The House of Mirth

ook I, Chapter 5

The observance of Sunday at Bellomont was chiefly marked by the
punctual appearance of the smart omnibus destined to convey the
household to the little church at the gates. Whether any one got
into the omnibus or not was a matter of secondary importance,
since by standing there it not only bore witness to the orthodox
intentions of the family, but made Mrs. Trenor feel, when she
finally heard it drive away, that she had somehow vicariously made
use of it.

It was Mrs. Trenor’s theory that her daughters actually did go
to church every Sunday; but their French governess’s convictions
calling her to the rival fane, and the fatigues of the week keeping
their mother in her room till luncheon, there was seldom any one
present to verify the fact. Now and then, in a spasmodic burst of
virtue—when the house had been too uproarious over night—Gus Trenor
forced his genial bulk into a tight frock-coat and routed his
daughters from their slumbers; but habitually, as Lily explained to
Mr. Gryce, this parental duty was forgotten till the church bells
were ringing across the park, and the omnibus had driven away empty.

Lily had hinted to Mr. Gryce that this neglect of religious
observances was repugnant to her early traditions, and that during
her visits to Bellomont she regularly accompanied Muriel and Hilda
to church. This tallied with the assurance, also confidentially
imparted, that, never having played bridge before, she had been
“dragged into it” on the night of her arrival, and had lost an
appalling amount of money in consequence of her ignorance of
the game and of the rules of betting. Mr. Gryce was undoubtedly
enjoying Bellomont. He liked the ease and glitter of the life, and
the lustre conferred on him by being a member of this group of rich
and conspicuous people. But he thought it a very materialistic
society; there were times when he was frightened by the talk of the
men and the looks of the ladies, and he was glad to find that Miss
Bart, for all her ease and self-possession, was not at home in so
ambiguous an atmosphere. For this reason he had been especially
pleased to learn that she would, as usual, attend the young Trenors
to church on Sunday morning; and as he paced the gravel sweep
before the door, his light overcoat on his arm and his prayer-book
in one carefully-gloved hand, he reflected agreeably on the
strength of character which kept her true to her early training in
surroundings so subversive to religious principles.

For a long time Mr. Gryce and the omnibus had the gravel sweep to
themselves; but, far from regretting this deplorable indifference
on the part of the other guests, he found himself nourishing the
hope that Miss Bart might be unaccompanied. The precious minutes
were flying, however; the big chestnuts pawed the ground and
flecked their impatient sides with foam; the coachman seemed to be
slowly petrifying on the box, and the groom on the doorstep; and
still the lady did not come. Suddenly, however, there was a sound
of voices and a rustle of skirts in the doorway, and Mr. Gryce,
restoring his watch to his pocket, turned with a nervous start;
but it was only to find himself handing Mrs. Wetherall into the
carriage.

The Wetheralls always went to church. They belonged to the vast
group of human automata who go through life without neglecting to
perform a single one of the gestures executed by the surrounding
puppets. It is true that the Bellomont puppets did not go to
church; but others equally important did—and Mr. and Mrs.
Wetherall’s circle was so large that God was included in their
visiting-list. They appeared, therefore, punctual and resigned,
with the air of people bound for a dull “At Home,” and after them
Hilda and Muriel straggled, yawning and pinning each other’s veils
and ribbons as they came. They had promised Lily to go to church
with her, they declared, and Lily was such a dear old duck that
they didn’t mind doing it to please her, though they couldn’t
fancy what had put the idea in her head, and though for their own
part they would much rather have played lawn tennis with Jack and
Gwen, if she hadn’t told them she was coming. The Misses Trenor
were followed by Lady Cressida Raith, a weather-beaten person in
Liberty silk and ethnological trinkets, who, on seeing the omnibus,
expressed her surprise that they were not to walk across the park;
but at Mrs. Wetherall’s horrified protest that the church was
a mile away, her ladyship, after a glance at the height of the
other’s heels, acquiesced in the necessity of driving, and poor
Mr. Gryce found himself rolling off between four ladies for whose
spiritual welfare he felt not the least concern.

