The House of Mirth

ook I, Chapter 3

Bridge at Bellomont usually lasted till the small hours; and when
Lily went to bed that night she had played too long for her own
good.

Feeling no desire for the self-communion which awaited her in her
room, she lingered on the broad stairway, looking down into the
hall below, where the last card-players were grouped about the tray
of tall glasses and silver-collared decanters which the butler had
just placed on a low table near the fire.

The hall was arcaded, with a gallery supported on columns of
pale yellow marble. Tall clumps of flowering plants were grouped
against a background of dark foliage in the angles of the walls.
On the crimson carpet a deer-hound and two or three spaniels dozed
luxuriously before the fire, and the light from the great central
lantern overhead shed a brightness on the women’s hair and struck
sparks from their jewels as they moved.

There were moments when such scenes delighted Lily, when they
gratified her sense of beauty and her craving for the external
finish of life; there were others when they gave a sharper edge
to the meagreness of her own opportunities. This was one of the
moments when the sense of contrast was uppermost, and she turned
away impatiently as Mrs. George Dorset, glittering in serpentine
spangles, drew Percy Gryce in her wake to a confidential nook
beneath the gallery.

It was not that Miss Bart was afraid of losing her newly-acquired
hold over Mr. Gryce. Mrs. Dorset might startle or dazzle him,
but she had neither the skill nor the patience to effect his
capture. She was too self-engrossed to penetrate the recesses of
his shyness, and besides, why should she care to give herself the
trouble? At most it might amuse her to make sport of his simplicity
for an evening—after that he would be merely a burden to her, and
knowing this, she was far too experienced to encourage him. But
the mere thought of that other woman, who could take a man up and
toss him aside as she willed, without having to regard him as a
possible factor in her plans, filled Lily Bart with envy. She had
been bored all the afternoon by Percy Gryce—the mere thought seemed
to waken an echo of his droning voice—but she could not ignore him
on the morrow, she must follow up her success, must submit to more
boredom, must be ready with fresh compliances and adaptabilities,
and all on the bare chance that he might ultimately decide to do
her the honour of boring her for life.

It was a hateful fate—but how escape from it? What choice had she?
To be herself, or a Gerty Farish. As she entered her bedroom, with
its softly-shaded lights, her lace dressing-gown lying across
the silken bedspread, her little embroidered slippers before the
fire, a vase of carnations filling the air with perfume, and
the last novels and magazines lying uncut on a table beside the
reading-lamp, she had a vision of Miss Farish’s cramped flat, with
its cheap conveniences and hideous wall-papers. 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. Now she was beginning to chafe at
the obligations it imposed, to feel herself a mere pensioner on the
splendour which had once seemed to belong to her. There were even
moments when she was conscious of having to pay her way.

For a long time she had refused to play bridge. She knew she could
not afford it, and she was afraid of acquiring so expensive a
taste. She had seen the danger exemplified in more than one of her
associates—in young Ned Silverton, for instance, the charming fair
boy now seated in abject rapture at the elbow of Mrs. Fisher, a
striking divorcee with eyes and gowns as emphatic as the head-lines
of her “case.” Lily could remember when young Silverton had
stumbled into their circle, with the air of a strayed Arcadian
who has published charming sonnets in his college journal. Since
then he had developed a taste for Mrs. Fisher and bridge, and the
latter at least had involved him in expenses from which he had been
more than once rescued by harassed maiden sisters, who treasured
the sonnets, and went without sugar in their tea to keep their
darling afloat. Ned’s case was familiar to Lily: she had seen his
charming eyes—which had a good deal more poetry in them than the
sonnets—change from surprise to amusement, and from amusement
to anxiety, as he passed under the spell of the terrible god of
chance; and she was afraid of discovering the same symptoms in her
own case.

For in the last year she had found that her hostesses expected her
to take a place at the card-table. It was one of the taxes she
had to pay for their prolonged hospitality, and for the dresses
and trinkets which occasionally replenished her insufficient
wardrobe. And since she had played regularly the passion had grown
on her. Once or twice of late she had won a large sum, and instead
of keeping it against future losses, had spent it in dress or
jewelry; and the desire to atone for this imprudence, combined
with the increasing exhilaration of the game, drove her to risk
higher stakes at each fresh venture. She tried to excuse herself
on the plea that, in the Trenor set, if one played at all one must
either play high or be set down as priggish or stingy; but she knew
that the gambling passion was upon her, and that in her present
surroundings there was small hope of resisting it.

