The House of Mirth
kind, Judy: I’ll lock up my cigarettes and wear that last year’s
dress you sent me this morning. And if you are really interested
in my career, perhaps you’ll be kind enough not to ask me to play
bridge again this evening.”
“Bridge? Does he mind bridge, too? Oh, Lily, what an awful life
you’ll lead! But of course I won’t—why didn’t you give me a hint
last night? There’s nothing I wouldn’t do, you poor duck, to see
you happy!”
And Mrs. Trenor, glowing with her sex’s eagerness to smooth the
course of true love, enveloped Lily in a long embrace.
“You’re quite sure,” she added solicitously, as the latter
extricated herself, “that you wouldn’t like me to telephone for
Lawrence Selden?”
“Quite sure,” said Lily.
* * * * *
The next three days demonstrated to her own complete satisfaction
Miss Bart’s ability to manage her affairs without extraneous aid.
As she sat, on the Saturday afternoon, on the terrace at Bellomont,
she smiled at Mrs. Trenor’s fear that she might go too fast. If
such a warning had ever been needful, the years had taught her a
salutary lesson, and she flattered herself that she now knew how to
adapt her pace to the object of pursuit. In the case of Mr. Gryce
she had found it well to flutter ahead, losing herself elusively
and luring him on from depth to depth of unconscious intimacy. The
surrounding atmosphere was propitious to this scheme of courtship.
Mrs. Trenor, true to her word, had shown no signs of expecting Lily
at the bridge-table, and had even hinted to the other card-players
that they were to betray no surprise at her unwonted defection. In
consequence of this hint, Lily found herself the centre of that
feminine solicitude which envelops a young woman in the mating
season. A solitude was tacitly created for her in the crowded
existence of Bellomont, and her friends could not have shown a
greater readiness for self-effacement had her wooing been adorned
with all the attributes of romance. In Lily’s set this conduct
implied a sympathetic comprehension of her motives, and Mr. Gryce
rose in her esteem as she saw the consideration he inspired.
The terrace at Bellomont on a September afternoon was a spot
propitious to sentimental musings, and as Miss Bart stood leaning
against the balustrade above the sunken garden, at a little
distance from the animated group about the tea-table, she might
have been lost in the mazes of an inarticulate happiness. In
reality, her thoughts were finding definite utterance in the
tranquil recapitulation of the blessings in store for her. From
where she stood she could see them embodied in the form of Mr.
Gryce, who, in a light overcoat and muffler, sat somewhat nervously
on the edge of his chair, while Carry Fisher, with all the energy
of eye and gesture with which nature and art had combined to
endow her, pressed on him the duty of taking part in the task of
municipal reform.
Mrs. Fisher’s latest hobby was municipal reform. It had been
preceded by an equal zeal for socialism, which had in turn replaced
an energetic advocacy of Christian Science. Mrs. Fisher was
small, fiery and dramatic; and her hands and eyes were admirable
instruments in the service of whatever causes she happened to
espouse. She had, however, the fault common to enthusiasts of
ignoring any slackness of response on the part of her hearers, and
Lily was amused by her unconsciousness of the resistance displayed
in every angle of Mr. Gryce’s attitude. Lily herself knew that
his mind was divided between the dread of catching cold if he
remained out of doors too long at that hour, and the fear that, if
he retreated to the house, Mrs. Fisher might follow him up with a
paper to be signed. Mr. Gryce had a constitutional dislike to what
he called “committing himself,” and tenderly as he cherished his
health, he evidently concluded that it was safer to stay out of
reach of pen and ink till chance released him from Mrs. Fisher’s
toils. Meanwhile he cast agonized glances in the direction of Miss
Bart, whose only response was to sink into an attitude of more
graceful abstraction. She had learned the value of contrast in
throwing her charms into relief, and was fully aware of the extent
to which Mrs. Fisher’s volubility was enhancing her own repose.
She was roused from her musings by the approach of her cousin Jack
Stepney who, at Gwen Van Osburgh’s side, was returning across the
garden from the tennis court.
The couple in question were engaged in the same kind of romance
in which Lily figured, and the latter felt a certain annoyance in
contemplating what seemed to her a caricature of her own situation.
Miss Van Osburgh was a large girl with flat surfaces and no high
lights: Jack Stepney had once said of her that she was as reliable
as roast mutton. His own taste was in the line of less solid and
more highly-seasoned diet; but hunger makes any fare palatable, and
there had been times when Mr. Stepney had been reduced to a crust.
Lily considered with interest the expression of their faces: the
girl’s turned toward her companion’s like an empty plate held up to
be filled, while the man lounging at her side already betrayed the
encroaching boredom which would presently crack the thin veneer of
his smile.
“How impatient men are!” Lily reflected. “All Jack has to do to get
everything he wants is to keep quiet and let that girl marry him;
whereas I have to calculate and contrive, and retreat and advance,
as if I were going through an intricate dance, where one misstep
would throw me hopelessly out of time.”
