“But if she wanted it published?”
“Wanted it? How do we know she did?”
“Why, I heard she’d left the letters to the man—whoever he is—with directions that they should be published after his death—”
“I don’t believe it,” Mrs. Touchett declared.
“He’s dead then, is he?” one of the men asked.
“Why, you don’t suppose if he were alive he could ever hold up his head again, with these letters being read by everybody?” Mrs. Touchett protested. “It must have been horrible enough to know they’d been written to him; but to publish them! No man could have done it and no woman could have told him to—”
“Oh, come, come,” Dresham judicially interposed; “after all, they’re not love-letters.”
“No—that’s the worst of it; they’re unloved letters,” Mrs. Touchett retorted.
“Then, obviously, she needn’t have written them; whereas the man, poor devil, could hardly help receiving them.”
“Perhaps he counted on the public to save him the trouble of reading them,” said young Hartly, who was in the cynical stage.
Mrs. Armiger turned her reproachful loveliness to Dresham. “From the way you defend him I believe you know who he is.”
Every one looked at Dresham, and his wife smiled with the superior air of the woman who is in her husband’s professional secrets. Dresham shrugged his shoulders.
“What have I said to defend him?”
“You called him a poor devil—you pitied him.”
“A man who could let Margaret Aubyn write to him in that way? Of course I pity him.”
“Then you must know who he is,” cried Mrs. Armiger with a triumphant air of penetration.
Hartly and Flamel laughed and Dresham shook his head. “No one knows; not even the publishers; so they tell me at least.”
“So they tell you to tell us,” Hartly astutely amended; and Mrs. Armiger added, with the appearance of carrying the argument a point farther, “But even if he’s dead and she’s dead, somebody must have given the letters to the publishers.”
“A little bird, probably,” said Dresham, smiling indulgently on her deduction.
“A little bird of prey then—a vulture, I should say—” another man interpolated.
“Oh, I’m not with you there,” said Dresham easily. “Those letters belonged to the public.”
“How can any letters belong to the public that weren’t written to the public?” Mrs. Touchett interposed.
“Well, these were, in a sense. A personality as big as Margaret Aubyn’s belongs to the world. Such a mind is part of the general fund of thought. It’s the penalty of greatness—one becomes a monument historique. Posterity pays the cost of keeping one up, but on condition that one is always open to the public.”
“I don’t see that that exonerates the man who gives up the keys of the sanctuary, as it were.”
“Who was he?” another voice inquired.
“Who was he? Oh, nobody, I fancy—the letter-box, the slit in the wall through which the letters passed to posterity….”
“But she never meant them for posterity!”
“A woman shouldn’t write such letters if she doesn’t mean them to be published….”
“She shouldn’t write them to such a man!” Mrs. Touchett scornfully corrected.
“I never keep letters,” said Mrs. Armiger, under the obvious impression that she was contributing a valuable point to the discussion.
There was a general laugh, and Flamel, who had not spoken, said lazily, “You women are too incurably subjective. I venture to say that most men would see in those letters merely their immense literary value, their significance as documents. The personal side doesn’t count where there’s so much else.”
“Oh, we all know you haven’t any principles,” Mrs. Armiger declared; and Alexa Glennard, lifting an indolent smile, said: “I shall never write you a love-letter, Mr. Flamel.”
Glennard moved away impatiently. Such talk was as tedious as the buzzing of gnats. He wondered why his wife had wanted to drag him on such a senseless expedition…. He hated Flamel’s crowd—and what business had Flamel himself to interfere in that way, standing up for the publication of the letters as though Glennard needed his defence? …
Glennard turned his head and saw that Flamel had drawn a seat to Alexa’s elbow and was speaking to her in a low tone. The other groups had scattered, straying in twos along the deck. It came over Glennard that he should never again be able to see Flamel speaking to his wife without the sense of sick mistrust that now loosened his joints….
Alexa, the next morning, over their early breakfast, surprised her husband by an unexpected request.
“Will you bring me those letters from town?” she asked.
“What letters?” he said, putting down his cup. He felt himself as vulnerable as a man who is lunged at in the dark.
“Mrs. Aubyn’s. The book they were all talking about yesterday.”
Glennard, carefully measuring his second cup of tea, said with deliberation, “I didn’t know you cared about that sort of thing.”
She was, in fact, not a great reader, and a new book seldom reached her till it was, so to speak, on the home stretch; but she replied with a gentle tenacity, “I think it would interest me because I read her life last year.”
“Her life? Where did you get that?”
“Some one lent it to me when it came out—Mr. Flamel, I think.”
His first impulse was to exclaim, “Why the devil do you borrow books of Flamel? I can buy you all you want—” but he felt himself irresistibly forced into an attitude of smiling compliance. “Flamel always has the newest books going, hasn’t he? You must be careful, by the way, about returning what he lends you. He’s rather crotchety about his library.”
“Oh, I’m always very careful,” she said, with a touch of competence that struck him; and she added, as he caught up his hat: “Don’t forget the letters.”
Why had she asked for the book? Was her sudden wish to see it the result of some hint of Flamel’s? The thought turned Glennard sick, but he preserved sufficient lucidity to tell himself, a moment later, that his last hope of self-control would be lost if he yielded to the temptation of seeing a hidden purpose in everything she said and did. How much Flamel guessed, he had no means of divining; nor could he predicate, from what he knew of the man, to what use his inferences might be put. The very qualities that had made Flamel a useful adviser made him the most dangerous of accomplices. Glennard felt himself agrope among alien forces that his own act had set in motion….
Alexa was a woman of few requirements; but her wishes, even in trifles, had a definiteness that distinguished them from the fluid impulses of her kind. He knew that, having once asked for the book, she would not forget it; and he put aside, as an ineffectual expedient, his momentary idea of applying for it at the circulating library and telling her that all the copies were out. If the book was to be bought, it had better be bought at once. He left his office earlier than usual and turned in at the first book-shop on his way to the train. The show-window was stacked with conspicuously lettered