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<h2> X </h2>
<p>His wife knew and she made no sign. Glennard found himself in the case of
the seafarer who, closing his eyes at nightfall on a scene he thinks to
put leagues behind him before day, wakes to a port-hole framing the same
patch of shore. From the kind of exaltation to which his resolve had
lifted him he dropped to an unreasoning apathy. His impulse of confession
had acted as a drug to self-reproach. He had tried to shift a portion of
his burden to his wife's shoulders and now that she had tacitly refused to
carry it, he felt the load too heavy to be taken up again.</p>
<p>A fortunate interval of hard work brought respite from this phase of
sterile misery. He went West to argue an important case, won it, and came
back to fresh preoccupations. His own affairs were thriving enough to
engross him in the pauses of his professional work, and for over two
months he had little time to look himself in the face. Not unnaturally—for
he was as yet unskilled in the subtleties of introspection—he
mistook his temporary insensibility for a gradual revival of moral health.</p>
<p>He told himself that he was recovering his sense of proportion, getting to
see things in their true light; and if he now thought of his rash appeal
to his wife's sympathy it was as an act of folly from the consequences of
which he had been saved by the providence that watches over madmen. He had
little leisure to observe Alexa; but he concluded that the common-sense
momentarily denied him had counselled her uncritical acceptance of the
inevitable. If such a quality was a poor substitute for the passionate
justness that had once seemed to characterize her, he accepted the
alternative as a part of that general lowering of the key that seems
needful to the maintenance of the matrimonial duet. What woman ever
retained her abstract sense of justice where another woman was concerned?
Possibly the thought that he had profited by Mrs. Aubyn's tenderness was
not wholly disagreeable to his wife.</p>
<p>When the pressure of work began to lessen, and he found himself, in the
lengthening afternoons, able to reach home somewhat earlier, he noticed
that the little drawing-room was always full and that he and his wife
seldom had an evening alone together. When he was tired, as often
happened, she went out alone; the idea of giving up an engagement to
remain with him seemed not to occur to her. She had shown, as a girl,
little fondness for society, nor had she seemed to regret it during the
year they had spent in the country. He reflected, however, that he was
sharing the common lot of husbands, who proverbially mistake the early
ardors of housekeeping for a sign of settled domesticity. Alexa, at any
rate, was refuting his theory as inconsiderately as a seedling defeats the
gardener's expectations. An undefinable change had come over her. In one
sense it was a happy one, since she had grown, if not handsomer, at least
more vivid and expressive; her beauty had become more communicable: it was
as though she had learned the conscious exercise of intuitive attributes
and now used her effects with the discrimination of an artist skilled in
values. To a dispassionate critic (as Glennard now rated himself) the art
may at times have been a little too obvious. Her attempts at lightness
lacked spontaneity, and she sometimes rasped him by laughing like Julia
Armiger; but he had enough imagination to perceive that, in respect of the
wife's social arts, a husband necessarily sees the wrong side of the
tapestry.</p>
<p>In this ironical estimate of their relation Glennard found himself
strangely relieved of all concern as to his wife's feelings for Flamel.
