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.

But we’re so different, you know: she likes being good, and I like being happy. And besides, she is free and I am not. If I were, I daresay I could manage to be happy even in her flat.

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.”

Why must a girl pay so dearly for her least escape from routine? Why could one never do a natural thing without having to screen it behind a structure of artifice?

He had his race’s accuracy in the appraisal of values, and to be seen walking down the platform at the crowded afternoon hour in the company of Miss Lily Bart would have been money in his pocket, as he might himself have phrased it.

It was the one subject which enabled him to forget himself, or allowed him, rather, to remember himself without constraint, because he was at home in it, and could assert a superiority that there were few to dispute.

like a merchant whose warehouses are crammed with an unmarketable commodity.

inner vanity is generally in proportion to the outer self-depreciation.

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.

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,

she had never been able to understand the laws of a universe which was so ready to leave her out of its calculations.

it seemed an added injustice that petty cares should leave a trace on the beauty which was her only defence against them.

Her ambitions had shrunk gradually in the desiccating air of failure.

she lay in the darkness reconstructing the past out of which her present had grown.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.

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.

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.

she was aware that such a guarded nature must find one huge outlet of egoism, and she determined to be to him what his Americana had hitherto been: the one possession in which he took sufficient pride to spend money on it.

Her beauty itself was not the mere ephemeral possession it might have been in the hands of inexperience: her skill in enhancing it, the care she took of it, the use she made of it, seemed to give it a kind of permanence. She felt she could trust it to carry her through to the end.

Society is a revolving body which is apt to be judged according to its place in each man’s heaven;

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.

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

The landscape outspread below her seemed an enlargement of her present mood, and she found something of herself in its calmness, its breadth, its long free reaches.

the only point of comparison was the sense of lightness, of emancipation, which she remembered feeling, in the whirl of a waltz or the seclusion of a conservatory, during the brief course of her youthful romance.

The peculiar charm of her feeling for Selden was that she understood it; she could put her finger on every link of the chain that was drawing them together.

“None,” said Selden calmly. “My only engagement at Bellomont was with you.”

“Because you’re such a wonderful spectacle: I always like to see what you are doing.” “How do you know what I should be doing if you were not here?” Selden smiled. “I don’t flatter myself that my coming has deflected your course of action by a hair’s breadth.”

“No; but your taking a walk with me is only another way of making use of your material. You are an artist, and I happen to be the bit of colour you are using today. It’s a part of your cleverness to be able to produce premeditated effects extemporaneously.”

“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.”

your genius lies in converting impulses into intentions?”

“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.”

Hitherto he had found, in her presence and her talk, the aesthetic amusement which a reflective man is apt to seek in desultory intercourse with pretty women. His attitude had been one of admiring spectatorship, and he would have been almost sorry to detect in her any emotional weakness which should interfere with the fulfilment of her aims. But now the hint of this weakness had become the most interesting thing about her.

That is how she looks when she is alone!

“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.”

“You might as well say that the only way not to think about air is to have enough to breathe. That is true enough in a sense; but your lungs are thinking about the air, if you are not. And so it is with your rich people—they may not be thinking of money, but they’re breathing it all the while; take them into another element and see how they squirm and gasp!”

Selden received this thrust without discomposure. “Yes; but I have tried to remain amphibious: it’s all right as long as one’s lungs can work in another air. The real alchemy consists in being able to turn gold back again into something else; and that’s the secret that most of your friends have lost.” 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?”

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?

leaned nearer and drew down her hands with a gesture less passionate than grave,

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?”

don’t know what effect they are going to have on me—but if marrying you is one of them, I will take the risk.”

The soft isolation of the falling day enveloped them: they seemed lifted into a finer air. All the exquisite influences of the hour trembled in their veins, and drew them to each other as the loosened leaves were drawn to the earth.

Affluence, unless stimulated by a keen imagination, forms but the vaguest notion of the practical strain of poverty.