The House of Mirth
repast he kept the talk on his hostess, who, fluttered at being
the centre of observation, shone as rosy as the candle-shades she
had manufactured for the occasion. Selden evinced an extraordinary
interest in her household arrangements: complimented her on the
ingenuity with which she had utilized every inch of her small
quarters, asked how her servant managed about afternoons out,
learned that one may improvise delicious dinners in a chafing-dish,
and uttered thoughtful generalizations on the burden of a large
establishment.
When they were in the sitting-room again, where they fitted as
snugly as bits in a puzzle, and she had brewed the coffee, and
poured it into her grandmother’s egg-shell cups, his eye, as he
leaned back, basking in the warm fragrance, lighted on a recent
photograph of Miss Bart, and the desired transition was effected
without an effort. The photograph was well enough—but to catch
her as she had looked last night! Gerty agreed with him—never had
she been so radiant. But could photography capture that light?
There had been a new look in her face—something different; yes,
Selden agreed there had been something different. The coffee was
so exquisite that he asked for a second cup: such a contrast to
the watery stuff at the club! Ah, your poor bachelor with his
impersonal club fare, alternating with the equally impersonal
CUISINE of the dinner-party! A man who lived in lodgings missed
the best part of life—he pictured the flavourless solitude of
Trenor’s repast, and felt a moment’s compassion for the man.... But
to return to Lily—and again and again he returned, questioning,
conjecturing, leading Gerty on, draining her inmost thoughts of
their stored tenderness for her friend.
At first she poured herself out unstintingly, happy in this perfect
communion of their sympathies. His understanding of Lily helped
to confirm her own belief in her friend. They dwelt together on
the fact that Lily had had no chance. Gerty instanced her generous
impulses—her restlessness and discontent. The fact that her life
had never satisfied her proved that she was made for better things.
She might have married more than once—the conventional rich
marriage which she had been taught to consider the sole end of
existence—but when the opportunity came she had always shrunk from
it. Percy Gryce, for instance, had been in love with her—every one
at Bellomont had supposed them to be engaged, and her dismissal
of him was thought inexplicable. This view of the Gryce incident
chimed too well with Selden’s mood not to be instantly adopted
by him, with a flash of retrospective contempt for what had once
seemed the obvious solution. If rejection there had been—and he
wondered now that he had ever doubted it!—then he held the key to
the secret, and the hillsides of Bellomont were lit up, not with
sunset, but with dawn. It was he who had wavered and disowned the
face of opportunity—and the joy now warming his breast might have
been a familiar inmate if he had captured it in its first flight.
It was at this point, perhaps, that a joy just trying its
wings in Gerty’s heart dropped to earth and lay still. She sat
facing Selden, repeating mechanically: “No, she has never been
understood——” and all the while she herself seemed to be sitting
in the centre of a great glare of comprehension. The little
confidential room, where a moment ago their thoughts had touched
elbows like their chairs, grew to unfriendly vastness, separating
her from Selden by all the length of her new vision of the
future—and that future stretched out interminably, with her lonely
figure toiling down it, a mere speck on the solitude.
“She is herself with a few people only; and you are one of them,”
she heard Selden saying. And again: “Be good to her, Gerty, won’t
you?” and: “She has it in her to become whatever she is believed to
be—you’ll help her by believing the best of her?”
The words beat on Gerty’s brain like the sound of a language which
has seemed familiar at a distance, but on approaching is found to
be unintelligible. He had come to talk to her of Lily—that was all!
There had been a third at the feast she had spread for him, and
that third had taken her own place. She tried to follow what he
was saying, to cling to her own part in the talk—but it was all as
meaningless as the boom of waves in a drowning head, and she felt,
as the drowning may feel, that to sink would be nothing beside the
pain of struggling to keep up.
Selden rose, and she drew a deep breath, feeling that soon she
could yield to the blessed waves.
“Mrs. Fisher’s? You say she was dining there? There’s music
afterward; I believe I had a card from her.” He glanced at the
foolish pink-faced clock that was drumming out this hideous hour.
“A quarter past ten? I might look in there now; the Fisher evenings
are amusing. I haven’t kept you up too late, Gerty? You look
tired—I’ve rambled on and bored you.” And in the unwonted overflow
of his feelings, he left a cousinly kiss upon her cheek.
* * * * *
At Mrs. Fisher’s, through the cigar smoke of the studio, a dozen
voices greeted Selden. A song was pending as he entered, and he
dropped into a seat near his hostess, his eyes roaming in search
of Miss Bart. But she was not there, and the discovery gave him a
pang out of all proportion to its seriousness; since the note in
his breast-pocket assured him that at four the next day they would
meet. To his impatience it seemed immeasurably long to wait, and
half-ashamed of the impulse, he leaned to Mrs. Fisher to ask, as
the music ceased, if Miss Bart had not dined with her.
“Lily? She’s just gone. She had to run off, I forget where. Wasn’t
she wonderful last night?”
“Who’s that? Lily?” asked Jack Stepney, from the depths of a
neighbouring arm-chair. “Really, you know, I’m no prude, but when
it comes to a girl standing there as if she was up at auction—I
thought seriously of speaking to cousin Julia.”
