The House of Mirth
diffusion of refinement and good taste. She was fond of pictures
and flowers, and of sentimental fiction, and she could not help
thinking that the possession of such tastes ennobled her desire for
worldly advantages. She would not indeed have cared to marry a man
who was merely rich: she was secretly ashamed of her mother’s crude
passion for money. Lily’s preference would have been for an English
nobleman with political ambitions and vast estates; or, for second
choice, an Italian prince with a castle in the Apennines and an
hereditary office in the Vatican. Lost causes had a romantic charm
for her, and she liked to picture herself as standing aloof from
the vulgar press of the Quirinal, and sacrificing her pleasure to
the claims of an immemorial tradition....
How long ago and how far off it all seemed! Those ambitions were
hardly more futile and childish than the earlier ones which had
centred about the possession of a French jointed doll with real
hair. Was it only ten years since she had wavered in imagination
between the English earl and the Italian prince? Relentlessly her
mind travelled on over the dreary interval....
After two years of hungry roaming Mrs. Bart had died——died of a
deep disgust. She had hated dinginess, and it was her fate to be
dingy. Her visions of a brilliant marriage for Lily had faded after
the first year.
“People can’t marry you if they don’t see you—and how can they see
you in these holes where we’re stuck?” That was the burden of her
lament; and her last adjuration to her daughter was to escape from
dinginess if she could.
“Don’t let it creep up on you and drag you down. Fight your way out
of it somehow—you’re young and can do it,” she insisted.
She had died during one of their brief visits to New York, and
there Lily at once became the centre of a family council composed
of the wealthy relatives whom she had been taught to despise
for living like pigs. It may be that they had an inkling of the
sentiments in which she had been brought up, for none of them
manifested a very lively desire for her company; indeed, the
question threatened to remain unsolved till Mrs. Peniston with a
sigh announced: “I’ll try her for a year.”
Every one was surprised, but one and all concealed their surprise,
lest Mrs. Peniston should be alarmed by it into reconsidering her
decision.
Mrs. Peniston was Mr. Bart’s widowed sister, and if she was by
no means the richest of the family group, its other members
nevertheless abounded in reasons why she was clearly destined by
Providence to assume the charge of Lily. In the first place she was
alone, and it would be charming for her to have a young companion.
Then she sometimes travelled, and Lily’s familiarity with foreign
customs—deplored as a misfortune by her more conservative
relatives—would at least enable her to act as a kind of courier.
But as a matter of fact Mrs. Peniston had not been affected by
these considerations. She had taken the girl simply because no one
else would have her, and because she had the kind of moral MAUVAISE
HONTE which makes the public display of selfishness difficult,
though it does not interfere with its private indulgence. It would
have been impossible for Mrs. Peniston to be heroic on a desert
island, but with the eyes of her little world upon her she took a
certain pleasure in her act.
She reaped the reward to which disinterestedness is entitled,
and found an agreeable companion in her niece. She had expected
to find Lily headstrong, critical and “foreign”—for even Mrs.
Peniston, though she occasionally went abroad, had the family dread
of foreignness—but the girl showed a pliancy, which, to a more
penetrating mind than her aunt’s, might have been less reassuring
than the open selfishness of youth. Misfortune had made Lily supple
instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to
break than a stiff one.
Mrs. Peniston, however, did not suffer from her niece’s
adaptability. Lily had no intention of taking advantage of her
aunt’s good-nature. She was in truth grateful for the refuge
offered her: Mrs. Peniston’s opulent interior was at least not
externally dingy. But dinginess is a quality which assumes all
manner of disguises; and Lily soon found that it was as latent
in the expensive routine of her aunt’s life as in the makeshift
existence of a continental pension.
Mrs. Peniston was one of the episodical persons who form the
padding of life. It was impossible to believe that she had herself
ever been a focus of activities. The most vivid thing about her
was the fact that her grandmother had been a Van Alstyne. This
connection with the well-fed and industrious stock of early New
York revealed itself in the glacial neatness of Mrs. Peniston’s
drawing-room and in the excellence of her cuisine. She belonged
to the class of old New Yorkers who have always lived well,
dressed expensively, and done little else; and to these inherited
obligations Mrs. Peniston faithfully conformed. She had always
been a looker-on at life, and her mind resembled one of those
little mirrors which her Dutch ancestors were accustomed to affix
to their upper windows, so that from the depths of an impenetrable
domesticity they might see what was happening in the street.
Mrs. Peniston was the owner of a country-place in New Jersey,
but she had never lived there since her husband’s death—a remote
event, which appeared to dwell in her memory chiefly as a dividing
point in the personal reminiscences that formed the staple of her
conversation. She was a woman who remembered dates with intensity,
and could tell at a moment’s notice whether the drawing-room
curtains had been renewed before or after Mr. Peniston’s last
illness.
