The House of Mirth
for, and what she wrote me a handsome cheque for when the season
was over!”
Mrs. Fisher was not a woman who talked of herself without cause,
and the practice of direct speech, far from precluding in her an
occasional resort to circuitous methods, served rather, at crucial
moments, the purpose of the juggler’s chatter while he shifts the
contents of his sleeves. Through the haze of her cigarette-smoke
she continued to gaze meditatively at Miss Bart, who, having
dismissed her maid, sat before the toilet table shaking out over
her shoulders the loosened undulations of her hair.
“Your hair’s wonderful, Lily. Thinner—? What does that matter,
when it’s so light and alive? So many women’s worries seem to go
straight to their hair—but yours looks as if there had never been
an anxious thought under it. I never saw you look better than you
did this evening. Mattie Gormer told me that Morpeth wanted to
paint you—why don’t you let him?”
Miss Bart’s immediate answer was to address a critical glance
to the reflection of the countenance under discussion. Then she
said, with a slight touch of irritation: “I don’t care to accept a
portrait from Paul Morpeth.”
Mrs. Fisher mused. “N—no. And just now, especially—well, he can do
you after you’re married.” She waited a moment, and then went on:
“By the way, I had a visit from Mattie the other day. She turned
up here last Sunday—and with Bertha Dorset, of all people in the
world!”
She paused again to measure the effect of this announcement on her
hearer, but the brush in Miss Bart’s lifted hand maintained its
unwavering stroke from brow to nape.
“I never was more astonished,” Mrs. Fisher pursued. “I don’t know
two women less predestined to intimacy—from Bertha’s standpoint,
that is; for of course poor Mattie thinks it natural enough that
she should be singled out—I’ve no doubt the rabbit always thinks
it is fascinating the anaconda. Well, you know I’ve always told
you that Mattie secretly longed to bore herself with the really
fashionable; and now that the chance has come, I see that she’s
capable of sacrificing all her old friends to it.”
Lily laid aside her brush and turned a penetrating glance upon her
friend. “Including ME?” she suggested.
“Ah, my dear,” murmured Mrs. Fisher, rising to push back a log from
the hearth.
“That’s what Bertha means, isn’t it?” Miss Bart went on steadily.
“For of course she always means something; and before I left Long
Island I saw that she was beginning to lay her toils for Mattie.”
Mrs. Fisher sighed evasively. “She has her fast now, at any rate.
To think of that loud independence of Mattie’s being only a
subtler form of snobbishness! Bertha can already make her believe
anything she pleases—and I’m afraid she’s begun, my poor child, by
insinuating horrors about you.”
Lily flushed under the shadow of her drooping hair. “The world
is too vile,” she murmured, averting herself from Mrs. Fisher’s
anxious scrutiny.
“It’s not a pretty place; and the only way to keep a footing in it
is to fight it on its own terms—and above all, my dear, not alone!”
Mrs. Fisher gathered up her floating implications in a resolute
grasp. “You’ve told me so little that I can only guess what has
been happening; but in the rush we all live in there’s no time to
keep on hating any one without a cause, and if Bertha is still
nasty enough to want to injure you with other people it must be
because she’s still afraid of you. From her standpoint there’s only
one reason for being afraid of you; and my own idea is that, if you
want to punish her, you hold the means in your hand. I believe you
can marry George Dorset tomorrow; but if you don’t care for that
particular form of retaliation, the only thing to save you from
Bertha is to marry somebody else.”
Chapter 7
The light projected on the situation by Mrs. Fisher had the
cheerless distinctness of a winter dawn. It outlined the facts with
a cold precision unmodified by shade or colour, and refracted, as
it were, from the blank walls of the surrounding limitations: she
had opened windows from which no sky was ever visible. But the
idealist subdued to vulgar necessities must employ vulgar minds to
draw the inferences to which he cannot stoop; and it was easier for
Lily to let Mrs. Fisher formulate her case than to put it plainly
to herself. Once confronted with it, however, she went the full
length of its consequences; and these had never been more clearly
present to her than when, the next afternoon, she set out for a
walk with Rosedale.
It was one of those still November days when the air is haunted
with the light of summer, and something in the lines of the
landscape, and in the golden haze which bathed them, recalled to
Miss Bart the September afternoon when she had climbed the slopes
of Bellomont with Selden. The importunate memory was kept before
her by its ironic contrast to her present situation, since her walk
with Selden had represented an irresistible flight from just such
a climax as the present excursion was designed to bring about. But
other memories importuned her also; the recollection of similar
situations, as skillfully led up to, but through some malice of
fortune, or her own unsteadiness of purpose, always failing of
the intended result. Well, her purpose was steady enough now. She
saw that the whole weary work of rehabilitation must begin again,
and against far greater odds, if Bertha Dorset should succeed in
breaking up her friendship with the Gormers; and her longing for
shelter and security was intensified by the passionate desire to
triumph over Bertha, as only wealth and predominance could triumph
over her. As the wife of Rosedale—the Rosedale she felt it in her
power to create—she would at least present an invulnerable front to
her enemy.
