The House of Mirth

ook I, Chapter 2

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 was vexed to see that,
in spite of so many years of vigilance, she had blundered twice
within five minutes. That stupid story about her dress-maker was
bad enough—it would have been so simple to tell Rosedale that she
had been taking tea with Selden! The mere statement of the fact
would have rendered it innocuous. But, after having let herself
be surprised in a falsehood, it was doubly stupid to snub the
witness of her discomfiture. If she had had the presence of mind to
let Rosedale drive her to the station, the concession might have
purchased his silence. He had his race’s accuracy in the appraisal
of values, and to be seen walking down the platform at the crowded
afternoon hour in the company of Miss Lily Bart would have been
money in his pocket, as he might himself have phrased it. He knew,
of course, that there would be a large house-party at Bellomont,
and the possibility of being taken for one of Mrs. Trenor’s guests
was doubtless included in his calculations. Mr. Rosedale was still
at a stage in his social ascent when it was of importance to
produce such impressions.

The provoking part was that Lily knew all this—knew how easy it
would have been to silence him on the spot, and how difficult it
might be to do so afterward. Mr. Simon Rosedale was a man who
made it his business to know everything about every one, whose
idea of showing himself to be at home in society was to display
an inconvenient familiarity with the habits of those with whom
he wished to be thought intimate. Lily was sure that within
twenty-four hours the story of her visiting her dress-maker at
the Benedick would be in active circulation among Mr. Rosedale’s
acquaintances. The worst of it was that she had always snubbed and
ignored him. On his first appearance—when her improvident cousin,
Jack Stepney, had obtained for him (in return for favours too
easily guessed) a card to one of the vast impersonal Van Osburgh
“crushes”—Rosedale, with that mixture of artistic sensibility and
business astuteness which characterizes his race, had instantly
gravitated toward Miss Bart. She understood his motives, for
her own course was guided by as nice calculations. Training and
experience had taught her to be hospitable to newcomers, since the
most unpromising might be useful later on, and there were plenty
of available OUBLIETTES to swallow them if they were not. But
some intuitive repugnance, getting the better of years of social
discipline, had made her push Mr. Rosedale into his OUBLIETTE
without a trial. He had left behind only the ripple of amusement
which his speedy despatch had caused among her friends; and though
later (to shift the metaphor) he reappeared lower down the stream,
it was only in fleeting glimpses, with long submergences between.

Hitherto Lily had been undisturbed by scruples. In her little set
Mr. Rosedale had been pronounced “impossible,” and Jack Stepney
roundly snubbed for his attempt to pay his debts in dinner
invitations. Even Mrs. Trenor, whose taste for variety had led
her into some hazardous experiments, resisted Jack’s attempts to
disguise Mr. Rosedale as a novelty, and declared that he was the
same little Jew who had been served up and rejected at the social
board a dozen times within her memory; and while Judy Trenor was
obdurate there was small chance of Mr. Rosedale’s penetrating
beyond the outer limbo of the Van Osburgh crushes. Jack gave up the
contest with a laughing “You’ll see,” and, sticking manfully to his
guns, showed himself with Rosedale at the fashionable restaurants,
in company with the personally vivid if socially obscure ladies who
are available for such purposes. But the attempt had hitherto been
vain, and as Rosedale undoubtedly paid for the dinners, the laugh
remained with his debtor.

Mr. Rosedale, it will be seen, was thus far not a factor to be
feared—unless one put one’s self in his power. And this was
precisely what Miss Bart had done. Her clumsy fib had let him see
that she had something to conceal; and she was sure he had a score
to settle with her. Something in his smile told her he had not
forgotten. She turned from the thought with a little shiver, but
it hung on her all the way to the station, and dogged her down the
platform with the persistency of Mr. Rosedale himself.

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.
Lily’s eye brightened, and a faint smile relaxed the drawn lines
of her mouth. She had known that Mr. Percy Gryce was to be at
Bellomont, but she had not counted on the luck of having him to
herself in the train; and the fact banished all perturbing thoughts
of Mr. Rosedale. Perhaps, after all, the day was to end more
favourably than it had begun.

