The Touchstone | Page 5

her rich aunt; and if he should have the luck to pick up a
dinner-invitation he might join her there without extra outlay.
He moved about the room, lingering here and there in a tentative
affectation of interest; but though the men greeted him pleasantly no
one asked him to dine. Doubtless they were all engaged, these men who
could afford to pay for their dinners, who did not have to hunt for
invitations as a beggar rummages for a crust in an ash- barrel! But
no--as Hollingsworth left the lessening circle about the table an
admiring youth called out--"Holly, stop and dine!"

Hollingsworth turned on him the crude countenance that looked like the
wrong side of a more finished face. "Sorry I can't. I'm in for a beastly
banquet."
Glennard threw himself into an arm-chair. Why go home in the rain to
dress? It was folly to take a cab to the opera, it was worse folly to go
there at all. His perpetual meetings with Alexa Trent were as unfair to
the girl as they were unnerving to himself. Since he couldn't marry her,
it was time to stand aside and give a better man the chance--and his
thought admitted the ironical implication that in the terms of
expediency the phrase might stand for Hollingsworth.

II
He dined alone and walked home to his rooms in the rain. As he turned
into Fifth Avenue he caught the wet gleam of carriages on their way to
the opera, and he took the first side street, in a moment of irritation
against the petty restrictions that thwarted every impulse. It was
ridiculous to give up the opera, not because one might possibly be
bored there, but because one must pay for the experiment.
In his sitting-room, the tacit connivance of the inanimate had centred
the lamp-light on a photograph of Alexa Trent, placed, in the obligatory
silver frame, just where, as memory officiously reminded him,
Margaret Aubyn's picture had long throned in its stead. Miss Trent's
features cruelly justified the usurpation. She had the kind of beauty that
comes of a happy accord of face and spirit. It is not given to many to
have the lips and eyes of their rarest mood, and some women go
through life behind a mask expressing only their anxiety about the
butcher's bill or their inability to see a joke. With Miss Trent, face and
mind had the same high serious contour. She looked like a throned
Justice by some grave Florentine painter; and it seemed to Glennard
that her most salient attribute, or that at least to which her conduct gave
most consistent expression, was a kind of passionate justice--the
intuitive feminine justness that is so much rarer than a reasoned
impartiality. Circumstances had tragically combined to develop this
instinct into a conscious habit. She had seen more than most girls of the
shabby side of life, of the perpetual tendency of want to cramp the
noblest attitude. Poverty and misfortune had overhung her childhood
and she had none of the pretty delusions about life that are supposed to

be the crowning grace of girlhood. This very competence, which gave
her a touching reasonableness, made Glennard's situation more difficult
than if he had aspired to a princess bred in the purple. Between them
they asked so little-- they knew so well how to make that little do--but
they understood also, and she especially did not for a moment let him
forget, that without that little the future they dreamed of was
impossible.
The sight of her photograph quickened Glennard's exasperation. He
was sick and ashamed of the part he was playing. He had loved her now
for two years, with the tranquil tenderness that gathers depth and
volume as it nears fulfilment; he knew that she would wait for him--but
the certitude was an added pang. There are times when the constancy of
the woman one cannot marry is almost as trying as that of the woman
one does not want to.
Glennard turned up his reading-lamp and stirred the fire. He had a long
evening before him and he wanted to crowd out thought with action.
He had brought some papers from his office and he spread them out on
his table and squared himself to the task. . . .
It must have been an hour later that he found himself automatically
fitting a key into a locked drawer. He had no more notion than a
somnambulist of the mental process that had led up to this action. He
was just dimly aware of having pushed aside the papers and the heavy
calf volumes that a moment before had bounded his horizon, and of
laying in their place, without a trace of conscious volition, the parcel he
had taken from the