The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Touchstone, by Edith Wharton

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Title: The Touchstone

Author: Edith Wharton

Posting Date: July 12, 2008 [EBook #267]
Release Date: May, 1995

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TOUCHSTONE ***

Produced by Judith Boss

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 rain-streaked 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 concl