The House of Mirth

ook I, Chapter 12

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; only it was a fertile
source of harmful complications. As she exhausted the amusement
of spending the money these complications became more pressing,
and Lily, whose mind could be severely logical in tracing the
causes of her ill-luck to others, justified herself by the thought
that she owed all her troubles to the enmity of Bertha Dorset.
This enmity, however, had apparently expired in a renewal of
friendliness between the two women. Lily’s visit to the Dorsets had
resulted, for both, in the discovery that they could be of use to
each other; and the civilized instinct finds a subtler pleasure in
making use of its antagonist than in confounding him. Mrs. Dorset
was, in fact, engaged in a new sentimental experiment, of which
Mrs. Fisher’s late property, Ned Silverton, was the rosy victim;
and at such moments, as Judy Trenor had once remarked, she felt a
peculiar need of distracting her husband’s attention. Dorset was
as difficult to amuse as a savage; but even his self-engrossment
was not proof against Lily’s arts, or rather these were especially
adapted to soothe an uneasy egoism. Her experience with Percy Gryce
stood her in good stead in ministering to Dorset’s humours, and if
the incentive to please was less urgent, the difficulties of her
situation were teaching her to make much of minor opportunities.

Intimacy with the Dorsets was not likely to lessen such
difficulties on the material side. Mrs. Dorset had none of Judy
Trenor’s lavish impulses, and Dorset’s admiration was not likely to
express itself in financial “tips,” even had Lily cared to renew
her experiences in that line. What she required, for the moment,
of the Dorsets’ friendship, was simply its social sanction. She
knew that people were beginning to talk of her; but this fact did
not alarm her as it had alarmed Mrs. Peniston. In her set such
gossip was not unusual, and a handsome girl who flirted with a
married man was merely assumed to be pressing to the limit of her
opportunities. It was Trenor himself who frightened her. Their walk
in the Park had not been a success. Trenor had married young, and
since his marriage his intercourse with women had not taken the
form of the sentimental small-talk which doubles upon itself like
the paths in a maze. He was first puzzled and then irritated to
find himself always led back to the same starting-point, and Lily
felt that she was gradually losing control of the situation. Trenor
was in truth in an unmanageable mood. In spite of his understanding
with Rosedale he had been somewhat heavily “touched” by the fall in
stocks; his household expenses weighed on him, and he seemed to be
meeting, on all sides, a sullen opposition to his wishes, instead
of the easy good luck he had hitherto encountered.

Mrs. Trenor was still at Bellomont, keeping the town-house open,
and descending on it now and then for a taste of the world, but
preferring the recurrent excitement of week-end parties to the
restrictions of a dull season. Since the holidays she had not urged
Lily to return to Bellomont, and the first time they met in town
Lily fancied there was a shade of coldness in her manner. Was it
merely the expression of her displeasure at Miss Bart’s neglect,
or had disquieting rumours reached her? The latter contingency
seemed improbable, yet Lily was not without a sense of uneasiness.
If her roaming sympathies had struck root anywhere, it was in
her friendship with Judy Trenor. She believed in the sincerity
of her friend’s affection, though it sometimes showed itself in
self-interested ways, and she shrank with peculiar reluctance from
any risk of estranging it. But, aside from this, she was keenly
conscious of the way in which such an estrangement would react on
herself. The fact that Gus Trenor was Judy’s husband was at times
Lily’s strongest reason for disliking him, and for resenting the
obligation under which he had placed her. To set her doubts at
rest, Miss Bart, soon after the New Year, “proposed” herself for a
week-end at Bellomont. She had learned in advance that the presence
of a large party would protect her from too great assiduity on
Trenor’s part, and his wife’s telegraphic “come by all means”
seemed to assure her of her usual welcome.