“You didn’t know Jack had become our social censor?” Mrs. Fisher
said to Selden with a laugh; and Stepney spluttered, amid the
general derision: “But she’s a cousin, hang it, and when a man’s
married—TOWN TALK was full of her this morning.”
“Yes: lively reading that was,” said Mr. Ned Van Alstyne, stroking
his moustache to hide the smile behind it. “Buy the dirty sheet?
No, of course not; some fellow showed it to me—but I’d heard the
stories before. When a girl’s as good-looking as that she’d better
marry; then no questions are asked. In our imperfectly organized
society there is no provision as yet for the young woman who claims
the privileges of marriage without assuming its obligations.”
“Well, I understand Lily is about to assume them in the shape of
Mr. Rosedale,” Mrs. Fisher said with a laugh.
“Rosedale—good heavens!” exclaimed Van Alstyne, dropping his
eye-glass. “Stepney, that’s your fault for foisting the brute on
us.”
“Oh, confound it, you know, we don’t MARRY Rosedale in our family,”
Stepney languidly protested; but his wife, who sat in oppressive
bridal finery at the other side of the room, quelled him with the
judicial reflection: “In Lily’s circumstances it’s a mistake to
have too high a standard.”
“I hear even Rosedale has been scared by the talk lately,” Mrs.
Fisher rejoined; “but the sight of her last night sent him off his
head. What do you think he said to me after her TABLEAU? ‘My God,
Mrs. Fisher, if I could get Paul Morpeth to paint her like that,
the picture’d appreciate a hundred per cent in ten years.’”
“By Jove,—but isn’t she about somewhere?” exclaimed Van Alstyne,
restoring his glass with an uneasy glance.
“No; she ran off while you were all mixing the punch down stairs.
Where was she going, by the way? What’s on tonight? I hadn’t heard
of anything.”
“Oh, not a party, I think,” said an inexperienced young Farish who
had arrived late. “I put her in her cab as I was coming in, and she
gave the driver the Trenors’ address.”
“The Trenors’?” exclaimed Mrs. Jack Stepney. “Why, the house is
closed—Judy telephoned me from Bellomont this evening.”
“Did she? That’s queer. I’m sure I’m not mistaken. Well, come now,
Trenor’s there, anyhow—I—oh, well—the fact is, I’ve no head for
numbers,” he broke off, admonished by the nudge of an adjoining
foot, and the smile that circled the room.
In its unpleasant light Selden had risen and was shaking hands with
his hostess. The air of the place stifled him, and he wondered why
he had stayed in it so long.
On the doorstep he stood still, remembering a phrase of Lily’s:
“It seems to me you spend a good deal of time in the element you
disapprove of.”
Well—what had brought him there but the quest of her? It was her
element, not his. But he would lift her out of it, take her beyond!
That BEYOND! on her letter was like a cry for rescue. He knew
that Perseus’s task is not done when he has loosed Andromeda’s
chains, for her limbs are numb with bondage, and she cannot rise
and walk, but clings to him with dragging arms as he beats back to
land with his burden. Well, he had strength for both—it was her
weakness which had put the strength in him. It was not, alas, a
clean rush of waves they had to win through, but a clogging morass
of old associations and habits, and for the moment its vapours
were in his throat. But he would see clearer, breathe freer in her
presence: she was at once the dead weight at his breast and the
spar which should float them to safety. He smiled at the whirl of
metaphor with which he was trying to build up a defence against the
influences of the last hour. It was pitiable that he, who knew the
mixed motives on which social judgments depend, should still feel
himself so swayed by them. How could he lift Lily to a freer vision
of life, if his own view of her was to be coloured by any mind in
which he saw her reflected?
The moral oppression had produced a physical craving for air, and
he strode on, opening his lungs to the reverberating coldness of
the night. At the corner of Fifth Avenue Van Alstyne hailed him
with an offer of company.
“Walking? A good thing to blow the smoke out of one’s head. Now
that women have taken to tobacco we live in a bath of nicotine.
It would be a curious thing to study the effect of cigarettes on
the relation of the sexes. Smoke is almost as great a solvent as
divorce: both tend to obscure the moral issue.”
Nothing could have been less consonant with Selden’s mood than
Van Alstyne’s after-dinner aphorisms, but as long as the latter
confined himself to generalities his listener’s nerves were in
control. Happily Van Alstyne prided himself on his summing-up of
social aspects, and with Selden for audience was eager to show the
sureness of his touch. Mrs. Fisher lived in an East side street
near the Park, and as the two men walked down Fifth Avenue the new
architectural developments of that versatile thoroughfare invited
Van Alstyne’s comment.
“That Greiner house, now—a typical rung in the social ladder! The
man who built it came from a MILIEU where all the dishes are put
on the table at once. His facade is a complete architectural meal;
if he had omitted a style his friends might have thought the money
had given out. Not a bad purchase for Rosedale, though: attracts
attention, and awes the Western sight-seer. By and bye he’ll get
out of that phase, and want something that the crowd will pass and
the few pause before. Especially if he marries my clever cousin——”
Selden dashed in with the query: “And the Wellington Brys’? Rather
clever of its kind, don’t you think?”
They were just beneath the wide white facade, with its rich
restraint of line, which suggested the clever corseting of a
redundant figure.
“That’s the next stage: the desire to imply that one has been to