She began to cut the pages of a novel, tranquilly studying her
prey through downcast lashes while she organized a method of
attack. Something in his attitude of conscious absorption told
her that he was aware of her presence: no one had ever been quite
so engrossed in an evening paper! She guessed that he was too shy
to come up to her, and that she would have to devise some means
of approach which should not appear to be an advance on her part.
It amused her to think that any one 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. Gryce, the
train gave a lurch, and he was aware of a slender hand gripping the
back of his chair. He rose with a start, his ingenuous face looking
as though it had been dipped in crimson: even the reddish tint in
his beard seemed to deepen. The train swayed again, almost flinging
Miss Bart into his arms.

She steadied herself with a laugh and drew back; but he was
enveloped in the scent of her dress, and his shoulder had felt her
fugitive touch.

“Oh, Mr. Gryce, is it you? I’m so sorry—I was trying to find the
porter and get some tea.”

She held out her hand as the train resumed its level rush, and they
stood exchanging a few words in the aisle. Yes—he was going to
Bellomont. He had heard she was to be of the party—he blushed again
as he admitted it. And was he to be there for a whole week? How
delightful!

But at this point one or two belated passengers from the last
station forced their way into the carriage, and Lily had to retreat
to her seat.

“The chair next to mine is empty—do take it,” she said over her
shoulder; and Mr. Gryce, with considerable embarrassment, succeeded
in effecting an exchange which enabled him to transport himself and
his bags to her side.

“Ah—and here is the porter, and perhaps we can have some tea.”

She signalled to that official, and in a moment, with the ease that
seemed to attend the fulfilment of all her wishes, a little table
had been set up between the seats, and she had helped Mr. Gryce to
bestow his encumbering properties beneath it.

When the tea came he watched her in silent fascination while
her hands flitted above the tray, looking miraculously fine and
slender in contrast to the coarse china and lumpy bread. It seemed
wonderful to him that any one should perform with such careless
ease the difficult task of making tea in public in a lurching
train. He would never have dared to order it for himself, lest he
should attract the notice of his fellow-passengers; but, secure in
the shelter of her conspicuousness, he sipped the inky draught with
a delicious sense of exhilaration.

Lily, with the flavour of Selden’s caravan tea on her lips, had
no great fancy to drown it in the railway brew which seemed such
nectar to her companion; but, rightly judging that one of the
charms of tea is the fact of drinking it together, she proceeded
to give the last touch to Mr. Gryce’s enjoyment by smiling at him
across her lifted cup.

“Is it quite right—I haven’t made it too strong?” she asked
solicitously; and he replied with conviction that he had never
tasted better tea.

“I daresay it is true,” she reflected; and her imagination was
fired by the thought that Mr. Gryce, who might have sounded the
depths of the most complex self-indulgence, was perhaps actually
taking his first journey alone with a pretty woman.

It struck her as providential that she should be the instrument
of his initiation. Some girls would not have known how to
manage him. They would have over-emphasized the novelty of the
adventure, trying to make him feel in it the zest of an escapade.
But Lily’s methods were more delicate. She remembered that her
cousin Jack Stepney had once defined Mr. Gryce as the young man
who had promised his mother never to go out in the rain without
his overshoes; and acting on this hint, she resolved to impart a
gently domestic air to the scene, in the hope that her companion,
instead of feeling that he was doing something reckless or unusual,
would merely be led to dwell on the advantage of always having a
companion to make one’s tea in the train.

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. She had
refrained from touching it because it was a last resource, and she
had relied on other arts to stimulate other sensations; but as a
settled look of dulness began to creep over his candid features,
she saw that extreme measures were necessary.

“And how,” she said, leaning forward, “are you getting on with your
Americana?”

His eye became a degree less opaque: it was as though an incipient
film had been removed from it, and she felt the pride of a skilful
operator.