Tonight the luck had been persistently bad, and the little gold
purse which hung among her trinkets was almost empty when she
returned to her room. She unlocked the wardrobe, and taking out her
jewel-case, looked under the tray for the roll of bills from which
she had replenished the purse before going down to dinner. Only
twenty dollars were left: the discovery was so startling that for a
moment she fancied she must have been robbed. Then she took paper
and pencil, and seating herself at the writing-table, tried to
reckon up what she had spent during the day. Her head was throbbing
with fatigue, and she had to go over the figures again and again;
but at last it became clear to her that she had lost three hundred
dollars at cards. She took out her cheque-book to see if her
balance was larger than she remembered, but found she had erred
in the other direction. Then she returned to her calculations;
but figure as she would, she could not conjure back the vanished
three hundred dollars. It was the sum she had set aside to pacify
her dress-maker—unless she should decide to use it as a sop to the
jeweller. At any rate, she had so many uses for it that its very
insufficiency had caused her to play high in the hope of doubling
it. But of course she had lost—she who needed every penny, while
Bertha Dorset, whose husband showered money on her, must have
pocketed at least five hundred, and Judy Trenor, who could have
afforded to lose a thousand a night, had left the table clutching
such a heap of bills that she had been unable to shake hands with
her guests when they bade her good night.

A world in which such things could be seemed a miserable place
to Lily Bart; but then she had never been able to understand the
laws of a universe which was so ready to leave her out of its
calculations.

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.

“Oh, I must stop worrying!” she exclaimed. “Unless it’s the
electric light——” she reflected, springing up from her seat and
lighting the candles on the dressing-table.

She turned out the wall-lights, and peered at herself between the
candle-flames. The white oval of her face swam out waveringly from
a background of shadows, the uncertain light blurring it like a
haze; but the two lines about the mouth remained.

Lily rose and undressed in haste.

“It is only because I am tired and have such odious things to think
about,” she kept repeating; and it seemed an added injustice that
petty cares should leave a trace on the beauty which was her only
defence against them.

But the odious things were there, and remained with her. She
returned wearily to the thought of Percy Gryce, as a wayfarer picks
up a heavy load and toils on after a brief rest. She was almost
sure she had “landed” him: a few days’ work and she would win her
reward. 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?

She remembered how her mother, after they had lost their money, used
to say to her with a kind of fierce vindictiveness: “But you’ll get
it all back—you’ll get it all back, with your face.”... The
remembrance roused a whole train of association, and she lay in the
darkness reconstructing the past out of which her present had grown.

A house in which no one ever dined at home unless there was
“company”; a door-bell perpetually ringing; a hall-table showered
with square envelopes which were opened in haste, and oblong
envelopes which were allowed to gather dust in the depths of a
bronze jar; a series of French and English maids giving warning
amid a chaos of hurriedly-ransacked wardrobes and dress-closets;
an equally changing dynasty of nurses and footmen; quarrels in the
pantry, the kitchen and the drawing-room; precipitate trips to
Europe, and returns with gorged trunks and days of interminable
unpacking; semi-annual discussions as to where the summer should
be spent, grey interludes of economy and brilliant reactions of
expense—such was the setting of Lily Bart’s first memories.

Ruling the turbulent element called home was the vigorous and
determined figure of a mother still young enough to dance her
ball-dresses to rags, while the hazy outline of a neutral-tinted
father filled an intermediate space between the butler and the man
who came to wind the clocks. Even to the eyes of infancy, Mrs.
Hudson Bart had appeared young; but Lily could not recall the time
when her father had not been bald and slightly stooping, with
streaks of grey in his hair, and a tired walk. It was a shock to
her to learn afterward that he was but two years older than her
mother.

Lily seldom saw her father by daylight. All day he was “downtown”;
and in winter it was long after nightfall when she heard his fagged
step on the stairs and his hand on the school-room door. He would
kiss her in silence, and ask one or two questions of the nurse or
the governess; then Mrs. Bart’s maid would come to remind him that
he was dining out, and he would hurry away with a nod to Lily. In
summer, when he joined them for a Sunday at Newport or Southampton,
he was even more effaced and silent than in winter. It seemed
to tire him to rest, and he would sit for hours staring at the
sea-line from a quiet corner of the verandah, while the clatter of
his wife’s existence went on unheeded a few feet off. Generally,
however, Mrs. Bart and Lily went to Europe for the summer, and
before the steamer was half way over Mr. Bart had dipped below the
horizon. Sometimes his daughter heard him denounced for having
neglected to forward Mrs. Bart’s remittances; but for the most part
he was never mentioned or thought of till his patient stooping
figure presented itself on the New York dock as a buffer between
the magnitude of his wife’s luggage and the restrictions of the
American custom-house.

