The House of Mirth

by Edith Wharton

She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.

If I were shabby no one would have me: a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself. The clothes are the background, the frame, if you like; they don’t make success, but they are a part of it. Who wants a dingy woman? We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed till we drop—and if we can’t keep it up alone, we have to go into partnership.”

Society is a revolving body which is apt to be judged according to its place in each man’s heaven; and at present it was turning its illuminated face to Lily.

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.

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.

“I don’t know,” she said, “why you are always accusing me of premeditation.” “I thought you confessed to it: you told me the other day that you had to follow a certain line—and if one does a thing at all, it is a merit to do it thoroughly.” “If you mean that a girl who has no one to think for her is obliged to think for herself, I am quite willing to accept the imputation. But you must find me a dismal kind of person if you suppose that I never yield to an impulse.” “Ah, but I don’t suppose that; haven’t I told you that your genius lies in converting impulses into intentions?” “My genius?” she echoed with a sudden note of weariness. “Is there any final test of genius but success? And I certainly haven’t succeeded.” Selden pushed his hat back and took a side-glance at her. “Success—what is success? I shall be interested to have your definition.” “Success?” She hesitated. “Why, to get as much as one can out of life, I suppose. It’s a relative quality, after all. Isn’t that your idea of it?” “My idea of it? God forbid!” He sat up with sudden energy, resting his elbows on his knees and staring out upon the mellow fields. “My idea of success,” he said, “is personal freedom.” “Freedom? Freedom from worries?” “From everything—from money, from poverty, from ease and anxiety, from all the material accidents. To keep a kind of republic of the spirit—that’s what I call success.”

From whatever angle he viewed their dawning intimacy, he could not see it as part of her scheme of life; and to be the unforeseen element in a career so accurately planned was stimulating even to a man who had renounced sentimental experiments.

Lily mused. “Don’t you think,” she rejoined after a moment, “that the people who find fault with society are too apt to regard it as an end and not a means, just as the people who despise money speak as if its only use were to be kept in bags and gloated over? Isn’t it fairer to look at them both as opportunities which may be used either stupidly or intelligently according to the capacity of the user?” “That is certainly the sane view; but the queer thing about society is that the people who regard it as an end are those who are in it, and not the critics on the fence. It’s just the other way with most shows: the audience may be under the illusion, but the actors know that real life is on the other side of the footlights. The people who take society as an escape from work are putting it to its proper use; but when it becomes the thing worked for, it distorts all the relations of life.” Selden raised himself on his elbow. “Good heavens!” he went on; “I don’t underrate the decorative side of life. It seems to me the sense of splendour has justified itself by what it has produced. The worst of it is that so much human nature is used up in the process. If we’re all the raw stuff of the cosmic effects, one would rather be the fire that tempers a sword than the fish that dyes a purple cloak. And a society like ours wastes such good material in producing its little patch of purple! Look at a boy like Ned Silverton—he’s really too good to be used to refurbish anybody’s social shab...

“Ah, you are as bad as the other sectarians,” she exclaimed; “why do you call your republic a republic? It is a close corporation, and you create arbitrary objections in order to keep people out.” “It is not my republic; if it were, I should have a coup d’état and seat you on the throne.” “Whereas, in reality, you think I can never even get my foot across the threshold? Oh, I understand what you mean. You despise my ambitions; you think them unworthy of me!” Selden smiled, but not ironically. “Well, isn’t that a tribute? I think them quite worthy of most of the people who live by them.” She had turned to gaze on him gravely. “But isn’t it possible that if I had the opportunities of these people, I might make a better use of them? Money stands for all kinds of things; its purchasing quality isn’t limited to diamonds and motor-cars.” “Not in the least; you might expiate your enjoyment of them by founding a hospital.” “But if you think they are what I should really enjoy, you must think my ambitions are good enough for me.” Selden met this appeal with a laugh. “Ah, my dear Miss Bart, I am not Divine Providence, to guarantee your enjoying the things you are trying to get!” “Then the best you can say for me is that after struggling to get them I probably shan’t like them?” She drew a deep breath. “What a miserable future you foresee for me!” “Well, have you never foreseen it for yourself?” The slow colour rose to her cheek, not a blush of excitement but drawn from the deep well...

