The House of Mirth quotes

“Oh, almost any—even to sitting on a bench and talking to me.

One sits out a cotillion⁠—why not sit out a train?

It isn’t a bit hotter here than in Mrs. Van Osburgh’s conservatory—and some of the women are not a bit uglier.”

in the modelling of her little ear, the crisp upward wave of her hair—was it ever so slightly brightened by art?—and the thick planting of her straight black lashes. Everything about her was at once vigorous and exquisite, at once strong and fine.

He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her.

He was aware that the qualities distinguishing her from the herd of her sex were chiefly external: as though a fine glaze of beauty and fastidiousness had been applied to vulgar clay.

“Oh, dear, I’m so hot and thirsty—and what a hideous place New York is!” She looked despairingly up and down the dreary thoroughfare. “

Other cities put on their best clothes in summer, but New York seems to sit in its shirtsleeves.

” Her eyes wandered down one of the side-streets. “Someone has had the humanity to plant a few trees over there. Let us go into the shade.”

As he watched her hand, polished as a bit of old ivory, with its slender pink nails, and the sapphire bracelet slipping over her wrist, he was struck with the irony of suggesting to her such a life as his cousin Gertrude Farish had chosen.

She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.

She seemed to read his thought. “It was horrid of me to say that of Gerty,” she said with charming compunction. “I forgot she was your cousin. But we’re so different, you know: she likes being good, and I like being happy.

She seemed to read his thought. “It was horrid of me to say that of Gerty,” she said with charming compunction. “I forgot she was your cousin.

But we’re so different, you know: she likes being good, and I like being happy.

And besides, she is free and I am not. If I were, I daresay I could manage to be happy even in her flat. It must be pure bliss to arrange the furniture just as one likes, and give all the horrors to the ash-man.

And besides, she is free and I am not. If I were, I daresay I could manage to be happy even in her flat. It must be pure bliss to arrange the furniture just as one likes, and give all the horrors to the ash-man.

If I could only do over my aunt’s drawing-room I know I should be a better woman.

”

“Dear Mr. Selden, that wasn’t worthy of you.

It’s stupid of you to make love to me, and it isn’t like you to be stupid.

” She leaned back, sipping her tea with an air so enchantingly judicial that, if they had been in her aunt’s drawing-room, he might almost have tried to disprove her deduction.

“It wasn’t meant to be disagreeable,” he returned amicably. “

Isn’t marriage your vocation? Isn’t it what you’re all brought up for?

”

a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself. The clothes are the background, the frame, if you like: they don’t make success, but they are a part of it. Who wants a dingy woman?

We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed till we drop⁠—and if we can’t keep it up alone, we have to go into partnership.

”

In the hansom she leaned back with a sigh.

Why must a girl pay so dearly for her least escape from routine? Why could one never do a natural thing without having to screen it behind a structure of artifice?

She had yielded to a passing impulse in going to Lawrence Selden’s rooms, and it was so seldom that she could allow herself the luxury of an impulse! This one, at any rate, was going to cost her rather more than she could afford.

She had just time to take her seat before the train started; but having arranged herself in her corner with the instinctive feeling for effect which never forsook her, she glanced about in the hope of seeing some other member of the Trenors’ party.

She wanted to get away from herself, and conversation was the only means of escape that she knew.

Her search was rewarded by the discovery of a very blond young man with a soft reddish beard, who, at the other end of the carriage, appeared to be dissembling himself behind an unfolded newspaper.

It amused her to think that anyone as rich as Mr. Percy Gryce should be shy; but she was gifted with treasures of indulgence for such idiosyncrasies, and besides, his timidity might serve her purpose better than too much assurance.

She had the art of giving self-confidence to the embarrassed, but she was not equally sure of being able to embarrass the self-confident.

She waited till the train had emerged from the tunnel and was racing between the ragged edges of the northern suburbs. Then, as it lowered its speed near Yonkers, she rose from her seat and drifted slowly down the carriage. As she passed Mr.

But in spite of her efforts, conversation flagged after the tray had been removed, and she was driven to take a fresh measurement of Mr. Gryce’s limitations.

It was not, after all, opportunity but imagination that he lacked: he had a mental palate which would never learn to distinguish between railway tea and nectar.