From an Olympian pinnacle of indifference he calmly surveyed their
inoffensive antics. It was surprising how his cheapening of his wife put
him at ease with himself. Far as he and she were from each other they yet
had, in a sense, the tacit nearness of complicity. Yes, they were
accomplices; he could no more be jealous of her than she could despise
him. The jealousy that would once have seemed a blur on her whiteness now
appeared like a tribute to ideals in which he no longer believed....</p>
<p>Glennard was little given to exploring the outskirts of literature. He
always skipped the "literary notices" in the papers and he had small
leisure for the intermittent pleasures of the periodical. He had therefore
no notion of the prolonged reverberations which the "Aubyn Letters" had
awakened in the precincts of criticism. When the book ceased to be talked
about he supposed it had ceased to be read; and this apparent subsidence
of the agitation about it brought the reassuring sense that he had
exaggerated its vitality. The conviction, if it did not ease his
conscience, at least offered him the relative relief of obscurity: he felt
like an offender taken down from the pillory and thrust into the soothing
darkness of a cell.</p>
<p>But one evening, when Alexa had left him to go to a dance, he chanced to
turn over the magazines on her table, and the copy of the Horoscope, to
which he settled down with his cigar, confronted him, on its first page,
with a portrait of Margaret Aubyn. It was a reproduction of the photograph
that had stood so long on his desk. The desiccating air of memory had
turned her into the mere abstraction of a woman, and this unexpected
evocation seemed to bring her nearer than she had ever been in life. Was
it because he understood her better? He looked long into her eyes; little
personal traits reached out to him like caresses—the tired droop of
her lids, her quick way of leaning forward as she spoke, the movements of
her long expressive hands. All that was feminine in her, the quality he
had always missed, stole toward him from her unreproachful gaze; and now
that it was too late life had developed in him the subtler perceptions
which could detect it in even this poor semblance of herself. For a moment
he found consolation in the thought that, at any cost, they had thus been
brought together; then a flood of shame rushed over him. Face to face with
her, he felt himself laid bare to the inmost fold of consciousness. The
shame was deep, but it was a renovating anguish; he was like a man whom
intolerable pain has roused from the creeping lethargy of death....</p>
<p>He rose next morning to as fresh a sense of life as though his hour of
mute communion with Margaret Aubyn had been a more exquisite renewal of
their earlier meetings. His waking thought was that he must see her again;
and as consciousness affirmed itself he felt an intense fear of losing the
sense of her nearness. But she was still close to him; her presence
remained the sole reality in a world of shadows. All through his working
hours he was re-living with incredible minuteness every incident of their
obliterated past; as a man who has mastered the spirit of a foreign tongue
turns with renewed wonder to the pages his youth has plodded over. In this
lucidity of retrospection the most trivial detail had its significance,
and the rapture of recovery was embittered to Glennard by the perception
of all that he had missed. He had been pitiably, grotesquely stupid; and
there was irony in the thought that, but for the crisis through which he
was passing, he might have lived on in complacent ignorance of his loss.
It was as though she had bought him with her blood....</p>
<p>That evening he and Alexa dined alone. After dinner he followed her to the
drawing-room. He no longer felt the need of avoiding her; he was hardly
conscious of her presence. After a few words they lapsed into silence and
he sat smoking with his eyes on the fire. It was not that he was unwilling
to talk to her; he felt a curious desire to be as kind as possible; but he
was always forgetting that she was there. Her full bright presence,
through which the currents of life flowed so warmly, had grown as tenuous
as a shadow, and he saw so far beyond her—</p>
<p>Presently she rose and began to move about the room. She seemed to be
looking for something and he roused himself to ask what she wanted.</p>
<p>"Only the last number of the Horoscope. I thought I'd left it on this
table." He said nothing, and she went on: "You haven't seen it?"</p>
<p>"No," he returned coldly. The magazine was locked in his desk.</p>
<p>His wife had moved to the mantel-piece. She stood facing him and as he
looked up he met her tentative gaze. "I was reading an article in it—a
review of Mrs. Aubyn's letters," she added, slowly, with her deep,
deliberate blush.</p>
<p>Glennard stooped to toss his cigar into the fire. He felt a savage wish
that she would not speak the other woman's name; nothing else seemed to
matter. "You seem to do a lot of reading," he said.</p>
<p>She still earnestly confronted him. "I was keeping this for you—I
thought it might interest you," she said, with an air of gentle
insistence.</p>
<p>He stood up and turned away. He was sure she knew that he had taken the
review and he felt that he was beginning to hate her again.</p>
<p>"I haven't time for such things," he said, indifferently. As he moved to
the door he heard her take a precipitate step forward; then she paused and
sank without speaking into the chair from which he had risen.</p>
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