The House of Mirth
of the easy good luck he had hitherto encountered.
Mrs. Trenor was still at Bellomont, keeping the town-house open,
and descending on it now and then for a taste of the world, but
preferring the recurrent excitement of week-end parties to the
restrictions of a dull season. Since the holidays she had not urged
Lily to return to Bellomont, and the first time they met in town
Lily fancied there was a shade of coldness in her manner. Was it
merely the expression of her displeasure at Miss Bart’s neglect,
or had disquieting rumours reached her? The latter contingency
seemed improbable, yet Lily was not without a sense of uneasiness.
If her roaming sympathies had struck root anywhere, it was in
her friendship with Judy Trenor. She believed in the sincerity
of her friend’s affection, though it sometimes showed itself in
self-interested ways, and she shrank with peculiar reluctance from
any risk of estranging it. But, aside from this, she was keenly
conscious of the way in which such an estrangement would react on
herself. The fact that Gus Trenor was Judy’s husband was at times
Lily’s strongest reason for disliking him, and for resenting the
obligation under which he had placed her. To set her doubts at
rest, Miss Bart, soon after the New Year, “proposed” herself for a
week-end at Bellomont. She had learned in advance that the presence
of a large party would protect her from too great assiduity on
Trenor’s part, and his wife’s telegraphic “come by all means”
seemed to assure her of her usual welcome.
Judy received her amicably. The cares of a large party always
prevailed over personal feelings, and Lily saw no change in
her hostess’s manner. Nevertheless, she was soon aware that
the experiment of coming to Bellomont was destined not to be
successful. The party was made up of what Mrs. Trenor called “poky
people”—her generic name for persons who did not play bridge—and,
it being her habit to group all such obstructionists in one
class, she usually invited them together, regardless of their
other characteristics. The result was apt to be an irreducible
combination of persons having no other quality in common than their
abstinence from bridge, and the antagonisms developed in a group
lacking the one taste which might have amalgamated them, were in
this case aggravated by bad weather, and by the ill-concealed
boredom of their host and hostess. In such emergencies, Judy would
usually have turned to Lily to fuse the discordant elements;
and Miss Bart, assuming that such a service was expected of
her, threw herself into it with her accustomed zeal. But at the
outset she perceived a subtle resistance to her efforts. If Mrs.
Trenor’s manner toward her was unchanged, there was certainly a
faint coldness in that of the other ladies. An occasional caustic
allusion to “your friends the Wellington Brys,” or to “the little
Jew who has bought the Greiner house—some one told us you knew him,
Miss Bart,”—showed Lily that she was in disfavour with that portion
of society which, while contributing least to its amusement, has
assumed the right to decide what forms that amusement shall take.
The indication was a slight one, and a year ago Lily would have
smiled at it, trusting to the charm of her personality to dispel
any prejudice against her. But now she had grown more sensitive
to criticism and less confident in her power of disarming it.
She knew, moreover, that if the ladies at Bellomont permitted
themselves to criticize her friends openly, it was a proof that
they were not afraid of subjecting her to the same treatment behind
her back. The nervous dread lest anything in Trenor’s manner should
seem to justify their disapproval made her seek every pretext for
avoiding him, and she left Bellomont conscious of having failed in
every purpose which had taken her there.
In town she returned to preoccupations which, for the moment, had
the happy effect of banishing troublesome thoughts. The Welly Brys,
after much debate, and anxious counsel with their newly-acquired
friends, had decided on the bold move of giving a general
entertainment. To attack society collectively, when one’s means of
approach are limited to a few acquaintances, is like advancing into
a strange country with an insufficient number of scouts; but such
rash tactics have sometimes led to brilliant victories, and the
Brys had determined to put their fate to the touch. Mrs. Fisher, to
whom they had entrusted the conduct of the affair, had decided that
TABLEAUX VIVANTS and expensive music were the two baits most likely
to attract the desired prey, and after prolonged negotiations,
and the kind of wire-pulling in which she was known to excel, she
had induced a dozen fashionable women to exhibit themselves in a
series of pictures which, by a farther miracle of persuasion, the
distinguished portrait painter, Paul Morpeth, had been prevailed
upon to organize.
Lily was in her element on such occasions. Under Morpeth’s guidance
her vivid plastic sense, hitherto nurtured on no higher food than
dress-making and upholstery, found eager expression in the disposal
of draperies, the study of attitudes, the shifting of lights
and shadows. Her dramatic instinct was roused by the choice of
subjects, and the gorgeous reproductions of historic dress stirred
an imagination which only visual impressions could reach. But
keenest of all was the exhilaration of displaying her own beauty
under a new aspect: of showing that her loveliness was no mere
fixed quality, but an element shaping all emotions to fresh forms
of grace.
Mrs. Fisher’s measures had been well-taken, and society, surprised
in a dull moment, succumbed to the temptation of Mrs. Bry’s
hospitality. The protesting minority were forgotten in the throng
which abjured and came; and the audience was almost as brilliant as
the show.