There was, however, one topic she could rely on: one spring that she had only to touch to set his simple machinery in motion.

… figuring prominently in the public eye, and to enjoy the thought of the interest which would be excited if the persons he met in the street, or sat among in travelling, were suddenly to be told that he was the possessor of the Gryce Americana.

Most timidities have such secret compensations, and Miss Bart was discerning enough to know that the inner vanity is generally in proportion to the outer self-depreciation.

With a more confident person she would not have dared to dwell so long on one topic, or to show such exaggerated interest in it; but she had rightly guessed that Mr. Gryce’s egoism was a thirsty soil, requiring constant nurture from without.

No; she was not made for mean and shabby surroundings, for the squalid compromises of poverty.

Her whole being dilated in an atmosphere of luxury; it was the background she required, the only climate she could breathe in.

But the luxury of others was not what she wanted. A few years ago it had sufficed her: she had taken her daily meed of pleasure without caring who provided it.

She began to undress without ringing for her maid, whom she had sent to bed.

She had been long enough in bondage to other people’s pleasure to be considerate of those who depended on hers, and in her bitter moods it sometimes struck her that she and her maid were in the same position, except that the latter received her wages more regularly.

As she sat before the mirror brushing her hair, her face looked hollow and pale, and she was frightened by two little lines near her mouth, faint flaws in the smooth curve of the cheek.

But the reward itself seemed unpalatable just then: she could get no zest from the thought of victory. It would be a rest from worry, no more—and how little that would have seemed to her a few years earlier!

Her ambitions had shrunk gradually in the desiccating air of failure.

But why had she failed? Was it her own fault or that of destiny?

It could certainly not be the fault of Mrs. Bart, who was spoken of by her friends as a “wonderful manager.”

Mrs. Bart was famous for the unlimited effect she produced on limited means; and to the lady and her acquaintances there was something heroic in living as though one were much richer than one’s bankbook denoted.

Lily was naturally proud of her mother’s aptitude in this line: she had been brought up in the faith that, whatever it cost, one must have a good cook, and be what Mrs. Bart called “decently dressed.” Mrs.

Then a long winter set in. There was a little money left, but to Mrs. Bart it seemed worse than nothing—the mere mockery of what she was entitled to.

What was the use of living if one had to live like a pig?

She sank into a kind of furious apathy, a state of inert anger against fate. Her faculty for “managing” deserted her, or she no longer took sufficient pride in it to exert it.

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.

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.

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.

Besides, Carry is the only person who can keep Gus in a good humour when we have bores in the house. Have you noticed that all the husbands like her? All, I mean, except her own.

It’s rather clever of her to have made a specialty of devoting herself to dull people⁠—the field is such a large one, and she has it practically to herself.

She finds compensations, no doubt—I know she borrows money of Gus—but then I’d pay her to keep him in a good humour, so I can’t complain, after all.”

“Do you think I am uncomplimentary? I’m not really, you know. Everyone knows you’re a thousand times handsomer and cleverer than Bertha; but then you’re not nasty.

And for always getting what she wants in the long run, commend me to a nasty woman.

”

“

Oh, I am⁠—it’s much safer to be fond of dangerous people.

But she is dangerous—and if I ever saw her up to mischief it’s now. I can tell by poor George’s manner. That man is a perfect barometer—he always knows when Bertha is going to—”

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:

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.

Then they had symbolized what she was gaining, now they stood for what she was giving up. That very afternoon they had seemed full of brilliant qualities; now she saw that they were merely dull in a loud way.

Under the glitter of their opportunities she saw the poverty of their achievement.

It was not that she wanted them to be more disinterested; but she would have liked them to be more picturesque. And she had a shamed recollection of the way in which, a few hours since, she had felt the centripetal force of their standards.

It was not that she wanted them to be more disinterested; but she would have liked them to be more picturesque. And she had a shamed recollection of the way in which, a few hours since, she had felt the centripetal force of their standards.

She closed her eyes an instant, and the vacuous routine of the life she had chosen stretched before her like a long white road without dip or turning: it was true she was to roll over it in a carriage instead of trudging it on foot, but sometimes the pedestrian enjoys the diversion of a shortcut which is denied to those on wheels.

