The House of Mirth
had not supposed she would waste her powder on such small game; but
perhaps she was only keeping her hand in; or perhaps a girl of her
type had no conversation but of the personal kind. At any rate, she
was amazingly pretty, and he had asked her to tea and must live up
to his obligations.
“Well, then,” he said with a plunge, “perhaps THAT’S the reason.”
“What?”
“The fact that you don’t want to marry me. Perhaps I don’t regard
it as such a strong inducement to go and see you.” He felt a slight
shiver down his spine as he ventured this, but her laugh reassured
him.
“Dear Mr. Selden, that wasn’t worthy of you. It’s stupid of you to
make love to me, and it isn’t like you to be stupid.” She leaned
back, sipping her tea with an air so enchantingly judicial that,
if they had been in her aunt’s drawing-room, he might almost have
tried to disprove her deduction.
“Don’t you see,” she continued, “that there are men enough to say
pleasant things to me, and that what I want is a friend who won’t
be afraid to say disagreeable ones when I need them? Sometimes I
have fancied you might be that friend—I don’t know why, except that
you are neither a prig nor a bounder, and that I shouldn’t have
to pretend with you or be on my guard against you.” Her voice had
dropped to a note of seriousness, and she sat gazing up at him with
the troubled gravity of a child.
“You don’t know how much I need such a friend,” she said. “My aunt
is full of copy-book axioms, but they were all meant to apply to
conduct in the early fifties. I always feel that to live up to them
would include wearing book-muslin with gigot sleeves. And the other
women—my best friends—well, they use me or abuse me; but they don’t
care a straw what happens to me. I’ve been about too long—people
are getting tired of me; they are beginning to say I ought to marry.”
There was a moment’s pause, during which Selden meditated one or
two replies calculated to add a momentary zest to the situation;
but he rejected them in favour of the simple question: “Well, why
don’t you?”
She coloured and laughed. “Ah, I see you ARE a friend after all,
and that is one of the disagreeable things I was asking for.”
“It wasn’t meant to be disagreeable,” he returned amicably. “Isn’t
marriage your vocation? Isn’t it what you’re all brought up for?”
She sighed. “I suppose so. What else is there?”
“Exactly. And so why not take the plunge and have it over?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “You speak as if I ought to marry the
first man who came along.”
“I didn’t mean to imply that you are as hard put to it as that. But
there must be some one with the requisite qualifications.”
She shook her head wearily. “I threw away one or two good chances
when I first came out—I suppose every girl does; and you know I
am horribly poor—and very expensive. I must have a great deal of
money.”
Selden had turned to reach for a cigarette-box on the mantelpiece.
“What’s become of Dillworth?” he asked.
“Oh, his mother was frightened—she was afraid I should have all the
family jewels reset. And she wanted me to promise that I wouldn’t
do over the drawing-room.”
“The very thing you are marrying for!”
“Exactly. So she packed him off to India.”
“Hard luck—but you can do better than Dillworth.”
He offered the box, and she took out three or four cigarettes,
putting one between her lips and slipping the others into a little
gold case attached to her long pearl chain.
“Have I time? Just a whiff, then.” She leaned forward, holding the
tip of her cigarette to his. As she did so, he noted, with a purely
impersonal enjoyment, how evenly the black lashes were set in her
smooth white lids, and how the purplish shade beneath them melted
into the pure pallor of the cheek.
She began to saunter about the room, examining the bookshelves
between the puffs of her cigarette-smoke. Some of the volumes
had the ripe tints of good tooling and old morocco, and her eyes
lingered on them caressingly, not with the appreciation of the
expert, but with the pleasure in agreeable tones and textures that
was one of her inmost susceptibilities. Suddenly her expression
changed from desultory enjoyment to active conjecture, and she
turned to Selden with a question.
“You collect, don’t you—you know about first editions and things?”
“As much as a man may who has no money to spend. Now and then I
pick up something in the rubbish heap; and I go and look on at the
big sales.”
She had again addressed herself to the shelves, but her eyes now
swept them inattentively, and he saw that she was preoccupied with
a new idea.
“And Americana—do you collect Americana?”
Selden stared and laughed.
“No, that’s rather out of my line. I’m not really a collector, you
see; I simply like to have good editions of the books I am fond of.”
She made a slight grimace. “And Americana are horribly dull, I
suppose?”
“I should fancy so—except to the historian. But your real collector
values a thing for its rarity. I don’t suppose the buyers of
Americana sit up reading them all night—old Jefferson Gryce
certainly didn’t.”
She was listening with keen attention. “And yet they fetch fabulous
prices, don’t they? It seems so odd to want to pay a lot for an
ugly badly-printed book that one is never going to read! And I
suppose most of the owners of Americana are not historians either?”
“No; very few of the historians can afford to buy them. They have
to use those in the public libraries or in private collections. It
seems to be the mere rarity that attracts the average collector.”
He had seated himself on an arm of the chair near which she was
standing, and she continued to question him, asking which were the
rarest volumes, whether the Jefferson Gryce collection was really
considered the finest in the world, and what was the largest price
ever fetched by a single volume.
