punctuality; but the altered conditions of her life, the vistas of
new relationships disclosed by every phrase, made her
communications as impersonal as a piece of journalism. It was as
though the state, the world, indeed, had taken her off his hands,
assuming the maintenance of a temperament that had long exhausted
his slender store of reciprocity.

In the retrospective light shed by the letters he was blinded to
their specific meaning. He was not a man who concerned himself
with literature, and they had been to him, at first, simply the
extension of her brilliant talk, later the dreaded vehicle of a
tragic importunity. He knew, of course, that they were wonderful;
that, unlike the authors who give their essence to the public and
keep only a dry rind for their friends, Mrs. Aubyn had stored of
her rarest vintage for this hidden sacrament of tenderness.
Sometimes, indeed, he had been oppressed, humiliated almost, by
the multiplicity of her allusions, the wide scope of her
interests, her persistence in forcing her superabundance of
thought and emotion into the shallow receptacle of his sympathy;
but he had never thought of the letters objectively, as the
production of a distinguished woman; had never measured the
literary significance of her oppressive prodigality. He was
almost frightened now at the wealth in his hands; the obligation
of her love had never weighed on him like this gift of her
imagination: it was as though he had accepted from her something
to which even a reciprocal tenderness could not have justified his
claim.

He sat a long time staring at the scattered pages on his desk; and
in the sudden realization of what they meant he could almost fancy