Mrs. Dresham immediately saw her advantage. “You haven’t read them? How very extraordinary! As Mrs. Armiger says, the book’s in the air; one breathes it in like the influenza.”
Glennard sat motionless, watching his wife.
“Perhaps it hasn’t reached the suburbs yet,” she said, with her unruffled smile.
“Oh, do let me come to you, then!” Mrs. Touchett cried; “anything for a change of air! I’m positively sick of the book and I can’t put it down. Can’t you sail us beyond its reach, Mr. Flamel?”
Flamel shook his head. “Not even with this breeze. Literature travels faster than steam nowadays. And the worst of it is that we can’t any of us give up reading; it’s as insidious as a vice and as tiresome as a virtue.”
“I believe it IS a vice, almost, to read such a book as the ‘Letters,'” said Mrs. Touchett. “It’s the woman’s soul, absolutely torn up by the roots–her whole self laid bare; and to a man who evidently didn’t care; who couldn’t have cared. I don’t mean to read another line; it’s too much like listening at a keyhole.”
“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.”
Everyone 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. . . .”