TALES OF MEN 
THE LEGEND 
By Edith Wharton 
I 
RTHUR BERNALD could 
never afterward recall just 
when the first conjecture 
flashed on him: oddly 
enough, there was no record 
of it in the agitated jottings 
of his diary. But, as it seemed to him in 
retrospect, he had always felt that the 
queer man at the Wades’ must be John 
Pellerin, if only for the negative reason 
that he couldn’t imaginably be any one 
else. It was impossible, in the confused 
pattern of the century’s intellectual life, to 
fit the stranger in anywhere, save in the 
big gap which, some five and twenty years 
earlier, had been left by Pellerin’s unac¬ 
countable disappearance; and conversely, 
such a man as the Wades’ visitor couldn’t 
have lived for sixty years without filling, 
somewhere in space, a nearly equivalent 
void. 
At all events, it was certainly not to Doc¬ 
tor Wade or to his mother that Bernald 
owed the hint: the good unconscious Wades, 
one of whose chief charms in the young 
man’s eyes was that they remained so ro¬ 
bustly untainted by Pellerinism, in spite 
of the fact that Doctor Wade’s younger 
brother, Howland, was among its most irrt- 
pudently flourishing high-priests. 
The incident had begun by Bernald’s 
running across Doctor Robert Wade one 
hot summer night at the University Club, 
and by Wade’s saying, in the tone of un¬ 
professional laxity which the shadowy still¬ 
ness of the place invited: “ I got hold of a 
queer fish at St. Martin’s the other day— 
case of heat-prostration picked up in Cen¬ 
tral Park. When we’d patched him up I 
found he had nowhere to go, and not a dol¬ 
lar in his pocket, and I sent him down to 
our place at Portchester to re-build.” 
The opening roused his hearer’s attention. 
Bob Wade had an odd unformulated sense 
of values that Bernald had learned to trust. 
278 
“What sort of chap? Young or old?” 
“Oh, every age—full of years, and yet 
with a lot left. He called himself sixty on 
the books.” 
“Sixty’s a good age for some kinds of 
living. And age is of course purely sub¬ 
jective. How has he used his sixty years ?” 
“ Well—part of them in educating him¬ 
self, apparently. He’s a scholar—human¬ 
ities, languages, and so forth.” 
“ Oh—decayed gentleman,” Bernald 
murmured, disappointed. 
“Decayed? Not much!” cried the doc¬ 
tor with his accustomed literalness. “ I 
only mentioned that side of Winterman— 
his name’s Winterman—because it was the 
side my mother noticed first. I suppose 
women generally do. But it’s only a part— 
a small part. The man’s the big thing.” 
“Really big?” 
“Well—there again. . . . When I took 
him down to the country, looking rather 
like a tramp from a ‘ Shelter,’ with an un¬ 
trimmed beard, and a suit of reach-me- 
downs he’d slept round the Park in for a 
week, I felt sure my mother’d carry the sil¬ 
ver up to her room, and send for the gar¬ 
dener’s dog to sleep in the hall the first 
night. But she didn’t.” 
“I see. ‘Women and children love 
him.’ Oh, Wade!” Bernald groaned. 
“ Not a bit of it! You’re out again. We 
don’t love him, either of us. But we feel 
him—the air’s charged with him. You’ll 
see.” 
And Bernald agreed that he would see, 
the following Sunday. Wade’s inarticulate 
attempts to characterize the stranger had 
struck his friend. The human revelation 
had for Bernald a poignant and ever-re- 
neWed interest," which his trade, as the dra¬ 
matic critic of a daily paper, had hitherto 
failed to discourage. And he knew that 
Bob Wade, simple and undefiled by litera¬ 
ture—Bernald’s specific affliction—had a 
free and personal way of judging men, and 
the diviner’s knack of reaching their hidden 
