained late at his 
 [ 127 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 office, and as he was preparing to leave he heard 
 some one asking for him in the outer room. He 
 seated himself again and Flamel was shown in. 
 
 The two men, as Glennard pushed aside an ob- 
 structive 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 inter- 
 mediary in such cases is entitled to a percentage on 
 the sale." 
 
 Flamel paused before answering. "You find, you 
 say. It 's a recent discovery ? " 
 [ 128 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 "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 con- 
 cerned ? " 
 
 Glennaxd 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 mo- 
 ment 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 ofifering me money in re- 
 turn 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 prob- 
 ably have expected to be paid." 
 
 He lifted his eyes to Flamel and the two men 
 [ 129 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 pro- 
 posed 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 does n't take them to the police-station." 
 
 "Stolen.?" Flamel echoed. "The letters were 
 stolen?" 
 
 Glennard burst into a laugh. " How much longer 
 do you expect me to keep up that pretence about 
 the letters ? You knew well enough they were writ- 
 ten to me." 
 
 Flamel looked at him in silence. "Were they.?" 
 he said at length. " I did n't know it." 
 
 "And didn't suspect it, I suppose," Glennard 
 sneered. 
 
 The other was again silent ; then he said, " I may 
 [ 130 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 upper- 
 most 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 wea- 
 pon, he had seized the one most apt to wound. 
 Hamel's muscles were imder 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 intent was lost in 
 the anguish of what they suggested. He was sure 
 [131 J 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 any- 
 body else, for that matter, to keep my wife informed 
 of my actions .? I did n't suppose even such egregious 
 conceit as yours could delude a man to that degree ! " 
 Struggling for a foothold in the 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 out- 
 break seemed to have restored his self-control, and 
 when he spoke it was with a deliberation implying 
 that his course was chosen. "In that case I under- 
 stand 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 in- 
 
 [ isa ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 tended as a random insult. In either case, here 's my 
 answer." 
 
 He tore the sHp 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 expe- 
 dient of assailing Flamers, the result had not justi- 
 fied his expectation. The blow he had struck had 
 blimted the edge of his anger, and the unforeseen ex- 
 tent of the hurt inflicted did not alter the fact that 
 his weapon had broken in his hands. He now saw 
 that his rage against Flamel was only the last pro- 
 jection of a passionate self-disgust. This conscious- 
 ness did not dull his dislike of the man ; it simply 
 made reprisals inefiectual. Flamel's unwillingness to 
 quarrel with him was the last stage of his abasement. 
 
 In the light of this final humiliation his assump- 
 tion 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 
 [ 133 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 involun- 
 tary readjustment of his vision, she had once more 
 become the central point of consciousness. 
 
 [ 134 J 
 
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 alter- 
 native 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 Hamel'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 some one else. 
 
 As he followed her upstairs he felt a sudden stir- 
 ring of his dormant anger. His sentiments had lost 
 [135 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 their artificial 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 dominant 
 thought : the sense that he and she had passed 
 through the fusion of love and had emerged from 
 it as incommimicably apart as though the transmu- 
 tation 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 dropped 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. 
 
 " There 's something that I want to say to you," 
 he began. 
 
 She held his gaze, but her color deepened. He 
 noticed again, with a jealous pang, how her beauty 
 [136] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 River- 
 side Drive," he went on, the utterance of the charge 
 reviving his anger. 
 
 "Ah," she minrmured. 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 aU you have to 
 say.?" 
 
 " Do you wish me to explain ? " she asked proudly. 
 
 " Do you imply I have n't the right to ? " 
 
 "I imply nothing. I will tell you whatever you 
 [ 137 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 does n't do. She 
 doesn't slink about in out-of-the-way streets with 
 men. Why could n'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 voice that somehow had an under-note of warn- 
 ing, "He wished to bid me good-bye. 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 for- 
 get 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 
 [ 138 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 in- 
 creased 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. 
 
 [ 139 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 " 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. Did n't he 
 tell you it was I who published Mrs. Aubyn's let- 
 ters ? Answer me that." 
 
 " No," she said ; and after a moment which seemed 
 given to the weighing of alternatives, she added: 
 " No one told me." 
 
 [ 140 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 " You did n'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 sus- 
 pected — 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 ex- 
 plain." 
 
