The Touchstone | Page 4

if, in turning over old papers,
his hand lit on her letters, the touch filled him with inarticulate
misery. . . .
"She had so few intimate friends . . . that letters will be of special

value." So few intimate friends! For years she had had but one; one
who in the last years had requited her wonderful pages, her tragic
outpourings of love, humility, and pardon, with the scant phrases by
which a man evades the vulgarest of sentimental importunities. He had
been a brute in spite of himself, and sometimes, now that the
remembrance of her face had faded, and only her voice and words
remained with him, he chafed at his own inadequacy, his stupid
inability to rise to the height of her passion. His egoism was not of a
kind to mirror its complacency in the adventure. To have been loved by
the most brilliant woman of her day, and to have been incapable of
loving her, seemed to him, in looking back, the most derisive evidence
of his limitations; and his remorseful tenderness for her memory was
complicated with a sense of irritation against her for having given him
once for all the measure of his emotional capacity. It was not often,
however, that he thus probed the past. The public, in taking possession
of Mrs. Aubyn, had eased his shoulders of their burden. There was
something fatuous in an attitude of sentimental apology toward a
memory already classic: to reproach one's self for not having loved
Margaret Aubyn was a good deal like being disturbed by an inability to
admire the Venus of Milo. From her cold niche of fame she looked
down ironically enough on his self-flagellations. . . . It was only when
he came on something that belonged to her that he felt a sudden
renewal of the old feeling, the strange dual impulse that drew him to
her voice but drove him from her hand, so that even now, at sight of
anything she had touched, his heart contracted painfully. It happened
seldom nowadays. Her little presents, one by one, had disappeared from
his rooms, and her letters, kept from some unacknowledged puerile
vanity in the possession of such treasures, seldom came beneath his
hand. . . .
"Her letters will be of special value--" Her letters! Why, he must have
hundreds of them--enough to fill a volume. Sometimes it used to seem
to him that they came with every post--he used to avoid looking in his
letter-box when he came home to his rooms-- but her writing seemed to
spring out at him as he put his key in the door--.
He stood up and strolled into the other room. Hollingsworth, lounging
away from the window, had joined himself to a languidly convivial
group of men to whom, in phrases as halting as though they struggled

to define an ultimate idea, he was expounding the cursed nuisance of
living in a hole with such a damned climate that one had to get out of it
by February, with the contingent difficulty of there being no place to
take one's yacht to in winter but that other played-out hole, the Riviera.
From the outskirts of this group Glennard wandered to another, where a
voice as different as possible from Hollingsworth's colorless organ
dominated another circle of languid listeners.
"Come and hear Dinslow talk about his patent: admission free," one of
the men sang out in a tone of mock resignation.
Dinslow turned to Glennard the confident pugnacity of his smile. "Give
it another six months and it'll be talking about itself," he declared. "It's
pretty nearly articulate now."
"Can it say papa?" someone else inquired.
Dinslow's smile broadened. "You'll be deuced glad to say papa to IT a
year from now," he retorted. "It'll be able to support even you in
affluence. Look here, now, just let me explain to you--"
Glennard moved away impatiently. The men at the club--all but those
who were "in it"--were proverbially "tired" of Dinslow's patent, and
none more so than Glennard, whose knowledge of its merits made it
loom large in the depressing catalogue of lost opportunities. The
relations between the two men had always been friendly, and Dinslow's
urgent offers to "take him in on the ground floor" had of late intensified
Glennard's sense of his own inability to meet good luck half way. Some
of the men who had paused to listen were already in evening clothes,
others on their way home to dress; and Glennard, with an accustomed
twinge of humiliation, said to himself that if he lingered among them it
was in the miserable hope that one of the number might ask him to dine.
Miss Trent had told him that she was to go to the opera that evening
with