The House of Mirth
Selden’s avoidance of Miss Bart had not been as unintentional as he
had allowed his cousin to think. At first, indeed, while the memory
of their last hour at Monte Carlo still held the full heat of his
indignation, he had anxiously watched for her return; but she had
disappointed him by lingering in England, and when she finally
reappeared it happened that business had called him to the West,
whence he came back only to learn that she was starting for Alaska
with the Gormers. The revelation of this suddenly-established
intimacy effectually chilled his desire to see her. If, at a moment
when her whole life seemed to be breaking up, she could cheerfully
commit its reconstruction to the Gormers, there was no reason why
such accidents should ever strike her as irreparable. Every step
she took seemed in fact to carry her farther from the region where,
once or twice, he and she had met for an illumined moment; and the
recognition of this fact, when its first pang had been surmounted,
produced in him a sense of negative relief. It was much simpler for
him to judge Miss Bart by her habitual conduct than by the rare
deviations from it which had thrown her so disturbingly in his way;
and every act of hers which made the recurrence of such deviations
more unlikely, confirmed the sense of relief with which he returned
to the conventional view of her.
But Gerty Farish’s words had sufficed to make him see how little
this view was really his, and how impossible it was for him to live
quietly with the thought of Lily Bart. To hear that she was in
need of help—even such vague help as he could offer—was to be at
once repossessed by that thought; and by the time he reached the
street he had sufficiently convinced himself of the urgency of his
cousin’s appeal to turn his steps directly toward Lily’s hotel.
There his zeal met a check in the unforeseen news that Miss Bart
had moved away; but, on his pressing his enquiries, the clerk
remembered that she had left an address, for which he presently
began to search through his books.
It was certainly strange that she should have taken this step
without letting Gerty Farish know of her decision; and Selden
waited with a vague sense of uneasiness while the address was
sought for. The process lasted long enough for uneasiness to turn
to apprehension; but when at length a slip of paper was handed him,
and he read on it: “Care of Mrs. Norma Hatch, Emporium Hotel,” his
apprehension passed into an incredulous stare, and this into the
gesture of disgust with which he tore the paper in two, and turned
to walk quickly homeward.
Chapter 9
When Lily woke on the morning after her translation to the Emporium
Hotel, her first feeling was one of purely physical satisfaction.
The force of contrast gave an added keenness to the luxury of lying
once more in a soft-pillowed bed, and looking across a spacious
sunlit room at a breakfast-table set invitingly near the fire.
Analysis and introspection might come later; but for the moment
she was not even troubled by the excesses of the upholstery or
the restless convolutions of the furniture. The sense of being
once more lapped and folded in ease, as in some dense mild medium
impenetrable to discomfort, effectually stilled the faintest note
of criticism.
When, the afternoon before, she had presented herself to the lady
to whom Carry Fisher had directed her, she had been conscious of
entering a new world. Carry’s vague presentment of Mrs. Norma
Hatch (whose reversion to her Christian name was explained as the
result of her latest divorce), left her under the implication
of coming “from the West,” with the not unusual extenuation of
having brought a great deal of money with her. She was, in short,
rich, helpless, unplaced: the very subject for Lily’s hand. Mrs.
Fisher had not specified the line her friend was to take; she
owned herself unacquainted with Mrs. Hatch, whom she “knew about”
through Melville Stancy, a lawyer in his leisure moments, and the
Falstaff of a certain section of festive club life. Socially, Mr.
Stancy might have been said to form a connecting link between the
Gormer world and the more dimly-lit region on which Miss Bart
now found herself entering. It was, however, only figuratively
that the illumination of Mrs. Hatch’s world could be described as
dim: in actual fact, Lily found her seated in a blaze of electric
light, impartially projected from various ornamental excrescences
on a vast concavity of pink damask and gilding, from which she
rose like Venus from her shell. The analogy was justified by the
appearance of the lady, whose large-eyed prettiness had the fixity
of something impaled and shown under glass. This did not preclude
the immediate discovery that she was some years younger than her
visitor, and that under her showiness, her ease, the aggression of
her dress and voice, there persisted that ineradicable innocence
which, in ladies of her nationality, so curiously coexists with
startling extremes of experience.
The environment in which Lily found herself was as strange to her
as its inhabitants. She was unacquainted with the world of the
fashionable New York hotel—a world over-heated, over-upholstered,
and over-fitted with mechanical appliances for the gratification
of fantastic requirements, while the comforts of a civilized life
were as unattainable as in a desert. Through this atmosphere of
torrid splendour moved wan beings as richly upholstered as the
furniture, beings without definite pursuits or permanent relations,
who drifted on a languid tide of curiosity from restaurant to
concert-hall, from palm-garden to music-room, from “art exhibit” to
dress-maker’s opening. High-stepping horses or elaborately equipped
motors waited to carry these ladies into vague metropolitan
distances, whence they returned, still more wan from the weight of
their sables, to be sucked back into the stifling inertia of the
hotel routine. Somewhere behind them, in the background of their
lives, there was doubtless a real past, peopled by real human
activities: they themselves were probably the product of strong
ambitions, persistent energies, diversified contacts with the
wholesome roughness of life; yet they had no more real existence
than the poet’s shades in limbo.