Mrs. Peniston thought the country lonely and trees damp, and
cherished a vague fear of meeting a bull. To guard against such
contingencies she frequented the more populous watering-places,
where she installed herself impersonally in a hired house and
looked on at life through the matting screen of her verandah. In
the care of such a guardian, it soon became clear to Lily that
she was to enjoy only the material advantages of good food and
expensive clothing; and, though far from underrating these, she
would gladly have exchanged them for what Mrs. Bart had taught her
to regard as opportunities. She sighed to think what her mother’s
fierce energies would have accomplished, had they been coupled
with Mrs. Peniston’s resources. Lily had abundant energy of her
own, but it was restricted by the necessity of adapting herself to
her aunt’s habits. She saw that at all costs she must keep Mrs.
Peniston’s favour till, as Mrs. Bart would have phrased it, she
could stand on her own legs. Lily had no mind for the vagabond life
of the poor relation, and to adapt herself to Mrs. Peniston she
had, to some degree, to assume that lady’s passive attitude. She
had fancied at first that it would be easy to draw her aunt into
the whirl of her own activities, but there was a static force in
Mrs. Peniston against which her niece’s efforts spent themselves
in vain. To attempt to bring her into active relation with life
was like tugging at a piece of furniture which has been screwed
to the floor. She did not, indeed, expect Lily to remain equally
immovable: she had all the American guardian’s indulgence for the
volatility of youth.
She had indulgence also for certain other habits of her niece’s.
It seemed to her natural that Lily should spend all her money on
dress, and she supplemented the girl’s scanty income by occasional
“handsome presents” meant to be applied to the same purpose.
Lily, who was intensely practical, would have preferred a fixed
allowance; but Mrs. Peniston liked the periodical recurrence of
gratitude evoked by unexpected cheques, and was perhaps shrewd
enough to perceive that such a method of giving kept alive in her
niece a salutary sense of dependence.
Beyond this, Mrs. Peniston had not felt called upon to do anything
for her charge: she had simply stood aside and let her take the
field. Lily had taken it, at first with the confidence of assured
possessorship, then with gradually narrowing demands, till now
she found herself actually struggling for a foothold on the
broad space which had once seemed her own for the asking. How it
happened she did not yet know. Sometimes she thought it was because
Mrs. Peniston had been too passive, and again she feared it was
because she herself had not been passive enough. Had she shown an
undue eagerness for victory? Had she lacked patience, pliancy and
dissimulation? Whether she charged herself with these faults or
absolved herself from them, made no difference in the sum-total
of her failure. Younger and plainer girls had been married off by
dozens, and she was nine-and-twenty, and still Miss Bart.
She was beginning to have fits of angry rebellion against fate,
when she longed to drop out of the race and make an independent
life for herself. But what manner of life would it be? She had
barely enough money to pay her dress-makers’ bills and her gambling
debts; and none of the desultory interests which she dignified with
the name of tastes was pronounced enough to enable her to live
contentedly in obscurity. Ah, no—she was too intelligent not to be
honest with herself. She knew that she hated dinginess as much as
her mother had hated it, and to her last breath she meant to fight
against it, dragging herself up again and again above its flood
till she gained the bright pinnacles of success which presented
such a slippery surface to her clutch.
Chapter 4
The next morning, on her breakfast tray, Miss Bart found a note
from her hostess.
“Dearest Lily,” it ran, “if it is not too much of a bore to be
down by ten, will you come to my sitting-room to help me with some
tiresome things?”
Lily tossed aside the note and subsided on her pillows with a sigh.
It WAS a bore to be down by ten—an hour regarded at Bellomont as
vaguely synchronous with sunrise—and she knew too well the nature
of the tiresome things in question. Miss Pragg, the secretary,
had been called away, and there would be notes and dinner-cards
to write, lost addresses to hunt up, and other social drudgery to
perform. It was understood that Miss Bart should fill the gap in
such emergencies, and she usually recognized the obligation without
a murmur.
Today, however, it renewed the sense of servitude which the
previous night’s review of her cheque-book had produced. Everything
in her surroundings ministered to feelings of ease and amenity.
The windows stood open to the sparkling freshness of the September
morning, and between the yellow boughs she caught a perspective of
hedges and parterres leading by degrees of lessening formality to
the free undulations of the park. Her maid had kindled a little
fire on the hearth, and it contended cheerfully with the sunlight
which slanted across the moss-green carpet and caressed the curved
sides of an old marquetry desk. Near the bed stood a table holding
her breakfast tray, with its harmonious porcelain and silver,
a handful of violets in a slender glass, and the morning paper
folded beneath her letters. There was nothing new to Lily in these
tokens of a studied luxury; but, though they formed a part of her
atmosphere, she never lost her sensitiveness to their charm. Mere
display left her with a sense of superior distinction; but she felt
an affinity to all the subtler manifestations of wealth.
Mrs. Trenor’s summons, however, suddenly recalled her state of
dependence, and she rose and dressed in a mood of irritability that
she was usually too prudent to indulge. She knew that such emotions
leave lines on the face as well as in the character, and she had
meant to take warning by the little creases which her midnight