The House of Mirth
unless I can spend it on the right woman. That’s what I want to do
with it: I want my wife to make all the other women feel small. I’d
never grudge a dollar that was spent on that. But it isn’t every
woman can do it, no matter how much you spend on her. There was a
girl in some history book who wanted gold shields, or something,
and the fellows threw ’em at her, and she was crushed under ’em:
they killed her. Well, that’s true enough: some women looked buried
under their jewelry. What I want is a woman who’ll hold her head
higher the more diamonds I put on it. And when I looked at you the
other night at the Brys’, in that plain white dress, looking as if
you had a crown on, I said to myself: ‘By gad, if she had one she’d
wear it as if it grew on her.’”
Still Lily did not speak, and he continued, warming with his theme:
“Tell you what it is, though, that kind of woman costs more than
all the rest of ’em put together. If a woman’s going to ignore her
pearls, they want to be better than anybody else’s—and so it is
with everything else. You know what I mean—you know it’s only the
showy things that are cheap. Well, I should want my wife to be able
to take the earth for granted if she wanted to. I know there’s one
thing vulgar about money, and that’s the thinking about it; and my
wife would never have to demean herself in that way.” He paused,
and then added, with an unfortunate lapse to an earlier manner: “I
guess you know the lady I’ve got in view, Miss Bart.”
Lily raised her head, brightening a little under the challenge.
Even through the dark tumult of her thoughts, the clink of Mr.
Rosedale’s millions had a faintly seductive note. Oh, for enough of
them to cancel her one miserable debt! But the man behind them grew
increasingly repugnant in the light of Selden’s expected coming.
The contrast was too grotesque: she could scarcely suppress the
smile it provoked. She decided that directness would be best.
“If you mean me, Mr. Rosedale, I am very grateful—very much
flattered; but I don’t know what I have ever done to make you
think—”
“Oh, if you mean you’re not dead in love with me, I’ve got sense
enough left to see that. And I ain’t talking to you as if you
were—I presume I know the kind of talk that’s expected under those
circumstances. I’m confoundedly gone on you—that’s about the size
of it—and I’m just giving you a plain business statement of the
consequences. You’re not very fond of me—YET—but you’re fond of
luxury, and style, and amusement, and of not having to worry about
cash. You like to have a good time, and not have to settle for it;
and what I propose to do is to provide for the good time and do the
settling.”
He paused, and she returned with a chilling smile: “You are
mistaken in one point, Mr. Rosedale: whatever I enjoy I am prepared
to settle for.”
She spoke with the intention of making him see that, if his words
implied a tentative allusion to her private affairs, she was
prepared to meet and repudiate it. But if he recognized her meaning
it failed to abash him, and he went on in the same tone: “I didn’t
mean to give offence; excuse me if I’ve spoken too plainly. But
why ain’t you straight with me—why do you put up that kind of
bluff? You know there’ve been times when you were bothered—damned
bothered—and as a girl gets older, and things keep moving along,
why, before she knows it, the things she wants are liable to move
past her and not come back. I don’t say it’s anywhere near that
with you yet; but you’ve had a taste of bothers that a girl like
yourself ought never to have known about, and what I’m offering you
is the chance to turn your back on them once for all.”
The colour burned in Lily’s face as he ended; there was no
mistaking the point he meant to make, and to permit it to pass
unheeded was a fatal confession of weakness, while to resent it too
openly was to risk offending him at a perilous moment. Indignation
quivered on her lip; but it was quelled by the secret voice which
warned her that she must not quarrel with him. He knew too much
about her, and even at the moment when it was essential that he
should show himself at his best, he did not scruple to let her
see how much he knew. How then would he use his power when her
expression of contempt had dispelled his one motive for restraint?
Her whole future might hinge on her way of answering him: she had
to stop and consider that, in the stress of her other anxieties, as
a breathless fugitive may have to pause at the cross-roads and try
to decide coolly which turn to take.
“You are quite right, Mr. Rosedale. I HAVE had bothers; and I am
grateful to you for wanting to relieve me of them. It is not always
easy to be quite independent and self-respecting when one is poor
and lives among rich people; I have been careless about money, and
have worried about my bills. But I should be selfish and ungrateful
if I made that a reason for accepting all you offer, with no better
return to make than the desire to be free from my anxieties. You
must give me time—time to think of your kindness—and of what I
could give you in return for it——”
She held out her hand with a charming gesture in which dismissal
was shorn of its rigour. Its hint of future leniency made Rosedale
rise in obedience to it, a little flushed with his unhoped-for
success, and disciplined by the tradition of his blood to accept
what was conceded, without undue haste to press for more. Something
in his prompt acquiescence frightened her; she felt behind it the
stored force of a patience that might subdue the strongest will.
But at least they had parted amicably, and he was out of the house
without meeting Selden—Selden, whose continued absence now smote
her with a new alarm. Rosedale had remained over an hour, and she
understood that it was now too late to hope for Selden. He would
write explaining his absence, of course; there would be a note
from him by the late post. But her confession would have to be
postponed; and the chill of the delay settled heavily on her fagged
spirit.