It was so pleasant to sit there looking up at her, as she lifted
now one book and then another from the shelves, fluttering the
pages between her fingers, while her drooping profile was outlined
against the warm background of old bindings, that he talked on
without pausing to wonder at her sudden interest in so unsuggestive
a subject. But he could never be long with her without trying to
find a reason for what she was doing, and as she replaced his
first edition of La Bruyere and turned away from the bookcases,
he began to ask himself what she had been driving at. Her next
question was not of a nature to enlighten him. She paused before
him with a smile which seemed at once designed to admit him to her
familiarity, and to remind him of the restrictions it imposed.
“Don’t you ever mind,” she asked suddenly, “not being rich enough
to buy all the books you want?”
He followed her glance about the room, with its worn furniture and
shabby walls.
“Don’t I just? Do you take me for a saint on a pillar?”
“And having to work—do you mind that?”
“Oh, the work itself is not so bad—I’m rather fond of the law.”
“No; but the being tied down: the routine—don’t you ever want to
get away, to see new places and people?”
“Horribly—especially when I see all my friends rushing to the
steamer.”
She drew a sympathetic breath. “But do you mind enough—to marry to
get out of it?”
Selden broke into a laugh. “God forbid!” he declared.
She rose with a sigh, tossing her cigarette into the grate.
“Ah, there’s the difference—a girl must, a man may if he chooses.”
She surveyed him critically. “Your coat’s a little shabby—but who
cares? It doesn’t keep people from asking you to dine. If I were
shabby no one would have me: a woman is asked out as much for
her clothes as for herself. The clothes are the background, the
frame, if you like: they don’t make success, but they are a part
of it. Who wants a dingy woman? We are expected to be pretty and
well-dressed till we drop—and if we can’t keep it up alone, we have
to go into partnership.”
Selden glanced at her with amusement: it was impossible, even with
her lovely eyes imploring him, to take a sentimental view of her
case.
“Ah, well, there must be plenty of capital on the look-out for
such an investment. Perhaps you’ll meet your fate tonight at the
Trenors’.”
She returned his look interrogatively.
“I thought you might be going there—oh, not in that capacity! But
there are to be a lot of your set—Gwen Van Osburgh, the Wetheralls,
Lady Cressida Raith—and the George Dorsets.”
She paused a moment before the last name, and shot a query through
her lashes; but he remained imperturbable.
“Mrs. Trenor asked me; but I can’t get away till the end of the
week; and those big parties bore me.”
“Ah, so they do me,” she exclaimed.
“Then why go?”
“It’s part of the business—you forget! And besides, if I didn’t, I
should be playing bezique with my aunt at Richfield Springs.”
“That’s almost as bad as marrying Dillworth,” he agreed, and they
both laughed for pure pleasure in their sudden intimacy.
She glanced at the clock.
“Dear me! I must be off. It’s after five.”
She paused before the mantelpiece, studying herself in the mirror
while she adjusted her veil. The attitude revealed the long slope
of her slender sides, which gave a kind of wild-wood grace to
her outline—as though she were a captured dryad subdued to the
conventions of the drawing-room; and Selden reflected that it was
the same streak of sylvan freedom in her nature that lent such
savour to her artificiality.
He followed her across the room to the entrance-hall; but on the
threshold she held out her hand with a gesture of leave-taking.
“It’s been delightful; and now you will have to return my visit.”
“But don’t you want me to see you to the station?”
“No; good bye here, please.”
She let her hand lie in his a moment, smiling up at him adorably.
“Good bye, then—and good luck at Bellomont!” he said, opening the
door for her.
On the landing she paused to look about her. There were a thousand
chances to one against her meeting anybody, but one could never
tell, and she always paid for her rare indiscretions by a violent
reaction of prudence. There was no one in sight, however, but a
char-woman who was scrubbing the stairs. Her own stout person and
its surrounding implements took up so much room that Lily, to pass
her, had to gather up her skirts and brush against the wall. As
she did so, the woman paused in her work and looked up curiously,
resting her clenched red fists on the wet cloth she had just drawn
from her pail. She had a broad sallow face, slightly pitted with
small-pox, and thin straw-coloured hair through which her scalp
shone unpleasantly.
“I beg your pardon,” said Lily, intending by her politeness to
convey a criticism of the other’s manner.
The woman, without answering, pushed her pail aside, and continued
to stare as Miss Bart swept by with a murmur of silken linings.
Lily felt herself flushing under the look. What did the creature
suppose? Could one never do the simplest, the most harmless thing,
without subjecting one’s self to some odious conjecture? Half way
down the next flight, she smiled to think that a char-woman’s stare
should so perturb her. The poor thing was probably dazzled by such
an unwonted apparition. But WERE such apparitions unwonted on
Selden’s stairs? Miss Bart was not familiar with the moral code of
bachelors’ flat-houses, and her colour rose again as it occurred to
her that the woman’s persistent gaze implied a groping among past
associations. But she put aside the thought with a smile at her own
fears, and hastened downward, wondering if she should find a cab
short of Fifth Avenue.
Under the Georgian porch she paused again, scanning the street for
a hansom. None was in sight, but as she reached the sidewalk she