The House of Mirth
Lily knew that Rosedale had overstated neither the difficulty
of her own position nor the completeness of the vindication he
offered: once Bertha’s match in material resources, her superior
gifts would make it easy for her to dominate her adversary. An
understanding of what such domination would mean, and of the
disadvantages accruing from her rejection of it, was brought home
to Lily with increasing clearness during the early weeks of the
winter. Hitherto, she had kept up a semblance of movement outside
the main flow of the social current; but with the return to town,
and the concentrating of scattered activities, the mere fact of
not slipping back naturally into her old habits of life marked
her as being unmistakably excluded from them. If one were not a
part of the season’s fixed routine, one swung unsphered in a void
of social non-existence. Lily, for all her dissatisfied dreaming,
had never really conceived the possibility of revolving about a
different centre: it was easy enough to despise the world, but
decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region. Her sense
of irony never quite deserted her, and she could still note, with
self-directed derision, the abnormal value suddenly acquired by the
most tiresome and insignificant details of her former life. Its
very drudgeries had a charm now that she was involuntarily released
from them: card-leaving, note-writing, enforced civilities to the
dull and elderly, and the smiling endurance of tedious dinners—how
pleasantly such obligations would have filled the emptiness of her
days! She did indeed leave cards in plenty; she kept herself, with
a smiling and valiant persistence, well in the eye of her world;
nor did she suffer any of those gross rebuffs which sometimes
produce a wholesome reaction of contempt in their victim. Society
did not turn away from her, it simply drifted by, preoccupied and
inattentive, letting her feel, to the full measure of her humbled
pride, how completely she had been the creature of its favour.
She had rejected Rosedale’s suggestion with a promptness of scorn
almost surprising to herself: she had not lost her capacity for
high flashes of indignation. But she could not breathe long on the
heights; there had been nothing in her training to develop any
continuity of moral strength: what she craved, and really felt
herself entitled to, was a situation in which the noblest attitude
should also be the easiest. Hitherto her intermittent impulses
of resistance had sufficed to maintain her self-respect. If she
slipped she recovered her footing, and it was only afterward that
she was aware of having recovered it each time on a slightly lower
level. She had rejected Rosedale’s offer without conscious effort;
her whole being had risen against it; and she did not yet perceive
that, by the mere act of listening to him, she had learned to live
with ideas which would once have been intolerable to her.
* * * * *
To Gerty Farish, keeping watch over her with a tenderer if less
discerning eye than Mrs. Fisher’s, the results of the struggle were
already distinctly visible. She did not, indeed, know what hostages
Lily had already given to expediency; but she saw her passionately
and irretrievably pledged to the ruinous policy of “keeping up.”
Gerty could smile now at her own early dream of her friend’s
renovation through adversity: she understood clearly enough that
Lily was not of those to whom privation teaches the unimportance of
what they have lost. But this very fact, to Gerty, made her friend
the more piteously in want of aid, the more exposed to the claims
of a tenderness she was so little conscious of needing.
Lily, since her return to town, had not often climbed Miss
Farish’s stairs. There was something irritating to her in the
mute interrogation of Gerty’s sympathy: she felt the real
difficulties of her situation to be incommunicable to any one
whose theory of values was so different from her own, and the
restrictions of Gerty’s life, which had once had the charm of
contrast, now reminded her too painfully of the limits to which
her own existence was shrinking. When at length, one afternoon,
she put into execution the belated resolve to visit her friend,
this sense of shrunken opportunities possessed her with unusual
intensity. The walk up Fifth Avenue, unfolding before her, in the
brilliance of the hard winter sunlight, an interminable procession
of fastidiously-equipped carriages—giving her, through the little
squares of brougham-windows, peeps of familiar profiles bent above
visiting-lists, of hurried hands dispensing notes and cards to
attendant footmen—this glimpse of the ever-revolving wheels of the
great social machine made Lily more than ever conscious of the
steepness and narrowness of Gerty’s stairs, and of the cramped
blind alley of life to which they led. Dull stairs destined to
be mounted by dull people: how many thousands of insignificant
figures were going up and down such stairs all over the world at
that very moment—figures as shabby and uninteresting as that of the
middle-aged lady in limp black who descended Gerty’s flight as Lily
climbed to it!
“That was poor Miss Jane Silverton—she came to talk things over
with me: she and her sister want to do something to support
themselves,” Gerty explained, as Lily followed her into the
sitting-room.
“To support themselves? Are they so hard up?” Miss Bart asked with
a touch of irritation: she had not come to listen to the woes of
other people.
“I’m afraid they have nothing left: Ned’s debts have swallowed
up everything. They had such hopes, you know, when he broke away
from Carry Fisher; they thought Bertha Dorset would be such a good
influence, because she doesn’t care for cards, and—well, she talked
quite beautifully to poor Miss Jane about feeling as if Ned were
her younger brother, and wanting to carry him off on the yacht, so
that he might have a chance to drop cards and racing, and take up
his literary work again.”