Judy received her amicably. The cares of a large party always
prevailed over personal feelings, and Lily saw no change in
her hostess’s manner. Nevertheless, she was soon aware that
the experiment of coming to Bellomont was destined not to be
successful. The party was made up of what Mrs. Trenor called “poky
people”—her generic name for persons who did not play bridge—and,
it being her habit to group all such obstructionists in one
class, she usually invited them together, regardless of their
other characteristics. The result was apt to be an irreducible
combination of persons having no other quality in common than their
abstinence from bridge, and the antagonisms developed in a group
lacking the one taste which might have amalgamated them, were in
this case aggravated by bad weather, and by the ill-concealed
boredom of their host and hostess. In such emergencies, Judy would
usually have turned to Lily to fuse the discordant elements;
and Miss Bart, assuming that such a service was expected of
her, threw herself into it with her accustomed zeal. But at the
outset she perceived a subtle resistance to her efforts. If Mrs.
Trenor’s manner toward her was unchanged, there was certainly a
faint coldness in that of the other ladies. An occasional caustic
allusion to “your friends the Wellington Brys,” or to “the little
Jew who has bought the Greiner house—some one told us you knew him,
Miss Bart,”—showed Lily that she was in disfavour with that portion
of society which, while contributing least to its amusement, has
assumed the right to decide what forms that amusement shall take.
The indication was a slight one, and a year ago Lily would have
smiled at it, trusting to the charm of her personality to dispel
any prejudice against her. But now she had grown more sensitive
to criticism and less confident in her power of disarming it.
She knew, moreover, that if the ladies at Bellomont permitted
themselves to criticize her friends openly, it was a proof that
they were not afraid of subjecting her to the same treatment behind
her back. The nervous dread lest anything in Trenor’s manner should
seem to justify their disapproval made her seek every pretext for
avoiding him, and she left Bellomont conscious of having failed in
every purpose which had taken her there.

In town she returned to preoccupations which, for the moment, had
the happy effect of banishing troublesome thoughts. The Welly Brys,
after much debate, and anxious counsel with their newly-acquired
friends, had decided on the bold move of giving a general
entertainment. To attack society collectively, when one’s means of
approach are limited to a few acquaintances, is like advancing into
a strange country with an insufficient number of scouts; but such
rash tactics have sometimes led to brilliant victories, and the
Brys had determined to put their fate to the touch. Mrs. Fisher, to
whom they had entrusted the conduct of the affair, had decided that
TABLEAUX VIVANTS and expensive music were the two baits most likely
to attract the desired prey, and after prolonged negotiations,
and the kind of wire-pulling in which she was known to excel, she
had induced a dozen fashionable women to exhibit themselves in a
series of pictures which, by a farther miracle of persuasion, the
distinguished portrait painter, Paul Morpeth, had been prevailed
upon to organize.

Lily was in her element on such occasions. Under Morpeth’s guidance
her vivid plastic sense, hitherto nurtured on no higher food than
dress-making and upholstery, found eager expression in the disposal
of draperies, the study of attitudes, the shifting of lights
and shadows. Her dramatic instinct was roused by the choice of
subjects, and the gorgeous reproductions of historic dress stirred
an imagination which only visual impressions could reach. But
keenest of all was the exhilaration of displaying her own beauty
under a new aspect: of showing that her loveliness was no mere
fixed quality, but an element shaping all emotions to fresh forms
of grace.

Mrs. Fisher’s measures had been well-taken, and society, surprised
in a dull moment, succumbed to the temptation of Mrs. Bry’s
hospitality. The protesting minority were forgotten in the throng
which abjured and came; and the audience was almost as brilliant as
the show.

Lawrence Selden was among those who had yielded to the proffered
inducements. If he did not often act on the accepted social axiom
that a man may go where he pleases, it was because he had long
since learned that his pleasures were mainly to be found in a small
group of the like-minded. But he enjoyed spectacular effects, and
was not insensible to the part money plays in their production: all
he asked was that the very rich should live up to their calling
as stage-managers, and not spend their money in a dull way. This
the Brys could certainly not be charged with doing. Their recently
built house, whatever it might lack as a frame for domesticity,
was almost as well-designed for the display of a festal assemblage
as one of those airy pleasure-halls which the Italian architects
improvised to set off the hospitality of princes. The air of
improvisation was in fact strikingly present: so recent, so
rapidly-evoked was the whole MISE-EN-SCENE that one had to touch
the marble columns to learn they were not of cardboard, to seat
one’s self in one of the damask-and-gold arm-chairs to be sure it
was not painted against the wall.

