The House of Mirth

by Edith Wharton

Under the glitter of their opportunities she saw the poverty of their achievement.

“Is there any final test of genius but success?

“My idea of success,” he said, “is personal freedom.”

“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.”

There was no one, I mean, to tell me about the republic of the spirit.” “There never is—it’s a country one has to find the way to one’s self.”

“That’s unjust, I think, because, as I understand it, one of the conditions of citizenship is not to think too much about money, and the only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.”

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.”

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.

“Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths?

“Why do you make the things I have chosen seem hateful to me, if you have nothing to give me instead?”

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.

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.

No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity;

To a torn heart uncomforted by human nearness, a room may open almost human arms, and the being to whom no four walls mean more than any others, is, at such hours, expatriate everywhere.

She was realizing for the first time that a woman’s dignity may cost more to keep up than her carriage;

maintenance of a moral attribute should be dependent on dollars and cents, made the world appear a more sordid place than she had conceived it.

One of the surprises of her unoccupied state was the discovery that time, when it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it, cannot be trusted to move at any recognized pace. Usually it loiters; but just when one has come to count upon its slowness, it may suddenly break into a wild irrational gallop.

In its light everything else dwindled and fell away from her. She understood now that she could not go forth and leave her old self with him: that self must indeed live on in his presence, but it must still continue to be hers.

a silence which he dared not break. When she rose he fancied that he saw her draw something from her dress and drop it into the fire; but he hardly noticed the gesture at the time. His faculties seemed tranced, and he was still groping for the word to break the spell.

She had a sense of deeper empoverishment—of an inner destitution compared to which outward conditions dwindled into insignificance.