The House of Mirth
from them that he was not afraid of her proximity.
These thoughts so engaged her that she fell into a gait hardly
likely to carry her to church before the sermon, and at length,
having passed from the gardens to the wood-path beyond, so far
forgot her intention as to sink into a rustic seat at a bend of the
walk. The spot was charming, and Lily was not insensible to the
charm, or to the fact that her presence enhanced it; but she was
not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in company,
and the combination of a handsome girl and a romantic scene struck
her as too good to be wasted. No one, however, appeared to profit
by the opportunity; and after a half hour of fruitless waiting she
rose and wandered on. She felt a stealing sense of fatigue as she
walked; the sparkle had died out of her, and the taste of life
was stale on her lips. She hardly knew what she had been seeking,
or why the failure to find it had so blotted the light from her
sky: she was only aware of a vague sense of failure, of an inner
isolation deeper than the loneliness about her.
Her footsteps flagged, and she stood gazing listlessly ahead,
digging the ferny edge of the path with the tip of her sunshade.
As she did so a step sounded behind her, and she saw Selden at her
side.
“How fast you walk!” he remarked. “I thought I should never catch
up with you.”
She answered gaily: “You must be quite breathless! I’ve been
sitting under that tree for an hour.”
“Waiting for me, I hope?” he rejoined; and she said with a vague
laugh:
“Well—waiting to see if you would come.”
“I seize the distinction, but I don’t mind it, since doing the one
involved doing the other. But weren’t you sure that I should come?”
“If I waited long enough—but you see I had only a limited time to
give to the experiment.”
“Why limited? Limited by luncheon?”
“No; by my other engagement.”
“Your engagement to go to church with Muriel and Hilda?”
“No; but to come home from church with another person.”
“Ah, I see; I might have known you were fully provided with
alternatives. And is the other person coming home this way?”
Lily laughed again. “That’s just what I don’t know; and to find
out, it is my business to get to church before the service is over.”
“Exactly; and it is my business to prevent your doing so; in which
case the other person, piqued by your absence, will form the
desperate resolve of driving back in the omnibus.”
Lily received this with fresh appreciation; his nonsense was like
the bubbling of her inner mood. “Is that what you would do in such
an emergency?” she enquired.
Selden looked at her with solemnity. “I am here to prove to you,”
he cried, “what I am capable of doing in an emergency!”
“Walking a mile in an hour—you must own that the omnibus would be
quicker!”
“Ah—but will he find you in the end? That’s the only test of
success.”
They looked at each other with the same luxury of enjoyment that
they had felt in exchanging absurdities over his tea-table; but
suddenly Lily’s face changed, and she said: “Well, if it is, he has
succeeded.”
Selden, following her glance, perceived a party of people advancing
toward them from the farther bend of the path. Lady Cressida
had evidently insisted on walking home, and the rest of the
church-goers had thought it their duty to accompany her. Lily’s
companion looked rapidly from one to the other of the two men of
the party; Wetherall walking respectfully at Lady Cressida’s side
with his little sidelong look of nervous attention, and Percy Gryce
bringing-up the rear with Mrs. Wetherall and the Trenors.
“Ah—now I see why you were getting up your Americana!” Selden
exclaimed with a note of the freest admiration but the blush with
which the sally was received checked whatever amplifications he had
meant to give it.
That Lily Bart should object to being bantered about her suitors,
or even about her means of attracting them, was so new to Selden
that he had a momentary flash of surprise, which lit up a number
of possibilities; but she rose gallantly to the defence of her
confusion, by saying, as its object approached: “That was why I was
waiting for you—to thank you for having given me so many points!”
“Ah, you can hardly do justice to the subject in such a short
time,” said Selden, as the Trenor girls caught sight of Miss Bart;
and while she signalled a response to their boisterous greeting, he
added quickly: “Won’t you devote your afternoon to it? You know I
must be off tomorrow morning. We’ll take a walk, and you can thank
me at your leisure.”
Chapter 6
The afternoon was perfect. A deeper stillness possessed the air,
and the glitter of the American autumn was tempered by a haze which
diffused the brightness without dulling it.
In the woody hollows of the park there was already a faint chill;
but as the ground rose the air grew lighter, and ascending the long
slopes beyond the high-road, Lily and her companion reached a zone
of lingering summer. The path wound across a meadow with scattered
trees; then it dipped into a lane plumed with asters and purpling
sprays of bramble, whence, through the light quiver of ash-leaves,
the country unrolled itself in pastoral distances.
Higher up, the lane showed thickening tufts of fern and of the
creeping glossy verdure of shaded slopes; trees began to overhang
it, and the shade deepened to the checkered dusk of a beech-grove.
The boles of the trees stood well apart, with only a light
feathering of undergrowth; the path wound along the edge of the
wood, now and then looking out on a sunlit pasture or on an orchard
spangled with fruit.
