impersonal
air, as though they had belonged to someone else and been borrowed in an
emergency that had somehow become chronic. She was conscious enough of
her deficiencies to try to amend them by rash imitations of the most
approved models; but no woman who does not dress well intuitively will
ever do so by the light of reason, and Mrs. Aubyn's plagiarisms, to
borrow a metaphor of her trade, somehow never seemed to be incorporated
with the text.

Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair.
The fame that came to Mrs. Aubyn with her second book left Glennard's
imagination untouched, or had at most the negative effect of removing
her still farther from the circle of his contracting sympathies. We are
all the sport of time; and fate had so perversely ordered the chronology
of Margaret Aubyn's romance that when her husband died Glennard felt as
though he had lost a friend.

It was not in his nature to be needlessly unkind; and though he was
in the impregnable position of the man who has given a woman no more
definable claim on him than that of letting her fancy that he loves
her, he would not for the world have accentuated his advantage by any
betrayal of indifference. During the first year of her widowhood their
friendship dragged on with halting renewals of sentiment, becoming more
and more a banquet of empty dishes from which the covers were never
removed; then Glennard went to New York to live and exchanged the faded
pleasures of intercourse for the comparative novelty of correspondence.
Her letters, oddly enough, seemed at first to bring her nearer than her
presence. She had adopted, and she successfully maintained, a note as
affectionately impersonal as his own; she wrote ardently of her work,
she questioned him about his, she even bantered him on the inevitable
pretty girl who was certain before long to divert the current of his
confidences. 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. His vanity found a
retrospective enjoyment in the sentiment his heart had rejected, and
this factitious emotion drove him once or twice to Hillbridge, whence,
after scenes of evasive tenderness, he returned dissatisfied with
himself and her. As he made room for himself in New York and peopled the
space he had cleared with the sympathies at the disposal of agreeable
and self-confident