The House of Mirth
palpitating out of reach, while she held her breath and watched
where it would alight. Yet Selden’s manner at the Brys’ had brought
the flutter of wings so close that they seemed to be beating in
her own heart. She had never seen him so alert, so responsive,
so attentive to what she had to say. His habitual manner had an
absent-minded kindliness which she accepted, and was grateful for,
as the liveliest sentiment her presence was likely to inspire; but
she was quick to feel in him a change implying that for once she
could give pleasure as well as receive it.
And it was so delightful that this higher degree of sympathy should
be reached through their interest in Lily Bart!
Gerty’s affection for her friend—a sentiment that had learned
to keep itself alive on the scantiest diet—had grown to active
adoration since Lily’s restless curiosity had drawn her into the
circle of Miss Farish’s work. Lily’s taste of beneficence had
wakened in her a momentary appetite for well-doing. Her visit to
the Girls’ Club had first brought her in contact with the dramatic
contrasts of life. She had always accepted with philosophic
calm the fact that such existences as hers were pedestalled on
foundations of obscure humanity. The dreary limbo of dinginess lay
all around and beneath that little illuminated circle in which life
reached its finest efflorescence, as the mud and sleet of a winter
night enclose a hot-house filled with tropical flowers. All this
was in the natural order of things, and the orchid basking in its
artificially created atmosphere could round the delicate curves of
its petals undisturbed by the ice on the panes.
But it is one thing to live comfortably with the abstract
conception of poverty, another to be brought in contact with its
human embodiments. Lily had never conceived of these victims of
fate otherwise than in the mass. That the mass was composed of
individual lives, innumerable separate centres of sensation, with
her own eager reachings for pleasure, her own fierce revulsions
from pain—that some of these bundles of feeling were clothed in
shapes not so unlike her own, with eyes meant to look on gladness,
and young lips shaped for love—this discovery gave Lily one of
those sudden shocks of pity that sometimes decentralize a life.
Lily’s nature was incapable of such renewal: she could feel other
demands only through her own, and no pain was long vivid which
did not press on an answering nerve. But for the moment she was
drawn out of herself by the interest of her direct relation with
a world so unlike her own. She had supplemented her first gift by
personal assistance to one or two of Miss Farish’s most appealing
subjects, and the admiration and interest her presence excited
among the tired workers at the club ministered in a new form to her
insatiable desire to please.
Gerty Farish was not a close enough reader of character to
disentangle the mixed threads of which Lily’s philanthropy was
woven. She supposed her beautiful friend to be actuated by the
same motive as herself—that sharpening of the moral vision which
makes all human suffering so near and insistent that the other
aspects of life fade into remoteness. Gerty lived by such simple
formulas that she did not hesitate to class her friend’s state
with the emotional “change of heart” to which her dealings with
the poor had accustomed her; and she rejoiced in the thought that
she had been the humble instrument of this renewal. Now she had
an answer to all criticisms of Lily’s conduct: as she had said,
she knew “the real Lily,” and the discovery that Selden shared her
knowledge raised her placid acceptance of life to a dazzled sense
of its possibilities—a sense farther enlarged, in the course of the
afternoon, by the receipt of a telegram from Selden asking if he
might dine with her that evening.
While Gerty was lost in the happy bustle which this announcement
produced in her small household, Selden was at one with her in
thinking with intensity of Lily Bart. The case which had called him
to Albany was not complicated enough to absorb all his attention,
and he had the professional faculty of keeping a part of his mind
free when its services were not needed. This part—which at the
moment seemed dangerously like the whole—was filled to the brim
with the sensations of the previous evening. Selden understood the
symptoms: he recognized the fact that he was paying up, as there
had always been a chance of his having to pay up, for the voluntary
exclusions of his past. He had meant to keep free from permanent
ties, not from any poverty of feeling, but because, in a different
way, he was, as much as Lily, the victim of his environment. There
had been a germ of truth in his declaration to Gerty Farish that he
had never wanted to marry a “nice” girl: the adjective connoting,
in his cousin’s vocabulary, certain utilitarian qualities which
are apt to preclude the luxury of charm. Now it had been Selden’s
fate to have a charming mother: her graceful portrait, all smiles
and Cashmere, still emitted a faded scent of the undefinable
quality. His father was the kind of man who delights in a charming
woman: who quotes her, stimulates her, and keeps her perennially
charming. Neither one of the couple cared for money, but their
disdain of it took the form of always spending a little more than
was prudent. If their house was shabby, it was exquisitely kept; if
there were good books on the shelves there were also good dishes
on the table. Selden senior had an eye for a picture, his wife an
understanding of old lace; and both were so conscious of restraint
and discrimination in buying that they never quite knew how it was
that the bills mounted up.
Though many of Selden’s friends would have called his parents poor,
he had grown up in an atmosphere where restricted means were felt
only as a check on aimless profusion: where the few possessions
were so good that their rarity gave them a merited relief, and
abstinence was combined with elegance in a way exemplified by Mrs.
