The Greater Inclination

The Greater Inclination

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Title: The Greater Inclination
Author: Edith Wharton
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THE GREATER INCLINATION

by EDITH WHARTON

TABLE OF CONTENTS
THE GREATER INCLINATION
I _The Muse's Tragedy_.
II A Journey.
III The Pelican.
IV Souls Belated.
V A Coward.
VI The Twilight of the God.
VII A Cup of Cold Water.

VIII The Portrait.

THE GREATER INCLINATION

THE MUSE'S TRAGEDY
Danyers afterwards liked to fancy that he had recognized Mrs. Anerton
at once; but that, of course, was absurd, since he had seen no portrait of
her--she affected a strict anonymity, refusing even her photograph to
the most privileged--and from Mrs. Memorall, whom he revered and
cultivated as her friend, he had extracted but the one impressionist
phrase: "Oh, well, she's like one of those old prints where the lines have
the value of color."
He was almost certain, at all events, that he had been thinking of Mrs.
Anerton as he sat over his breakfast in the empty hotel restaurant, and
that, looking up on the approach of the lady who seated herself at the
table near the window, he had said to himself, "That might be she."
Ever since his Harvard days--he was still young enough to think of
them as immensely remote--Danyers had dreamed of Mrs. Anerton, the
Silvia of Vincent Rendle's immortal sonnet-cycle, the Mrs. A. of the
Life and Letters. Her name was enshrined in some of the noblest
English verse of the nineteenth century--and of all past or future
centuries, as Danyers, from the stand-point of a maturer judgment, still
believed. The first reading of certain poems--of the Antinous, the Pia
Tolomei, the Sonnets to Silvia,--had been epochs in Danyers's growth,
and the verse seemed to gain in mellowness, in amplitude, in meaning
as one brought to its interpretation more experience of life, a finer
emotional sense. Where, in his boyhood, he had felt only the perfect,
the almost austere beauty of form, the subtle interplay of vowel-sounds,
the rush and fulness of lyric emotion, he now thrilled to the
close-packed significance of each line, the allusiveness of each
word--his imagination lured hither and thither on fresh trails of thought,
and perpetually spurred by the sense that, beyond what he had already

discovered, more marvellous regions lay waiting to be explored.
Danyers had written, at college, the prize essay on Rendle's poetry (it
chanced to be the moment of the great man's death); he had fashioned
the fugitive verse of his own storm-and-stress period on the forms
which Rendle had first given to English metre; and when two years
later the Life and Letters appeared, and the Silvia of the sonnets took
substance as Mrs. A., he had included in his worship of Rendle the
woman who had inspired not only such divine verse but such playful,
tender, incomparable prose.
Danyers never forgot the day when Mrs. Memorall happened to
mention that she knew Mrs. Anerton. He had known Mrs. Memorall for
a year or more, and had somewhat contemptuously classified her as the
kind of woman who runs cheap excursions to celebrities; when one
afternoon she remarked, as she put a second lump of sugar in his tea:
"Is it right this time? You're almost as particular as Mary Anerton."
"Mary Anerton?"
"Yes, I never can remember how she likes her tea. Either it's lemon
with sugar, or lemon without sugar, or cream without either, and
whichever it is must be put into the cup before the tea is poured in; and
if one hasn't remembered, one must begin all over