She was roused by a chuckle which Mr. Dorset seemed to eject from the depths of his lean throat.

it was a day for impulse and truancy. The light air seemed full of powdered gold; below the dewy bloom of the lawns the woodlands blushed and smouldered, and the hills across the river swam in molten blue.

Every drop of blood in Lily’s veins invited her to happiness.

The sound of wheels roused her from these musings, and leaning behind her shutters she saw the omnibus take up its freight. She was too late, then—but the fact did not alarm her. A glimpse of Mr.

But Lily, though her attitude was as calm as his, was throbbing inwardly with a rush of thoughts.

There were in her at the moment two beings, one drawing deep breaths of freedom and exhilaration, the other gasping for air in a little black prison-house of fears.

But gradually the captive’s gasps grew fainter, or the other paid less heed to them: the horizon expanded, the air grew stronger, and the free spirit quivered for flight.

How much of it was owing to the spell of the perfect afternoon, the scent of the fading woods, the thought of the dullness she had fled from? Lily had no definite experience by which to test the quality of her feelings.

She had several times been in love with fortunes or careers, but only once with a man.

That was years ago, when she first came out, and had been smitten with a romantic passion for a young gentleman named Herbert Melson, who had blue eyes and a little wave in his hair. Mr.

“No; but your taking a walk with me is only another way of making use of your material.

You are an artist and I happen to be the bit of colour you are using today.

It’s a part of your cleverness to be able to produce premeditated effects extemporaneously.”

“

If you mean that a girl who has no one to think for her is obliged to think for herself, I am quite willing to accept the imputation.

But you must find me a dismal kind of person if you suppose that I never yield to an impulse.”

“My genius?” she echoed with a sudden note of weariness. “

Is there any final test of genius but success? And I certainly haven’t succeeded.

”

“From everything—from money, from poverty, from ease and anxiety, from all the material accidents.

To keep a kind of republic of the spirit⁠—that’s what I call success.

”

“

Ah, there are signposts⁠—but one has to know how to read them.

”

Selden received this thrust without discomposure. “Yes; but I have tried to remain amphibious: it’s all right as long as one’s lungs can work in another air.

The real alchemy consists in being able to turn gold back again into something else; and that’s the secret that most of your friends have lost.

”

It’s just the other way with most shows—the audience may be under the illusion, but the actors know that real life is on the other side of the footlights.

The people who take society as an escape from work are putting it to its proper use; but when it becomes the thing worked for it distorts all the relations of life.

” Selden raised himself on his elbow. “Good heavens!” he went on, “I don’t underrate the decorative side of life. It seems to me the sense of splendour has justified itself by what it has produced.

Selden answered her with a shrug. “

Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths? Isn’t it a sufficient condemnation of society to find one’s self accepting such phraseology?

I very nearly acquired the jargon at Silverton’s age, and I know how names can alter the colour of beliefs.”

She had turned to gaze on him gravely. “But isn’t it possible that, if I had the opportunities of these people, I might make a better use of them?

Money stands for all kinds of things⁠—its purchasing quality isn’t limited to diamonds and motorcars.

”

“Why do you do this to me?” she cried. “

Why do you make the things I have chosen seem hateful to me, if you have nothing to give me instead?

”

Trenor’s vigorous comments, the reckoning was certainly a formidable one, and Lily, as she listened, found herself gradually reverting to her friend’s view of the situation. Mrs. Trenor’s words were moreover emphasized for her hearer by anxieties which she herself could scarcely guess.

Affluence, unless stimulated by a keen imagination, forms but the vaguest notion of the practical strain of poverty.

Judy knew it must be “horrid” for poor Lily to have to stop to consider whether she could afford real lace on her petticoats, and not to have a motorcar and a steam-yacht at her orders;

The result of her meditations was the decision to join her aunt at Richfield. She could not remain at Bellomont without playing bridge, and being involved in other expenses; and to continue her usual series of autumn visits would merely prolong the same difficulties.

She had reached a point where abrupt retrenchment was necessary, and the only cheap life was a dull life.

She would start the next morning for Richfield.

He’s going to be rich enough to buy us all out one of these days, and if she’d only ask him to dine now and then I could get almost anything out of him.

