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The Touchstone by Edith Wharton
page 83 of 112 (74%)


XI


As Glennard, in the raw February sunlight, mounted the road to the
cemetery, he felt the beatitude that comes with an abrupt
cessation of physical pain. He had reached the point where self-
analysis ceases; the impulse that moved him was purely intuitive.
He did not even seek a reason for it, beyond the obvious one that
his desire to stand by Margaret Aubyn's grave was prompted by no
attempt at a sentimental reparation, but rather by the vague need
to affirm in some way the reality of the tie between them.

The ironical promiscuity of death had brought Mrs. Aubyn back to
share the narrow hospitality of her husband's last lodging; but
though Glennard knew she had been buried near New York he had
never visited her grave. He was oppressed, as he now threaded the
long avenues, by a chilling vision of her return. There was no
family to follow her hearse; she had died alone, as she had lived;
and the "distinguished mourners" who had formed the escort of the
famous writer knew nothing of the woman they were committing to
the grave. Glennard could not even remember at what season she
had been buried; but his mood indulged the fancy that it must have
been on some such day of harsh sunlight, the incisive February
brightness that gives perspicuity without warmth. The white
avenues stretched before him interminably, lined with stereotyped
emblems of affliction, as though all the platitudes ever uttered
had been turned to marble and set up over the unresisting dead.
Here and there, no doubt, a frigid urn or an insipid angel
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