Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 109.djvu/155



BY EDITH WHARTON

The shade of those our days that had no tongue.

I

was last winter, after a twelve years’ absence from New York, that I saw again, at one of the Jim Cumnors’ dinners, my old friend Halston Merrick.

The Cumnors’ house is one of the few where, even after such a lapse of time, one can be sure of finding familiar faces and picking up old threads; where for a moment one can abandon one’s self to the illusion that New York humanity is less unstable than its bricks and mortar. And that evening in particular I remember feeling that there could be no pleasanter way of re-entering the confused and careless world to which I was returning than through the quiet, softly-lit dining-room in which Mrs. Cumnor, with a characteristic sense of my needing to be broken in gradually, had contrived to assemble so many friendly faces.

I was glad to see them all, including the three or four I did not know, or failed to recognize, but had no difficulty in classing as in the tradition and of the group; but I was most of all glad—as I rather wonderingly found—to set eyes again on Halston Merrick.

He and I had been at Harvard together, for one thing, and had shared there curiosities and ardours a little outside the current tendencies: had, on the whole, been freer and less amenable to the accepted. Then, for the next few years, Merrick had been a vivid and promising figure in young American life. Handsome, free and fine, he had wandered and tasted and compared. After leaving Harvard he had spent two years at Oxford. He then accepted a private secretaryship to our Ambassador in England, and came back from this adventure with a fresh curiosity about public affairs at home, and the conviction that men of his kind did n’t play a large enough part in them. This led, first, to his running for a State Senatorship which he failed to get, and ultimately to a few months of intelligent activity in a municipal office. Soon after a change of party had deprived him of this post he published a small volume of rather hauntingly delicate sonnets, and, a year later, an odd uneven brilliant book on Municipal Government. After that one hardly knew where to look for his next appearance; but chance rather disappointingly VOL. 109 - NO. 2