The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Choice, by Edith Wharton

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Title: The Choice
1916

Author: Edith Wharton

Release Date: January 17, 2008 [EBook #24348]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CHOICE ***

Produced by David Widger

THE CHOICE

By Edith Wharton

Copyright, 1916, By Charles Scribner's Sons

I

Stilling, that night after dinner, had surpassed himself. He always did,
Wrayford reflected, when the small fry from Highfield came to dine. He,
Cobham Stilling, who had to find his bearings and keep to his level in
the big heedless ironic world of New York, dilated and grew vast in the
congenial medium of Highfield. The Red House was the biggest house of
the Highfield summer colony, and Cobham Stilling was its biggest man. No
one else within a radius of a hundred miles (on a conservative estimate)
had as many horses, as many greenhouses, as many servants, and assuredly
no one else had three motors and a motor-boat for the lake.

The motor-boat was Stilling's latest hobby, and he rode--or steered--it
in and out of the conversation all the evening, to the obvious
edification of every one present save his wife and his visitor, Austin
Wrayford. The interest of the latter two who, from opposite ends of the
drawing-room, exchanged a fleeting glance when Stilling again launched
his craft on the thin current of the talk--the interest of Mrs. Stilling
and Wrayford had already lost its edge by protracted contact with the
subject.

But the dinner-guests--the Rector, Mr. Swordsley, his wife Mrs.
Swordsley, Lucy and Agnes Granger, their brother Addison, and young
Jack Emmerton from Harvard--were all, for divers reasons, stirred to the
proper pitch of feeling. Mr. Swordsley, no doubt, was saying to himself:
"If my good parishioner here can afford to buy a motor-boat, in addition
to all the other expenditures which an establishment like this must
entail, I certainly need not scruple to appeal to him again for a
contribution for our Galahad Club." The Granger girls, meanwhile, were
evoking visions of lakeside picnics, not unadorned with the presence of
young Mr. Emmerton; while th