The House of Mirth

INTRODUCTION

HENRY JAMES has been claimed as initiating it. Writing from England in August 1902, he told Edith Wharton that he had asked his publishers to send her "a rather long-winded (but I hope not hopelessly heavy) novel of mine…a thing called The Wings of the Dove," and went on to voice almost extravagant praise for Mrs. Wharton’s recently published novel, The Valley of Decision. James found it splendidly done and brilliant and interesting from a literary point of view. Still, he had evident reservations about this historical chronicle and its eighteenth-century Italian setting. After circling about for a page or two, he began to stammer out his message. Let it suffer the wrong of being crudely hinted as my desire, earnestly, tenderly, intelligently to admonish you…admonish you, I say, in favour of the American subject. After another cascade of language (introduced, as not uncommonly with James, by the phrase in a word), he came to the exact point: "Do New York! The 1st-hand account is precious."

James and Edith Wharton had not actually met at this date, though on two occasions, in Paris and then in Venice, they had attended the same dinner party. But they had been keeping an eye on each other—on Edith Wharton’s part, an eye at once reverential and wary. After James had offered her a characteristically modulated judgment on a story she had been rash enough to send him—it had infinite wit and point, he said, but it was "a little hard," and ill-suited to its form—the younger writer assuaged herself by declaring to a friend that James’s The Sacred Fount (1901) was ignoble, and that she could weep over the ruins of such a talent. Edith’s sister-in-law, Minnie Jones, then intervened by presenting Henry James, an old friend of hers, with Mrs. Wharton’s two volumes of short stories and her first full-length work, The Valley of Decision. James was impressed: the writings showed a diabolical little cleverness but he trusted that their author would forswear the foreign and the historical, and allow herself to be tethered in native pastures. There followed the letter pleading with Mrs. Wharton that she do New York.

It was the wisest literary advice she ever received, and the timeliest. For some months, in fact, she had been at work on a novel set in New York society, to be called Disintegration, a term referring to a profound social deterioration resulting from the divorce of wealth from responsibility. The narrative was showing considerable promise, with lively characters and spirited dialogue; but James’s exhortation, it appears, brought Mrs. Wharton to focus more sharply on her subject matter, and she abandoned Disintegration in favor of another novel she had been tinkering with in her notebook for a couple of years. At this stage, it bore the title A Moment’s Ornament; only in revision would it be called The House of Mirth.*1

New York was, of course, where the former Edith Newbold Jones had spent the better part of forty years—with periods out for Europe and Newport—from the time she had been born into its upper-middle-class echelons in 1862, as the daughter of George Frederic and Lucretia Rhinelander Jones. Within what has been described as a closely knit community of cousins, the Joneses brushed shoulders with Schermerhorns, Rhinelanders, Newbolds, Astors, and other wealthy and socially distinguished relatives and in-laws. This was the society with which the adolescent and debutante Edith Jones became familiar, at the great balls held at Delmonico’s during the season, at concerts and the opera, at ceremonial lunches and dinners. But it is not—the point is worth stressing—the society mirrored in The House of Mirth. Edith Wharton’s own vanished New York was portrayed in The Age of Innocence, written in 1920 and looking back to the 1870s; and its disappearance is that handsome novel’s central and ambiguously nostalgic motif. For The House of Mirth, Mrs. Wharton concentrated instead on a social world larger, showier, morally much looser, and even richer than the Joneses’ set: the new breed, as the longer-established folk called them; the ultra-fashionable dancing people, in a phrase of the 1880s.

Edith Jones had come to know an early phase of this scene when she was being courted by young Harry Stevens, whose mother, Mrs. Paran Stevens, was one of the most energetic and conspicuous hostesses of the era. She sought with some success to move between the Fifth Avenue dancing people and the loftier social enclave of Schermerhorns and Rhinelanders; but Edith’s kin persistently snubbed her, and it was on Mrs. Stevens’s demand that the engagement between Miss Jones and Mr. Stevens was called off, a victim of New York social warfare. The novelist-to-be, meanwhile, had carefully taken the measure of that fashionable world, and by the early 1900s the writer of fiction could observe with ironic amusement that the old and the new were blurring together. In The House of Mirth, Freddy Van Osburgh, heir apparent to the oldest, Dutch-descended portion of the old guard, does not scruple to drop in of an evening at the crudely opulent hotel apartment of the arriviste Norma Hatch.