“I’ve got a few new things,” he said, suffused with pleasure, but
lowering his voice as though he feared his fellow-passengers might
be in league to despoil him.

She returned a sympathetic enquiry, and gradually he was drawn
on to talk of his latest purchases. It was the one subject which
enabled him to forget himself, or allowed him, rather, to remember
himself without constraint, because he was at home in it, and could
assert a superiority that there were few to dispute. Hardly any of
his acquaintances cared for Americana, or knew anything about them;
and the consciousness of this ignorance threw Mr. Gryce’s knowledge
into agreeable relief. The only difficulty was to introduce the
topic and to keep it to the front; most people showed no desire to
have their ignorance dispelled, and Mr. Gryce was like a merchant
whose warehouses are crammed with an unmarketable commodity.

But Miss Bart, it appeared, really did want to know about
Americana; and moreover, she was already sufficiently informed to
make the task of farther instruction as easy as it was agreeable.
She questioned him intelligently, she heard him submissively; and,
prepared for the look of lassitude which usually crept over his
listeners’ faces, he grew eloquent under her receptive gaze. The
“points” she had had the presence of mind to glean from Selden, in
anticipation of this very contingency, were serving her to such
good purpose that she began to think her visit to him had been the
luckiest incident of the day. She had once more shown her talent
for profiting by the unexpected, and dangerous theories as to the
advisability of yielding to impulse were germinating under the
surface of smiling attention which she continued to present to her
companion.

Mr. Gryce’s sensations, if less definite, were equally agreeable.
He felt the confused titillation with which the lower organisms
welcome the gratification of their needs, and all his senses
floundered in a vague well-being, through which Miss Bart’s
personality was dimly but pleasantly perceptible.

Mr. Gryce’s interest in Americana had not originated with himself:
it was impossible to think of him as evolving any taste of his
own. An uncle had left him a collection already noted among
bibliophiles; the existence of the collection was the only fact
that had ever shed glory on the name of Gryce, and the nephew took
as much pride in his inheritance as though it had been his own
work. Indeed, he gradually came to regard it as such, and to feel a
sense of personal complacency when he chanced on any reference to
the Gryce Americana. Anxious as he was to avoid personal notice, he
took, in the printed mention of his name, a pleasure so exquisite
and excessive that it seemed a compensation for his shrinking from
publicity.

To enjoy the sensation as often as possible, he subscribed to all
the reviews dealing with book-collecting in general, and American
history in particular, and as allusions to his library abounded
in the pages of these journals, which formed his only reading, he
came to regard himself as 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. Miss Bart had the gift of following
an undercurrent of thought while she appeared to be sailing on the
surface of conversation; and in this case her mental excursion
took the form of a rapid survey of Mr. Percy Gryce’s future as
combined with her own. The Gryces were from Albany, and but lately
introduced to the metropolis, where the mother and son had come,
after old Jefferson Gryce’s death, to take possession of his house
in Madison Avenue—an appalling house, all brown stone without and
black walnut within, with the Gryce library in a fire-proof annex
that looked like a mausoleum. Lily, however, knew all about them:
young Mr. Gryce’s arrival had fluttered the maternal breasts of
New York, and when a girl has no mother to palpitate for her she
must needs be on the alert for herself. Lily, therefore, had not
only contrived to put herself in the young man’s way, but had made
the acquaintance of Mrs. Gryce, a monumental woman with the voice
of a pulpit orator and a mind preoccupied with the iniquities of
her servants, who came sometimes to sit with Mrs. Peniston and
learn from that lady how she managed to prevent the kitchen-maid’s
smuggling groceries out of the house. Mrs. Gryce had a kind of
impersonal benevolence: cases of individual need she regarded
with suspicion, but she subscribed to Institutions when their
annual reports showed an impressive surplus. Her domestic duties
were manifold, for they extended from furtive inspections of the
servants’ bedrooms to unannounced descents to the cellar; but she
had never allowed herself many pleasures. Once, however, she had
had a special edition of the Sarum Rule printed in rubric and
presented to every clergyman in the diocese; and the gilt album in
which their letters of thanks were pasted formed the chief ornament
of her drawing-room table.

