e had so few intimate friends... that letters will be of special
value." So few intimate friends! For years she had had but one; one
who in the last years had requited her wonderful pages, her tragic
outpourings of love, humility, and pardon, with the scant phrases by
which a man evades the vulgarest of sentimental importunities. He
had been a brute in spite of himself, and sometimes, now that the
remembrance of her face had faded, and only her voice and words remained
with him, he chafed at his own inadequacy, his stupid inability to rise
to the height of her passion. His egoism was not of a kind to mirror its
complacency in the adventure. To have been loved by the most brilliant
woman of her day, and to have been incapable of loving her, seemed to
him, in looking back, the most derisive evidence of his limitations; and
his remorseful tenderness for her memory was complicated with a sense of
irritation against her for having given him once for all the measure of
his emotional capacity. It was not often, however, that he thus probed
the past. The public, in taking possession of Mrs. Aubyn, had eased his
shoulders of their burden. There was something fatuous in an attitude of
sentimental apology toward a memory already classic: to reproach one's
self for not having loved Margaret Aubyn was a good deal like being
disturbed by an inability to admire the Venus of Milo. From her
cold niche of fame she looked down ironically enough on his
self-flagellations.... It was only when he came on something that
belonged to her that he felt a sudden renewal of the old feeling, the
strange dual impulse that drew him to her voice but drove him from her
hand, so that even now, at sight of anything she had touched, his heart
contracted painfully. It happened seldom nowadays. Her little presents,
one by one, had disappeared from his rooms, and her letters, kept from
some unacknowledged puerile vanity in the possession of such treasures,
seldom came beneath his hand....

"Her letters will be of special value--" Her letters! Why, he must have
hundreds of them--enough to fill a volume. Sometimes it used to seem
to him that they came with every post--he used to avoid looking in his
letter-box when he came home to his rooms--but her writing seemed to
spring out at him as he put his key in the door--.

He stood up and strolled into the other room. Hollingsworth, lounging
away from the window, had joined himself to a languidly convivial group
of