The House of Mirth

ook I, Chapter 7

It spoke much for the depth of Mrs. Trenor’s friendship that her
voice, in admonishing Miss Bart, took the same note of personal
despair as if she had been lamenting the collapse of a house-party.

“All I can say is, Lily, that I can’t make you out!” She leaned
back, sighing, in the morning abandon of lace and muslin, turning
an indifferent shoulder to the heaped-up importunities of her desk,
while she considered, with the eye of a physician who has given up
the case, the erect exterior of the patient confronting her.

“If you hadn’t told me you were going in for him seriously—but I’m
sure you made that plain enough from the beginning! Why else did
you ask me to let you off bridge, and to keep away Carry and Kate
Corby? I don’t suppose you did it because he amused you; we could
none of us imagine your putting up with him for a moment unless
you meant to marry him. And I’m sure everybody played fair! They
all wanted to help it along. Even Bertha kept her hands off—I will
say that—till Lawrence came down and you dragged him away from
her. After that she had a right to retaliate—why on earth did you
interfere with her? You’ve known Lawrence Selden for years—why did
you behave as if you had just discovered him? If you had a grudge
against Bertha it was a stupid time to show it—you could have paid
her back just as well after you were married! I told you Bertha
was dangerous. She was in an odious mood when she came here, but
Lawrence’s turning up put her in a good humour, and if you’d only
let her think he came for HER it would have never occurred to her
to play you this trick. Oh, Lily, you’ll never do anything if
you’re not serious!”

Miss Bart accepted this exhortation in a spirit of the purest
impartiality. Why should she have been angry? It was the voice
of her own conscience which spoke to her through Mrs. Trenor’s
reproachful accents. But even to her own conscience she must trump
up a semblance of defence. “I only took a day off—I thought he
meant to stay on all this week, and I knew Mr. Selden was leaving
this morning.”

Mrs. Trenor brushed aside the plea with a gesture which laid bare
its weakness.

“He did mean to stay—that’s the worst of it. It shows that he’s
run away from you; that Bertha’s done her work and poisoned him
thoroughly.”

Lily gave a slight laugh. “Oh, if he’s running I’ll overtake him!”

Her friend threw out an arresting hand. “Whatever you do, Lily, do
nothing!”

Miss Bart received the warning with a smile. “I don’t mean,
literally, to take the next train. There are ways——” But she did
not go on to specify them.

Mrs. Trenor sharply corrected the tense. “There WERE ways—plenty
of them! I didn’t suppose you needed to have them pointed out.
But don’t deceive yourself—he’s thoroughly frightened. He has run
straight home to his mother, and she’ll protect him!”

“Oh, to the death,” Lily agreed, dimpling at the vision.

“How you can LAUGH——” her friend rebuked her; and she dropped back
to a soberer perception of things with the question: “What was it
Bertha really told him?”

“Don’t ask me—horrors! She seemed to have raked up everything. Oh,
you know what I mean—of course there isn’t anything, REALLY; but
I suppose she brought in Prince Varigliano—and Lord Hubert—and
there was some story of your having borrowed money of old Ned Van
Alstyne: did you ever?”

“He is my father’s cousin,” Miss Bart interposed.

“Well, of course she left THAT out. It seems Ned told Carry Fisher;
and she told Bertha, naturally. They’re all alike, you know: they
hold their tongues for years, and you think you’re safe, but when
their opportunity comes they remember everything.”

Lily had grown pale: her voice had a harsh note in it. “It was
some money I lost at bridge at the Van Osburghs’. I repaid it, of
course.”

“Ah, well, they wouldn’t remember that; besides, it was the idea
of the gambling debt that frightened Percy. Oh, Bertha knew her
man—she knew just what to tell him!”