Selden, who had put one of these seats to the test, found himself,
from an angle of the ball-room, surveying the scene with frank
enjoyment. The company, in obedience to the decorative instinct
which calls for fine clothes in fine surroundings, had dressed
rather with an eye to Mrs. Bry’s background than to herself. The
seated throng, filling the immense room without undue crowding,
presented a surface of rich tissues and jewelled shoulders in
harmony with the festooned and gilded walls, and the flushed
splendours of the Venetian ceiling. At the farther end of the room
a stage had been constructed behind a proscenium arch curtained
with folds of old damask; but in the pause before the parting of
the folds there was little thought of what they might reveal, for
every woman who had accepted Mrs. Bry’s invitation was engaged in
trying to find out how many of her friends had done the same.

Gerty Farish, seated next to Selden, was lost in that
indiscriminate and uncritical enjoyment so irritating to Miss
Bart’s finer perceptions. It may be that Selden’s nearness had
something to do with the quality of his cousin’s pleasure; but Miss
Farish was so little accustomed to refer her enjoyment of such
scenes to her own share in them, that she was merely conscious of a
deeper sense of contentment.

“Wasn’t it dear of Lily to get me an invitation? Of course it would
never have occurred to Carry Fisher to put me on the list, and I
should have been so sorry to miss seeing it all—and especially
Lily herself. Some one told me the ceiling was by Veronese—you
would know, of course, Lawrence. I suppose it’s very beautiful,
but his women are so dreadfully fat. Goddesses? Well, I can only
say that if they’d been mortals and had to wear corsets, it would
have been better for them. I think our women are much handsomer.
And this room is wonderfully becoming—every one looks so well! Did
you ever see such jewels? Do look at Mrs. George Dorset’s pearls—I
suppose the smallest of them would pay the rent of our Girls’ Club
for a year. Not that I ought to complain about the club; every
one has been so wonderfully kind. Did I tell you that Lily had
given us three hundred dollars? Wasn’t it splendid of her? And
then she collected a lot of money from her friends—Mrs. Bry gave
us five hundred, and Mr. Rosedale a thousand. I wish Lily were not
so nice to Mr. Rosedale, but she says it’s no use being rude to
him, because he doesn’t see the difference. She really can’t bear
to hurt people’s feelings—it makes me so angry when I hear her
called cold and conceited! The girls at the club don’t call her
that. Do you know she has been there with me twice?—yes, Lily! And
you should have seen their eyes! One of them said it was as good
as a day in the country just to look at her. And she sat there,
and laughed and talked with them—not a bit as if she were being
CHARITABLE, you know, but as if she liked it as much as they did.
They’ve been asking ever since when she’s coming back; and she’s
promised me——oh!”

Miss Farish’s confidences were cut short by the parting of the
curtain on the first TABLEAU—a group of nymphs dancing across
flower-strewn sward in the rhythmic postures of Botticelli’s
Spring. TABLEAUX VIVANTS depend for their effect not only on the
happy disposal of lights and the delusive interposition of layers
of gauze, but on a corresponding adjustment of the mental vision.
To unfurnished minds they remain, in spite of every enhancement
of art, only a superior kind of wax-works; but to the responsive
fancy they may give magic glimpses of the boundary world between
fact and imagination. Selden’s mind was of this order: he could
yield to vision-making influences as completely as a child to the
spell of a fairy-tale. Mrs. Bry’s TABLEAUX wanted none of the
qualities which go to the producing of such illusions, and under
Morpeth’s organizing hand the pictures succeeded each other with
the rhythmic march of some splendid frieze, in which the fugitive
curves of living flesh and the wandering light of young eyes have
been subdued to plastic harmony without losing the charm of life.

The scenes were taken from old pictures, and the participators had
been cleverly fitted with characters suited to their types. No
one, for instance, could have made a more typical Goya than Carry
Fisher, with her short dark-skinned face, the exaggerated glow of
her eyes, the provocation of her frankly-painted smile. A brilliant
Miss Smedden from Brooklyn showed to perfection the sumptuous
curves of Titian’s Daughter, lifting her gold salver laden with
grapes above the harmonizing gold of rippled hair and rich brocade,
and a young Mrs. Van Alstyne, who showed the frailer Dutch type,
with high blue-veined forehead and pale eyes and lashes, made
a characteristic Vandyck, in black satin, against a curtained
archway. Then there were Kauffmann nymphs garlanding the altar of
Love; a Veronese supper, all sheeny textures, pearl-woven heads and
marble architecture; and a Watteau group of lute-playing comedians,
lounging by a fountain in a sunlit glade.