In this desultory yet agitated fashion life went on through Lily’s
teens: a zig-zag broken course down which the family craft glided
on a rapid current of amusement, tugged at by the underflow of
a perpetual need—the need of more money. Lily could not recall
the time when there had been money enough, and in some vague way
her father seemed always to blame for the deficiency. 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 bank-book 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. Bart’s worst reproach to her husband was to ask him if he
expected her to “live like a pig”; and his replying in the negative
was always regarded as a justification for cabling to Paris for an
extra dress or two, and telephoning to the jeweller that he might,
after all, send home the turquoise bracelet which Mrs. Bart had
looked at that morning.

Lily knew people who “lived like pigs,” and their appearance and
surroundings justified her mother’s repugnance to that form of
existence. They were mostly cousins, who inhabited dingy houses
with engravings from Cole’s Voyage of Life on the drawing-room
walls, and slatternly parlour-maids who said “I’ll go and see”
to visitors calling at an hour when all right-minded persons are
conventionally if not actually out. The disgusting part of it was
that many of these cousins were rich, so that Lily imbibed the idea
that if people lived like pigs it was from choice, and through the
lack of any proper standard of conduct. This gave her a sense of
reflected superiority, and she did not need Mrs. Bart’s comments on
the family frumps and misers to foster her naturally lively taste
for splendour.

Lily was nineteen when circumstances caused her to revise her view
of the universe.

The previous year she had made a dazzling debut fringed by a heavy
thunder-cloud of bills. The light of the debut still lingered on
the horizon, but the cloud had thickened; and suddenly it broke.
The suddenness added to the horror; and there were still times
when Lily relived with painful vividness every detail of the day
on which the blow fell. She and her mother had been seated at the
luncheon-table, over the CHAUFROIX and cold salmon of the previous
night’s dinner: it was one of Mrs. Bart’s few economies to consume
in private the expensive remnants of her hospitality. Lily was
feeling the pleasant languor which is youth’s penalty for dancing
till dawn; but her mother, in spite of a few lines about the mouth,
and under the yellow waves on her temples, was as alert, determined
and high in colour as if she had risen from an untroubled sleep.

In the centre of the table, between the melting MARRONS GLACES
and candied cherries, a pyramid of American Beauties lifted their
vigorous stems; they held their heads as high as Mrs. Bart, but
their rose-colour had turned to a dissipated purple, and Lily’s
sense of fitness was disturbed by their reappearance on the
luncheon-table.

“I really think, mother,” she said reproachfully, “we might
afford a few fresh flowers for luncheon. Just some jonquils or
lilies-of-the-valley—”

Mrs. Bart stared. Her own fastidiousness had its eye fixed on the
world, and she did not care how the luncheon-table looked when
there was no one present at it but the family. But she smiled at
her daughter’s innocence.

“Lilies-of-the-valley,” she said calmly, “cost two dollars a dozen
at this season.”

Lily was not impressed. She knew very little of the value of money.

“It would not take more than six dozen to fill that bowl,” she
argued.

“Six dozen what?” asked her father’s voice in the doorway.

The two women looked up in surprise; though it was a Saturday, the
sight of Mr. Bart at luncheon was an unwonted one. But neither
his wife nor his daughter was sufficiently interested to ask an
explanation.

Mr. Bart dropped into a chair, and sat gazing absently at the
fragment of jellied salmon which the butler had placed before him.

“I was only saying,” Lily began, “that I hate to see faded flowers
at luncheon; and mother says a bunch of lilies-of-the-valley would
not cost more than twelve dollars. Mayn’t I tell the florist to
send a few every day?”

She leaned confidently toward her father: he seldom refused her
anything, and Mrs. Bart had taught her to plead with him when her
own entreaties failed.

Mr. Bart sat motionless, his gaze still fixed on the salmon, and
his lower jaw dropped; he looked even paler than usual, and his
thin hair lay in untidy streaks on his forehead. Suddenly he looked
at his daughter and laughed. The laugh was so strange that Lily
coloured under it: she disliked being ridiculed, and her father
seemed to see something ridiculous in the request. Perhaps he
thought it foolish that she should trouble him about such a trifle.