In this strain Mrs. Trenor continued for nearly an hour to admonish
her friend. Miss Bart listened with admirable equanimity. Her
naturally good temper had been disciplined by years of enforced
compliance, since she had almost always had to attain her ends
by the circuitous path of other people’s; and, being naturally
inclined to face unpleasant facts as soon as they presented
themselves, she was not sorry to hear an impartial statement of
what her folly was likely to cost, the more so as her own thoughts
were still insisting on the other side of the case. Presented
in the light of Mrs. Trenor’s vigorous comments, the reckoning
was certainly a formidable one, and Lily, as she listened, found
herself gradually reverting to her friend’s view of the situation.
Mrs. Trenor’s words were moreover emphasized for her hearer by
anxieties which she herself could scarcely guess. Affluence, unless
stimulated by a keen imagination, forms but the vaguest notion of
the practical strain of poverty. Judy knew it must be “horrid” for
poor Lily to have to stop to consider whether she could afford
real lace on her petticoats, and not to have a motor-car and a
steam-yacht at her orders; but the daily friction of unpaid bills,
the daily nibble of small temptations to expenditure, were trials
as far out of her experience as the domestic problems of the
char-woman. Mrs. Trenor’s unconsciousness of the real stress of the
situation had the effect of making it more galling to Lily. While
her friend reproached her for missing the opportunity to eclipse
her rivals, she was once more battling in imagination with the
mounting tide of indebtedness from which she had so nearly escaped.
What wind of folly had driven her out again on those dark seas?

If anything was needed to put the last touch to her self-abasement
it was the sense of the way her old life was opening its ruts again
to receive her. Yesterday her fancy had fluttered free pinions
above a choice of occupations; now she had to drop to the level of
the familiar routine, in which moments of seeming brilliancy and
freedom alternated with long hours of subjection.

She laid a deprecating hand on her friend’s. “Dear Judy! I’m sorry
to have been such a bore, and you are very good to me. But you must
have some letters for me to answer—let me at least be useful.”

She settled herself at the desk, and Mrs. Trenor accepted her
resumption of the morning’s task with a sigh which implied that,
after all, she had proved herself unfit for higher uses.

The luncheon-table showed a depleted circle. All the men but Jack
Stepney and Dorset had returned to town (it seemed to Lily a last
touch of irony that Selden and Percy Gryce should have gone in the
same train), and Lady Cressida and the attendant Wetheralls had
been despatched by motor to lunch at a distant country-house. At
such moments of diminished interest it was usual for Mrs. Dorset to
keep her room till the afternoon; but on this occasion she drifted
in when luncheon was half over, hollowed-eyed and drooping, but
with an edge of malice under her indifference.

She raised her eyebrows as she looked about the table. “How few of
us are left! I do so enjoy the quiet—don’t you, Lily? I wish the
men would always stop away—it’s really much nicer without them.
Oh, you don’t count, George: one doesn’t have to talk to one’s
husband. But I thought Mr. Gryce was to stay for the rest of the
week?” she added enquiringly. “Didn’t he intend to, Judy? He’s such
a nice boy—I wonder what drove him away? He is rather shy, and I’m
afraid we may have shocked him: he has been brought up in such an
old-fashioned way. Do you know, Lily, he told me he had never seen
a girl play cards for money till he saw you doing it the other
night? And he lives on the interest of his income, and always has a
lot left over to invest!”

Mrs. Fisher leaned forward eagerly. “I do believe it is some one’s
duty to educate that young man. It is shocking that he has never
been made to realize his duties as a citizen. Every wealthy man
should be compelled to study the laws of his country.”

Mrs. Dorset glanced at her quietly. “I think he HAS studied the
divorce laws. He told me he had promised the Bishop to sign some
kind of a petition against divorce.”

Mrs. Fisher reddened under her powder, and Stepney said with
a laughing glance at Miss Bart: “I suppose he is thinking of
marriage, and wants to tinker up the old ship before he goes
aboard.”

His betrothed looked shocked at the metaphor, and George Dorset
exclaimed with a sardonic growl: “Poor devil! It isn’t the ship
that will do for him, it’s the crew.”

“Or the stowaways,” said Miss Corby brightly. “If I contemplated a
voyage with him I should try to start with a friend in the hold.”

Miss Van Osburgh’s vague feeling of pique was struggling for
appropriate expression. “I’m sure I don’t see why you laugh at him;
I think he’s very nice,” she exclaimed; “and, at any rate, a girl
who married him would always have enough to be comfortable.”

She looked puzzled at the redoubled laughter which hailed her
words, but it might have consoled her to know how deeply they had
sunk into the breast of one of her hearers.

Comfortable! At that moment the word was more eloquent to Lily
Bart than any other in the language. She could not even pause to
smile over the heiress’s view of a colossal fortune as a mere
shelter against want: her mind was filled with the vision of what
that shelter might have been to her. Mrs. Dorset’s pin-pricks did
not smart, for her own irony cut deeper: no one could hurt her as
much as she was hurting herself, for no one else—not even Judy
Trenor—knew the full magnitude of her folly.

