Read "The Verdict" by Edith Wharton online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
I HAD always thought Jack Gisburn rather a cheap genius -- though a good / fellow enough -- so it was no great surprise to me to hear that, in the / height of his glory, he had dropped his painting, married a rich widow, / and established himself in a villa on the Riviera. (Though I rather / thought it would have been Rome or Florence.)
"The height of his glory" -- that was what the women called it. I can / hear Mrs. Gideon Thwing -- his last Chicago sitter -- deploring his / unaccountable abdication. "Of course it's going to send the value of my / picture 'way up; but I don't think of that, Mr. Rickham -- the loss to / Arrt is all I think of. " The word, on Mrs. Thwing's lips, multiplied / its _rs_ as though they were reflected in an endless vista of mirrors. / And it was not only the Mrs. Thwings who mourned. Had not the exquisite / Hermia Croft, at the last Grafton Gallery show, stopped me before / Gisburn's "Moon-dancers" to say, with tears in her eyes: "We shall not / look upon its like again"?