Percy had been brought up in the principles which so excellent a
woman was sure to inculcate. Every form of prudence and suspicion
had been grafted on a nature originally reluctant and cautious,
with the result that it would have seemed hardly needful for Mrs.
Gryce to extract his promise about the overshoes, so little likely
was he to hazard himself abroad in the rain. After attaining his
majority, and coming into the fortune which the late Mr. Gryce had
made out of a patent device for excluding fresh air from hotels,
the young man continued to live with his mother in Albany; but
on Jefferson Gryce’s death, when another large property passed
into her son’s hands, Mrs. Gryce thought that what she called his
“interests” demanded his presence in New York. She accordingly
installed herself in the Madison Avenue house, and Percy, whose
sense of duty was not inferior to his mother’s, spent all his week
days in the handsome Broad Street office where a batch of pale men
on small salaries had grown grey in the management of the Gryce
estate, and where he was initiated with becoming reverence into
every detail of the art of accumulation.

As far as Lily could learn, this had hitherto been Mr. Gryce’s only
occupation, and she might have been pardoned for thinking it not
too hard a task to interest a young man who had been kept on such
low diet. At any rate, she felt herself so completely in command of
the situation that she yielded to a sense of security in which all
fear of Mr. Rosedale, and of the difficulties on which that fear
was contingent, vanished beyond the edge of thought.

The stopping of the train at Garrisons would not have distracted
her from these thoughts, had she not caught a sudden look of
distress in her companion’s eye. His seat faced toward the door,
and she guessed that he had been perturbed by the approach of an
acquaintance; a fact confirmed by the turning of heads and general
sense of commotion which her own entrance into a railway-carriage
was apt to produce.

She knew the symptoms at once, and was not surprised to be hailed
by the high notes of a pretty woman, who entered the train
accompanied by a maid, a bull-terrier, and a footman staggering
under a load of bags and dressing-cases.

“Oh, Lily—are you going to Bellomont? Then you can’t let me
have your seat, I suppose? But I MUST have a seat in this
carriage—porter, you must find me a place at once. Can’t some one
be put somewhere else? I want to be with my friends. Oh, how do you
do, Mr. Gryce? Do please make him understand that I must have a
seat next to you and Lily.”

Mrs. George Dorset, regardless of the mild efforts of a traveller
with a carpet-bag, who was doing his best to make room for her
by getting out of the train, stood in the middle of the aisle,
diffusing about her that general sense of exasperation which a
pretty woman on her travels not infrequently creates.

She was smaller and thinner than Lily Bart, with a restless
pliability of pose, as if she could have been crumpled up and run
through a ring, like the sinuous draperies she affected. Her small
pale face seemed the mere setting of a pair of dark exaggerated
eyes, of which the visionary gaze contrasted curiously with her
self-assertive tone and gestures; so that, as one of her friends
observed, she was like a disembodied spirit who took up a great
deal of room.

Having finally discovered that the seat adjoining Miss Bart’s
was at her disposal, she possessed herself of it with a farther
displacement of her surroundings, explaining meanwhile that she had
come across from Mount Kisco in her motor-car that morning, and had
been kicking her heels for an hour at Garrisons, without even the
alleviation of a cigarette, her brute of a husband having neglected
to replenish her case before they parted that morning.

“And at this hour of the day I don’t suppose you’ve a single one
left, have you, Lily?” she plaintively concluded.

Miss Bart caught the startled glance of Mr. Percy Gryce, whose own
lips were never defiled by tobacco.

“What an absurd question, Bertha!” she exclaimed, blushing at the
thought of the store she had laid in at Lawrence Selden’s.

“Why, don’t you smoke? Since when have you given it up? What—you
never—— And you don’t either, Mr. Gryce? Ah, of course—how stupid
of me—I understand.”

And Mrs. Dorset leaned back against her travelling cushions with a
smile which made Lily wish there had been no vacant seat beside her
own.