“Why do you do this to me?” she cried. “Why do you make the things I have chosen seem hateful to me if you have nothing to give me instead?” The words roused Selden from the musing fit into which he had fallen. He himself did not know why he had led their talk along such lines; it was the last use he would have imagined himself making of an afternoon’s solitude with Miss Bart. But it was one of those moments when neither seemed to speak deliberately, when an indwelling voice in each called to the other across unsounded depths of feeling. “No, I have nothing to give you instead,” he said, sitting up and turning so that he faced her. “If I had, it should be yours, you know.” She received this abrupt declaration in a way even stranger than the manner of its making: she dropped her face on her hands and he saw that for a moment she wept. It was for a moment only, however; for when he leaned nearer and drew down her hands with a gesture less passionate than grave, she turned on him a face softened but not disfigured by emotion, and he said to himself, somewhat cruelly, that even her weeping was an art. The reflection steadied his voice as he asked, between pity and irony: “Isn’t it natural that I should try to belittle all the things I can’t offer you?” Her face brightened at this, but she drew her hand away, not with a gesture of coquetry but as though renouncing something to which she had no claim. “But you belittle me, don’t you,” she returned gently, “in being so sure they ...

It was not the first time that Selden had heard Lily’s beauty lightly remarked on, and hitherto the tone of the comments had imperceptibly coloured his view of her. But now it woke only a motion of indignant contempt. This was the world she lived in, these were the standards by which she was fated to be measured! Does one go to Caliban for a judgment on Miranda?

“How long the night is! And I know I shan’t sleep tomorrow. Some one told me my father used to lie sleepless and think of horrors. And he was not wicked, only unfortunate—and I see now how he must have suffered, lying alone with his thoughts! But I am bad—a bad girl—all my thoughts are bad—I have always had bad people about me. Is that any excuse? I thought I could manage my own life—I was proud—proud! But now I’m on their level—”

That’s Lily all over, you know: she works like a slave preparing the ground and sowing her seeds, but the day she ought to be reaping the harvest, she oversleeps herself or goes off on a picnic.” Mrs. Fisher paused and looked reflectively at the deep shimmer of sea between the cactus-flowers. “Sometimes,” she added, “I think it’s just flightiness, and sometimes I think it’s because, at heart, she despises the things she’s trying for. And it’s the difficulty of deciding that makes her such an interesting study.”

Miss Farish still fixed her with an anxious gaze. “But what is your story, Lily? I don’t believe any one knows it yet.” “My story? I don’t believe I know it myself. You see, I never thought of preparing a version in advance as Bertha did; and if I had, I don’t think I should take the trouble to use it now.” But Gerty continued with her quiet reasonableness: “I don’t want a version prepared in advance, but I want you to tell me exactly what happened from the beginning.” “From the beginning?” Miss Bart gently mimicked her. “Dear Gerty, how little imagination you good people have! Why, the beginning was in my cradle, I suppose, in the way I was brought up and the things I was taught to care for. Or, no, I won’t blame anybody for my faults; I’ll say it was in my blood, that I got it from some wicked pleasure-loving ancestress who reacted against the homely virtues of New Amsterdam and wanted to be back at the court of the Charleses!” And as Miss Farish continued to press her with troubled eyes, she went on impatiently: “You asked me just now for the truth; well, the truth about any girl is that once she’s talked about she’s done for; and the more she explains her case the worse it looks. My good Gerty, you don’t happen to have a cigarette about you?”

Lily flushed under the shadow of her drooping hair. “The world is too vile,” she murmured, averting herself from Mrs. Fisher’s anxious scrutiny. “It’s not a pretty place; and the only way to keep a footing in it is to fight it on its own terms—and above all, my dear, not alone!” Mrs. Fisher gathered up her floating implications in a resolute grasp. “You’ve told me so little that I can only guess what has been happening; but in the rush we all live in, there’s no time to keep on hating any one without a cause, and if Bertha is still nasty enough to want to injure you with other people, it must be because she’s still afraid of you. From her standpoint there’s only one reason for being afraid of you; and my own idea is that if you want to punish her, you hold the means in your hand. I believe you can marry George Dorset to-morrow; but if you don’t care for that particular form of retaliation, the only thing to save you from Bertha is to marry somebody else.”