It lay heavier when the postman’s last ring brought no note for
her, and she had to go upstairs to a lonely night—a night as grim
and sleepless as her tortured fancy had pictured it to Gerty.
She had never learned to live with her own thoughts, and to be
confronted with them through such hours of lucid misery made the
confused wretchedness of her previous vigil seem easily bearable.
Daylight disbanded the phantom crew, and made it clear to her
that she would hear from Selden before noon; but the day passed
without his writing or coming. Lily remained at home, lunching and
dining alone with her aunt, who complained of flutterings of the
heart, and talked icily on general topics. Mrs. Peniston went to
bed early, and when she had gone Lily sat down and wrote a note to
Selden. She was about to ring for a messenger to despatch it when
her eye fell on a paragraph in the evening paper which lay at her
elbow: “Mr. Lawrence Selden was among the passengers sailing this
afternoon for Havana and the West Indies on the Windward Liner
Antilles.”
She laid down the paper and sat motionless, staring at her note.
She understood now that he was never coming—that he had gone away
because he was afraid that he might come. She rose, and walking
across the floor stood gazing at herself for a long time in the
brightly lit mirror above the mantelpiece. The lines in her face
came out terribly—she looked old; and when a girl looks old to
herself, how does she look to other people? She moved away, and
began to wander aimlessly about the room, fitting her steps with
mechanical precision between the monstrous roses of Mrs. Peniston’s
Axminster. Suddenly she noticed that the pen with which she had
written to Selden still rested against the uncovered inkstand.
She seated herself again, and taking out an envelope, addressed
it rapidly to Rosedale. Then she laid out a sheet of paper, and
sat over it with suspended pen. It had been easy enough to write
the date, and “Dear Mr. Rosedale”—but after that her inspiration
flagged. She meant to tell him to come to her, but the words
refused to shape themselves. At length she began: “I have been
thinking——” then she laid the pen down, and sat with her elbows on
the table and her face hidden in her hands.
Suddenly she started up at the sound of the door-bell. It was
not late—barely ten o’clock—and there might still be a note from
Selden, or a message—or he might be there himself, on the other
side of the door! The announcement of his sailing might have been
a mistake—it might be another Lawrence Selden who had gone to
Havana—all these possibilities had time to flash through her mind,
and build up the conviction that she was after all to see or hear
from him, before the drawing-room door opened to admit a servant
carrying a telegram.
Lily tore it open with shaking hands, and read Bertha Dorset’s name
below the message: “Sailing unexpectedly tomorrow. Will you join us
on a cruise in Mediterranean?”
BOOK TWO
Chapter 1
It came vividly to Selden on the Casino steps that Monte Carlo
had, more than any other place he knew, the gift of accommodating
itself to each man’s humour. His own, at the moment, lent it a
festive readiness of welcome that might well, in a disenchanted
eye, have turned to paint and facility. So frank an appeal for
participation—so outspoken a recognition of the holiday vein in
human nature—struck refreshingly on a mind jaded by prolonged
hard work in surroundings made for the discipline of the senses.
As he surveyed the white square set in an exotic coquetry of
architecture, the studied tropicality of the gardens, the groups
loitering in the foreground against mauve mountains which
suggested a sublime stage-setting forgotten in a hurried shifting
of scenes—as he took in the whole outspread effect of light and
leisure, he felt a movement of revulsion from the last few months
of his life.
The New York winter had presented an interminable perspective of
snow-burdened days, reaching toward a spring of raw sunshine and
furious air, when the ugliness of things rasped the eye as the
gritty wind ground into the skin. Selden, immersed in his work,
had told himself that external conditions did not matter to a man
in his state, and that cold and ugliness were a good tonic for
relaxed sensibilities. When an urgent case summoned him abroad
to confer with a client in Paris, he broke reluctantly with the
routine of the office; and it was only now that, having despatched
his business, and slipped away for a week in the south, he began to
feel the renewed zest of spectatorship that is the solace of those
who take an objective interest in life.
The multiplicity of its appeals—the perpetual surprise of its
contrasts and resemblances! All these tricks and turns of the
show were upon him with a spring as he descended the Casino steps
and paused on the pavement at its doors. He had not been abroad
for seven years—and what changes the renewed contact produced! If
the central depths were untouched, hardly a pin-point of surface
remained the same. And this was the very place to bring out the
completeness of the renewal. The sublimities, the perpetuities,
might have left him as he was: but this tent pitched for a day’s
revelry spread a roof of oblivion between himself and his fixed sky.
It was mid-April, and one felt that the revelry had reached its
climax and that the desultory groups in the square and gardens
would soon dissolve and reform in other scenes. Meanwhile the last
moments of the performance seemed to gain an added brightness
from the hovering threat of the curtain. The quality of the air,
the exuberance of the flowers, the blue intensity of sea and sky,
produced the effect of a closing TABLEAU, when all the lights are