The man is mad to know the people who don’t want to know him, and when a fellow’s in that state there is nothing he won’t do for the first woman who takes him up.

”

but this way of explaining the situation helped to drape its crudity, and she was always scrupulous about keeping up appearances to herself.

Her personal fastidiousness had a moral equivalent, and when she made a tour of inspection in her own mind there were certain closed doors she did not open.

As they reached the gates of Bellomont she turned to Trenor with a smile.

The Van Osburgh marriage was celebrated in the village church near the paternal estate on the Hudson.

It was the “simple country wedding” to which guests are convoyed in special trains, and from which the hordes of the uninvited have to be fended off by the intervention of the police.

While these sylvan rites were taking place, in a church packed with fashion and festooned with orchids, the representatives of the press were threading their way, notebook in hand, through the labyrinth of wedding presents, and the agent of a cinematograph syndicate was setting up …

all these precious tints enhanced and deepened by the varied art of their setting.

The glow of the stones warmed Lily’s veins like wine.

More completely than any other expression of wealth they symbolized the life she longed to lead, the life of fastidious aloofness and refinement in which every detail should have the finish of a jewel, and the whole form a harmonious setting to her own jewel-like …

Ah, lucky girls who grow up in the shelter of a mother’s love—a mother who knows how to contrive opportunities without conceding favours, how to take advantage of propinquity without allowing appetite to be dulled by habit!

The cleverest girl may miscalculate where her own interests are concerned, may yield too much at one moment and withdraw too far at the next: it takes a mother’s unerring vigilance and foresight to land her daughters safely in the arms of wealth and suitability.

Lily’s passing lightheartedness sank beneath a renewed sense of failure. Life was too stupid, too blundering! Why should Percy Gryce’s millions be joined to another great fortune, why should this clumsy girl be put in possession of powers she would never know how to use?

The first two weeks after her return represented to Mrs. Peniston the domestic equivalent of a religious retreat.

She “went through” the linen and blankets in the precise spirit of the penitent exploring the inner folds of conscience; she sought for moths as the stricken soul seeks for lurking infirmities.

The topmost shelf of every closet was made to yield up its secret, cellar and coal-bin were probed to their darkest depths and, as a final stage in the lustral rites, the entire house was swathed in penitential white and deluged with expiatory soapsuds.

There were moments when she longed blindly for anything different, anything strange, remote and untried; but the utmost reach of her imagination did not go beyond picturing her usual life in a new setting.

She could not figure herself as anywhere but in a drawing-room, diffusing elegance as a flower sheds perfume.

Meanwhile, as October advanced she had to face the alternative of returning to the Trenors or joining her aunt in town. Even the desolating dullness of New York in October, and the soapy discomforts of Mrs.

Having corrected the irregularity, she seated herself on one of the glossy purple armchairs;

Mrs. Peniston always sat on a chair, never in it.

Then she turned her glance to Miss Bart.

She had it straight from Julia Melson that they cost three hundred dollars apiece at Céleste’s, but she says they didn’t look it. I’m glad you decided not to be a bridesmaid; that shade of salmon-pink wouldn’t have suited you.”

Mrs. Peniston delighted in discussing the minutest details of festivities in which she had not taken part.

Nothing would have induced her to undergo the exertion and fatigue of attending the Van Osburgh wedding, but so great was her interest in the event that, having heard two versions of it, she now prepared to extract a third from her niece.

She was not, however, without purveyors of information ready to supplement her deficiencies.

Grace Stepney’s mind was like a kind of moral flypaper, to which the buzzing items of gossip were drawn by a fatal attraction, and where they hung fast in the toils of an inexorable memory.

Lily would have been surprised to know how many trivial facts concerning herself were lodged in Miss Stepney’s head.

She had in truth no abstract propensity to malice: she did not dislike Lily because the latter was brilliant and predominant, but because she thought that Lily disliked her.

It is less mortifying to believe one’s self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness.

Even such scant civilities as Lily accorded to Mr. Rosedale would have made Miss Stepney her friend for life; but how could she foresee that such a friend was worth cultivating?

… unequalled familiarity with the secret chronicles of society, she had the innocence of the schoolgirl who regards wickedness as a part of “history,” and to whom it never occurs that the scandals she reads of in lesson-hours may be repeating themselves in the next street.