This indistinctly outlined but primarily light-minded and aimlessly wasteful society, then, was the New York that Edith Wharton took it upon herself to do. It was a bold commitment. New York had provided various scenic settings for Henry James and William Dean Howells, and (though Edith Wharton did not yet know their work) for Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser. But in no instance had New York been a novel’s chief character, and in the New York of the early 1900s that Edith Wharton knew best—a society of irresponsible pleasure-seekers, as she put it in her autobiography of 1934—she had chosen a protagonist essentially incapable of serious and significant action. This problem she recognized clearly enough, and the answer she came to, as she recalled, was that a frivolous society can acquire significance through what its frivolity destroys. The answer, in short, was Lily Bart.

She had yet to determine the defining nature of the destructive element: or rather, she had yet to see how it might be effectively rendered by the arts of narrative. What began to press on her imagination as the permeating—the doable—quality of the mirth-loving society was its theatricality.

Edith Wharton was not alone in detecting a large amount of the theatrical in the turn-of-the-century urban atmosphere. All the writers just named (and one could add others) drew upon stage performances as fact and metaphor of city life, as sources of enjoyment, and as purveyors and reflectors of illusion. The stage was thought to have a shaping influence, for the most part a bad one, on youthful character and conduct in much the way television is thought to have in our day. But no one saw more deeply into the implications of the phenomenon than Edith Wharton. This was due in part to the fact that, as it happened, she was developing and exercising a strong histrionic awareness during the time when The House of Mirth was coming into being. We can shortly look at a remarkable issue of it in a long passage midway through the novel; but a word can be helpful here on Edith Wharton’s personal and literal, if frustrated, relation to the New York stage.

It may be that another tryout for The House of Mirth, along with the abortive Disintegration, was a stage comedy of manners called The Tightrope, which Mrs. Wharton wrote in 1900. It apparently contained a musicale and a ballroom scene (to judge from passing references), but the manuscript has not survived. She next toyed with the idea of a historical melodrama, a story of sexual passion and murder, and marginally involving James Boswell and Dr. Johnson, two of Edith Wharton’s favorite literary figures. That work was abandoned, but a year later Edith completed two acts of a serious contemporary play, The Man of Genius, and sketched a full outline of the remainder of the action. The play manipulated the entwining themes of adultery and the creative personality. There was talk of producing it, but it never reached the stage; not improbably because it was too intelligent and probing for its own good.

There followed two stage adaptations of foreign texts. For the English actress Marie Tempest, Edith Wharton did an excellent four-act dramatization of Abbé Prévost’s eighteenth-century novel Manon Lescaut, only to be informed quite casually by Miss Tempest, over supper in her London home, that the actress had decided not to do any more costume plays. In May 1902 Mrs. Wharton let herself be persuaded by the gifted and volatile prima donna Mrs. Pat Campbell to translate a tragic drama by Hermann Sudermann, Es Lebe das Leben. The political and erotic analogies in the play appealed to her, and she spent a summer on the translation. This work did make it to Broadway, but only for a short run.

While we are at it, we can glance at the later stage and film adventures that befell The House of Mirth itself. Over the summer of 1906 Edith Wharton collaborated with Clyde Fitch—at the time the country’s most popular playwright, the author of Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines and the like—on a stage version of the novel, she writing the dialogue and Fitch taking care of the structure and movement. It opened in September at the Detroit Opera House to a good deal of applause, but the first night at the Savoy Theater in New York a month later was a distinct failure. The Times pronounced it a doleful play, and Edith was inclined to doubt that any play "with a ‘sad ending’…could ever get a hearing from an American audience. Howells, who accompanied her to the opening, was in agreement: What the American public always wants, he confided to her as they left the theater, is a tragedy with a happy ending."

