The Touchstone | Page 3

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THE TOUCHSTONE By Edith Wharton

I
Professor Joslin, who, as our readers are doubtless aware, is engaged in
writing the life of Mrs. Aubyn, asks us to state that he will be greatly
indebted to any of the famous novelist's friends who will furnish him
with information concerning the period previous to her coming to
England. Mrs. Aubyn had so few intimate friends, and consequently so
few regular correspondents, that letters will be of special value.
Professor Joslin's address is 10 Augusta Gardens, Kensington, and he
begs us to say that he will promptly return any documents entrusted to
him."
Glennard dropped the Spectator and sat looking into the fire. The club
was filling up, but he still had to himself the small inner room, with its
darkening outlook down the rainstreaked prospect of Fifth Avenue. It
was all dull and dismal enough, yet a moment earlier his boredom had
been perversely tinged by a sense of resentment at the thought that, as
things were going, he might in time have to surrender even the despised
privilege of boring himself within those particular four walls. It was not
that he cared much for the club, but that the remote contingency of
having to give it up stood to him, just then, perhaps by very reason of
its insignificance and remoteness, for the symbol of his increasing
abnegations; of that perpetual paring-off that was gradually reducing
existence to the naked business of keeping himself alive. It was the
futility of his multiplied shifts and privations that made them seem
unworthy of a high attitude; the sense that, however rapidly he
eliminated the superfluous, his cleared horizon was likely to offer no
nearer view of the one prospect toward which he strained. To give up
things in order to marry the woman one loves is easier than to give
them up without being brought appreciably nearer to such a conclusion.
Through the open door he saw young Hollingsworth rise with a yawn

from the ineffectual solace of a brandy-and-soda and transport his
purposeless person to the window. Glennard measured his course with
a contemptuous eye. It was so like Hollingsworth to get up and look out
of the window just as it was growing too dark to see anything! There
was a man rich enough to do what he pleased--had he been capable of
being pleased--yet barred from all conceivable achievement by his own
impervious dulness; while, a few feet off, Glennard, who wanted only
enough to keep a decent coat on his back and a roof over the head of
the woman he loved, Glennard, who had sweated, toiled, denied
himself for the scant measure of opportunity that his zeal would have
converted into a kingdom--sat wretchedly calculating that, even when
he had resigned from the club, and knocked off his cigars, and given up
his Sundays out of town, he would still be no nearer attainment.
The Spectator had slipped to his feet and as he picked it up his eye fell
again on the paragraph addressed to the friends of Mrs. Aubyn. He had
read it for the first time with a scarcely perceptible quickening of
attention: her name had so long been public property that his eye
passed it unseeingly, as the crowd in the street hurries without a glance
by some familiar monument.
"Information concerning the period previous to her coming to
England. . . ." The words were an evocation. He saw her again as she
had looked at their first meeting, the poor woman of genius with her
long pale face and short-sighted eyes, softened a little by the grace of
youth and inexperience, but so incapable even then of any hold upon
the pulses. When she spoke, indeed, she was wonderful, more
wonderful, perhaps, than when later, to Glennard's fancy at least, the
conscious of memorable things uttered seemed to take from even her
most intimate speech the perfect bloom of privacy. It was in those
earliest days, if ever, that he had come near loving her; though even
then his sentiment had lived only in the intervals of its expression.
Later, when to be loved by her had been a state to touch any man's
imagination, the physical reluctance had, inexplicably, so overborne the
intellectual attraction, that the last years had been, to both of them, an
agony of conflicting impulses. Even now,