The House of Mirth
above a choice of occupations; now she had to drop to the level of
the familiar routine, in which moments of seeming brilliancy and
freedom alternated with long hours of subjection.
She laid a deprecating hand on her friend’s. “Dear Judy! I’m sorry
to have been such a bore, and you are very good to me. But you must
have some letters for me to answer—let me at least be useful.”
She settled herself at the desk, and Mrs. Trenor accepted her
resumption of the morning’s task with a sigh which implied that,
after all, she had proved herself unfit for higher uses.
The luncheon-table showed a depleted circle. All the men but Jack
Stepney and Dorset had returned to town (it seemed to Lily a last
touch of irony that Selden and Percy Gryce should have gone in the
same train), and Lady Cressida and the attendant Wetheralls had
been despatched by motor to lunch at a distant country-house. At
such moments of diminished interest it was usual for Mrs. Dorset to
keep her room till the afternoon; but on this occasion she drifted
in when luncheon was half over, hollowed-eyed and drooping, but
with an edge of malice under her indifference.
She raised her eyebrows as she looked about the table. “How few of
us are left! I do so enjoy the quiet—don’t you, Lily? I wish the
men would always stop away—it’s really much nicer without them.
Oh, you don’t count, George: one doesn’t have to talk to one’s
husband. But I thought Mr. Gryce was to stay for the rest of the
week?” she added enquiringly. “Didn’t he intend to, Judy? He’s such
a nice boy—I wonder what drove him away? He is rather shy, and I’m
afraid we may have shocked him: he has been brought up in such an
old-fashioned way. Do you know, Lily, he told me he had never seen
a girl play cards for money till he saw you doing it the other
night? And he lives on the interest of his income, and always has a
lot left over to invest!”
Mrs. Fisher leaned forward eagerly. “I do believe it is some one’s
duty to educate that young man. It is shocking that he has never
been made to realize his duties as a citizen. Every wealthy man
should be compelled to study the laws of his country.”
Mrs. Dorset glanced at her quietly. “I think he HAS studied the
divorce laws. He told me he had promised the Bishop to sign some
kind of a petition against divorce.”
Mrs. Fisher reddened under her powder, and Stepney said with
a laughing glance at Miss Bart: “I suppose he is thinking of
marriage, and wants to tinker up the old ship before he goes
aboard.”
His betrothed looked shocked at the metaphor, and George Dorset
exclaimed with a sardonic growl: “Poor devil! It isn’t the ship
that will do for him, it’s the crew.”
“Or the stowaways,” said Miss Corby brightly. “If I contemplated a
voyage with him I should try to start with a friend in the hold.”
Miss Van Osburgh’s vague feeling of pique was struggling for
appropriate expression. “I’m sure I don’t see why you laugh at him;
I think he’s very nice,” she exclaimed; “and, at any rate, a girl
who married him would always have enough to be comfortable.”
She looked puzzled at the redoubled laughter which hailed her
words, but it might have consoled her to know how deeply they had
sunk into the breast of one of her hearers.
Comfortable! At that moment the word was more eloquent to Lily
Bart than any other in the language. She could not even pause to
smile over the heiress’s view of a colossal fortune as a mere
shelter against want: her mind was filled with the vision of what
that shelter might have been to her. Mrs. Dorset’s pin-pricks did
not smart, for her own irony cut deeper: no one could hurt her as
much as she was hurting herself, for no one else—not even Judy
Trenor—knew the full magnitude of her folly.
She was roused from these unprofitable considerations by a
whispered request from her hostess, who drew her apart as they left
the luncheon-table.
“Lily, dear, if you’ve nothing special to do, may I tell Carry
Fisher that you intend to drive to the station and fetch Gus? He
will be back at four, and I know she has it in her mind to meet
him. Of course I’m very glad to have him amused, but I happen to
know that she has bled him rather severely since she’s been here,
and she is so keen about going to fetch him that I fancy she must
have got a lot more bills this morning. It seems to me,” Mrs.
Trenor feelingly concluded, “that most of her alimony is paid by
other women’s husbands!”
Miss Bart, on her way to the station, had leisure to muse over
her friend’s words, and their peculiar application to herself.
Why should she have to suffer for having once, for a few hours,
borrowed money of an elderly cousin, when a woman like Carry
Fisher could make a living unrebuked from the good-nature of her
men friends and the tolerance of their wives? It all turned on the
tiresome distinction between what a married woman might, and a
girl might not, do. Of course it was shocking for a married woman
to borrow money—and Lily was expertly aware of the implication
involved—but still, it was the mere MALUM PROHIBITUM which the
world decries but condones, and which, though it may be punished by
private vengeance, does not provoke the collective disapprobation
of society. To Miss Bart, in short, no such opportunities were
possible. She could of course borrow from her women friends—a
hundred here or there, at the utmost—but they were more ready to
give a gown or a trinket, and looked a little askance when she
hinted her preference for a cheque. Women are not generous lenders,
and those among whom her lot was cast were either in the same
case as herself, or else too far removed from it to understand
its necessities. The result of her meditations was the decision
to join her aunt at Richfield. She could not remain at Bellomont
without playing bridge, and being involved in other expenses;
and to continue her usual series of autumn visits would merely
prolong the same difficulties. She had reached a point where abrupt
retrenchment was necessary, and the only cheap life was a dull
life. She would start the next morning for Richfield.
