The House of Mirth
make themselves agreeable to Dorset, and Lily had been kind to him
at Bellomont, and was now smiling on him with a divine renewal of
kindness.
“Well, here we are, in for another six months of caterwauling,”
he began complainingly. “Not a shade of difference between this
year and last, except that the women have got new clothes and the
singers haven’t got new voices. My wife’s musical, you know—puts me
through a course of this every winter. It isn’t so bad on Italian
nights—then she comes late, and there’s time to digest. But when
they give Wagner we have to rush dinner, and I pay up for it. And
the draughts are damnable—asphyxia in front and pleurisy in the
back. There’s Trenor leaving the box without drawing the curtain!
With a hide like that draughts don’t make any difference. Did you
ever watch Trenor eat? If you did, you’d wonder why he’s alive; I
suppose he’s leather inside too.—But I came to say that my wife
wants you to come down to our place next Sunday. Do for heaven’s
sake say yes. She’s got a lot of bores coming—intellectual ones,
I mean; that’s her new line, you know, and I’m not sure it ain’t
worse than the music. Some of ’em have long hair, and they start
an argument with the soup, and don’t notice when things are handed
to them. The consequence is the dinner gets cold, and I have
dyspepsia. That silly ass Silverton brings them to the house—he
writes poetry, you know, and Bertha and he are getting tremendously
thick. She could write better than any of ’em if she chose, and I
don’t blame her for wanting clever fellows about; all I say is:
‘Don’t let me see ’em eat!’”
The gist of this strange communication gave Lily a distinct thrill
of pleasure. Under ordinary circumstances, there would have been
nothing surprising in an invitation from Bertha Dorset; but since
the Bellomont episode an unavowed hostility had kept the two women
apart. Now, with a start of inner wonder, Lily felt that her thirst
for retaliation had died out. IF YOU WOULD FORGIVE YOUR ENEMY,
says the Malay proverb, FIRST INFLICT A HURT ON HIM; and Lily was
experiencing the truth of the apothegm. If she had destroyed Mrs.
Dorset’s letters, she might have continued to hate her; but the
fact that they remained in her possession had fed her resentment to
satiety.
She uttered a smiling acceptance, hailing in the renewal of the tie
an escape from Trenor’s importunities.
Chapter 11
Meanwhile the holidays had gone by and the season was beginning.
Fifth Avenue had become a nightly torrent of carriages surging
upward to the fashionable quarters about the Park, where
illuminated windows and outspread awnings betokened the usual
routine of hospitality. Other tributary currents crossed the
mainstream, bearing their freight to the theatres, restaurants or
opera; and Mrs. Peniston, from the secluded watch-tower of her
upper window, could tell to a nicety just when the chronic volume
of sound was increased by the sudden influx setting toward a Van
Osburgh ball, or when the multiplication of wheels meant merely
that the opera was over, or that there was a big supper at Sherry’s.
Mrs. Peniston followed the rise and culmination of the season
as keenly as the most active sharer in its gaieties; and,
as a looker-on, she enjoyed opportunities of comparison and
generalization such as those who take part must proverbially
forego. No one could have kept a more accurate record of
social fluctuations, or have put a more unerring finger on
the distinguishing features of each season: its dulness, its
extravagance, its lack of balls or excess of divorces. She had a
special memory for the vicissitudes of the “new people” who rose
to the surface with each recurring tide, and were either submerged
beneath its rush or landed triumphantly beyond the reach of envious
breakers; and she was apt to display a remarkable retrospective
insight into their ultimate fate, so that, when they had fulfilled
their destiny, she was almost always able to say to Grace
Stepney—the recipient of her prophecies—that she had known exactly
what would happen.
This particular season Mrs. Peniston would have characterized as
that in which everybody “felt poor” except the Welly Brys and Mr.
Simon Rosedale. It had been a bad autumn in Wall Street, where
prices fell in accordance with that peculiar law which proves
railway stocks and bales of cotton to be more sensitive to the
allotment of executive power than many estimable citizens trained
to all the advantages of self-government. Even fortunes supposed to
be independent of the market either betrayed a secret dependence on
it, or suffered from a sympathetic affection: fashion sulked in its
country houses, or came to town incognito, general entertainments
were discountenanced, and informality and short dinners became the
fashion.
But society, amused for a while at playing Cinderella, soon
wearied of the hearthside role, and welcomed the Fairy Godmother
in the shape of any magician powerful enough to turn the shrunken
pumpkin back again into the golden coach. The mere fact of growing
richer at a time when most people’s investments are shrinking, is
calculated to attract envious attention; and according to Wall
Street rumours, Welly Bry and Rosedale had found the secret of
performing this miracle.
