The House of Mirth
you do this to me?” she cried. “Why do you make the things I have
chosen seem hateful to me, if you have nothing to give me instead?”
The words roused Selden from the musing fit into which he had
fallen. He himself did not know why he had led their talk along
such lines; it was the last use he would have imagined himself
making of an afternoon’s solitude with Miss Bart. But it was one
of those moments when neither seemed to speak deliberately, when
an indwelling voice in each called to the other across unsounded
depths of feeling.
“No, I have nothing to give you instead,” he said, sitting up and
turning so that he faced her. “If I had, it should be yours, you
know.”
She received this abrupt declaration in a way even stranger than
the manner of its making: she dropped her face on her hands and he
saw that for a moment she wept.
It was for a moment only, however; for when he leaned nearer and
drew down her hands with a gesture less passionate than grave, she
turned on him a face softened but not disfigured by emotion, and he
said to himself, somewhat cruelly, that even her weeping was an art.
The reflection steadied his voice as he asked, between pity and
irony: “Isn’t it natural that I should try to belittle all the
things I can’t offer you?”
Her face brightened at this, but she drew her hand away, not with
a gesture of coquetry, but as though renouncing something to which
she had no claim.
“But you belittle ME, don’t you,” she returned gently, “in being so
sure they are the only things I care for?”
Selden felt an inner start; but it was only the last quiver of his
egoism. Almost at once he answered quite simply: “But you do care
for them, don’t you? And no wishing of mine can alter that.”
He had so completely ceased to consider how far this might carry
him, that he had a distinct sense of disappointment when she turned
on him a face sparkling with derision.
“Ah,” she cried, “for all your fine phrases you’re really as great
a coward as I am, for you wouldn’t have made one of them if you
hadn’t been so sure of my answer.”
The shock of this retort had the effect of crystallizing Selden’s
wavering intentions.
“I am not so sure of your answer,” he said quietly. “And I do you
the justice to believe that you are not either.”
It was her turn to look at him with surprise; and after a
moment—“Do you want to marry me?” she asked.
He broke into a laugh. “No, I don’t want to—but perhaps I should if
you did!”
“That’s what I told you—you’re so sure of me that you can amuse
yourself with experiments.” She drew back the hand he had regained,
and sat looking down on him sadly.
“I am not making experiments,” he returned. “Or if I am, it is
not on you but on myself. I don’t know what effect they are going
to have on me—but if marrying you is one of them, I will take the
risk.”
She smiled faintly. “It would be a great risk, certainly—I have
never concealed from you how great.”
“Ah, it’s you who are the coward!” he exclaimed.
She had risen, and he stood facing her with his eyes on hers. The
soft isolation of the falling day enveloped them: they seemed
lifted into a finer air. All the exquisite influences of the
hour trembled in their veins, and drew them to each other as the
loosened leaves were drawn to the earth.
“It’s you who are the coward,” he repeated, catching her hands in
his.
She leaned on him for a moment, as if with a drop of tired wings:
he felt as though her heart were beating rather with the stress
of a long flight than the thrill of new distances. Then, drawing
back with a little smile of warning—“I shall look hideous in dowdy
clothes; but I can trim my own hats,” she declared.
They stood silent for a while after this, smiling at each other
like adventurous children who have climbed to a forbidden height
from which they discover a new world. The actual world at their
feet was veiling itself in dimness, and across the valley a clear
moon rose in the denser blue.
Suddenly they heard a remote sound, like the hum of a giant insect,
and following the high-road, which wound whiter through the
surrounding twilight, a black object rushed across their vision.
Lily started from her attitude of absorption; her smile faded and
she began to move toward the lane.
“I had no idea it was so late! We shall not be back till after
dark,” she said, almost impatiently.
Selden was looking at her with surprise: it took him a moment to
regain his usual view of her; then he said, with an uncontrollable
note of dryness: “That was not one of our party; the motor was
going the other way.”
“I know—I know——” She paused, and he saw her redden through the
twilight. “But I told them I was not well—that I should not go out.
Let us go down!” she murmured.
Selden continued to look at her; then he drew his cigarette-case
from his pocket and slowly lit a cigarette. It seemed to him
necessary, at that moment, to proclaim, by some habitual gesture
of this sort, his recovered hold on the actual: he had an almost
puerile wish to let his companion see that, their flight over, he
had landed on his feet.
She waited while the spark flickered under his curved palm; then he
held out the cigarettes to her.
She took one with an unsteady hand, and putting it to her lips,
leaned forward to draw her light from his. In the indistinctness
the little red gleam lit up the lower part of her face, and he saw
her mouth tremble into a smile.
“Were you serious?” she asked, with an odd thrill of gaiety
which she might have caught up, in haste, from a heap of stock
inflections, without having time to select the just note. Selden’s
voice was under better control. “Why not?” he returned. “You see I
took no risks in being so.” And as she continued to stand before
him, a little pale under the retort, he added quickly: “Let us go
down.”
Chapter 7
It spoke much for the depth of Mrs. Trenor’s friendship that her
voice, in admonishing Miss Bart, took the same note of personal
despair as if she had been lamenting the collapse of a house-party.