 Glennard, unconsciously, had moved nearer. He 
 breathed like a man who has been running. "You 
 knew, then, you knew — " he stammered. The avowal 
 [141 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 sus- 
 pected 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 youVe done nothing, you've said 
 nothing, you've made no sign, you've lived along- 
 side of me as if it had made no difference — no differ- 
 ence in either of otu- 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 have n't you any sense of shame ? " 
 
 He preserved sufficient lucidity, as the words pom-ed 
 from him, to see how fatally they invited her deri- 
 sion ; 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. 
 
 [ 142 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 "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 . . .P " he whispered. 
 
 " Oh, God — oh, God — " she sobbed. She dropped 
 beside him and hid her anguish against his knees. 
 They clxmg thus in silence a long time, driven to- 
 gether 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 watch- 
 ing her as she wandered away from him. 
 
 " You hate me," broke from him. 
 
 She made no answer. 
 
 [ 143 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 " 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 rettUTied 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 
 doit.?" 
 
 " 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 mak- 
 ing 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." 
 [ 144 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 " Good heavens ! If there were any reparation — ■" 
 
 He rose quickly and crossed the space that divided 
 
 them. " Why did you never speak ? " 
 " Have n'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 'd 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 mtirmured. " 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 '11 hate me ? " 
 "No — but that you'll hate me. Let me xmder- 
 stand without your telling me." 
 [ 145 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 "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 have n't the right to, you mean ? " 
 
 " I mean that you '11 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 justi' 
 fled in ordering me out of the house." 
 
 She answered him with a glance of divination. " I 
 shall understand — but you '11 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 stiU looked at him 
 without anger. " What would be the use ? " she said 
 with a note of sadness. 
 
 " Ah, I did n't ask that^'' he penitently murmured. 
 
 « Well, then— " 
 
 To this adjuration he made no response beyond 
 [ 146 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 that of gazing at her with an eye which seemed now 
 to view her as a mere factor in an immense redistri- 
 bution of meanings. 
 
 "I insulted Flamel to-day. I let him see that I 
 suspected him of having told you. I hated him be- 
 cause he knew about the letters." 
 
 He caught the spreading horror of her eyes, and 
 for an instant he had to grapple with the new temp- 
 tation 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. 
 
 [147 J 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 " 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 re- 
 peated, "and he never told you of the letters — " 
 
 She sprang to her feet. "How can you?" she 
 flamed. "How dare you? That—r 
 
 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 dif- 
 ferent levels." 
 
 " I 'm on yours, wherever it is ! " 
 
 He lifted his head and their gaze flowed together. 
 
 [148 ] 
 
xrv 
 
 THE great renewals take effect as impercepti- 
 bly 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 
 a new language; and he had to grope for her 
 through the dense fog of his humiliation, the dis- 
 torting 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 oiu? nakedness. If 
 Glennard did not hate his wife it was slowly, suiFer- 
 ingly, that there was bom in him that profoimder 
 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 
 [ 149 J 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 subject that lay between them like a hatinted wood. 
 But every word, every action, seemed to glance at 
 it, to draw toward it, as though a foimt of healing 
 sprang in its poisoned shade. K only they might cut 
 a way through the thicket to that restoring spring ! 
 Glennard, watching his wife with the intentness 
 of a wanderer to whom no natural sign is negligeable, 
 saw that she had taken temporary refuge in the pur- 
 pose 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 sign of their bondage. Their 
 shared renunciations drew her nearer to him, helped, 
 [150] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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. 
 
 It was as though a latent presence had become 
 visible to both. Glennard 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 how it hvui him. It was just what I meant to 
 do, of course ; but I can't leave him to that false 
 impression ; I must write him." 
 [161 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 did n't care." 
 
 «Ah!" 
 
 He stiQ stood looking down on her. "Don't you 
 want me to set that right ? " he pursued. 
 
 She lifted her head and fixed him bravely. "It 
 is n't necessary," she said. 
 
 Glennard flushed with the shock of the retort; 
 then, with a gesture of comprehension, "No," he 
 said, " with you it could n't be ; but I might still set 
 myself right." 
 
 She looked at him gently. "Don't I," she mur- 
 mured, " do that .? " 
 
 " In being yoiu-self merely ? Alas, the rehabilita- 
 tion'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 
 [152] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 caught her hands. "Don't you see that it's become 
 aji 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?" 
 