She was roused from these unprofitable considerations by a
whispered request from her hostess, who drew her apart as they left
the luncheon-table.

“Lily, dear, if you’ve nothing special to do, may I tell Carry
Fisher that you intend to drive to the station and fetch Gus? He
will be back at four, and I know she has it in her mind to meet
him. Of course I’m very glad to have him amused, but I happen to
know that she has bled him rather severely since she’s been here,
and she is so keen about going to fetch him that I fancy she must
have got a lot more bills this morning. It seems to me,” Mrs.
Trenor feelingly concluded, “that most of her alimony is paid by
other women’s husbands!”

Miss Bart, on her way to the station, had leisure to muse over
her friend’s words, and their peculiar application to herself.
Why should she have to suffer for having once, for a few hours,
borrowed money of an elderly cousin, when a woman like Carry
Fisher could make a living unrebuked from the good-nature of her
men friends and the tolerance of their wives? It all turned on the
tiresome distinction between what a married woman might, and a
girl might not, do. Of course it was shocking for a married woman
to borrow money—and Lily was expertly aware of the implication
involved—but still, it was the mere MALUM PROHIBITUM which the
world decries but condones, and which, though it may be punished by
private vengeance, does not provoke the collective disapprobation
of society. To Miss Bart, in short, no such opportunities were
possible. She could of course borrow from her women friends—a
hundred here or there, at the utmost—but they were more ready to
give a gown or a trinket, and looked a little askance when she
hinted her preference for a cheque. Women are not generous lenders,
and those among whom her lot was cast were either in the same
case as herself, or else too far removed from it to understand
its necessities. The result of her meditations was the decision
to join her aunt at Richfield. She could not remain at Bellomont
without playing bridge, and being involved in other expenses;
and to continue her usual series of autumn visits would merely
prolong the same difficulties. She had reached a point where abrupt
retrenchment was necessary, and the only cheap life was a dull
life. She would start the next morning for Richfield.

At the station she thought Gus Trenor seemed surprised, and not
wholly unrelieved, to see her. She yielded up the reins of the
light runabout in which she had driven over, and as he climbed
heavily to her side, crushing her into a scant third of the seat,
he said: “Halloo! It isn’t often you honour me. You must have been
uncommonly hard up for something to do.”

The afternoon was warm, and propinquity made her more than usually
conscious that he was red and massive, and that beads of moisture
had caused the dust of the train to adhere unpleasantly to the
broad expanse of cheek and neck which he turned to her; but she was
aware also, from the look in his small dull eyes, that the contact
with her freshness and slenderness was as agreeable to him as the
sight of a cooling beverage.

The perception of this fact helped her to answer gaily: “It’s not
often I have the chance. There are too many ladies to dispute the
privilege with me.”

“The privilege of driving me home? Well, I’m glad you won the race,
anyhow. But I know what really happened—my wife sent you. Now
didn’t she?”

He had the dull man’s unexpected flashes of astuteness, and Lily
could not help joining in the laugh with which he had pounced on
the truth.

“You see, Judy thinks I’m the safest person for you to be with; and
she’s quite right,” she rejoined.

“Oh, is she, though? If she is, it’s because you wouldn’t waste
your time on an old hulk like me. We married men have to put up
with what we can get: all the prizes are for the clever chaps
who’ve kept a free foot. Let me light a cigar, will you? I’ve had a
beastly day of it.”

He drew up in the shade of the village street, and passed the
reins to her while he held a match to his cigar. The little flame
under his hand cast a deeper crimson on his puffing face, and Lily
averted her eyes with a momentary feeling of repugnance. And yet
some women thought him handsome!

As she handed back the reins, she said sympathetically: “Did you
have such a lot of tiresome things to do?”