As they drew nearer she was whimsically struck by a kind of family
likeness between Miss Van Osburgh and Percy Gryce. There was no
resemblance of feature. Gryce was handsome in a didactic way—he
looked like a clever pupil’s drawing from a plaster-cast—while
Gwen’s countenance had no more modelling than a face painted on
a toy balloon. But the deeper affinity was unmistakable: the two
had the same prejudices and ideals, and the same quality of making
other standards non-existent by ignoring them. This attribute was
common to most of Lily’s set: they had a force of negation which
eliminated everything beyond their own range of perception. Gryce
and Miss Van Osburgh were, in short, made for each other by every
law of moral and physical correspondence——“Yet they wouldn’t look
at each other,” Lily mused, “they never do. Each of them wants a
creature of a different race, of Jack’s race and mine, with all
sorts of intuitions, sensations and perceptions that they don’t
even guess the existence of. And they always get what they want.”
She stood talking with her cousin and Miss Van Osburgh, till a
slight cloud on the latter’s brow advised her that even cousinly
amenities were subject to suspicion, and Miss Bart, mindful of the
necessity of not exciting enmities at this crucial point of her
career, dropped aside while the happy couple proceeded toward the
tea-table.
Seating herself on the upper step of the terrace, Lily leaned
her head against the honeysuckles wreathing the balustrade. The
fragrance of the late blossoms seemed an emanation of the tranquil
scene, a landscape tutored to the last degree of rural elegance.
In the foreground glowed the warm tints of the gardens. Beyond the
lawn, with its pyramidal pale-gold maples and velvety firs, sloped
pastures dotted with cattle; and through a long glade the river
widened like a lake under the silver light of September. Lily did
not want to join the circle about the tea-table. They represented
the future she had chosen, and she was content with it, but in no
haste to anticipate its joys. The certainty that she could marry
Percy Gryce when she pleased had lifted a heavy load from her
mind, and her money troubles were too recent for their removal not
to leave a sense of relief which a less discerning intelligence
might have taken for happiness. Her vulgar cares were at an end.
She would be able to arrange her life as she pleased, to soar
into that empyrean of security where creditors cannot penetrate.
She would have smarter gowns than Judy Trenor, and far, far more
jewels than Bertha Dorset. She would be free forever from the
shifts, the expedients, the humiliations of the relatively poor.
Instead of having to flatter, she would be flattered; instead of
being grateful, she would receive thanks. There were old scores
she could pay off as well as old benefits she could return. And
she had no doubts as to the extent of her power. She knew that Mr.
Gryce was of the small chary type most inaccessible to impulses
and emotions. He had the kind of character in which prudence is
a vice, and good advice the most dangerous nourishment. But Lily
had known the species before: she was aware that such a guarded
nature must find one huge outlet of egoism, and she determined to
be to him what his Americana had hitherto been: the one possession
in which he took sufficient pride to spend money on it. She knew
that this generosity to self is one of the forms of meanness, and
she resolved so to identify herself with her husband’s vanity that
to gratify her wishes would be to him the most exquisite form of
self-indulgence. The system might at first necessitate a resort
to some of the very shifts and expedients from which she intended
it should free her; but she felt sure that in a short time she
would be able to play the game in her own way. How should she have
distrusted her powers? Her beauty itself was not the mere ephemeral
possession it might have been in the hands of inexperience: her
skill in enhancing it, the care she took of it, the use she made
of it, seemed to give it a kind of permanence. She felt she could
trust it to carry her through to the end.
And the end, on the whole, was worthwhile. Life was not the mockery
she had thought it three days ago. There was room for her, after
all, in this crowded selfish world of pleasure whence, so short a
time since, her poverty had seemed to exclude her. These people
whom she had ridiculed and yet envied were glad to make a place for
her in the charmed circle about which all her desires revolved.
They were not as brutal and self-engrossed as she had fancied—or
rather, since it would no longer be necessary to flatter and humour
them, that side of their nature became less conspicuous. Society is
a revolving body which is apt to be judged according to its place
in each man’s heaven; and at present it was turning its illuminated
face to Lily.
In the rosy glow it diffused her companions seemed full of amiable
qualities. She liked their elegance, their lightness, their lack
of emphasis: even the self-assurance which at times was so like
obtuseness now seemed the natural sign of social ascendency. They
were lords of the only world she cared for, and they were ready to
admit her to their ranks and let her lord it with them. Already
she felt within her a stealing allegiance to their standards, an
acceptance of their limitations, a disbelief in the things they did
not believe in, a contemptuous pity for the people who were not
able to live as they lived.
The early sunset was slanting across the park. Through the boughs
of the long avenue beyond the gardens she caught the flash of
wheels, and divined that more visitors were approaching. There
was a movement behind her, a scattering of steps and voices:
it was evident that the party about the tea-table was breaking
up. Presently she heard a tread behind her on the terrace. She
supposed that Mr. Gryce had at last found means to escape from his
predicament, and she smiled at the significance of his coming to
join her instead of beating an instant retreat to the fireside.
She turned to give him the welcome which such gallantry deserved;
but her greeting wavered into a blush of wonder, for the man who