Lawrence Selden was among those who had yielded to the proffered
inducements. If he did not often act on the accepted social axiom
that a man may go where he pleases, it was because he had long
since learned that his pleasures were mainly to be found in a small
group of the like-minded. But he enjoyed spectacular effects, and
was not insensible to the part money plays in their production: all
he asked was that the very rich should live up to their calling
as stage-managers, and not spend their money in a dull way. This
the Brys could certainly not be charged with doing. Their recently
built house, whatever it might lack as a frame for domesticity,
was almost as well-designed for the display of a festal assemblage
as one of those airy pleasure-halls which the Italian architects
improvised to set off the hospitality of princes. The air of
improvisation was in fact strikingly present: so recent, so
rapidly-evoked was the whole MISE-EN-SCENE that one had to touch
the marble columns to learn they were not of cardboard, to seat
one’s self in one of the damask-and-gold arm-chairs to be sure it
was not painted against the wall.
Selden, who had put one of these seats to the test, found himself,
from an angle of the ball-room, surveying the scene with frank
enjoyment. The company, in obedience to the decorative instinct
which calls for fine clothes in fine surroundings, had dressed
rather with an eye to Mrs. Bry’s background than to herself. The
seated throng, filling the immense room without undue crowding,
presented a surface of rich tissues and jewelled shoulders in
harmony with the festooned and gilded walls, and the flushed
splendours of the Venetian ceiling. At the farther end of the room
a stage had been constructed behind a proscenium arch curtained
with folds of old damask; but in the pause before the parting of
the folds there was little thought of what they might reveal, for
every woman who had accepted Mrs. Bry’s invitation was engaged in
trying to find out how many of her friends had done the same.
Gerty Farish, seated next to Selden, was lost in that
indiscriminate and uncritical enjoyment so irritating to Miss
Bart’s finer perceptions. It may be that Selden’s nearness had
something to do with the quality of his cousin’s pleasure; but Miss
Farish was so little accustomed to refer her enjoyment of such
scenes to her own share in them, that she was merely conscious of a
deeper sense of contentment.
“Wasn’t it dear of Lily to get me an invitation? Of course it would
never have occurred to Carry Fisher to put me on the list, and I
should have been so sorry to miss seeing it all—and especially
Lily herself. Some one told me the ceiling was by Veronese—you
would know, of course, Lawrence. I suppose it’s very beautiful,
but his women are so dreadfully fat. Goddesses? Well, I can only
say that if they’d been mortals and had to wear corsets, it would
have been better for them. I think our women are much handsomer.
And this room is wonderfully becoming—every one looks so well! Did
you ever see such jewels? Do look at Mrs. George Dorset’s pearls—I
suppose the smallest of them would pay the rent of our Girls’ Club
for a year. Not that I ought to complain about the club; every
one has been so wonderfully kind. Did I tell you that Lily had
given us three hundred dollars? Wasn’t it splendid of her? And
then she collected a lot of money from her friends—Mrs. Bry gave
us five hundred, and Mr. Rosedale a thousand. I wish Lily were not
so nice to Mr. Rosedale, but she says it’s no use being rude to
him, because he doesn’t see the difference. She really can’t bear
to hurt people’s feelings—it makes me so angry when I hear her
called cold and conceited! The girls at the club don’t call her
that. Do you know she has been there with me twice?—yes, Lily! And
you should have seen their eyes! One of them said it was as good
as a day in the country just to look at her. And she sat there,
and laughed and talked with them—not a bit as if she were being
CHARITABLE, you know, but as if she liked it as much as they did.
They’ve been asking ever since when she’s coming back; and she’s
promised me——oh!”
Miss Farish’s confidences were cut short by the parting of the
curtain on the first TABLEAU—a group of nymphs dancing across
flower-strewn sward in the rhythmic postures of Botticelli’s
Spring. TABLEAUX VIVANTS depend for their effect not only on the
happy disposal of lights and the delusive interposition of layers
of gauze, but on a corresponding adjustment of the mental vision.
To unfurnished minds they remain, in spite of every enhancement
of art, only a superior kind of wax-works; but to the responsive
fancy they may give magic glimpses of the boundary world between
fact and imagination. Selden’s mind was of this order: he could
yield to vision-making influences as completely as a child to the
spell of a fairy-tale. Mrs. Bry’s TABLEAUX wanted none of the
qualities which go to the producing of such illusions, and under
Morpeth’s organizing hand the pictures succeeded each other with
the rhythmic march of some splendid frieze, in which the fugitive
curves of living flesh and the wandering light of young eyes have
been subdued to plastic harmony without losing the charm of life.
The scenes were taken from old pictures, and the participators had
been cleverly fitted with characters suited to their types. No
one, for instance, could have made a more typical Goya than Carry
Fisher, with her short dark-skinned face, the exaggerated glow of
her eyes, the provocation of her frankly-painted smile. A brilliant
Miss Smedden from Brooklyn showed to perfection the sumptuous
curves of Titian’s Daughter, lifting her gold salver laden with
grapes above the harmonizing gold of rippled hair and rich brocade,
and a young Mrs. Van Alstyne, who showed the frailer Dutch type,
with high blue-veined forehead and pale eyes and lashes, made
a characteristic Vandyck, in black satin, against a curtained