Mrs. Peniston had kept her imagination shrouded, like the drawing-room furniture.

She knew, of course, that society was “very much changed,” and that many women her mother would have thought “peculiar” were now in a position to be critical about their visiting-lists;

Miss Bart had in fact been treading a devious way, and none of her critics could have been more alive to the fact than herself; but she had a fatalistic sense of being drawn from one wrong turning to another, without ever perceiving the right road till it was too late to take it.

Lily, who considered herself above narrow prejudices, had not imagined that the fact of letting Gus Trenor make a little money for her would ever disturb her self-complacency. And the fact in itself still seemed harmless enough;

But now it woke only a motion of indignant contempt. This was the world she lived in, these were the standards by which she was fated to be measured!

Does one go to Caliban for a judgment on Miranda?

In the long moment before the curtain fell, he had time to feel the whole tragedy of her life.

It would not have surprised them to feel a summer breeze on their faces, or to see the lights among the boughs reduplicated in the arch of a starry sky.

The strange solitude about them was no stranger than the sweetness of being alone in it together.

At length Lily withdrew her hand, and moved away a step, so that her white-robed slimness was outlined against the dusk of the branches. Selden followed her, and still without speaking they seated themselves on a bench beside the fountain.

She had always hated her room at Mrs. Peniston’s—its ugliness, its impersonality, the fact that nothing in it was really hers.

To a torn heart uncomforted by human nearness a room may open almost human arms, and the being to whom no four walls mean more than any others, is, at such hours, expatriate everywhere.

Lily had no heart to lean on. Her relation with her aunt was as superficial as that of chance lodgers who pass on the stairs. But even had the two been in closer contact, it was impossible to think of Mrs.

But even had the two been in closer contact, it was impossible to think of Mrs. Peniston’s mind as offering shelter or comprehension to such misery as Lily’s.

As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch.

What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.

Peniston’s mind as offering shelter or comprehension to such misery as Lily’s. As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch.

What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.

She started up and looked forth on the passing streets. Gerty!—they were nearing Gerty’s corner.

As to the nature of Selden’s growing kindness, Gerty would no more have dared to define it than she would have tried to learn a butterfly’s colours by knocking the dust from its wings.

To seize on the wonder would be to brush off its bloom, and perhaps see it fade and stiffen in her hand: better the sense of beauty palpitating out of reach, while she held her breath and watched where it would alight.

Yet Selden’s manner at the Brys’ had brought the flutter of wings so close that they seemed to be beating in her own heart. She had never seen him so alert, so responsive, so attentive to what she had to say.

All this was in the natural order of things, and the orchid basking in its artificially created atmosphere could round the delicate curves of its petals undisturbed by the ice on the panes.

But it is one thing to live comfortably with the abstract conception of poverty, another to be brought in contact with its human embodiments.

Lily had never conceived of these victims of fate otherwise than in the mass.

her graceful portrait, all smiles and Cashmere, still emitted a faded scent of the undefinable quality. His father was the kind of man who delights in a charming woman: who quotes her, stimulates her, and keeps her perennially charming.

Neither one of the couple cared for money, but their disdain of it took the form of always spending a little more than was prudent.

If their house was shabby, it was exquisitely kept; if there were good books on the shelves there were also good dishes on the table. Selden senior had an eye for a picture, his wife an understanding of old lace;

Gerty’s little sitting-room sparkled with welcome when Selden entered it. Its modest “effects,” compact of enamel paint and ingenuity, spoke to him in the language just then sweetest to his ear.

It is surprising how little narrow walls and a low ceiling matter, when the roof of the soul has suddenly been raised.

Gerty sparkled too; or at least shone with a tempered radiance.

His understanding of Lily helped to confirm her own belief in her friend. They dwelt together on the fact that Lily had had no chance. Gerty instanced her generous impulses—her restlessness and discontent.

The fact that her life had never satisfied her proved that she was made for better things.

She might have married more than once—the conventional rich marriage which she had been taught to consider the sole end of existence—but when the opportunity came she had always shrunk from it.

“Walking? A good thing to blow the smoke out of one’s head. Now that women have taken to tobacco we live in a bath of nicotine. It would be a curious thing to study the effect of cigarettes on the relation of the sexes.

