Explore "The Legend" by Edith Wharton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
ARTHUR BERNALD could never afterward recall just when the first / conjecture flashed on him: oddly enough, there was no record of it / in the agitated jottings of his diary. But, as it seemed to him in / retrospect, he had always felt that the queer man at the Wades' must / be John Pellerin, if only for the negative reason that he couldn't / imaginably be any one else. It was impossible, in the confused pattern / of the century's intellectual life, to fit the stranger in anywhere, / save in the big gap which, some five and twenty years earlier, had been / left by Pellerin's unaccountable disappearance; and conversely, such a / man as the Wades' visitor couldn't have lived for sixty years without / filling, somewhere in space, a nearly equivalent void.
At all events, it was certainly not to Doctor Wade or to his mother that / Bernald owed the hint: the good unconscious Wades, one of whose chief / charms in the young man's eyes was that they remained so robustly / untainted by Pellerinism, in spite of the fact that Doctor Wade's / younger brother, Howland, was among its most impudently flourishing / high-priests.