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 young men, it seemed to him natural to infer that
Mrs. Aubyn had refurnished in the same manner the void he was not
unwilling his departure should have left. But in the dissolution
of sentimental partnerships it is seldom that both associates are
able to withdraw their funds at the same time; and Glennard