Smoke is almost as great a solvent as divorce: both tend to obscure the moral issue.

”

In the little glass above her dressing-table she saw her face reflected against the shadows of the room, and tears blotted the reflection. What right had she to dream the dreams of loveliness?

A dull face invited a dull fate.

She cried quietly as she undressed, laying aside her clothes with her habitual precision, setting everything in order for the next day, when the old life must be taken up as though there had been no break in its routine.

But if Selden’s infatuation seemed a fatal necessity, the effect that his name produced shook Gerty’s steadfastness with a last pang.

Men pass through such superhuman loves and outlive them: they are the probation subduing the heart to human joys.

How gladly Gerty would have welcomed the ministry of healing: how willingly have soothed the sufferer back to tolerance of life! But Lily’s self-betrayal took this last hope from her. The mortal maid on the shore is helpless against the siren who loves her prey:

then memory returned, and she looked about her with a shiver. In the cold slant of light reflected from the back wall of a neighbouring building, she saw her evening dress and opera cloak lying in a tawdry heap on a chair.

Finery laid off is as unappetizing as the remains of a feast, and it occurred to Lily that, at home, her maid’s vigilance had always spared her the sight of such incongruities.

Her body ached with fatigue, and with the constriction of her attitude in Gerty’s bed.

In the solitude of her own room she was brought back to a sharp contemplation of facts. Her daylight view of them necessarily differed from the cloudy vision of the night.

The winged furies were now prowling gossips who dropped in on each other for tea.

But her fears seemed the uglier, thus shorn of their vagueness; and besides, she had to act, not rave. For the first time she forced herself to reckon up the exact amount of her debt to Trenor;

It lay heavier when the postman’s last ring brought no note for her, and she had to go upstairs to a lonely night—a night as grim and sleepless as her tortured fancy had pictured it to Gerty.

She had never learned to live with her own thoughts, and to be confronted with them through such hours of lucid misery made the confused wretchedness of her previous vigil seem easily bearable.

Daylight disbanded the phantom crew, and made it clear to her that she would hear from Selden before noon; but the day passed without his writing or coming.

a woman’s life might be ruined by a man’s inability to digest fresh bread. Grotesque? Yes—and tragic—like most absurdities.

There’s nothing grimmer than the tragedy that wears a comic mask.

… Where was he? Oh—the reason they chucked Sicily and rushed back? Well—partly, no doubt, Miss Bart’s desire to get back to bridge and smartness. Dead as a stone to art and poetry—the light never was on sea or land for her!

and her faculty for renewing herself in new scenes, and casting off problems of conduct as easily as the surroundings in which they had arisen, made the mere change from one place to another seem, not merely a postponement, but a solution of her troubles.

Moral complications existed for her only in the environment that had produced them; she did not mean to slight or ignore them, but they lost their reality when they changed their background.

She could not have remained in New York without repaying the money she owed to Trenor; to acquit herself of that odious debt she might even have faced a marriage with Rosedale;

It left him, collapsed and breathing heavily, to an apathy so deep and prolonged that Lily almost feared the passersby would think it the result of a seizure, and stop to offer their aid.

But Monte Carlo is, of all places, the one where the human bond is least close, and odd sights are the least arresting.

If a glance or two lingered on the couple, no intrusive sympathy disturbed them; and it was Lily herself who broke the silence by rising from her seat.

He saw then, with a pang of self-reproach, that she meant neither to explain nor to defend herself; that by his miserable silence he had forfeited all chance of helping her, and that the decisive hour was past.

She had risen, and stood before him in a kind of clouded majesty, like some deposed princess moving tranquilly to exile.

“Lily!” he exclaimed, with a note of despairing appeal; but—“Oh, not now,” she gently admonished him; and then, in all the sweetness of her recovered composure: “Since I must find shelter somewhere, and since you’re so kindly here to help me—”

The blinds of Mrs. Peniston’s drawing-room were drawn down against the oppressive June sun, and in the sultry twilight the faces of her assembled relatives took on a fitting shadow of bereavement.

They were all there: Van Alstynes, Stepneys and Melsons—even a stray Peniston or two, indicating, by a greater latitude in dress and manner, the fact of remoter relationship and more settled hopes.

