Produced by Anne Soulard, Tiffany Vergon and the PG Online Distributed Proofreading Team THE GREATER INCLINATION By Edith Wharton TABLE OF CONTENTS THE GREATER INCLINATION I _The Muse’s Tragedy_. II _A Journey_. III _The Pelican_. IV _Souls Belated_. V _A Coward_. VI _The Twilight of the God_. VII _A Cup of Cold Water_. VIII _The Portrait_. THE GREATER INCLINATION THE MUSE’S TRAGEDY Danyers afterwards liked to fancy that he had recognized Mrs. Anerton at once; but that, of course, was absurd, since he had seen no portrait of her--she affected a strict anonymity, refusing even her photograph to the most privileged--and from Mrs. Memorall, whom he revered and cultivated as her friend, he had extracted but the one impressionist phrase: “Oh, well, she’s like one of those old prints where the lines have the value of color.” He was almost certain, at all events, that he had been thinking of Mrs. Anerton as he sat over his breakfast in the empty hotel restaurant, and that, looking up on the approach of the lady who seated herself at the table near the window, he had said to himself, “_That might be she_.” Ever since his Harvard days--he was still young enough to think of them as immensely remote--Danyers had dreamed of Mrs. Anerton, the Silvia of Vincent Rendle’s immortal sonnet-cycle, the Mrs. A. of the _Life and Letters_. Her name was enshrined in some of the noblest English verse of the nineteenth century--and of all past or future centuries, as Danyers, from the stand-point of a maturer judgment, still believed. The first reading of certain poems--of the _Antinous_, the _Pia Tolomei_, the _Sonnets to Silvia_,--had been epochs in Danyers’s growth, and the verse seemed to gain in mellowness, in amplitude, in meaning as one brought to its interpretation more experience of life, a finer emotional sense. Where, in his boyhood, he had felt only the perfect, the almost austere beauty of form, the subtle interplay of vowel-sounds, the rush and fulness of lyric emotion, he now thrilled to the close-packed significance of each line, the allusiveness of each word--his imagination lured hither and thither on fresh trails of thought, and perpetually spurred by the sense that, beyond what he had already discovered, more marvellous regions lay waiting to be explored. Danyers had written, at college, the prize essay on Rendle’s poetry (it chanced to be the moment of the great man’s death); he had fashioned the fugitive verse of his own storm-and-stress period on the forms which Rendle had first given to English metre; and when two years later the _Life and Letters_ appeared, and the Silvia of the sonnets took substance as Mrs. A., he had included in his worship of Rendle the woman who had inspired not only such divine verse but such playful, tender, incomparable prose.