The House of Mirth
had approached her was Lawrence Selden.
“You see I came after all,” he said; but before she had time
to answer, Mrs. Dorset, breaking away from a lifeless colloquy
with her host, had stepped between them with a little gesture of
appropriation.
Chapter 5
The observance of Sunday at Bellomont was chiefly marked by the
punctual appearance of the smart omnibus destined to convey the
household to the little church at the gates. Whether any one got
into the omnibus or not was a matter of secondary importance,
since by standing there it not only bore witness to the orthodox
intentions of the family, but made Mrs. Trenor feel, when she
finally heard it drive away, that she had somehow vicariously made
use of it.
It was Mrs. Trenor’s theory that her daughters actually did go
to church every Sunday; but their French governess’s convictions
calling her to the rival fane, and the fatigues of the week keeping
their mother in her room till luncheon, there was seldom any one
present to verify the fact. Now and then, in a spasmodic burst of
virtue—when the house had been too uproarious over night—Gus Trenor
forced his genial bulk into a tight frock-coat and routed his
daughters from their slumbers; but habitually, as Lily explained to
Mr. Gryce, this parental duty was forgotten till the church bells
were ringing across the park, and the omnibus had driven away empty.
Lily had hinted to Mr. Gryce that this neglect of religious
observances was repugnant to her early traditions, and that during
her visits to Bellomont she regularly accompanied Muriel and Hilda
to church. This tallied with the assurance, also confidentially
imparted, that, never having played bridge before, she had been
“dragged into it” on the night of her arrival, and had lost an
appalling amount of money in consequence of her ignorance of
the game and of the rules of betting. Mr. Gryce was undoubtedly
enjoying Bellomont. He liked the ease and glitter of the life, and
the lustre conferred on him by being a member of this group of rich
and conspicuous people. But he thought it a very materialistic
society; there were times when he was frightened by the talk of the
men and the looks of the ladies, and he was glad to find that Miss
Bart, for all her ease and self-possession, was not at home in so
ambiguous an atmosphere. For this reason he had been especially
pleased to learn that she would, as usual, attend the young Trenors
to church on Sunday morning; and as he paced the gravel sweep
before the door, his light overcoat on his arm and his prayer-book
in one carefully-gloved hand, he reflected agreeably on the
strength of character which kept her true to her early training in
surroundings so subversive to religious principles.
For a long time Mr. Gryce and the omnibus had the gravel sweep to
themselves; but, far from regretting this deplorable indifference
on the part of the other guests, he found himself nourishing the
hope that Miss Bart might be unaccompanied. The precious minutes
were flying, however; the big chestnuts pawed the ground and
flecked their impatient sides with foam; the coachman seemed to be
slowly petrifying on the box, and the groom on the doorstep; and
still the lady did not come. Suddenly, however, there was a sound
of voices and a rustle of skirts in the doorway, and Mr. Gryce,
restoring his watch to his pocket, turned with a nervous start;
but it was only to find himself handing Mrs. Wetherall into the
carriage.
The Wetheralls always went to church. They belonged to the vast
group of human automata who go through life without neglecting to
perform a single one of the gestures executed by the surrounding
puppets. It is true that the Bellomont puppets did not go to
church; but others equally important did—and Mr. and Mrs.
Wetherall’s circle was so large that God was included in their
visiting-list. They appeared, therefore, punctual and resigned,
with the air of people bound for a dull “At Home,” and after them
Hilda and Muriel straggled, yawning and pinning each other’s veils
and ribbons as they came. They had promised Lily to go to church
with her, they declared, and Lily was such a dear old duck that
they didn’t mind doing it to please her, though they couldn’t
fancy what had put the idea in her head, and though for their own
part they would much rather have played lawn tennis with Jack and
Gwen, if she hadn’t told them she was coming. The Misses Trenor
were followed by Lady Cressida Raith, a weather-beaten person in
Liberty silk and ethnological trinkets, who, on seeing the omnibus,
expressed her surprise that they were not to walk across the park;
but at Mrs. Wetherall’s horrified protest that the church was
a mile away, her ladyship, after a glance at the height of the
other’s heels, acquiesced in the necessity of driving, and poor
Mr. Gryce found himself rolling off between four ladies for whose
spiritual welfare he felt not the least concern.
It might have afforded him some consolation could he have known
that Miss Bart had really meant to go to church. She had even risen
earlier than usual in the execution of her purpose. She had an idea
that the sight of her in a grey gown of devotional cut, with her
famous lashes drooped above a prayer-book, would put the finishing
touch to Mr. Gryce’s subjugation, and render inevitable a certain
incident which she had resolved should form a part of the walk they
were to take together after luncheon. Her intentions in short had
never been more definite; but poor Lily, for all the hard glaze of
her exterior, was inwardly as malleable as wax. Her faculty for
adapting herself, for entering into other people’s feelings, if it
served her now and then in small contingencies, hampered her in the
decisive moments of life. She was like a water-plant in the flux
of the tides, and today the whole current of her mood was carrying
her toward Lawrence Selden. Why had he come? Was it to see herself
or Bertha Dorset? It was the last question which, at that moment,
should have engaged her. She might better have contented herself
with thinking that he had simply responded to the despairing
summons of his hostess, anxious to interpose him between herself
and the ill-humour of Mrs. Dorset. But Lily had not rested till she
learned from Mrs. Trenor that Selden had come of his own accord.