“Twelve dollars—twelve dollars a day for flowers? Oh, certainly, my
dear—give him an order for twelve hundred.” He continued to laugh.

Mrs. Bart gave him a quick glance.

“You needn’t wait, Poleworth—I will ring for you,” she said to the
butler.

The butler withdrew with an air of silent disapproval, leaving the
remains of the CHAUFROIX on the sideboard.

“What is the matter, Hudson? Are you ill?” said Mrs. Bart severely.

She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making,
and it was odious to her that her husband should make a show of
himself before the servants.

“Are you ill?” she repeated.

“Ill?—— No, I’m ruined,” he said.

Lily made a frightened sound, and Mrs. Bart rose to her feet.

“Ruined——?” she cried; but controlling herself instantly, she
turned a calm face to Lily.

“Shut the pantry door,” she said.

Lily obeyed, and when she turned back into the room her father was
sitting with both elbows on the table, the plate of salmon between
them, and his head bowed on his hands.

Mrs. Bart stood over him with a white face which made her hair
unnaturally yellow. She looked at Lily as the latter approached:
her look was terrible, but her voice was modulated to a ghastly
cheerfulness.

“Your father is not well—he doesn’t know what he is saying. It
is nothing—but you had better go upstairs; and don’t talk to the
servants,” she added.

Lily obeyed; she always obeyed when her mother spoke in that
voice. She had not been deceived by Mrs. Bart’s words: she knew
at once that they were ruined. In the dark hours which followed,
that awful fact overshadowed even her father’s slow and difficult
dying. To his wife he no longer counted: he had become extinct
when he ceased to fulfil his purpose, and she sat at his side
with the provisional air of a traveller who waits for a belated
train to start. Lily’s feelings were softer: she pitied him in a
frightened ineffectual way. But the fact that he was for the most
part unconscious, and that his attention, when she stole into the
room, drifted away from her after a moment, made him even more of a
stranger than in the nursery days when he had never come home till
after dark. She seemed always to have seen him through a blur—first
of sleepiness, then of distance and indifference—and now the fog
had thickened till he was almost indistinguishable. If she could
have performed any little services for him, or have exchanged with
him a few of those affecting words which an extensive perusal of
fiction had led her to connect with such occasions, the filial
instinct might have stirred in her; but her pity, finding no active
expression, remained in a state of spectatorship, overshadowed by
her mother’s grim unflagging resentment. Every look and act of Mrs.
Bart’s seemed to say: “You are sorry for him now—but you will feel
differently when you see what he has done to us.”

It was a relief to Lily when her father died.

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. It was
well enough to “manage” when by so doing one could keep one’s own
carriage; but when one’s best contrivance did not conceal the fact
that one had to go on foot, the effort was no longer worth making.

Lily and her mother wandered from place to place, now paying long
visits to relations whose house-keeping Mrs. Bart criticized, and
who deplored the fact that she let Lily breakfast in bed when the
girl had no prospects before her, and now vegetating in cheap
continental refuges, where Mrs. Bart held herself fiercely aloof
from the frugal tea-tables of her companions in misfortune. She was
especially careful to avoid her old friends and the scenes of her
former successes. To be poor seemed to her such a confession of
failure that it amounted to disgrace; and she detected a note of
condescension in the friendliest advances.

Only one thought consoled her, and that was the contemplation of
Lily’s beauty. She studied it with a kind of passion, as though
it were some weapon she had slowly fashioned for her vengeance.
It was the last asset in their fortunes, the nucleus around which
their life was to be rebuilt. She watched it jealously, as though
it were her own property and Lily its mere custodian; and she
tried to instil into the latter a sense of the responsibility that
such a charge involved. She followed in imagination the career
of other beauties, pointing out to her daughter what might be
achieved through such a gift, and dwelling on the awful warning of
those who, in spite of it, had failed to get what they wanted: to
Mrs. Bart, only stupidity could explain the lamentable denouement
of some of her examples. She was not above the inconsistency of
charging fate, rather than herself, with her own misfortunes; but
she inveighed so acrimoniously against love-matches that Lily would
have fancied her own marriage had been of that nature, had not Mrs.
Bart frequently assured her that she had been “talked into it”—by
whom, she never made clear.