Miss Farish paused with a sigh which reflected the perplexity of
her departing visitor. “But that isn’t all; it isn’t even the
worst. It seems that Ned has quarrelled with the Dorsets; or at
least Bertha won’t allow him to see her, and he is so unhappy about
it that he has taken to gambling again, and going about with all
sorts of queer people. And cousin Grace Van Osburgh accuses him of
having had a very bad influence on Freddy, who left Harvard last
spring, and has been a great deal with Ned ever since. She sent
for Miss Jane, and made a dreadful scene; and Jack Stepney and
Herbert Melson, who were there too, told Miss Jane that Freddy was
threatening to marry some dreadful woman to whom Ned had introduced
him, and that they could do nothing with him because now he’s of
age he has his own money. You can fancy how poor Miss Jane felt—she
came to me at once, and seemed to think that if I could get her
something to do she could earn enough to pay Ned’s debts and send
him away—I’m afraid she has no idea how long it would take her to
pay for one of his evenings at bridge. And he was horribly in debt
when he came back from the cruise—I can’t see why he should have
spent so much more money under Bertha’s influence than Carry’s: can
you?”
Lily met this query with an impatient gesture. “My dear Gerty, I
always understand how people can spend much more money—never how
they can spend any less!”
She loosened her furs and settled herself in Gerty’s easy-chair,
while her friend busied herself with the tea-cups.
“But what can they do—the Miss Silvertons? How do they mean
to support themselves?” she asked, conscious that the note of
irritation still persisted in her voice. It was the very last
topic she had meant to discuss—it really did not interest her in
the least—but she was seized by a sudden perverse curiosity to
know how the two colourless shrinking victims of young Silverton’s
sentimental experiments meant to cope with the grim necessity which
lurked so close to her own threshold.
“I don’t know—I am trying to find something for them. Miss Jane
reads aloud very nicely—but it’s so hard to find any one who is
willing to be read to. And Miss Annie paints a little——”
“Oh, I know—apple-blossoms on blotting-paper; just the kind of
thing I shall be doing myself before long!” exclaimed Lily,
starting up with a vehemence of movement that threatened
destruction to Miss Farish’s fragile tea-table.
Lily bent over to steady the cups; then she sank back into her
seat. “I’d forgotten there was no room to dash about in—how
beautifully one does have to behave in a small flat! Oh, Gerty, I
wasn’t meant to be good,” she sighed out incoherently.
Gerty lifted an apprehensive look to her pale face, in which the
eyes shone with a peculiar sleepless lustre.
“You look horribly tired, Lily; take your tea, and let me give you
this cushion to lean against.”
Miss Bart accepted the cup of tea, but put back the cushion with an
impatient hand.
“Don’t give me that! I don’t want to lean back—I shall go to sleep
if I do.”
“Well, why not, dear? I’ll be as quiet as a mouse,” Gerty urged
affectionately.
“No—no; don’t be quiet; talk to me—keep me awake! I don’t sleep at
night, and in the afternoon a dreadful drowsiness creeps over me.”
“You don’t sleep at night? Since when?”
“I don’t know—I can’t remember.” She rose and put the empty cup on
the tea-tray. “Another, and stronger, please; if I don’t keep awake
now I shall see horrors tonight—perfect horrors!”
“But they’ll be worse if you drink too much tea.”
“No, no—give it to me; and don’t preach, please,” Lily returned
imperiously. Her voice had a dangerous edge, and Gerty noticed that
her hand shook as she held it out to receive the second cup.
“But you look so tired: I’m sure you must be ill——”
Miss Bart set down her cup with a start. “Do I look ill? Does my
face show it?” She rose and walked quickly toward the little mirror
above the writing-table. “What a horrid looking-glass—it’s all
blotched and discoloured. Any one would look ghastly in it!” She
turned back, fixing her plaintive eyes on Gerty. “You stupid dear,
why do you say such odious things to me? It’s enough to make one
ill to be told one looks so! And looking ill means looking ugly.”
She caught Gerty’s wrists, and drew her close to the window. “After
all, I’d rather know the truth. Look me straight in the face,
Gerty, and tell me: am I perfectly frightful?”
“You’re perfectly beautiful now, Lily: your eyes are shining, and
your cheeks have grown so pink all of a sudden——”
“Ah, they WERE pale, then—ghastly pale, when I came in? Why don’t
you tell me frankly that I’m a wreck? My eyes are bright now
because I’m so nervous—but in the mornings they look like lead.
And I can see the lines coming in my face—the lines of worry and
disappointment and failure! Every sleepless night leaves a new
one—and how can I sleep, when I have such dreadful things to think
about?”
“Dreadful things—what things?” asked Gerty, gently detaching her
wrists from her friend’s feverish fingers.
“What things? Well, poverty, for one—and I don’t know any that’s
more dreadful.” Lily turned away and sank with sudden weariness
into the easy-chair near the tea-table. “You asked me just now if I
could understand why Ned Silverton spent so much money. Of course I
understand—he spends it on living with the rich. You think we live
ON the rich, rather than with them: and so we do, in a sense—but
it’s a privilege we have to pay for! We eat their dinners, and
drink their wine, and smoke their cigarettes, and use their
carriages and their opera-boxes and their private cars—yes, but
there’s a tax to pay on every one of those luxuries. The man pays
it by big tips to the servants, by playing cards beyond his means,