“He didn’t even wire me—he just happened to find the trap at the
station. Perhaps it’s not over with Bertha after all,” Mrs. Trenor
musingly concluded; and went away to arrange her dinner-cards
accordingly.
Perhaps it was not, Lily reflected; but it should be soon, unless
she had lost her cunning. If Selden had come at Mrs. Dorset’s call,
it was at her own that he would stay. So much the previous evening
had told her. Mrs. Trenor, true to her simple principle of making
her married friends happy, had placed Selden and Mrs. Dorset next
to each other at dinner; but, in obedience to the time-honoured
traditions of the match-maker, she had separated Lily and Mr.
Gryce, sending in the former with George Dorset, while Mr. Gryce
was coupled with Gwen Van Osburgh.
George Dorset’s talk did not interfere with the range of his
neighbour’s thoughts. He was a mournful dyspeptic, intent on
finding out the deleterious ingredients of every dish and diverted
from this care only by the sound of his wife’s voice. On this
occasion, however, Mrs. Dorset took no part in the general
conversation. She sat talking in low murmurs with Selden, and
turning a contemptuous and denuded shoulder toward her host, who,
far from resenting his exclusion, plunged into the excesses of
the MENU with the joyous irresponsibility of a free man. To Mr.
Dorset, however, his wife’s attitude was a subject of such evident
concern that, when he was not scraping the sauce from his fish, or
scooping the moist bread-crumbs from the interior of his roll, he
sat straining his thin neck for a glimpse of her between the lights.
Mrs. Trenor, as it chanced, had placed the husband and wife on
opposite sides of the table, and Lily was therefore able to observe
Mrs. Dorset also, and by carrying her glance a few feet farther, to
set up a rapid comparison between Lawrence Selden and Mr. Gryce.
It was that comparison which was her undoing. Why else had she
suddenly grown interested in Selden? She had known him for eight
years or more: ever since her return to America he had formed a
part of her background. She had always been glad to sit next to
him at dinner, had found him more agreeable than most men, and had
vaguely wished that he possessed the other qualities needful to
fix her attention; but till now she had been too busy with her own
affairs to regard him as more than one of the pleasant accessories
of life. Miss Bart was a keen reader of her own heart, and she saw
that her sudden preoccupation with Selden was due to the fact that
his presence shed a new light on her surroundings. Not that he was
notably brilliant or exceptional; in his own profession he was
surpassed by more than one man who had bored Lily through many a
weary dinner. It was rather that he had preserved a certain social
detachment, a happy air of viewing the show objectively, of having
points of contact outside the great gilt cage in which they were
all huddled for the mob to gape at. How alluring the world outside
the cage appeared to Lily, as she heard its door clang on her! In
reality, as she knew, the door never clanged: it stood always open;
but most of the captives were like flies in a bottle, and having
once flown in, could never regain their freedom. It was Selden’s
distinction that he had never forgotten the way out.
That was the secret of his way of readjusting her vision. Lily,
turning her eyes from him, found herself scanning her little world
through his retina: it was as though the pink lamps had been shut
off and the dusty daylight let in. She looked down the long table,
studying its occupants one by one, from Gus Trenor, with his
heavy carnivorous head sunk between his shoulders, as he preyed
on a jellied plover, to his wife, at the opposite end of the long
bank of orchids, suggestive, with her glaring good-looks, of a
jeweller’s window lit by electricity. And between the two, what a
long stretch of vacuity! How dreary and trivial these people were!
Lily reviewed them with a scornful impatience: Carry Fisher, with
her shoulders, her eyes, her divorces, her general air of embodying
a “spicy paragraph”; young Silverton, who had meant to live on
proof-reading and write an epic, and who now lived on his friends
and had become critical of truffles; Alice Wetherall, an animated
visiting-list, whose most fervid convictions turned on the wording
of invitations and the engraving of dinner-cards; Wetherall, with
his perpetual nervous nod of acquiescence, his air of agreeing with
people before he knew what they were saying; Jack Stepney, with his
confident smile and anxious eyes, half way between the sheriff and
an heiress; Gwen Van Osburgh, with all the guileless confidence of
a young girl who has always been told that there is no one richer
than her father.
Lily smiled at her classification of her friends. How different
they had seemed to her a few hours ago! Then they had symbolized
what she was gaining, now they stood for what she was giving
up. That very afternoon they had seemed full of brilliant
qualities; now she saw that they were merely dull in a loud way.
Under the glitter of their opportunities she saw the poverty
of their achievement. It was not that she wanted them to be
more disinterested; but she would have liked them to be more
picturesque. And she had a shamed recollection of the way in which,
a few hours since, she had felt the centripetal force of their
standards. She closed her eyes an instant, and the vacuous routine