“All I can say is, Lily, that I can’t make you out!” She leaned
back, sighing, in the morning abandon of lace and muslin, turning
an indifferent shoulder to the heaped-up importunities of her desk,
while she considered, with the eye of a physician who has given up
the case, the erect exterior of the patient confronting her.
“If you hadn’t told me you were going in for him seriously—but I’m
sure you made that plain enough from the beginning! Why else did
you ask me to let you off bridge, and to keep away Carry and Kate
Corby? I don’t suppose you did it because he amused you; we could
none of us imagine your putting up with him for a moment unless
you meant to marry him. And I’m sure everybody played fair! They
all wanted to help it along. Even Bertha kept her hands off—I will
say that—till Lawrence came down and you dragged him away from
her. After that she had a right to retaliate—why on earth did you
interfere with her? You’ve known Lawrence Selden for years—why did
you behave as if you had just discovered him? If you had a grudge
against Bertha it was a stupid time to show it—you could have paid
her back just as well after you were married! I told you Bertha
was dangerous. She was in an odious mood when she came here, but
Lawrence’s turning up put her in a good humour, and if you’d only
let her think he came for HER it would have never occurred to her
to play you this trick. Oh, Lily, you’ll never do anything if
you’re not serious!”
Miss Bart accepted this exhortation in a spirit of the purest
impartiality. Why should she have been angry? It was the voice
of her own conscience which spoke to her through Mrs. Trenor’s
reproachful accents. But even to her own conscience she must trump
up a semblance of defence. “I only took a day off—I thought he
meant to stay on all this week, and I knew Mr. Selden was leaving
this morning.”
Mrs. Trenor brushed aside the plea with a gesture which laid bare
its weakness.
“He did mean to stay—that’s the worst of it. It shows that he’s
run away from you; that Bertha’s done her work and poisoned him
thoroughly.”
Lily gave a slight laugh. “Oh, if he’s running I’ll overtake him!”
Her friend threw out an arresting hand. “Whatever you do, Lily, do
nothing!”
Miss Bart received the warning with a smile. “I don’t mean,
literally, to take the next train. There are ways——” But she did
not go on to specify them.
Mrs. Trenor sharply corrected the tense. “There WERE ways—plenty
of them! I didn’t suppose you needed to have them pointed out.
But don’t deceive yourself—he’s thoroughly frightened. He has run
straight home to his mother, and she’ll protect him!”
“Oh, to the death,” Lily agreed, dimpling at the vision.
“How you can LAUGH——” her friend rebuked her; and she dropped back
to a soberer perception of things with the question: “What was it
Bertha really told him?”
“Don’t ask me—horrors! She seemed to have raked up everything. Oh,
you know what I mean—of course there isn’t anything, REALLY; but
I suppose she brought in Prince Varigliano—and Lord Hubert—and
there was some story of your having borrowed money of old Ned Van
Alstyne: did you ever?”
“He is my father’s cousin,” Miss Bart interposed.
“Well, of course she left THAT out. It seems Ned told Carry Fisher;
and she told Bertha, naturally. They’re all alike, you know: they
hold their tongues for years, and you think you’re safe, but when
their opportunity comes they remember everything.”
Lily had grown pale: her voice had a harsh note in it. “It was
some money I lost at bridge at the Van Osburghs’. I repaid it, of
course.”
“Ah, well, they wouldn’t remember that; besides, it was the idea
of the gambling debt that frightened Percy. Oh, Bertha knew her
man—she knew just what to tell him!”
In this strain Mrs. Trenor continued for nearly an hour to admonish
her friend. Miss Bart listened with admirable equanimity. Her
naturally good temper had been disciplined by years of enforced
compliance, since she had almost always had to attain her ends
by the circuitous path of other people’s; and, being naturally
inclined to face unpleasant facts as soon as they presented
themselves, she was not sorry to hear an impartial statement of
what her folly was likely to cost, the more so as her own thoughts
were still insisting on the other side of the case. Presented
in the light of Mrs. Trenor’s vigorous comments, the reckoning
was certainly a formidable one, and Lily, as she listened, found
herself gradually reverting to her friend’s view of the situation.
Mrs. Trenor’s words were moreover emphasized for her hearer by
anxieties which she herself could scarcely guess. Affluence, unless
stimulated by a keen imagination, forms but the vaguest notion of
the practical strain of poverty. Judy knew it must be “horrid” for
poor Lily to have to stop to consider whether she could afford
real lace on her petticoats, and not to have a motor-car and a
steam-yacht at her orders; but the daily friction of unpaid bills,
the daily nibble of small temptations to expenditure, were trials
as far out of her experience as the domestic problems of the
char-woman. Mrs. Trenor’s unconsciousness of the real stress of the
situation had the effect of making it more galling to Lily. While
her friend reproached her for missing the opportunity to eclipse
her rivals, she was once more battling in imagination with the
mounting tide of indebtedness from which she had so nearly escaped.
What wind of folly had driven her out again on those dark seas?
If anything was needed to put the last touch to her self-abasement
it was the sense of the way her old life was opening its ruts again
to receive her. Yesterday her fancy had fluttered free pinions