“I should say so—rather!” Trenor, who was seldom listened to,
either by his wife or her friends, settled down into the rare
enjoyment of a confidential talk. “You don’t know how a fellow
has to hustle to keep this kind of thing going.” He waved his
whip in the direction of the Bellomont acres, which lay outspread
before them in opulent undulations. “Judy has no idea of what she
spends—not that there isn’t plenty to keep the thing going,” he
interrupted himself, “but a man has got to keep his eyes open and
pick up all the tips he can. My father and mother used to live
like fighting-cocks on their income, and put by a good bit of it
too—luckily for me—but at the pace we go now, I don’t know where I
should be if it weren’t for taking a flyer now and then. The women
all think—I mean Judy thinks—I’ve nothing to do but to go downtown
once a month and cut off coupons, but the truth is it takes a
devilish lot of hard work to keep the machinery running. Not that I
ought to complain today, though,” he went on after a moment, “for
I did a very neat stroke of business, thanks to Stepney’s friend
Rosedale: by the way, Miss Lily, I wish you’d try to persuade Judy
to be decently civil to that chap. He’s going to be rich enough to
buy us all out one of these days, and if she’d only ask him to dine
now and then I could get almost anything out of him. The man is mad
to know the people who don’t want to know him, and when a fellow’s
in that state there is nothing he won’t do for the first woman who
takes him up.”

Lily hesitated a moment. The first part of her companion’s
discourse had started an interesting train of thought, which was
rudely interrupted by the mention of Mr. Rosedale’s name. She
uttered a faint protest.

“But you know Jack did try to take him about, and he was
impossible.”

“Oh, hang it—because he’s fat and shiny, and has a sloppy manner!
Well, all I can say is that the people who are clever enough to be
civil to him now will make a mighty good thing of it. A few years
from now he’ll be in it whether we want him or not, and then he
won’t be giving away a half-a-million tip for a dinner.”

Lily’s mind had reverted from the intrusive personality of Mr.
Rosedale to the train of thought set in motion by Trenor’s first
words. This vast mysterious Wall Street world of “tips” and
“deals”—might she not find in it the means of escape from her
dreary predicament? She had often heard of women making money in
this way through their friends: she had no more notion than most of
her sex of the exact nature of the transaction, and its vagueness
seemed to diminish its indelicacy. She could not, indeed, imagine
herself, in any extremity, stooping to extract a “tip” from Mr.
Rosedale; but at her side was a man in possession of that precious
commodity, and who, as the husband of her dearest friend, stood to
her in a relation of almost fraternal intimacy.

In her inmost heart Lily knew it was not by appealing to the
fraternal instinct that she was likely to move Gus Trenor; but this
way of explaining the situation helped to drape its crudity, and
she was always scrupulous about keeping up appearances to herself.
Her personal fastidiousness had a moral equivalent, and when she
made a tour of inspection in her own mind there were certain closed
doors she did not open.

As they reached the gates of Bellomont she turned to Trenor with a
smile. “The afternoon is so perfect—don’t you want to drive me a
little farther? I’ve been rather out of spirits all day, and it’s
so restful to be away from people, with some one who won’t mind if
I’m a little dull.”

She looked so plaintively lovely as she proffered the request, so
trustfully sure of his sympathy and understanding, that Trenor felt
himself wishing that his wife could see how other women treated
him—not battered wire-pullers like Mrs. Fisher, but a girl that
most men would have given their boots to get such a look from.

“Out of spirits? Why on earth should you ever be out of spirits? Is
your last box of Doucet dresses a failure, or did Judy rook you out
of everything at bridge last night?”

Lily shook her head with a sigh. “I have had to give up Doucet;
and bridge too—I can’t afford it. In fact I can’t afford any of
the things my friends do, and I am afraid Judy often thinks me a
bore because I don’t play cards any longer, and because I am not as
smartly dressed as the other women. But you will think me a bore
too if I talk to you about my worries, and I only mention them
because I want you to do me a favour—the very greatest of favours.”

Her eyes sought his once more, and she smiled inwardly at the tinge
of apprehension that she read in them.

“Why, of course—if it’s anything I can manage——” He broke off, and
she guessed that his enjoyment was disturbed by the remembrance of
Mrs. Fisher’s methods.

“The greatest of favours,” she rejoined gently. “The fact is, Judy
is angry with me, and I want you to make my peace.”

“Angry with you? Oh, come, nonsense——” his relief broke through in
a laugh. “Why, you know she’s devoted to you.”

“She is the best friend I have, and that is why I mind having to
vex her. But I daresay you know what she has wanted me to do. She
has set her heart—poor dear—on my marrying—marrying a great deal of
money.”

She paused with a slight falter of embarrassment, and Trenor,
turning abruptly, fixed on her a look of growing intelligence.

