Edith Wharton

The Touchstone Edith Wharton

HE dined alone and walked home to his rooms in the rain. As he turned into Fifth Avenue hecaught the wet gleam of carriages on their way to the opera, and he took the first side street, in amoment of irritation against the petty restrictions that thwarted every impulse. It was ridiculous togive up the opera, not because one might possibly be bored there, but because one must pay for theexperiment. In his sitting-room, the tacit connivance of the inanimate had centred the lamp-light on aphotograph of Alexa Trent, placed, in the obligatory silver frame, just where, as memory officiouslyreminded him, Margaret Aubyn's picture had long throned in its stead. Miss Trent's features cruellyjustified 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 throughlife behind a mask expressing only their anxiety about the butcher's bill or their inability to see ajoke. With Miss Trent, face and mind had the same high serious contour. She looked like a thronedJustice 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 passionatejustice-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 seenmore than most girls of the shabby side of life, of the perpetual tendency of want to cramp thenoblest attitude. Poverty and misfortune had overhung her childhood and she had none of thepretty delusions about life that are supposed to be the crowning grace of girlhood. This verycompetence, which gave her a touching reasonableness, made Glennard's situation more difficultthan if he had aspired to a princess bred in the purple. Between them they asked so little-theyknew so well how to make that little do-but they understood also, and she especially did not for amoment let him forget, that without that little the future they dreamed of was impossible