It might have afforded him some consolation could he have known
that Miss Bart had really meant to go to church. She had even risen
earlier than usual in the execution of her purpose. She had an idea
that the sight of her in a grey gown of devotional cut, with her
famous lashes drooped above a prayer-book, would put the finishing
touch to Mr. Gryce’s subjugation, and render inevitable a certain
incident which she had resolved should form a part of the walk they
were to take together after luncheon. Her intentions in short had
never been more definite; but poor Lily, for all the hard glaze of
her exterior, was inwardly as malleable as wax. Her faculty for
adapting herself, for entering into other people’s feelings, if it
served her now and then in small contingencies, hampered her in the
decisive moments of life. She was like a water-plant in the flux
of the tides, and today the whole current of her mood was carrying
her toward Lawrence Selden. Why had he come? Was it to see herself
or Bertha Dorset? It was the last question which, at that moment,
should have engaged her. She might better have contented herself
with thinking that he had simply responded to the despairing
summons of his hostess, anxious to interpose him between herself
and the ill-humour of Mrs. Dorset. But Lily had not rested till she
learned from Mrs. Trenor that Selden had come of his own accord.
“He didn’t even wire me—he just happened to find the trap at the
station. Perhaps it’s not over with Bertha after all,” Mrs. Trenor
musingly concluded; and went away to arrange her dinner-cards
accordingly.

Perhaps it was not, Lily reflected; but it should be soon, unless
she had lost her cunning. If Selden had come at Mrs. Dorset’s call,
it was at her own that he would stay. So much the previous evening
had told her. Mrs. Trenor, true to her simple principle of making
her married friends happy, had placed Selden and Mrs. Dorset next
to each other at dinner; but, in obedience to the time-honoured
traditions of the match-maker, she had separated Lily and Mr.
Gryce, sending in the former with George Dorset, while Mr. Gryce
was coupled with Gwen Van Osburgh.

George Dorset’s talk did not interfere with the range of his
neighbour’s thoughts. He was a mournful dyspeptic, intent on
finding out the deleterious ingredients of every dish and diverted
from this care only by the sound of his wife’s voice. On this
occasion, however, Mrs. Dorset took no part in the general
conversation. She sat talking in low murmurs with Selden, and
turning a contemptuous and denuded shoulder toward her host, who,
far from resenting his exclusion, plunged into the excesses of
the MENU with the joyous irresponsibility of a free man. To Mr.
Dorset, however, his wife’s attitude was a subject of such evident
concern that, when he was not scraping the sauce from his fish, or
scooping the moist bread-crumbs from the interior of his roll, he
sat straining his thin neck for a glimpse of her between the lights.

Mrs. Trenor, as it chanced, had placed the husband and wife on
opposite sides of the table, and Lily was therefore able to observe
Mrs. Dorset also, and by carrying her glance a few feet farther, to
set up a rapid comparison between Lawrence Selden and Mr. Gryce.
It was that comparison which was her undoing. Why else had she
suddenly grown interested in Selden? She had known him for eight
years or more: ever since her return to America he had formed a
part of her background. She had always been glad to sit next to
him at dinner, had found him more agreeable than most men, and had
vaguely wished that he possessed the other qualities needful to
fix her attention; but till now she had been too busy with her own
affairs to regard him as more than one of the pleasant accessories
of life. Miss Bart was a keen reader of her own heart, and she saw
that her sudden preoccupation with Selden was due to the fact that
his presence shed a new light on her surroundings. Not that he was
notably brilliant or exceptional; in his own profession he was
surpassed by more than one man who had bored Lily through many a
weary dinner. It was rather that he had preserved a certain social
detachment, a happy air of viewing the show objectively, of having
points of contact outside the great gilt cage in which they were
all huddled for the mob to gape at. How alluring the world outside
the cage appeared to Lily, as she heard its door clang on her! In
reality, as she knew, the door never clanged: it stood always open;
but most of the captives were like flies in a bottle, and having
once flown in, could never regain their freedom. It was Selden’s
distinction that he had never forgotten the way out.

That was the secret of his way of readjusting her vision. Lily,
turning her eyes from him, found herself scanning her little world
through his retina: it was as though the pink lamps had been shut
off and the dusty daylight let in. She looked down the long table,
studying its occupants one by one, from Gus Trenor, with his
heavy carnivorous head sunk between his shoulders, as he preyed
on a jellied plover, to his wife, at the opposite end of the long
bank of orchids, suggestive, with her glaring good-looks, of a
jeweller’s window lit by electricity. And between the two, what a
long stretch of vacuity! How dreary and trivial these people were!
Lily reviewed them with a scornful impatience: Carry Fisher, with
her shoulders, her eyes, her divorces, her general air of embodying
a “spicy paragraph”; young Silverton, who had meant to live on
proof-reading and write an epic, and who now lived on his friends
and had become critical of truffles; Alice Wetherall, an animated
visiting-list, whose most fervid convictions turned on the wording
of invitations and the engraving of dinner-cards; Wetherall, with
his perpetual nervous nod of acquiescence, his air of agreeing with
people before he knew what they were saying; Jack Stepney, with his
confident smile and anxious eyes, half way between the sheriff and
an heiress; Gwen Van Osburgh, with all the guileless confidence of
a young girl who has always been told that there is no one richer
than her father.