 [153 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 "That it does her no good — all youVe feeling, 
 all you're suffering. Can it be that it makes no dif- 
 ference ? " 
 
 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 commvmi- 
 cation. 
 
 It was she who, after a while, began to speak, with 
 a new suffiising 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 tem- 
 ples — the temples of the unclean gods — purified 
 them by turning them to their own uses ? I 've al- 
 ways 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 
 [ 154 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 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 imderstanding, that might 
 never have come to us if we hadn't been in such 
 great need. . ." 
 
 She moved over to him and laid a hand on his. 
 His head was bent and he did not change his atti- 
 tude. 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. 
 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 should n'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 had n't understood ! I took every- 
 [155 ] 
 
THE TOUCHSTONE 
 
 thing 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 yau in return ! " 
 
 His wife's cry caught him up. " It is n't that she 's 
 given me to you — it is that she 's given you to your- 
 self." 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 youVe never before been what 
 she thought you, and that now, so wonderfully, she 's 
 made you into the man she loved ? That '* worth suf- 
 fering 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. 
 
 THE END 
 
BY EDITH WHARTON 
 THE GREATER INCLINATION 
 
 12nio $1.50 
 
 CONTENTS 
 The Muse's Tragedy A Journey 
 
 The Pelican Souls Belated 
 
 A Coward The Twilight of the God 
 
 A Cup of Cold Water The Portrait 
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS 
 
 IT 
 Eight pieces of delicate texture and artistic conception. Every 
 one of them has the external shape and coloring of the world in 
 which we mingle day by day, and every one of them is at heart 
 a poignant spiritual tragedy. This may sound like extravagant 
 praise, but no conventional commendation would be adequate 
 for such a book. Between these stories and those of the ordi- 
 nary entertaining sort there is a great gulf fixed. — The Dial. 
 
 IT 
 Marked by great technical skill, by keen humor, and by a style 
 which is individual and striking. There is a quality of distinction 
 about her work not merely of style but of character. — The New 
 
 Tork Sun. 
 
 IT 
 
 This book of short stories comes out of America, and it is good. 
 It is very good. Mrs. Wharton is one of the few to grasp that ob- 
 vious but much neglected fact that the first business of a writer 
 is to be able to write. "The Greater Inclination " is distinguished 
 and deUghtful. — The Academy. 
 
 IT 
 If we were to single out one book from those that have been 
 published this season as exhibiting in the highest degree that 
 
rare creative power called literary genius, we should name "The 
 Greater Inclination," by Mrs. Edith Wharton. — Tht Bookman. 
 
 IT 
 Her style is as finished as a cameo, and there is nowhere an 
 indication of haste or crudity or the least inattention to detail. 
 Only a woman to the manner born in society, a woman, too, 
 whose literary favorites or her literary masters may have been 
 Thackeray or James, since she partakes of the spirit of the one, 
 and has followed the exquisite workmanship of the other, could 
 have written "The PeUcan" or "Souls Belated." — lAteratvre. 
 
 IT 
 Mrs. Wharton has not only observed people carefully, but has 
 really perceived the subtle significance of their ordinary as- 
 pects, so that her figures are not only individuals but types. 
 This sympathetic and suggestive portrayal and the generally 
 optimistic and moral tone make "The Greater Inclination" a 
 book of really great value. — Boston Transcript. 
 
 IT 
 Mrs. Wharton shows us so much delicacy of touch, so much 
 clarity and neatness of style, and at times so much profundity 
 of comprehension as to make her volume quite unique among 
 the books that have been sent to us this year. . . . We could 
 go on quoting indefinitely, so full is Mrs. Wharton's book of 
 thoughts that are startUngly original in substance and given 
 with a most vivid sense of form ; but we prefer to commend the 
 volume most unreservedly to every reader, since nothing that 
 we have seen this year in fiction-writing has seemed to us so 
 memorable, both in its choice of subjects, its mastery of style, 
 and its piquant art that makes one think and wonder. — N. T. 
 Commercial Adeertiser. 
 
 Charles Scribner's Sons, Publishers 
 
 lSa-lS7 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 
 
D. B. Updike 
 
 The Merrymount Press 
 
 Boston