relief. He told himself that now the worst was over and things
would fall into perspective again. His wife and Flamel had turned
to other topics, and coming out on the veranda, he handed the
cigars to Flamel, saying, cheerfully--and yet he could have sworn
they were the last words he meant to utter!--"Look here, old man,
before you go down to Newport you must come out and spend a few
days with us--mustn't he, Alexa?"



VIII


Glennard had, perhaps unconsciously, counted on the continuance of
this easier mood. He had always taken pride in a certain
robustness of fibre that enabled him to harden himself against the
inevitable, to convert his failures into the building materials of
success. Though it did not even now occur to him that what he
called the inevitable had hitherto been the alternative he
happened to prefer, he was yet obscurely aware that his present
difficulty was one not to be conjured by any affectation of
indifference. Some griefs build the soul a spacious house--but in
this misery of Glennard's he could not stand upright. It pressed
against him at every turn. He told himself that this was because
there was no escape from the visible evidences of his act. The
"Letters" confronted him everywhere. People who had never opened
a book discussed them with critical reservations; to have read
them had become a social obligation in circles to which literature
never penetrates except in a personal guise.