Lily smiled at her classification of her friends. How different
they had seemed to her a few hours ago! 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. 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 short cut 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.

“I say, do look at her,” he exclaimed, turning to Miss Bart with
lugubrious merriment—“I beg your pardon, but do just look at my
wife making a fool of that poor devil over there! One would really
suppose she was gone on him—and it’s all the other way round, I
assure you.”

Thus adjured, Lily turned her eyes on the spectacle which was
affording Mr. Dorset such legitimate mirth. It certainly appeared,
as he said, that Mrs. Dorset was the more active participant in
the scene: her neighbour seemed to receive her advances with a
temperate zest which did not distract him from his dinner. The
sight restored Lily’s good humour, and knowing the peculiar
disguise which Mr. Dorset’s marital fears assumed, she asked gaily:
“Aren’t you horribly jealous of her?”

Dorset greeted the sally with delight. “Oh, abominably—you’ve
just hit it—keeps me awake at night. The doctors tell me that’s
what has knocked my digestion out—being so infernally jealous of
her.—I can’t eat a mouthful of this stuff, you know,” he added
suddenly, pushing back his plate with a clouded countenance;
and Lily, unfailingly adaptable, accorded her radiant attention
to his prolonged denunciation of other people’s cooks, with a
supplementary tirade on the toxic qualities of melted butter.

It was not often that he found so ready an ear; and, being a man
as well as a dyspeptic, it may be that as he poured his grievances
into it he was not insensible to its rosy symmetry. At any rate he
engaged Lily so long that the sweets were being handed when she
caught a phrase on her other side, where Miss Corby, the comic
woman of the company, was bantering Jack Stepney on his approaching
engagement. Miss Corby’s role was jocularity: she always entered
the conversation with a handspring.

“And of course you’ll have Sim Rosedale as best man!” Lily heard
her fling out as the climax of her prognostications; and Stepney
responded, as if struck: “Jove, that’s an idea. What a thumping
present I’d get out of him!”

SIM ROSEDALE! The name, made more odious by its diminutive,
obtruded itself on Lily’s thoughts like a leer. It stood for one
of the many hated possibilities hovering on the edge of life. If
she did not marry Percy Gryce, the day might come when she would
have to be civil to such men as Rosedale. IF SHE DID NOT MARRY
HIM? But she meant to marry him—she was sure of him and sure of
herself. She drew back with a shiver from the pleasant paths in
which her thoughts had been straying, and set her feet once more in
the middle of the long white road.... When she went upstairs that
night she found that the late post had brought her a fresh batch of
bills. Mrs. Peniston, who was a conscientious woman, had forwarded
them all to Bellomont.

* * * * *

Miss Bart, accordingly, rose the next morning with the most earnest
conviction that it was her duty to go to church. She tore herself
betimes from the lingering enjoyment of her breakfast tray, rang to
have her grey gown laid out, and despatched her maid to borrow a
prayer-book from Mrs. Trenor.

But her course was too purely reasonable not to contain the germs
of rebellion. No sooner were her preparations made than they roused
a smothered sense of resistance. A small spark was enough to
kindle Lily’s imagination, and the sight of the grey dress and the
borrowed prayer-book flashed a long light down the years. She would
have to go to church with Percy Gryce every Sunday. They would have
a front pew in the most expensive church in New York, and his name
would figure handsomely in the list of parish charities. In a few
years, when he grew stouter, he would be made a warden. Once in the
winter the rector would come to dine, and her husband would beg
her to go over the list and see that no DIVORCEES were included,
except those who had showed signs of penitence by being re-married
to the very wealthy. There was nothing especially arduous in this
round of religious obligations; but it stood for a fraction of that
great bulk of boredom which loomed across her path. And who could
consent to be bored on such a morning? Lily had slept well, and
her bath had filled her with a pleasant glow, which was becomingly
reflected in the clear curve of her cheek. No lines were visible
this morning, or else the glass was at a happier angle.