Each evanescent picture touched the vision-building faculty in
Selden, leading him so far down the vistas of fancy that even Gerty
Farish’s running commentary—“Oh, how lovely Lulu Melson looks!”
or: “That must be Kate Corby, to the right there, in purple”—did
not break the spell of the illusion. Indeed, so skilfully had the
personality of the actors been subdued to the scenes they figured
in that even the least imaginative of the audience must have felt
a thrill of contrast when the curtain suddenly parted on a picture
which was simply and undisguisedly the portrait of Miss Bart.

Here there could be no mistaking the predominance of
personality—the unanimous “Oh!” of the spectators was a tribute,
not to the brush-work of Reynolds’s “Mrs. Lloyd” but to the flesh
and blood loveliness of Lily Bart. She had shown her artistic
intelligence in selecting a type so like her own that she could
embody the person represented without ceasing to be herself. It
was as though she had stepped, not out of, but into, Reynolds’s
canvas, banishing the phantom of his dead beauty by the beams
of her living grace. The impulse to show herself in a splendid
setting—she had thought for a moment of representing Tiepolo’s
Cleopatra—had yielded to the truer instinct of trusting to her
unassisted beauty, and she had purposely chosen a picture without
distracting accessories of dress or surroundings. Her pale
draperies, and the background of foliage against which she stood,
served only to relieve the long dryad-like curves that swept upward
from her poised foot to her lifted arm. The noble buoyancy of her
attitude, its suggestion of soaring grace, revealed the touch of
poetry in her beauty that Selden always felt in her presence, yet
lost the sense of when he was not with her. Its expression was now
so vivid that for the first time he seemed to see before him the
real Lily Bart, divested of the trivialities of her little world,
and catching for a moment a note of that eternal harmony of which
her beauty was a part.

“Deuced bold thing to show herself in that get-up; but, gad, there
isn’t a break in the lines anywhere, and I suppose she wanted us to
know it!”

These words, uttered by that experienced connoisseur, Mr. Ned
Van Alstyne, whose scented white moustache had brushed Selden’s
shoulder whenever the parting of the curtains presented any
exceptional opportunity for the study of the female outline,
affected their hearer in an unexpected way. It was not the first
time that Selden had heard Lily’s beauty lightly remarked on, and
hitherto the tone of the comments had imperceptibly coloured his
view of her. 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 was as though her beauty, thus
detached from all that cheapened and vulgarized it, had held out
suppliant hands to him from the world in which he and she had once
met for a moment, and where he felt an overmastering longing to be
with her again.

He was roused by the pressure of ecstatic fingers. “Wasn’t she too
beautiful, Lawrence? Don’t you like her best in that simple dress?
It makes her look like the real Lily—the Lily I know.”

He met Gerty Farish’s brimming gaze. “The Lily we know,” he
corrected; and his cousin, beaming at the implied understanding,
exclaimed joyfully: “I’ll tell her that! She always says you
dislike her.”

* * * * *

The performance over, Selden’s first impulse was to seek
Miss Bart. During the interlude of music which succeeded the
TABLEAUX, the actors had seated themselves here and there in the
audience, diversifying its conventional appearance by the varied
picturesqueness of their dress. Lily, however, was not among them,
and her absence served to protract the effect she had produced
on Selden: it would have broken the spell to see her too soon in
the surroundings from which accident had so happily detached her.
They had not met since the day of the Van Osburgh wedding, and on
his side the avoidance had been intentional. Tonight, however,
he knew that, sooner or later, he should find himself at her
side; and though he let the dispersing crowd drift him whither
it would, without making an immediate effort to reach her, his
procrastination was not due to any lingering resistance, but to the
desire to luxuriate a moment in the sense of complete surrender.

Lily had not an instant’s doubt as to the meaning of the murmur
greeting her appearance. No other tableau had been received with
that precise note of approval: it had obviously been called forth
by herself, and not by the picture she impersonated. She had feared
at the last moment that she was risking too much in dispensing with
the advantages of a more sumptuous setting, and the completeness
of her triumph gave her an intoxicating sense of recovered power.
Not caring to diminish the impression she had produced, she held
herself aloof from the audience till the movement of dispersal
before supper, and thus had a second opportunity of showing
herself to advantage, as the throng poured slowly into the empty
drawing-room where she was standing.