Lily was duly impressed by the magnitude of her opportunities. The
dinginess of her present life threw into enchanting relief the
existence to which she felt herself entitled. To a less illuminated
intelligence Mrs. Bart’s counsels might have been dangerous; but
Lily understood that beauty is only the raw material of conquest,
and that to convert it into success other arts are required. She
knew that to betray any sense of superiority was a subtler form of
the stupidity her mother denounced, and it did not take her long
to learn that a beauty needs more tact than the possessor of an
average set of features.

Her ambitions were not as crude as Mrs. Bart’s. It had been among
that lady’s grievances that her husband—in the early days, before
he was too tired—had wasted his evenings in what she vaguely
described as “reading poetry”; and among the effects packed off to
auction after his death were a score or two of dingy volumes which
had struggled for existence among the boots and medicine bottles of
his dressing-room shelves. There was in Lily a vein of sentiment,
perhaps transmitted from this source, which gave an idealizing
touch to her most prosaic purposes. She liked to think of her
beauty as a power for good, as giving her the opportunity to attain
a position where she should make her influence felt in the vague
diffusion of refinement and good taste. She was fond of pictures
and flowers, and of sentimental fiction, and she could not help
thinking that the possession of such tastes ennobled her desire for
worldly advantages. She would not indeed have cared to marry a man
who was merely rich: she was secretly ashamed of her mother’s crude
passion for money. Lily’s preference would have been for an English
nobleman with political ambitions and vast estates; or, for second
choice, an Italian prince with a castle in the Apennines and an
hereditary office in the Vatican. Lost causes had a romantic charm
for her, and she liked to picture herself as standing aloof from
the vulgar press of the Quirinal, and sacrificing her pleasure to
the claims of an immemorial tradition....

How long ago and how far off it all seemed! Those ambitions were
hardly more futile and childish than the earlier ones which had
centred about the possession of a French jointed doll with real
hair. Was it only ten years since she had wavered in imagination
between the English earl and the Italian prince? Relentlessly her
mind travelled on over the dreary interval....

After two years of hungry roaming Mrs. Bart had died——died of a
deep disgust. She had hated dinginess, and it was her fate to be
dingy. Her visions of a brilliant marriage for Lily had faded after
the first year.

“People can’t marry you if they don’t see you—and how can they see
you in these holes where we’re stuck?” That was the burden of her
lament; and her last adjuration to her daughter was to escape from
dinginess if she could.

“Don’t let it creep up on you and drag you down. Fight your way out
of it somehow—you’re young and can do it,” she insisted.

She had died during one of their brief visits to New York, and
there Lily at once became the centre of a family council composed
of the wealthy relatives whom she had been taught to despise
for living like pigs. It may be that they had an inkling of the
sentiments in which she had been brought up, for none of them
manifested a very lively desire for her company; indeed, the
question threatened to remain unsolved till Mrs. Peniston with a
sigh announced: “I’ll try her for a year.”

Every one was surprised, but one and all concealed their surprise,
lest Mrs. Peniston should be alarmed by it into reconsidering her
decision.

Mrs. Peniston was Mr. Bart’s widowed sister, and if she was by
no means the richest of the family group, its other members
nevertheless abounded in reasons why she was clearly destined by
Providence to assume the charge of Lily. In the first place she was
alone, and it would be charming for her to have a young companion.
Then she sometimes travelled, and Lily’s familiarity with foreign
customs—deplored as a misfortune by her more conservative
relatives—would at least enable her to act as a kind of courier.
But as a matter of fact Mrs. Peniston had not been affected by
these considerations. She had taken the girl simply because no one
else would have her, and because she had the kind of moral MAUVAISE
HONTE which makes the public display of selfishness difficult,
though it does not interfere with its private indulgence. It would
have been impossible for Mrs. Peniston to be heroic on a desert
island, but with the eyes of her little world upon her she took a
certain pleasure in her act.

She reaped the reward to which disinterestedness is entitled,
and found an agreeable companion in her niece. She had expected
to find Lily headstrong, critical and “foreign”—for even Mrs.
Peniston, though she occasionally went abroad, had the family dread
of foreignness—but the girl showed a pliancy, which, to a more
penetrating mind than her aunt’s, might have been less reassuring
than the open selfishness of youth. Misfortune had made Lily supple
instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to
break than a stiff one.

Mrs. Peniston, however, did not suffer from her niece’s
adaptability. Lily had no intention of taking advantage of her
aunt’s good-nature. She was in truth grateful for the refuge
offered her: Mrs. Peniston’s opulent interior was at least not
externally dingy. But dinginess is a quality which assumes all
manner of disguises; and Lily soon found that it was as latent
in the expensive routine of her aunt’s life as in the makeshift
existence of a continental pension.

