The Touchstone | Page 7

elders.
Husbands who are notoriously inopportune, may even die
inopportunely, and this was the revenge that Mr. Aubyn, some two
years after her return to Hillbridge, took upon his injured wife. He died
precisely at the moment when Glennard was beginning to criticise her.
It was not that she bored him; she did what was infinitely worse--she
made him feel his inferiority. The sense of mental equality had been
gratifying to his raw ambition; but as his self-knowledge defined itself,
his understanding of her also increased; and if man is at times indirectly
flattered by the moral superiority of woman, her mental ascendency is
extenuated by no such oblique tribute to his powers. The attitude of
looking up is a strain on the muscles; and it was becoming more and
more Glennard's opinion that brains, in a woman, should be merely the
obverse of beauty. To beauty Mrs. Aubyn could lay no claim; and
while she had enough prettiness to exasperate him by her incapacity to
make use of it, she seemed invincibly ignorant of any of the little
artifices whereby women contrive to palliate their defects and even to

turn them into graces. Her dress never seemed a part of her; all her
clothes had an impersonal air, as though they had belonged to someone
else and been borrowed in an emergency that had somehow become
chronic. She was conscious enough of her deficiencies to try to amend
them by rash imitations of the most approved models; but no woman
who does not dress well intuitively will ever do so by the light of
reason, and Mrs. Aubyn's plagiarisms, to borrow a metaphor of her
trade, somehow never seemed to be incorporated with the text.
Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her
hair. The fame that came to Mrs. Aubyn with her second book left
Glennard's imagination untouched, or had at most the negative effect of
removing her still farther from the circle of his contracting sympathies.
We are all the sport of time; and fate had so perversely ordered the
chronology of Margaret Aubyn's romance that when her husband died
Glennard felt as though he had lost a friend.
It was not in his nature to be needlessly unkind; and though he was in
the impregnable position of the man who has given a woman no more
definable claim on him than that of letting her fancy that he loves her,
he would not for the world have accentuated his advantage by any
betrayal of indifference. During the first year of her widowhood their
friendship dragged on with halting renewals of sentiment, becoming
more and more a banquet of empty dishes from which the covers were
never removed; then Glennard went to New York to live and
exchanged the faded pleasures of intercourse for the comparative
novelty of correspondence. Her letters, oddly enough, seemed at first to
bring her nearer than her presence. She had adopted, and she
successfully maintained, a note as affectionately impersonal as his own;
she wrote ardently of her work, she questioned him about his, she even
bantered him on the inevitable pretty girl who was certain before long
to divert the current of his confidences. To Glennard, who was almost a
stranger in New York, the sight of Mrs. Aubyn's writing was like a
voice of reassurance in surroundings as yet insufficiently aware of him.
His vanity found a retrospective enjoyment in the sentiment his heart
had rejected, and this factitious emotion drove him once or twice to
Hillbridge, whence, after scenes of evasive tenderness, he returned
dissatisfied with himself and her. As he made room for himself in New
York and peopled the space he had cleared with the sympathies at the

disposal of agreeable and self-confident young men, it seemed to him
natural to infer that Mrs. Aubyn had refurnished in the same manner the
void he was not unwilling his departure should have left. But in the
dissolution of sentimental partnerships it is seldom that both associates
are able to withdraw their funds at the same time; and Glennard
gradually learned that he stood for the venture on which Mrs. Aubyn
had irretrievably staked her all. It was not the kind of figure he cared to
cut. He had no fancy for leaving havoc in his wake and would have
preferred to sow a quick growth of oblivion in the spaces wasted by his
unconsidered inroads; but if he supplied the seed it was clearly Mrs.
Aubyn's business to see to the raising of the crop. Her attitude seemed
indeed to throw his own reasonableness into distincter relief: so that
they might have stood for thrift and improvidence in an allegory of the
affections.
It was not that Mrs. Aubyn permitted herself to