Lily had not been long in this pallid world without discovering
that Mrs. Hatch was its most substantial figure. That lady, though
still floating in the void, showed faint symptoms of developing
an outline; and in this endeavour she was actively seconded by
Mr. Melville Stancy. It was Mr. Stancy, a man of large resounding
presence, suggestive of convivial occasions and of a chivalry
finding expression in “first-night” boxes and thousand dollar
bonbonnieres, who had transplanted Mrs. Hatch from the scene of
her first development to the higher stage of hotel life in the
metropolis. It was he who had selected the horses with which she
had taken the blue ribbon at the Show, had introduced her to the
photographer whose portraits of her formed the recurring ornament
of “Sunday Supplements,” and had got together the group which
constituted her social world. It was a small group still, with
heterogeneous figures suspended in large unpeopled spaces; but Lily
did not take long to learn that its regulation was no longer in Mr.
Stancy’s hands. As often happens, the pupil had outstripped the
teacher, and Mrs. Hatch was already aware of heights of elegance
as well as depths of luxury beyond the world of the Emporium. This
discovery at once produced in her a craving for higher guidance,
for the adroit feminine hand which should give the right turn
to her correspondence, the right “look” to her hats, the right
succession to the items of her MENUS. It was, in short, as the
regulator of a germinating social life that Miss Bart’s guidance
was required; her ostensible duties as secretary being restricted
by the fact that Mrs. Hatch, as yet, knew hardly any one to write
to.
The daily details of Mrs. Hatch’s existence were as strange to
Lily as its general tenor. The lady’s habits were marked by an
Oriental indolence and disorder peculiarly trying to her companion.
Mrs. Hatch and her friends seemed to float together outside the
bounds of time and space. No definite hours were kept; no fixed
obligations existed: night and day flowed into one another in a
blur of confused and retarded engagements, so that one had the
impression of lunching at the tea-hour, while dinner was often
merged in the noisy after-theatre supper which prolonged Mrs.
Hatch’s vigil till daylight.
Through this jumble of futile activities came and went a strange
throng of hangers-on—manicures, beauty-doctors, hair-dressers,
teachers of bridge, of French, of “physical development”: figures
sometimes indistinguishable, by their appearance, or by Mrs.
Hatch’s relation to them, from the visitors constituting her
recognized society. But strangest of all to Lily was the encounter,
in this latter group, of several of her acquaintances. She had
supposed, and not without relief, that she was passing, for the
moment, completely out of her own circle; but she found that Mr.
Stancy, one side of whose sprawling existence overlapped the
edge of Mrs. Fisher’s world, had drawn several of its brightest
ornaments into the circle of the Emporium. To find Ned Silverton
among the habitual frequenters of Mrs. Hatch’s drawing-room
was one of Lily’s first astonishments; but she soon discovered
that he was not Mr. Stancy’s most important recruit. It was on
little Freddy Van Osburgh, the small slim heir of the Van Osburgh
millions, that the attention of Mrs. Hatch’s group was centred.
Freddy, barely out of college, had risen above the horizon since
Lily’s eclipse, and she now saw with surprise what an effulgence he
shed on the outer twilight of Mrs. Hatch’s existence. This, then,
was one of the things that young men “went in” for when released
from the official social routine; this was the kind of “previous
engagement” that so frequently caused them to disappoint the hopes
of anxious hostesses. Lily had an odd sense of being behind the
social tapestry, on the side where the threads were knotted and
the loose ends hung. For a moment she found a certain amusement in
the show, and in her own share of it: the situation had an ease
and unconventionality distinctly refreshing after her experience
of the irony of conventions. But these flashes of amusement were
but brief reactions from the long disgust of her days. Compared
with the vast gilded void of Mrs. Hatch’s existence, the life of
Lily’s former friends seemed packed with ordered activities. Even
the most irresponsible pretty woman of her acquaintance had her
inherited obligations, her conventional benevolences, her share in
the working of the great civic machine; and all hung together in
the solidarity of these traditional functions. The performance of
specific duties would have simplified Miss Bart’s position; but the
vague attendance on Mrs. Hatch was not without its perplexities.
It was not her employer who created these perplexities. Mrs.
Hatch showed from the first an almost touching desire for Lily’s
approval. Far from asserting the superiority of wealth, her
beautiful eyes seemed to urge the plea of inexperience: she wanted
to do what was “nice,” to be taught how to be “lovely.” The
difficulty was to find any point of contact between her ideals and
Lily’s.
Mrs. Hatch swam in a haze of indeterminate enthusiasms, of
aspirations culled from the stage, the newspapers, the fashion
journals, and a gaudy world of sport still more completely beyond
her companion’s ken. To separate from these confused conceptions
those most likely to advance the lady on her way, was Lily’s
obvious duty; but its performance was hampered by rapidly-growing