However, a revised treatment of the Fitch-Wharton script produced seventy years later by the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven suggested another reason for the play’s lack of success. This adaptation was well staged and competently acted; the sets were charming, the costumes vivid. But what was unmistakably revealed was a nearly total absence of dramatic tension in the show. In this, the play was oddly faithful to the original novel. For what the novel disclosed by the author’s brilliant design (and the play, as it were, by the accident of imitation) was a social theater that had substituted intrigue, posturing, and betrayal for decisive action.

A more satisfactory version of The House of Mirth was a television film screened for public broadcasting in 1981. It had its peculiarities: the actor chosen to play Selden, whom the novel presents as a slightly worn-out gentleman in his late thirties, looked like nothing so much as a well-heeled second-year graduate student at Brown; and the story line must have been close to incomprehensible to anyone who had not recently read the novel. But Geraldine Chaplin was touchingly lovely and vulnerable as Lily Bart; and the colorful social pageantry had a finely paced ritual quality.

More than that, the film made manifest the fact that although The House of Mirth is not dramatic, it is exceedingly cinematic. As a single instance, one may cite the dinner scene at the Trenors’ country home at Bellomont, where Lily sits at the long orchid-strewn table with Judy and Gus Trenor, Selden, the drowsy-witted millionaire Percy Gryce, Bertha Dorset and her husband George, Jack Stepney, Carry Fisher. As Lily’s gaze passes slowly from one face to another, each, by a hallucinatory trick of the camera, changes into a grotesque, into a huge-snouted animal or a gargoyle: the true beings that lie behind and are masked by their social role-playing.

It is a superb visualization and if anything an improvement on the original novelistic moment, which occurs in chapter five of book one. What is being illustrated is Lawrence Selden’s effect on Lily of readjusting her vision it is when Lily begins to scan her dinner companions through his [Selden’s] retina that she perceives Gus Trenor, with his heavy carnivorous head sunk between his shoulders, as he preyed on a jellied plover and, among others, Jack Stepney, with his confident smile and anxious eyes, halfway between the sheriff and an heiress.

It is most often Selden who sees social conduct as theatrical and the socialites as actors and actresses, and his capacity for so envisioning them is rooted in his detachment. Even with regard to Lily Bart, his attitude—or so he tells himself on their Sunday afternoon excursion into the Bellomont woods—is one of admiring spectatorship. The stance allows him to discern, as does no other character in the novel, the characterizing and destructive self-deception of the social performers. It reverses the usual situation. With most shows, he tells Lily, the audience may be under the illusion, but the actors know that real life is on the other side of the footlights. The guests at Bellomont, on the contrary, go through their playacting convinced that they are engaged in the be-all-and-end-all reality, the only one that counts; and they will do anything to protect it.

The theatrical figure comes to its fulfillment at the start of book two, when Selden, just arrived at Monte Carlo, stands on the Casino steps and surveys the white square set in an exotic coquetry of architecture and the groups loitering in the foreground against mauve mountains which suggested a sublime stage-setting forgotten in a hurried shifting of scenes. As his zest for spectatorship renews itself, the image proliferates into a visual impression that warrants full quotation:

It was mid-April, and one felt that the revelry had reached its climax and that the desultory groups in the square and gardens would soon dissolve and reform in other scenes. Meanwhile the last moments of the performance seemed to gain an added brightness from the hovering threat of the curtain. The quality of the air, the exuberance of the flowers, the blue intensity of sea and sky, produced the effect of a closing tableau, when all the lights are turned on at once. This impression was presently heightened by the way in which a consciously conspicuous group of people advanced to the middle front, and stood before Selden with the air of the chief performers gathered together by the exigencies of the final effect. Their appearance confirmed the impression that the show had been staged regardless of expense, and emphasized its resemblance to one of those costume-plays in which the protagonists walk through the passions without displacing a drapery. The ladies stood in unrelated attitudes calculated to isolate their effects, and the men hung about them as irrelevantly as stage heroes whose tailors are named in the programme. It was Selden himself who unwittingly fused the group by arresting the attention of one of its members.

