The Legend by Edith Wharton — Read

IT had been arranged that Pellerin, after the meeting of the Uplift / Club, should join Bernald at his rooms and spend the night there, / instead of returning to Portchester. The plan had been eagerly / elaborated by the young man, but he had been unprepared for the alacrity / with which his wonderful friend accepted it. He was beginning to see / that it was a part of Pellerin's wonderfulness to fall in, quite simply / and naturally, with any arrangements made for his convenience, or / tending to promote the convenience of others. Bernald felt that his / extreme docility in such matters was proportioned to the force of / resistance which, for nearly half a life-time, had kept him, with his / back to the wall, fighting alone against the powers of darkness. In such / a scale of values how little the small daily alternatives must weigh!

At the close of Howland Wade's discourse, Bernald, charged with his / prodigious secret, had felt the need to escape for an instant from / the liberated rush of talk. The interest of watching Pellerin was so / perilously great that the watcher felt it might, at any moment, betray / him. He lingered in the crowded drawing-room long enough to see his / friend enclosed in a mounting tide, above which Mrs. Beecher Bain and / Miss Fosdick actively waved their conversational tridents; then he took / refuge, at the back of the house, in a small dim library where, in his / younger days, he had discussed personal immortality and the problem of / consciousness with beautiful girls whose names he could not remember.