Selden’s knack of wearing her old velvet as if it were new. A man
has the advantage of being delivered early from the home point of
view, and before Selden left college he had learned that there
are as many different ways of going without money as of spending
it. Unfortunately, he found no way as agreeable as that practised
at home; and his views of womankind in especial were tinged by
the remembrance of the one woman who had given him his sense of
“values.” It was from her that he inherited his detachment from
the sumptuary side of life: the stoic’s carelessness of material
things, combined with the Epicurean’s pleasure in them. Life shorn
of either feeling appeared to him a diminished thing; and nowhere
was the blending of the two ingredients so essential as in the
character of a pretty woman.
It had always seemed to Selden that experience offered a great deal
besides the sentimental adventure, yet he could vividly conceive of
a love which should broaden and deepen till it became the central
fact of life. What he could not accept, in his own case, was the
makeshift alternative of a relation that should be less than this:
that should leave some portions of his nature unsatisfied, while it
put an undue strain on others. He would not, in other words, yield
to the growth of an affection which might appeal to pity yet leave
the understanding untouched: sympathy should no more delude him
than a trick of the eyes, the grace of helplessness than a curve of
the cheek.
But now—that little BUT passed like a sponge over all his vows.
His reasoned-out resistances seemed for the moment so much less
important than the question as to when Lily would receive his
note! He yielded himself to the charm of trivial preoccupations,
wondering at what hour her reply would be sent, with what words
it would begin. As to its import he had no doubt—he was as sure
of her surrender as of his own. And so he had leisure to muse on
all its exquisite details, as a hard worker, on a holiday morning,
might lie still and watch the beam of light travel gradually
across his room. But if the new light dazzled, it did not blind
him. He could still discern the outline of facts, though his own
relation to them had changed. He was no less conscious than before
of what was said of Lily Bart, but he could separate the woman he
knew from the vulgar estimate of her. His mind turned to Gerty
Farish’s words, and the wisdom of the world seemed a groping thing
beside the insight of innocence. BLESSED ARE THE PURE IN HEART,
FOR THEY SHALL SEE GOD—even the hidden god in their neighbour’s
breast! Selden was in the state of impassioned self-absorption
that the first surrender to love produces. His craving was for the
companionship of one whose point of view should justify his own,
who should confirm, by deliberate observation, the truth to which
his intuitions had leaped. He could not wait for the midday recess,
but seized a moment’s leisure in court to scribble his telegram to
Gerty Farish.
Reaching town, he was driven direct to his club, where he hoped a
note from Miss Bart might await him. But his box contained only
a line of rapturous assent from Gerty, and he was turning away
disappointed when he was hailed by a voice from the smoking room.
“Hallo, Lawrence! Dining here? Take a bite with me—I’ve ordered a
canvas-back.”
He discovered Trenor, in his day clothes, sitting, with a tall
glass at his elbow, behind the folds of a sporting journal.
Selden thanked him, but pleaded an engagement.
“Hang it, I believe every man in town has an engagement tonight. I
shall have the club to myself. You know how I’m living this winter,
rattling round in that empty house. My wife meant to come to town
today, but she’s put it off again, and how is a fellow to dine
alone in a room with the looking-glasses covered, and nothing but
a bottle of Harvey sauce on the sideboard? I say, Lawrence, chuck
your engagement and take pity on me—it gives me the blue devils to
dine alone, and there’s nobody but that canting ass Wetherall in
the club.”
“Sorry, Gus—I can’t do it.”
As Selden turned away, he noticed the dark flush on Trenor’s face,
the unpleasant moisture of his intensely white forehead, the way
his jewelled rings were wedged in the creases of his fat red
fingers. Certainly the beast was predominating—the beast at the
bottom of the glass. And he had heard this man’s name coupled with
Lily’s! Bah—the thought sickened him; all the way back to his rooms
he was haunted by the sight of Trenor’s fat creased hands——
On his table lay the note: Lily had sent it to his rooms. He knew
what was in it before he broke the seal—a grey seal with BEYOND!
beneath a flying ship. Ah, he would take her beyond—beyond the
ugliness, the pettiness, the attrition and corrosion of the soul——
* * * * *
Gerty’s little sitting-room sparkled with welcome when Selden
entered it. Its modest “effects,” compact of enamel paint and
ingenuity, spoke to him in the language just then sweetest to his
ear. It is surprising how little narrow walls and a low ceiling
matter, when the roof of the soul has suddenly been raised. Gerty
sparkled too; or at least shone with a tempered radiance. He had
never before noticed that she had “points”—really, some good fellow
might do worse.... Over the little dinner (and here, again, the
effects were wonderful) he told her she ought to marry—he was in a
mood to pair off the whole world. She had made the caramel custard
with her own hands? It was sinful to keep such gifts to herself.
He reflected with a throb of pride that Lily could trim her own
hats—she had told him so the day of their walk at Bellomont.
He did not speak of Lily till after dinner. During the little