She was soon the centre of a group which increased and renewed
itself as the circulation became general, and the individual
comments on her success were a delightful prolongation of the
collective applause. At such moments she lost something of
her natural fastidiousness, and cared less for the quality of
the admiration received than for its quantity. Differences of
personality were merged in a warm atmosphere of praise, in which
her beauty expanded like a flower in sunlight; and if Selden had
approached a moment or two sooner he would have seen her turning
on Ned Van Alstyne and George Dorset the look he had dreamed of
capturing for himself.

Fortune willed, however, that the hurried approach of Mrs. Fisher,
as whose aide-de-camp Van Alstyne was acting, should break up the
group before Selden reached the threshold of the room. One or two
of the men wandered off in search of their partners for supper,
and the others, noticing Selden’s approach, gave way to him in
accordance with the tacit freemasonry of the ball-room. Lily was
therefore standing alone when he reached her; and finding the
expected look in her eye, he had the satisfaction of supposing he
had kindled it. The look did indeed deepen as it rested on him, for
even in that moment of self-intoxication Lily felt the quicker beat
of life that his nearness always produced. She read, too, in his
answering gaze the delicious confirmation of her triumph, and for
the moment it seemed to her that it was for him only she cared to
be beautiful.

Selden had given her his arm without speaking. She took it in
silence, and they moved away, not toward the supper-room, but
against the tide which was setting thither. The faces about her
flowed by like the streaming images of sleep: she hardly noticed
where Selden was leading her, till they passed through a glass
doorway at the end of the long suite of rooms and stood suddenly in
the fragrant hush of a garden. Gravel grated beneath their feet,
and about them was the transparent dimness of a midsummer night.
Hanging lights made emerald caverns in the depths of foliage, and
whitened the spray of a fountain falling among lilies. The magic
place was deserted: there was no sound but the splash of the water
on the lily-pads, and a distant drift of music that might have been
blown across a sleeping lake.

Selden and Lily stood still, accepting the unreality of the scene
as a part of their own dream-like sensations. 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.

Suddenly she raised her eyes with the beseeching earnestness of a
child. “You never speak to me—you think hard things of me,” she
murmured.

“I think of you at any rate, God knows!” he said.

“Then why do we never see each other? Why can’t we be friends?
You promised once to help me,” she continued in the same tone, as
though the words were drawn from her unwillingly.

“The only way I can help you is by loving you,” Selden said in a
low voice.

She made no reply, but her face turned to him with the soft motion
of a flower. His own met it slowly, and their lips touched. She
drew back and rose from her seat. Selden rose too, and they stood
facing each other. Suddenly she caught his hand and pressed it a
moment against her cheek.

“Ah, love me, love me—but don’t tell me so!” she sighed with her
eyes in his; and before he could speak she had turned and slipped
through the arch of boughs, disappearing in the brightness of the
room beyond.

Selden stood where she had left him. He knew too well the
transiency of exquisite moments to attempt to follow her; but
presently he reentered the house and made his way through the
deserted rooms to the door. A few sumptuously-cloaked ladies were
already gathered in the marble vestibule, and in the coat-room he
found Van Alstyne and Gus Trenor.

The former, at Selden’s approach, paused in the careful selection
of a cigar from one of the silver boxes invitingly set out near the
door.

“Hallo, Selden, going too? You’re an Epicurean like myself, I see:
you don’t want to see all those goddesses gobbling terrapin. Gad,
what a show of good-looking women; but not one of ’em could touch
that little cousin of mine. Talk of jewels—what’s a woman want with
jewels when she’s got herself to show? The trouble is that all
these fal-bals they wear cover up their figures when they’ve got
’em. I never knew till tonight what an outline Lily has.”

“It’s not her fault if everybody don’t know it now,” growled
Trenor, flushed with the struggle of getting into his fur-lined
coat. “Damned bad taste, I call it—no, no cigar for me. You can’t
tell what you’re smoking in one of these new houses—likely as not
the CHEF buys the cigars. Stay for supper? Not if I know it! When
people crowd their rooms so that you can’t get near any one you
want to speak to, I’d as soon sup in the elevated at the rush hour.
My wife was dead right to stay away: she says life’s too short to
spend it in breaking in new people.”