And the day was the accomplice of her mood: 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.
Gryce’s crestfallen face even suggested that she had done wisely
in absenting herself, since the disappointment he so candidly
betrayed would surely whet his appetite for the afternoon walk.
That walk she did not mean to miss; one glance at the bills on her
writing-table was enough to recall its necessity. But meanwhile
she had the morning to herself, and could muse pleasantly on the
disposal of its hours. She was familiar enough with the habits of
Bellomont to know that she was likely to have a free field till
luncheon. She had seen the Wetheralls, the Trenor girls and Lady
Cressida packed safely into the omnibus; Judy Trenor was sure to
be having her hair shampooed; Carry Fisher had doubtless carried
off her host for a drive; Ned Silverton was probably smoking
the cigarette of young despair in his bedroom; and Kate Corby
was certain to be playing tennis with Jack Stepney and Miss Van
Osburgh. Of the ladies, this left only Mrs. Dorset unaccounted for,
and Mrs. Dorset never came down till luncheon: her doctors, she
averred, had forbidden her to expose herself to the crude air of
the morning.

To the remaining members of the party Lily gave no special thought;
wherever they were, they were not likely to interfere with her
plans. These, for the moment, took the shape of assuming a dress
somewhat more rustic and summerlike in style than the garment she
had first selected, and rustling downstairs, sunshade in hand, with
the disengaged air of a lady in quest of exercise. The great hall
was empty but for the knot of dogs by the fire, who, taking in at
a glance the outdoor aspect of Miss Bart, were upon her at once
with lavish offers of companionship. She put aside the ramming paws
which conveyed these offers, and assuring the joyous volunteers
that she might presently have a use for their company, sauntered
on through the empty drawing-room to the library at the end of the
house. The library was almost the only surviving portion of the
old manor-house of Bellomont: a long spacious room, revealing the
traditions of the mother-country in its classically-cased doors,
the Dutch tiles of the chimney, and the elaborate hob-grate with
its shining brass urns. A few family portraits of lantern-jawed
gentlemen in tie-wigs, and ladies with large head-dresses and small
bodies, hung between the shelves lined with pleasantly-shabby
books: books mostly contemporaneous with the ancestors in question,
and to which the subsequent Trenors had made no perceptible
additions. The library at Bellomont was in fact never used for
reading, though it had a certain popularity as a smoking room or
a quiet retreat for flirtation. It had occurred to Lily, however,
that it might on this occasion have been resorted to by the only
member of the party in the least likely to put it to its original
use. She advanced noiselessly over the dense old rug scattered
with easy-chairs, and before she reached the middle of the room
she saw that she had not been mistaken. Lawrence Selden was in
fact seated at its farther end; but though a book lay on his knee,
his attention was not engaged with it, but directed to a lady
whose lace-clad figure, as she leaned back in an adjoining chair,
detached itself with exaggerated slimness against the dusky leather
upholstery.

Lily paused as she caught sight of the group; for a moment she
seemed about to withdraw, but thinking better of this, she
announced her approach by a slight shake of her skirts which made
the couple raise their heads, Mrs. Dorset with a look of frank
displeasure, and Selden with his usual quiet smile. The sight of
his composure had a disturbing effect on Lily; but to be disturbed
was in her case to make a more brilliant effort at self-possession.

“Dear me, am I late?” she asked, putting a hand in his as he
advanced to greet her.

“Late for what?” enquired Mrs. Dorset tartly. “Not for luncheon,
certainly—but perhaps you had an earlier engagement?”

“Yes, I had,” said Lily confidingly.

“Really? Perhaps I am in the way, then? But Mr. Selden is entirely
at your disposal.” Mrs. Dorset was pale with temper, and her
antagonist felt a certain pleasure in prolonging her distress.

“Oh, dear, no—do stay,” she said good-humouredly. “I don’t in the
least want to drive you away.”

“You’re awfully good, dear, but I never interfere with Mr. Selden’s
engagements.”

The remark was uttered with a little air of proprietorship not lost
on its object, who concealed a faint blush of annoyance by stooping
to pick up the book he had dropped at Lily’s approach. The latter’s
eyes widened charmingly and she broke into a light laugh.

“But I have no engagement with Mr. Selden! My engagement was to go
to church; and I’m afraid the omnibus has started without me. HAS
it started, do you know?”

She turned to Selden, who replied that he had heard it drive away
some time since.

“Ah, then I shall have to walk; I promised Hilda and Muriel to go
to church with them. It’s too late to walk there, you say? Well, I
shall have the credit of trying, at any rate—and the advantage of
escaping part of the service. I’m not so sorry for myself, after
all!”

And with a bright nod to the couple on whom she had intruded, Miss
Bart strolled through the glass doors and carried her rustling
grace down the long perspective of the garden walk.