“

One hears such things without listening.

” She rose and laid her resolute hands on Miss Farish’s shoulders. “Gerty, are people going to cut me?”

“So as not to weep, perhaps. But no—I’m not of the tearful order.

I discovered early that crying makes my nose red, and the knowledge has helped me through several painful episodes.

” She took a restless turn about the room, and then, reseating herself, lifted the bright mockery of her eyes to Gerty’s anxious countenance.

“The whole truth?” Miss Bart laughed. “

What is truth? Where a woman is concerned, it’s the story that’s easiest to believe.

In this case it’s a great deal easier to believe Bertha Dorset’s story than mine, because she has a big house and an opera box, and it’s convenient to be on good terms with her.”

And as Miss Farish continued to press her with troubled eyes, she went on impatiently: “

You asked me just now for the truth⁠—well, the truth about any girl is that once she’s talked about she’s done for; and the more she explains her case the worse it looks.

—My good Gerty, you don’t happen to have a cigarette about you?”

there was nothing to do but to trust to the happy chance of an accidental meeting, and Lily knew that, even so late in the season, there was always a hope of running across her friends in their frequent passages through town.

To this end she assiduously showed herself at the restaurants they frequented, where, attended by the troubled Gerty, she lunched luxuriously, as she said, on her expectations.

“My dear Gerty, you wouldn’t have me let the headwaiter see that I’ve nothing to live on but Aunt Julia’s legacy? Think of Grace Stepney’s satisfaction if she came in and found us lunching on cold mutton and tea!

“Oh—” Miss Bart protested, drawing back from her penitent clasp; but Mrs. Fisher went on with her usual directness: “

Look here, Lily, don’t let’s beat about the bush: half the trouble in life is caused by pretending there isn’t any.

That’s not my way, and I can only say I’m thoroughly ashamed of myself for following the other women’s lead. But we’ll talk of that by and by—tell me now where you’re staying and what your plans are.

The people about her were doing the same things as the Trenors, the Van Osburghs and the Dorsets: the difference lay in a hundred shades of aspect and manner, from the pattern of the men’s waistcoats to the inflection of the women’s voices.

Everything was pitched in a higher key, and there was more of each thing: more noise, more colour, more champagne, more familiarity⁠—but also greater good-nature, less rivalry, and a fresher capacity for enjoyment.

Miss Bart’s arrival had been welcomed with an uncritical friendliness that first irritated her pride and then brought her to a sharp sense of her own situation—of the place in life which, for the moment, she must accept and make the best of.

but in the interval he had mounted nearer to the goal, while she had lost the power to abbreviate the remaining steps of the way. All this she saw with the clearness of vision that came to her in moments of despondency.

It was success that dazzled her⁠—she could distinguish facts plainly enough in the twilight of failure.

And the twilight, as she now sought to pierce it, was gradually lighted by a faint spark of reassurance. Under the utilitarian motive of Rosedale’s wooing she had felt, clearly enough, the heat of personal inclination.

Little as she was addicted to solitude, there had come to be moments when it seemed a welcome escape from the empty noises of her life.

She was weary of being swept passively along a current of pleasure and business in which she had no share; weary of seeing other people pursue amusement and squander money, while she felt herself of no more account among them than an expensive toy in the hands of a spoiled child.

It was in this frame of mind that, striking back from the shore one morning into the windings of an unfamiliar lane, she came suddenly upon the figure of George Dorset.

She stood silent, gazing away from him down the autumnal stretch of the deserted lane. And suddenly fear possessed her—fear of herself, and of the terrible force of the temptation.

All her past weaknesses were like so many eager accomplices drawing her toward the path their feet had already smoothed.

She turned quickly, and held out her hand to Dorset.

“It’s a well-earned rest: I’ll say that for myself,” she continued, sinking down with a sigh of content on the pillowed lounge near the fire. “Louisa Bry is a stern taskmaster: I often used to wish myself back with the Gormers.

Talk of love making people jealous and suspicious⁠—it’s nothing to social ambition!

Louisa used to lie awake at night wondering whether the women who called on us called on me because I was with her, or on her because she was with me; and she was always laying traps to find out what I thought.

“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.”

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;

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.

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!

”

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.