At the station she thought Gus Trenor seemed surprised, and not
wholly unrelieved, to see her. She yielded up the reins of the
light runabout in which she had driven over, and as he climbed
heavily to her side, crushing her into a scant third of the seat,
he said: “Halloo! It isn’t often you honour me. You must have been
uncommonly hard up for something to do.”
The afternoon was warm, and propinquity made her more than usually
conscious that he was red and massive, and that beads of moisture
had caused the dust of the train to adhere unpleasantly to the
broad expanse of cheek and neck which he turned to her; but she was
aware also, from the look in his small dull eyes, that the contact
with her freshness and slenderness was as agreeable to him as the
sight of a cooling beverage.
The perception of this fact helped her to answer gaily: “It’s not
often I have the chance. There are too many ladies to dispute the
privilege with me.”
“The privilege of driving me home? Well, I’m glad you won the race,
anyhow. But I know what really happened—my wife sent you. Now
didn’t she?”
He had the dull man’s unexpected flashes of astuteness, and Lily
could not help joining in the laugh with which he had pounced on
the truth.
“You see, Judy thinks I’m the safest person for you to be with; and
she’s quite right,” she rejoined.
“Oh, is she, though? If she is, it’s because you wouldn’t waste
your time on an old hulk like me. We married men have to put up
with what we can get: all the prizes are for the clever chaps
who’ve kept a free foot. Let me light a cigar, will you? I’ve had a
beastly day of it.”
He drew up in the shade of the village street, and passed the
reins to her while he held a match to his cigar. The little flame
under his hand cast a deeper crimson on his puffing face, and Lily
averted her eyes with a momentary feeling of repugnance. And yet
some women thought him handsome!
As she handed back the reins, she said sympathetically: “Did you
have such a lot of tiresome things to do?”
“I should say so—rather!” Trenor, who was seldom listened to,
either by his wife or her friends, settled down into the rare
enjoyment of a confidential talk. “You don’t know how a fellow
has to hustle to keep this kind of thing going.” He waved his
whip in the direction of the Bellomont acres, which lay outspread
before them in opulent undulations. “Judy has no idea of what she
spends—not that there isn’t plenty to keep the thing going,” he
interrupted himself, “but a man has got to keep his eyes open and
pick up all the tips he can. My father and mother used to live
like fighting-cocks on their income, and put by a good bit of it
too—luckily for me—but at the pace we go now, I don’t know where I
should be if it weren’t for taking a flyer now and then. The women
all think—I mean Judy thinks—I’ve nothing to do but to go downtown
once a month and cut off coupons, but the truth is it takes a
devilish lot of hard work to keep the machinery running. Not that I
ought to complain today, though,” he went on after a moment, “for
I did a very neat stroke of business, thanks to Stepney’s friend
Rosedale: by the way, Miss Lily, I wish you’d try to persuade Judy
to be decently civil to that chap. He’s going to be rich enough to
buy us all out one of these days, and if she’d only ask him to dine
now and then I could get almost anything out of him. The man is mad
to know the people who don’t want to know him, and when a fellow’s
in that state there is nothing he won’t do for the first woman who
takes him up.”
Lily hesitated a moment. The first part of her companion’s
discourse had started an interesting train of thought, which was
rudely interrupted by the mention of Mr. Rosedale’s name. She
uttered a faint protest.
“But you know Jack did try to take him about, and he was
impossible.”
“Oh, hang it—because he’s fat and shiny, and has a sloppy manner!
Well, all I can say is that the people who are clever enough to be
civil to him now will make a mighty good thing of it. A few years
from now he’ll be in it whether we want him or not, and then he
won’t be giving away a half-a-million tip for a dinner.”
Lily’s mind had reverted from the intrusive personality of Mr.
Rosedale to the train of thought set in motion by Trenor’s first
words. This vast mysterious Wall Street world of “tips” and
“deals”—might she not find in it the means of escape from her
dreary predicament? She had often heard of women making money in
this way through their friends: she had no more notion than most of
her sex of the exact nature of the transaction, and its vagueness
seemed to diminish its indelicacy. She could not, indeed, imagine
herself, in any extremity, stooping to extract a “tip” from Mr.
Rosedale; but at her side was a man in possession of that precious
commodity, and who, as the husband of her dearest friend, stood to
her in a relation of almost fraternal intimacy.
In her inmost heart Lily knew it was not by appealing to the
fraternal instinct that she was likely to move Gus Trenor; but this
way of explaining the situation helped to drape its crudity, and
she was always scrupulous about keeping up appearances to herself.
Her personal fastidiousness had a moral equivalent, and when she
made a tour of inspection in her own mind there were certain closed
doors she did not open.
As they reached the gates of Bellomont she turned to Trenor with a
smile. “The afternoon is so perfect—don’t you want to drive me a
little farther? I’ve been rather out of spirits all day, and it’s
so restful to be away from people, with some one who won’t mind if
I’m a little dull.”
She looked so plaintively lovely as she proffered the request, so