It is one of the extraordinary passages in American fiction, uncoiling, as it does, in several significant directions at once. It contributes tellingly to social history in its depiction of the expensive and insipid histrionics of the New Yorkers; and at the same time, in the same satirical phrasing, it is a devastating comment on the actual condition of the theater in America. The men and ladies (among them, it turns out, Carry Fisher, Jack Stepney and his bride—the former Gwen Van Osburgh—and the Wellington Brys) are not only taking part in a stage play, they are taking part in a very bad one. It is of a kind with that always popular Broadway show of the era, the costume play, where no authentic human emotion was allowed to disturb the decor; and where, far from working closely in an ensemble performance, the actresses strike picturesque poses that have no relation to each other, and the actors hang about them in faultlessly dressed irrelevance. Broadway and society, within the clustering imagery, are linked, not in the classical manner for the betterment of cultural health, but in shared disjointed futility.

The passage, beyond that, has a resonance for the architecture of the novel. When the consciously conspicuous group advances to the middle front, they have the air, for Selden, of featured players lining up in a closing tableau for the final curtain. And in fact, the three fast-moving chapters the scene serves to introduce provide the last occasion in the story when the conspicuous group is seen together en masse.

What Edith Wharton gives thereafter, over roughly the final third of The House of Mirth, is a series of displaced social settings, successively coarser parodies of the frivolous society. It is an almost unrivalled instance of social history (in its larger ranges) as narrative art and in a manner Henry James quite failed to appreciate when he told Minnie Jones that, although he admired The House of Mirth, he felt it to be two books and too confused.

The good-natured Carry Fisher arranges for Lily to have a long stay with the Gormers, who have rented the Van Alstyne house on Long Island—they are the type to rent the homes of the socially superior; Lily, after a bit, identifies the place as only a flamboyant copy of her own world, a caricature—the twist on the recurring metaphor is startling—approximating the real thing as the ‘society play’ approaches the manners of the drawing-room. Lily is prepared to think, however, that for all its noisiness the Gormers’ set might have a greater talent for enjoyment than that of Bertha Dorset—until Mattie Gormer becomes a slavish follower of Bertha Dorset herself, aping her mean and shallow snobbishness.

Lily Bart then moves into the Emporium Hotel, as social secretary to Mrs. Norma Hatch, and enters an over-heated, overupholstered world, the human members of which are uncannily devoid of real existence. This is where the Freddy Van Osburghs are likely to come for a spot of social slumming, and Lily, watching them unbuttoned, so to say, has the sense of being behind the social tapestry, on the side where the threads were knotted and the loose ends hung. Before long Lily is ejected from the Emporium, the victim of her hostess’s inept adulterous intrigue, exactly as she had been from the Dorsets’ yacht at Monte Carlo—the novel’s plot imitates and parodies itself even as the social centers do.

The last locale is the hat-making shop of Mme. Regina, a final gross mimicking of the higher society. The girls shape and trim hats for such as Mrs. Trenor and Mrs. Dorset, chattering briskly about their clientele; while Lily, listening and appalled, sees the fragmentary and distorted image of the world she had lived in reflected in the mirror of the working-girls’ minds.

It is Lawrence Selden, to repeat, who has the most articulate consciousness of society as theater, but he has it, one might venture, at the cost of his life. In his adopted role of spectator he is not much better than Lily’s aunt, Mrs. Peniston, who had always been a looker-on at life, and whose mind, we are told in one of the novel’s choicest images, resembled one of those little mirrors which her Dutch ancestors were accustomed to affix to their upper windows, so that, while remaining herself invisible, she could see what was going on outside in the street.