Against the dull chocolate-coloured background of the restaurant, the purity of her head stood out as it had never done in the most brightly-lit ballroom.

He looked at her with a startled uncomfortable feeling, as though her beauty were a forgotten enemy that had lain in ambush and now sprang out on him unawares.

To clear the air he tried to take an easy tone with her. “Why, Miss Lily, I haven’t seen you for an age. I didn’t know what had become of you.”

“

Too soft⁠—one might have sunk in too deep.

” Lily rested one arm on the edge of the table, and sat looking at him more intently than she had ever looked before.

She was conscious of having been forgetful, awkward and slow to learn. It was bitter to acknowledge her inferiority even to herself, but the fact had been brought home to her that as a breadwinner she could never compete with professional ability.

Since she had been brought up to be ornamental, she could hardly blame herself for failing to serve any practical purpose; but the discovery put an end to her consoling sense of universal efficiency.

As she turned homeward her thoughts shrank in anticipation from the fact that there would be nothing to get up for the next morning. The luxury of lying late in bed was a pleasure belonging to the life of ease;

Inherited tendencies had combined with early training to make her the highly specialized product she was: an organism as helpless out of its narrow range as the sea-anemone torn from the rock.

She had been fashioned to adorn and delight; to what other end does nature round the rose-leaf and paint the hummingbird’s breast?

And was it her fault that the purely decorative mission is less easily and harmoniously fulfilled among social beings than in the world of nature? That it is apt to be hampered by material necessities or complicated by moral scruples?

But the sallow preoccupied women, with their bags and notebooks and rolls of music, were all engrossed in their own affairs, and even those who sat by themselves were busy running over proof-sheets or devouring magazines between their hurried gulps of tea.

Lily alone was stranded in a great waste of disoccupation.

She drank several cups of the tea which was served with her portion of stewed oysters, and her brain felt clearer and livelier when she emerged once more into the street.

it was exhilarating to think that she had actually a reason for hurrying home. To prolong her enjoyment of the sensation she decided to walk; but the distance was so great that she found herself glancing nervously at the clocks on the way.

One of the surprises of her unoccupied state was the discovery that time, when it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it, cannot be trusted to move at any recognized pace.

Usually it loiters; but just when one has come to count upon its slowness, it may suddenly break into a wild irrational gallop.

The discovery did not disturb Lily as it might once have done.

She had passed beyond the phase of well-bred reciprocity, in which every demonstration must be scrupulously proportioned to the emotion it elicits, and generosity of feeling is the only ostentation condemned.

But the sense of loneliness returned with redoubled force as she saw herself forever shut out from Selden’s inmost self. She had come to him with no definite purpose; the mere longing to see him had directed her;

That is all I have lived on—don’t take it from me now! Even in my worst moments it has been like a little light in the darkness.

Some women are strong enough to be good by themselves, but I needed the help of your belief in me.

Perhaps I might have resisted a great temptation, but the little ones would have pulled me down. And then I remembered—I remembered your saying that such a life could never satisfy me; and I was ashamed to admit to myself that it could.

Even in my worst moments it has been like a little light in the darkness. Some women are strong enough to be good by themselves, but I needed the help of your belief in me.

Perhaps I might have resisted a great temptation, but the little ones would have pulled me down.

And then I remembered—I remembered your saying that such a life could never satisfy me; and I was ashamed to admit to myself that it could. That is what you did for me—that is what I wanted to thank you for.

I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else.

What can one do when one finds that one only fits into one hole?

One must get back to it or be thrown out into the rubbish heap—and you don’t know what it’s like in the rubbish heap!”

Lily walked on unconscious of her surroundings.

She was still treading the buoyant ether which emanates from the high moments of life.

But gradually it shrank away from her and she felt the dull pavement beneath her feet. The sense of weariness returned with accumulated force, and for a moment she felt that she could walk no farther.

he’d gone steady with me six months and given me his mother’s wedding ring. But I presume he was too stylish for me—he travelled for the firm, and had seen a great deal of society.

Work girls aren’t looked after the way you are, and they don’t always know how to look after themselves.

I didn’t … and it pretty near killed me when he went away and left off writing … It was then I came down sick—I thought it was the end of everything. I guess it would have been if you hadn’t sent me off.