She had to draw upon this thought, as upon some fiery stimulant, to
keep up her part in the scene toward which Rosedale was too frankly
tending. As she walked beside him, shrinking in every nerve from
the way in which his look and tone made free of her, yet telling
herself that this momentary endurance of his mood was the price she
must pay for her ultimate power over him, she tried to calculate
the exact point at which concession must turn to resistance, and
the price HE would have to pay be made equally clear to him. But
his dapper self-confidence seemed impenetrable to such hints, and
she had a sense of something hard and self-contained behind the
superficial warmth of his manner.
They had been seated for some time in the seclusion of a rocky glen
above the lake, when she suddenly cut short the culmination of an
impassioned period by turning upon him the grave loveliness of her
gaze.
“I DO believe what you say, Mr. Rosedale,” she said quietly; “and I
am ready to marry you whenever you wish.”
Rosedale, reddening to the roots of his glossy hair, received this
announcement with a recoil which carried him to his feet, where he
halted before her in an attitude of almost comic discomfiture.
“For I suppose that is what you do wish,” she continued, in the
same quiet tone. “And, though I was unable to consent when you
spoke to me in this way before, I am ready, now that I know you so
much better, to trust my happiness to your hands.”
She spoke with the noble directness which she could command on
such occasions, and which was like a large steady light thrown
across the tortuous darkness of the situation. In its inconvenient
brightness Rosedale seemed to waver a moment, as though conscious
that every avenue of escape was unpleasantly illuminated.
Then he gave a short laugh, and drew out a gold cigarette-case, in
which, with plump jewelled fingers, he groped for a gold-tipped
cigarette. Selecting one, he paused to contemplate it a moment
before saying: “My dear Miss Lily, I’m sorry if there’s been any
little misapprehension between us—but you made me feel my suit was
so hopeless that I had really no intention of renewing it.”
Lily’s blood tingled with the grossness of the rebuff; but she
checked the first leap of her anger, and said in a tone of gentle
dignity: “I have no one but myself to blame if I gave you the
impression that my decision was final.”
Her word-play was always too quick for him, and this reply held him
in puzzled silence while she extended her hand and added, with the
faintest inflection of sadness in her voice: “Before we bid each
other goodbye, I want at least to thank you for having once thought
of me as you did.”
The touch of her hand, the moving softness of her look,
thrilled a vulnerable fibre in Rosedale. It was her exquisite
inaccessibleness, the sense of distance she could convey without a
hint of disdain, that made it most difficult for him to give her up.
“Why do you talk of saying goodbye? Ain’t we going to be good
friends all the same?” he urged, without releasing her hand.
She drew it away quietly. “What is your idea of being good
friends?” she returned with a slight smile. “Making love to me
without asking me to marry you?” Rosedale laughed with a recovered
sense of ease.
“Well, that’s about the size of it, I suppose. I can’t help making
love to you—I don’t see how any man could; but I don’t mean to ask
you to marry me as long as I can keep out of it.”
She continued to smile. “I like your frankness; but I am afraid our
friendship can hardly continue on those terms.” She turned away, as
though to mark that its final term had in fact been reached, and
he followed her for a few steps with a baffled sense of her having
after all kept the game in her own hands.
“Miss Lily——” he began impulsively; but she walked on without
seeming to hear him.
He overtook her in a few quick strides, and laid an entreating hand
on her arm. “Miss Lily—don’t hurry away like that. You’re beastly
hard on a fellow; but if you don’t mind speaking the truth I don’t
see why you shouldn’t allow me to do the same.”
She had paused a moment with raised brows, drawing away
instinctively from his touch, though she made no effort to evade
his words.
“I was under the impression,” she rejoined, “that you had done so
without waiting for my permission.”
“Well—why shouldn’t you hear my reasons for doing it, then? We’re
neither of us such new hands that a little plain speaking is going
to hurt us. I’m all broken up on you: there’s nothing new in that.
I’m more in love with you than I was this time last year; but I’ve
got to face the fact that the situation is changed.”
She continued to confront him with the same air of ironic
composure. “You mean to say that I’m not as desirable a match as
you thought me?”
“Yes; that’s what I do mean,” he answered resolutely. “I won’t go
into what’s happened. I don’t believe the stories about you—I don’t
WANT to believe them. But they’re there, and my not believing them
ain’t going to alter the situation.”
She flushed to her temples, but the extremity of her need checked
the retort on her lip and she continued to face him composedly. “If
they are not true,” she said, “doesn’t THAT alter the situation?”
He met this with a steady gaze of his small stock-taking eyes,
which made her feel herself no more than some superfine human
merchandise. “I believe it does in novels; but I’m certain it don’t
in real life. You know that as well as I do: if we’re speaking the
truth, let’s speak the whole truth. Last year I was wild to marry
you, and you wouldn’t look at me: this year—well, you appear to be
willing. Now, what has changed in the interval? Your situation,
that’s all. Then you thought you could do better; now——”
“You think you can?” broke from her ironically.
“Why, yes, I do: in one way, that is.” He stood before her, his
hands in his pockets, his chest sturdily expanded under its vivid