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--.