She was taking her way churchward, but at no very quick pace; a
fact not lost on one of her observers, who stood in the doorway
looking after her with an air of puzzled amusement. The truth is
that she was conscious of a somewhat keen shock of disappointment.
All her plans for the day had been built on the assumption that it
was to see her that Selden had come to Bellomont. She had expected,
when she came downstairs, to find him on the watch for her; and
she had found him, instead, in a situation which might well denote
that he had been on the watch for another lady. Was it possible,
after all, that he had come for Bertha Dorset? The latter had
acted on the assumption to the extent of appearing at an hour when
she never showed herself to ordinary mortals, and Lily, for the
moment, saw no way of putting her in the wrong. It did not occur
to her that Selden might have been actuated merely by the desire
to spend a Sunday out of town: women never learn to dispense with
the sentimental motive in their judgments of men. But Lily was not
easily disconcerted; competition put her on her mettle, and she
reflected that Selden’s coming, if it did not declare him to be
still in Mrs. Dorset’s toils, showed him to be so completely free
from them that he was not afraid of her proximity.

These thoughts so engaged her that she fell into a gait hardly
likely to carry her to church before the sermon, and at length,
having passed from the gardens to the wood-path beyond, so far
forgot her intention as to sink into a rustic seat at a bend of the
walk. The spot was charming, and Lily was not insensible to the
charm, or to the fact that her presence enhanced it; but she was
not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in company,
and the combination of a handsome girl and a romantic scene struck
her as too good to be wasted. No one, however, appeared to profit
by the opportunity; and after a half hour of fruitless waiting she
rose and wandered on. She felt a stealing sense of fatigue as she
walked; the sparkle had died out of her, and the taste of life
was stale on her lips. She hardly knew what she had been seeking,
or why the failure to find it had so blotted the light from her
sky: she was only aware of a vague sense of failure, of an inner
isolation deeper than the loneliness about her.

Her footsteps flagged, and she stood gazing listlessly ahead,
digging the ferny edge of the path with the tip of her sunshade.
As she did so a step sounded behind her, and she saw Selden at her
side.

“How fast you walk!” he remarked. “I thought I should never catch
up with you.”

She answered gaily: “You must be quite breathless! I’ve been
sitting under that tree for an hour.”

“Waiting for me, I hope?” he rejoined; and she said with a vague
laugh:

“Well—waiting to see if you would come.”

“I seize the distinction, but I don’t mind it, since doing the one
involved doing the other. But weren’t you sure that I should come?”

“If I waited long enough—but you see I had only a limited time to
give to the experiment.”

“Why limited? Limited by luncheon?”

“No; by my other engagement.”

“Your engagement to go to church with Muriel and Hilda?”

“No; but to come home from church with another person.”

“Ah, I see; I might have known you were fully provided with
alternatives. And is the other person coming home this way?”

Lily laughed again. “That’s just what I don’t know; and to find
out, it is my business to get to church before the service is over.”

“Exactly; and it is my business to prevent your doing so; in which
case the other person, piqued by your absence, will form the
desperate resolve of driving back in the omnibus.”

Lily received this with fresh appreciation; his nonsense was like
the bubbling of her inner mood. “Is that what you would do in such
an emergency?” she enquired.

Selden looked at her with solemnity. “I am here to prove to you,”
he cried, “what I am capable of doing in an emergency!”

“Walking a mile in an hour—you must own that the omnibus would be
quicker!”

“Ah—but will he find you in the end? That’s the only test of
success.”

They looked at each other with the same luxury of enjoyment that
they had felt in exchanging absurdities over his tea-table; but
suddenly Lily’s face changed, and she said: “Well, if it is, he has
succeeded.”

Selden, following her glance, perceived a party of people advancing
toward them from the farther bend of the path. Lady Cressida
had evidently insisted on walking home, and the rest of the
church-goers had thought it their duty to accompany her. Lily’s
companion looked rapidly from one to the other of the two men of
the party; Wetherall walking respectfully at Lady Cressida’s side
with his little sidelong look of nervous attention, and Percy Gryce
bringing-up the rear with Mrs. Wetherall and the Trenors.

“Ah—now I see why you were getting up your Americana!” Selden
exclaimed with a note of the freest admiration but the blush with
which the sally was received checked whatever amplifications he had
meant to give it.

That Lily Bart should object to being bantered about her suitors,
or even about her means of attracting them, was so new to Selden
that he had a momentary flash of surprise, which lit up a number
of possibilities; but she rose gallantly to the defence of her
confusion, by saying, as its object approached: “That was why I was
waiting for you—to thank you for having given me so many points!”

“Ah, you can hardly do justice to the subject in such a short
time,” said Selden, as the Trenor girls caught sight of Miss Bart;
and while she signalled a response to their boisterous greeting, he
added quickly: “Won’t you devote your afternoon to it? You know I
must be off tomorrow morning. We’ll take a walk, and you can thank
me at your leisure.”