Edith Wharton: Complete Works. Edith Wharton

his consciousness where self-criticism cowered—Glennard’s course seemed justified by its merely material success. How could such a crop of innocent 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 married her instead of the other. It was what she had always wanted—to be with him—and she had gained her point at last….

      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 immediate 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 protection…. Yet a moment before he had almost hated her! … He laughed aloud at his senseless terrors…. He was off his balance, decidedly….

      “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 couldn’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. “Isn’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 domain. 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 course I shall let him know. You always seem to imply that I’m going to do something rude to Flamel.”

      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 himself 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.

      —————

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 heterogeneous 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 distaste 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 drive 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 themselves slipping more and more into Flamel’s intimacy. Alexa had once or twice said that she enjoyed meeting clever people; but her enjoyment took the negative form of a smiling receptivity; and Glennard felt 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 retina 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 circumstances to support the claims of the other two. This was Mrs. Dresham, the wife of the editor of the Radiator. Mrs. Dresham was a lady who had rescued herself from social obscurity by assuming the rôle 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 remarkableness. For the conceivable tedium of this duty, Mrs. Dresham was repaid by the fact that there were people 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-condemned by their inability to appreciate her. Under Dresham’s tutelage she had developed into a “thoughtful woman,” who read his leaders in the Radiator and bought the works he 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 wouldn’t spoil the afternoon by making people talk; though he reduced his annoyance 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.”

      Mrs. Dresham immediately saw her advantage. “You haven’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 hasn’t reached the suburbs yet,” she said with her unruffled 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?”

      Flamel shook his head. “Not even with this breeze. Literature travels faster than