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Updated: June 22, 2025
The sympathy of the cleverest woman in Hillbridge was balm to his craving for distinction: it was public confirmation of his secret sense that he was cut out for a bigger place. It must not be understood that Glennard was vain. Vanity contents itself with the coarsest diet; there is no palate so fastidious as that of self-distrust.
"Anything in the emblematic line?" asked the anaemic man behind the dripping counter. Glennard shook his head. "Just cut flowers? This way, then." The florist unlocked a glass door and led him down a moist green aisle.
"What DID you hear?" Glennard asked; and his wife interposed: "Won't you have another bit of cake, Julia? Or, Stephen, ring for some hot toast, please." Her tone betrayed a polite satiety of the topic under discussion. Glennard turned to the bell, but Mrs. Armiger pursued him with her lovely amazement. "Why, the 'Aubyn Letters' didn't you know about it?
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.
"And since when have you discovered that there was any question of business, as far as I was concerned?" Glennard flushed and his voice rose slightly. "Are you reproaching me for not having remembered it sooner?"
Dinner over, they returned to the veranda, where a moon, rising behind the old elm, was combining with that complaisant tree a romantic enlargement of their borders. Glennard had forgotten the cigars. He went to his study to fetch them, and in passing through the drawing-room he saw the second volume of the "Letters" lying open on his wife's table.
"I've imagined that you had reasons for still wishing me to be civil to him, as you call it." "Ah," said Glennard, with an effort at lightness; but his irony dropped, for something in her voice made him feel that he and she stood at last in that naked desert of apprehension where meaning skulks vainly behind speech. "And why did you imagine this?" The blood mounted to his forehead.
She ended with a laugh that had the effect of being a strayed echo of Mrs. Armiger's; and before Glennard could speak she had added, with her hand on the door, "Mr. Flamel stayed so late that I've hardly time to dress. The concert begins ridiculously early, and Julia dines at half-past seven "
The other groups had scattered, straying in twos along the deck. It came over Glennard that he should never again be able to see Flamel speaking to his wife without the sense of sick mistrust that now loosened his joints.... Alexa, the next morning, over their early breakfast, surprised her husband by an unexpected request. "Will you bring me those letters from town?" she asked.
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.
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