The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Long Run, by Edith Wharton

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: The Long Run
1916

Author: Edith Wharton

Release Date: January 3, 2008 [EBook #24133]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LONG RUN ***

Produced by David Widger

THE LONG RUN

By Edith Wharton

Copyright, 1916, By Charles Scribner's Sons

_The shade of those our days that had no tongue._

I

It 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 a shade 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
diningroom 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 passing 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 more critical than our comrades, and less
amenable to the accepted. Then, for the next following years, Merrick
had been a vivid and promising figure in young American life. Handsome,
careless, and free, he had wandered and tasted and compared. After
leaving Harvard he had spent two years at Oxford; then he had accepted
a private secretaryship to our Ambassador in England, and had come back
from this adventure with a fresh curiosity about public affairs at home,
and the conviction that men of his kind should play a