Mrs. Peniston was one of the episodical persons who form the
padding of life. It was impossible to believe that she had herself
ever been a focus of activities. The most vivid thing about her
was the fact that her grandmother had been a Van Alstyne. This
connection with the well-fed and industrious stock of early New
York revealed itself in the glacial neatness of Mrs. Peniston’s
drawing-room and in the excellence of her cuisine. She belonged
to the class of old New Yorkers who have always lived well,
dressed expensively, and done little else; and to these inherited
obligations Mrs. Peniston faithfully conformed. She had always
been a looker-on at life, and her mind resembled one of those
little mirrors which her Dutch ancestors were accustomed to affix
to their upper windows, so that from the depths of an impenetrable
domesticity they might see what was happening in the street.

Mrs. Peniston was the owner of a country-place in New Jersey,
but she had never lived there since her husband’s death—a remote
event, which appeared to dwell in her memory chiefly as a dividing
point in the personal reminiscences that formed the staple of her
conversation. She was a woman who remembered dates with intensity,
and could tell at a moment’s notice whether the drawing-room
curtains had been renewed before or after Mr. Peniston’s last
illness.

Mrs. Peniston thought the country lonely and trees damp, and
cherished a vague fear of meeting a bull. To guard against such
contingencies she frequented the more populous watering-places,
where she installed herself impersonally in a hired house and
looked on at life through the matting screen of her verandah. In
the care of such a guardian, it soon became clear to Lily that
she was to enjoy only the material advantages of good food and
expensive clothing; and, though far from underrating these, she
would gladly have exchanged them for what Mrs. Bart had taught her
to regard as opportunities. She sighed to think what her mother’s
fierce energies would have accomplished, had they been coupled
with Mrs. Peniston’s resources. Lily had abundant energy of her
own, but it was restricted by the necessity of adapting herself to
her aunt’s habits. She saw that at all costs she must keep Mrs.
Peniston’s favour till, as Mrs. Bart would have phrased it, she
could stand on her own legs. Lily had no mind for the vagabond life
of the poor relation, and to adapt herself to Mrs. Peniston she
had, to some degree, to assume that lady’s passive attitude. She
had fancied at first that it would be easy to draw her aunt into
the whirl of her own activities, but there was a static force in
Mrs. Peniston against which her niece’s efforts spent themselves
in vain. To attempt to bring her into active relation with life
was like tugging at a piece of furniture which has been screwed
to the floor. She did not, indeed, expect Lily to remain equally
immovable: she had all the American guardian’s indulgence for the
volatility of youth.

She had indulgence also for certain other habits of her niece’s.
It seemed to her natural that Lily should spend all her money on
dress, and she supplemented the girl’s scanty income by occasional
“handsome presents” meant to be applied to the same purpose.
Lily, who was intensely practical, would have preferred a fixed
allowance; but Mrs. Peniston liked the periodical recurrence of
gratitude evoked by unexpected cheques, and was perhaps shrewd
enough to perceive that such a method of giving kept alive in her
niece a salutary sense of dependence.

Beyond this, Mrs. Peniston had not felt called upon to do anything
for her charge: she had simply stood aside and let her take the
field. Lily had taken it, at first with the confidence of assured
possessorship, then with gradually narrowing demands, till now
she found herself actually struggling for a foothold on the
broad space which had once seemed her own for the asking. How it
happened she did not yet know. Sometimes she thought it was because
Mrs. Peniston had been too passive, and again she feared it was
because she herself had not been passive enough. Had she shown an
undue eagerness for victory? Had she lacked patience, pliancy and
dissimulation? Whether she charged herself with these faults or
absolved herself from them, made no difference in the sum-total
of her failure. Younger and plainer girls had been married off by
dozens, and she was nine-and-twenty, and still Miss Bart.

She was beginning to have fits of angry rebellion against fate,
when she longed to drop out of the race and make an independent
life for herself. But what manner of life would it be? She had
barely enough money to pay her dress-makers’ bills and her gambling
debts; and none of the desultory interests which she dignified with
the name of tastes was pronounced enough to enable her to live
contentedly in obscurity. Ah, no—she was too intelligent not to be
honest with herself. She knew that she hated dinginess as much as
her mother had hated it, and to her last breath she meant to fight
against it, dragging herself up again and again above its flood
till she gained the bright pinnacles of success which presented
such a slippery surface to her clutch.