Lily had no real intimacy with nature, but she had a passion for
the appropriate and could be keenly sensitive to a scene which
was the fitting background of her own sensations. The landscape
outspread below her seemed an enlargement of her present mood, and
she found something of herself in its calmness, its breadth, its
long free reaches. On the nearer slopes the sugar-maples wavered
like pyres of light; lower down was a massing of grey orchards, and
here and there the lingering green of an oak-grove. Two or three
red farm-houses dozed under the apple-trees, and the white wooden
spire of a village church showed beyond the shoulder of the hill;
while far below, in a haze of dust, the high-road ran between the
fields.
“Let us sit here,” Selden suggested, as they reached an open ledge
of rock above which the beeches rose steeply between mossy boulders.
Lily dropped down on the rock, glowing with her long climb. She
sat quiet, her lips parted by the stress of the ascent, her eyes
wandering peacefully over the broken ranges of the landscape.
Selden stretched himself on the grass at her feet, tilting his hat
against the level sun-rays, and clasping his hands behind his head,
which rested against the side of the rock. He had no wish to make
her talk; her quick-breathing silence seemed a part of the general
hush and harmony of things. In his own mind there was only a lazy
sense of pleasure, veiling the sharp edges of sensation as the
September haze veiled the scene at their feet. But Lily, though her
attitude was as calm as his, was throbbing inwardly with a rush of
thoughts. There were in her at the moment two beings, one drawing
deep breaths of freedom and exhilaration, the other gasping for
air in a little black prison-house of fears. But gradually the
captive’s gasps grew fainter, or the other paid less heed to them:
the horizon expanded, the air grew stronger, and the free spirit
quivered for flight.
She could not herself have explained the sense of buoyancy which
seemed to lift and swing her above the sun-suffused world at her
feet. Was it love, she wondered, or a mere fortuitous combination
of happy thoughts and sensations? How much of it was owing to the
spell of the perfect afternoon, the scent of the fading woods, the
thought of the dulness she had fled from? Lily had no definite
experience by which to test the quality of her feelings. She had
several times been in love with fortunes or careers, but only
once with a man. That was years ago, when she first came out, and
had been smitten with a romantic passion for a young gentleman
named Herbert Melson, who had blue eyes and a little wave in
his hair. Mr. Melson, who was possessed of no other negotiable
securities, had hastened to employ these in capturing the eldest
Miss Van Osburgh: since then he had grown stout and wheezy, and was
given to telling anecdotes about his children. If Lily recalled
this early emotion it was not to compare it with that which now
possessed her; the only point of comparison was the sense of
lightness, of emancipation, which she remembered feeling, in the
whirl of a waltz or the seclusion of a conservatory, during the
brief course of her youthful romance. She had not known again
till today that lightness, that glow of freedom; but now it was
something more than a blind groping of the blood. The peculiar
charm of her feeling for Selden was that she understood it; she
could put her finger on every link of the chain that was drawing
them together. Though his popularity was of the quiet kind,
felt rather than actively expressed among his friends, she had
never mistaken his inconspicuousness for obscurity. His reputed
cultivation was generally regarded as a slight obstacle to easy
intercourse, but Lily, who prided herself on her broad-minded
recognition of literature, and always carried an Omar Khayam in
her travelling-bag, was attracted by this attribute, which she
felt would have had its distinction in an older society. It was,
moreover, one of his gifts to look his part; to have a height which
lifted his head above the crowd, and the keenly-modelled dark
features which, in a land of amorphous types, gave him the air of
belonging to a more specialized race, of carrying the impress of a
concentrated past. Expansive persons found him a little dry, and
very young girls thought him sarcastic; but this air of friendly
aloofness, as far removed as possible from any assertion of
personal advantage, was the quality which piqued Lily’s interest.
Everything about him accorded with the fastidious element in her
taste, even to the light irony with which he surveyed what seemed
to her most sacred. She admired him most of all, perhaps, for being
able to convey as distinct a sense of superiority as the richest
man she had ever met.
It was the unconscious prolongation of this thought which led her
to say presently, with a laugh: “I have broken two engagements for
you today. How many have you broken for me?”
“None,” said Selden calmly. “My only engagement at Bellomont was
with you.”
She glanced down at him, faintly smiling.
“Did you really come to Bellomont to see me?”
“Of course I did.”
Her look deepened meditatively. “Why?” she murmured, with an accent
which took all tinge of coquetry from the question.
“Because you’re such a wonderful spectacle: I always like to see
what you are doing.”
“How do you know what I should be doing if you were not here?”
Selden smiled. “I don’t flatter myself that my coming has deflected
your course of action by a hair’s breadth.”
“That’s absurd—since, if you were not here, I could obviously not
be taking a walk with you.”
“No; but your taking a walk with me is only another way of making
use of your material. You are an artist and I happen to be the bit
of colour you are using today. It’s a part of your cleverness to be
able to produce premeditated effects extemporaneously.”
Lily smiled also: his words were too acute not to strike her sense
of humour. It was true that she meant to use the accident of his
presence as part of a very definite effect; or that, at least,
was the secret pretext she had found for breaking her promise to