The conviction that he had been sent by Gerty and that whatever straits he conceived her to be in, he would never voluntarily have come to her aid, strengthened her resolve not to admit him a hair’s breadth farther into her confidence. However doubtful she might feel her situation to be, she would rather persist in darkness than owe her enlightenment to Selden.

It was strange to find herself passing his house on such an errand. She seemed suddenly to see her action as he would see it; and the fact of his own connection with it, the fact that, to attain her end, she must trade on his name, and profit by a secret of his past, chilled her blood with shame. What a long way she had travelled since the day of their first talk together! Even then her feet had been set in the path she was now following; even then she had resisted the hand he had held out.

All her resentment of his fancied coldness was swept away in this overwhelming rush of recollection. Twice he had been ready to help her—to help her by loving her, as he had said—and if, the third time, he had seemed to fail her, whom but herself could she accuse?

“Once—twice—you gave me the chance to escape from my life, and I refused it: refused it because I was a coward. Afterward I saw my mistake: I saw I could never be happy with what had contented me before. But it was too late: you had judged me—I understood. It was too late for happiness, but not too late to be helped by the thought of what I had missed. That is all I have lived on; don’t take it from me now! Even in my worst moments it has been like a little light in the darkness. Some women are strong enough to be good by themselves, but I needed the help of your belief in me. Perhaps I might have resisted a great temptation, but the little ones would have pulled me down. And then I remembered—I remembered your saying that such a life could never satisfy me; and I was ashamed to admit to myself that it could. That is what you did for me; that is what I wanted to thank you for. I wanted to tell you that I have always remembered, and that I have tried—tried hard—” She broke off suddenly. Her tears had risen again, and in drawing out her handkerchief, her fingers touched the packet in the folds of her dress. A wave of colour suffused her, and the words died on her lips. Then she lifted her eyes to his and went on in an altered voice. “I have tried hard, but life is difficult, and I am a very useless person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I was just a screw or a cog in the great machine I called life, and when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use...

“You have something to tell me; do you mean to marry?” he said abruptly. Lily’s eyes did not falter, but a look of wonder, of puzzled self-interrogation, formed itself slowly in their depths. In the light of his question, she had paused to ask herself if her decision had really been taken when she entered the room. “You always told me I should have to come to it sooner or later!” she said with a faint smile. “And you have come to it now?” “I shall have to come to it—presently. But there is something else I must come to first.” She paused again, trying to transmit to her voice the steadiness of her recovered smile. “There is some one I must say good-bye to. Oh, not you—we are sure to see each other again—but the Lily Bart you knew. I have kept her with me all this time, but now we are going to part, and I have brought her back to you; I am going to leave her here. When I go out presently, she will not go with me. I shall like to think that she has stayed with you; and she’ll be no trouble, she’ll take up no room.” She went toward him, and put out her hand, still smiling. “Will you let her stay with you?” she asked. He caught her hand, and she felt in his the vibration of feeling that had not yet risen to his lips. “Lily, can’t I help you?” he exclaimed. She looked at him gently. “Do you remember what you said to me once? That you could help me only by loving me? Well, you did love me for a moment; and it helped me. It has always helped me. But the moment is gone; it was I w...

In whatever form a slowly accumulated past lives in the blood—whether in the concrete image of the old house stored with visual memories, or in the conception of the house not built with hands but made up of inherited passions and loyalties—it has the same power of broadening and deepening the individual existence, of attaching it by mysterious links of kinship to all the mighty sum of human striving.

That it was her real self, every pulse in him ardently denied. Her real self had lain warm on his heart but a few hours earlier; what had he to do with this estranged and tranquil face which, for the first time, neither paled nor brightened at his coming?