Rosedale, in particular, was said to have doubled his fortune, and
there was talk of his buying the newly-finished house of one of the
victims of the crash, who, in the space of twelve short months, had
made the same number of millions, built a house in Fifth Avenue,
filled a picture gallery with old masters, entertained all New
York in it, and been smuggled out of the country between a trained
nurse and a doctor, while his creditors mounted guard over the old
masters, and his guests explained to each other that they had dined
with him only because they wanted to see the pictures. Mr. Rosedale
meant to have a less meteoric career. He knew he should have to
go slowly, and the instincts of his race fitted him to suffer
rebuffs and put up with delays. But he was prompt to perceive
that the general dulness of the season afforded him an unusual
opportunity to shine, and he set about with patient industry to
form a background for his growing glory. Mrs. Fisher was of immense
service to him at this period. She had set off so many newcomers
on the social stage that she was like one of those pieces of stock
scenery which tell the experienced spectator exactly what is going
to take place. But Mr. Rosedale wanted, in the long run, a more
individual environment. He was sensitive to shades of difference
which Miss Bart would never have credited him with perceiving,
because he had no corresponding variations of manner; and it
was becoming more and more clear to him that Miss Bart herself
possessed precisely the complementary qualities needed to round off
his social personality.
Such details did not fall within the range of Mrs. Peniston’s
vision. Like many minds of panoramic sweep, hers was apt to
overlook the MINUTIAE of the foreground, and she was much more
likely to know where Carry Fisher had found the Welly Brys’ CHEF
for them, than what was happening to her own niece. She was not,
however, without purveyors of information ready to supplement
her deficiencies. Grace Stepney’s mind was like a kind of moral
fly-paper, to which the buzzing items of gossip were drawn by a
fatal attraction, and where they hung fast in the toils of an
inexorable memory. Lily would have been surprised to know how many
trivial facts concerning herself were lodged in Miss Stepney’s
head. She was quite aware that she was of interest to dingy people,
but she assumed that there is only one form of dinginess, and
that admiration for brilliancy is the natural expression of its
inferior state. She knew that Gerty Farish admired her blindly, and
therefore supposed that she inspired the same sentiments in Grace
Stepney, whom she classified as a Gerty Farish without the saving
traits of youth and enthusiasm.
In reality, the two differed from each other as much as they
differed from the object of their mutual contemplation. Miss
Farish’s heart was a fountain of tender illusions, Miss Stepney’s
a precise register of facts as manifested in their relation to
herself. She had sensibilities which, to Lily, would have seemed
comic in a person with a freckled nose and red eyelids, who lived
in a boarding-house and admired Mrs. Peniston’s drawing-room; but
poor Grace’s limitations gave them a more concentrated inner life,
as poor soil starves certain plants into intenser efflorescence.
She had in truth no abstract propensity to malice: she did not
dislike Lily because the latter was brilliant and predominant,
but because she thought that Lily disliked her. It is less
mortifying to believe one’s self unpopular than insignificant, and
vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of
unfriendliness. Even such scant civilities as Lily accorded to Mr.
Rosedale would have made Miss Stepney her friend for life; but how
could she foresee that such a friend was worth cultivating? How,
moreover, can a young woman who has never been ignored measure
the pang which this injury inflicts? And, lastly, how could Lily,
accustomed to choose between a pressure of engagements, guess
that she had mortally offended Miss Stepney by causing her to be
excluded from one of Mrs. Peniston’s infrequent dinner-parties?
Mrs. Peniston disliked giving dinners, but she had a high sense
of family obligation, and on the Jack Stepneys’ return from their
honeymoon she felt it incumbent upon her to light the drawing-room
lamps and extract her best silver from the Safe Deposit vaults.
Mrs. Peniston’s rare entertainments were preceded by days of
heart-rending vacillation as to every detail of the feast, from
the seating of the guests to the pattern of the table-cloth, and
in the course of one of these preliminary discussions she had
imprudently suggested to her cousin Grace that, as the dinner was a
family affair, she might be included in it. For a week the prospect
had lighted up Miss Stepney’s colourless existence; then she had
been given to understand that it would be more convenient to have
her another day. Miss Stepney knew exactly what had happened.
Lily, to whom family reunions were occasions of unalloyed dulness,
had persuaded her aunt that a dinner of “smart” people would be
much more to the taste of the young couple, and Mrs. Peniston,
who leaned helplessly on her niece in social matters, had been
prevailed upon to pronounce Grace’s exile. After all, Grace could
come any other day; why should she mind being put off?
It was precisely because Miss Stepney could come any other day—and
because she knew her relations were in the secret of her unoccupied
evenings—that this incident loomed gigantically on her horizon. She
was aware that she had Lily to thank for it; and dull resentment
was turned to active animosity.
Mrs. Peniston, on whom she had looked in a day or two after the
dinner, laid down her crochet-work and turned abruptly from her
oblique survey of Fifth Avenue.
“Gus Trenor?—Lily and Gus Trenor?” she said, growing so suddenly
pale that her visitor was almost alarmed.
“Oh, cousin Julia . . . of course I don’t mean....”
“I don’t know what you DO mean,” said Mrs. Peniston, with a
frightened quiver in her small fretful voice. “Such things were
never heard of in my day. And my own niece! I’m not sure I
understand you. Do people say he’s in love with her?”
Mrs. Peniston’s horror was genuine. Though she boasted an
unequalled familiarity with the secret chronicles of society, she
had the innocence of the school-girl who regards wickedness as a
part of “history,” and to whom it never occurs that the scandals