“A great deal of money? Oh, by Jove—you don’t mean Gryce? What—you
do? Oh, no, of course I won’t mention it—you can trust me to keep
my mouth shut—but Gryce—good Lord, GRYCE! Did Judy really think you
could bring yourself to marry that portentous little ass? But you
couldn’t, eh? And so you gave him the sack, and that’s the reason
why he lit out by the first train this morning?” He leaned back,
spreading himself farther across the seat, as if dilated by the
joyful sense of his own discernment. “How on earth could Judy think
you would do such a thing? I could have told her you’d never put up
with such a little milksop!”

Lily sighed more deeply. “I sometimes think,” she murmured, “that
men understand a woman’s motives better than other women do.”

“Some men—I’m certain of it! I could have TOLD Judy,” he repeated,
exulting in the implied superiority over his wife.

“I thought you would understand; that’s why I wanted to speak to
you,” Miss Bart rejoined. “I can’t make that kind of marriage; it’s
impossible. But neither can I go on living as all the women in my
set do. I am almost entirely dependent on my aunt, and though she
is very kind to me she makes me no regular allowance, and lately
I’ve lost money at cards, and I don’t dare tell her about it. I
have paid my card debts, of course, but there is hardly anything
left for my other expenses, and if I go on with my present life I
shall be in horrible difficulties. I have a tiny income of my own,
but I’m afraid it’s badly invested, for it seems to bring in less
every year, and I am so ignorant of money matters that I don’t
know if my aunt’s agent, who looks after it, is a good adviser.”
She paused a moment, and added in a lighter tone: “I didn’t mean
to bore you with all this, but I want your help in making Judy
understand that I can’t, at present, go on living as one must
live among you all. I am going away tomorrow to join my aunt at
Richfield, and I shall stay there for the rest of the autumn, and
dismiss my maid and learn how to mend my own clothes.”

At this picture of loveliness in distress, the pathos of which
was heightened by the light touch with which it was drawn, a
murmur of indignant sympathy broke from Trenor. Twenty-four hours
earlier, if his wife had consulted him on the subject of Miss
Bart’s future, he would have said that a girl with extravagant
tastes and no money had better marry the first rich man she could
get; but with the subject of discussion at his side, turning to
him for sympathy, making him feel that he understood her better
than her dearest friends, and confirming the assurance by the
appeal of her exquisite nearness, he was ready to swear that such
a marriage was a desecration, and that, as a man of honour, he was
bound to do all he could to protect her from the results of her
disinterestedness. This impulse was reinforced by the reflection
that if she had married Gryce she would have been surrounded
by flattery and approval, whereas, having refused to sacrifice
herself to expediency, she was left to bear the whole cost of
her resistance. Hang it, if he could find a way out of such
difficulties for a professional sponge like Carry Fisher, who was
simply a mental habit corresponding to the physical titillations
of the cigarette or the cock-tail, he could surely do as much for
a girl who appealed to his highest sympathies, and who brought her
troubles to him with the trustfulness of a child.

Trenor and Miss Bart prolonged their drive till long after sunset;
and before it was over he had tried, with some show of success, to
prove to her that, if she would only trust him, he could make a
handsome sum of money for her without endangering the small amount
she possessed. She was too genuinely ignorant of the manipulations
of the stock-market to understand his technical explanations, or
even perhaps to perceive that certain points in them were slurred;
the haziness enveloping the transaction served as a veil for her
embarrassment, and through the general blur her hopes dilated like
lamps in a fog. She understood only that her modest investments
were to be mysteriously multiplied without risk to herself; and the
assurance that this miracle would take place within a short time,
that there would be no tedious interval for suspense and reaction,
relieved her of her lingering scruples.

Again she felt the lightening of her load, and with it the release
of repressed activities. Her immediate worries conjured, it was
easy to resolve that she would never again find herself in such
straits, and as the need of economy and self-denial receded
from her foreground she felt herself ready to meet any other
demand which life might make. Even the immediate one of letting
Trenor, as they drove homeward, lean a little nearer and rest
his hand reassuringly on hers, cost her only a momentary shiver
of reluctance. It was part of the game to make him feel that her
appeal had been an uncalculated impulse, provoked by the liking he
inspired; and the renewed sense of power in handling men, while it
consoled her wounded vanity, helped also to obscure the thought of
the claim at which his manner hinted. He was a coarse dull man who,
under all his show of authority, was a mere supernumerary in the
costly show for which his money paid: surely, to a clever girl, it
would be easy to hold him by his vanity, and so keep the obligation
on his side.