It is the fate of lookers-on that they can always be deceived by appearances and gossip; they have too little touch with human experience to discriminate wisely. Mrs. Peniston is easily gulled into believing her niece to be a promiscuous and profligate girl and cuts Lily out of her will; and Selden, spying Lily emerging from the Trenors’ house late at night, assumes on the spot the sexual worst and cuts her out of his life. Selden passes through his own stages of decline. He is in certain ways amusing and sympathetic at Bellomont, though his republic of the spirit, as enunciated to Lily, sounds a rather chilly, inactive, and solitary place. He has stray moments of longing for Lily, but he grows increasingly myopic and priggish as book two goes forward and is at his worst in conversations about Lily with Gerty Farish (for example, in chapter eight). Readers’ reactions will differ, but for me the last two sentences of the book—about this moment of love and the word which made all things clear—are to be received as Selden’s ultimate misapprehension. I doubt if we are expected to believe a word of it.

Lily Bart is as beautifully conceived, in her way, as the society in which and against which she loses herself. Up to a point, she is perfectly equipped to play a lead part in the social gaming. No woman in her set is more adept at arranging herself in graceful and inviting postures, as she does on the train to Rhinebeck; and it is revealed during the preparations for the tableaux vivants that she possesses a fine dramatic instinct and a vivid plastic sense, which she exercises happily in fixing the draperies and experimenting with statuelike attitudes. But in marked contrast to the other fashionable ladies (in Selden’s description of them), Lily always knows the real from the histrionic, and she always hangs on to at least a portion of her real self. This is a main reason why, however exasperated one may become with her, one cares about Lily Bart, profoundly. She chooses Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Mrs. Lloyd for her own tableau vivant exactly because she could embody the person represented without ceasing to be herself and the particularly warm approval that greets her appearance had obviously been called forth by herself, and not by the picture she impersonated.

That real self periodically rises up to thwart some glittering marital opportunity that her theatrical self had been organizing. Lily, as Carry Fisher says musingly, works hard to prepare the ground: but the day she ought to be reaping the harvest she oversleeps herself or goes off on a picnic. Carry is shrewd enough to suspect that Lily behaves this way because she despises the very things she aims at; and Lily, with some bitterness, accuses Selden of making her hate those things—physical comfort and luxury, an end to financial care—without giving her anything in return. Her trouble, as she sees with a kind of helpless clarity, is a lack of moral constancy; she can sustain the nobler position only for so long; after a while and with a change of place, the easier options become irresistible. But at the end, in Selden’s lodgings and with Selden looking on obtusely, Lily performs the act that ensures the victory of her real self, and she goes home with it to die.*2

The House of Mirth was a stunning success. Within ten days of its publication on October 14, 1905, 30,000 copies were sold. By November 20, 100,000 copies were in print, and Mrs. Wharton’s editor, the cultivated and courteous William Crary Brownell, assured her that the novel was having the most rapid sale of any book ever published by Scribner. Before the year was out, Edith Wharton had earned some $35,000 in serial rights and royalties: a half million dollars or more today. The novel continued to be a big bestseller well into 1906.

It had been serialized in Scribner’s, and the final installment had the makings of a national event. One woman wired a friend in despair that Lily Bart is dead, and another wrote Edith to ask whether, somehow, Lily might not be allowed to live and marry Lawrence Selden. Persons in high literary places addressed to Edith Wharton exclamations of astonishment and admiration; and New Yorkers queried each other as to the real-life originals of this character or that. Some reviewers tried to stem the tide of enthusiasm by arguing that the subject of the book was improper for literary treatment; in literature, opined one commentator, what was important was ideals and humor. But the general view, however reluctant, was that Edith Wharton had now proved herself to be one of the two or three most serious and accomplished writers of fiction in America.

What is the status of The House of Mirth as we push toward the mid-1980s? A little less than a decade ago I wrote that among those critics who were well disposed to the novel on its publication, the issue was whether it could be adjudged a masterpiece or whether it fell just short of that final accolade, and, I concluded, enlightened critical opinion remains today at that same stage of uncertainty. As formulated, the statement was reasonably correct. But The House of Mirth has undergone a curious sea-change in the years since. It is not so much that the novel has grown on us, though that has happened too. But even more, the novel has appeared to grow in itself, to enlarge and thicken, to enrich and complicate before our beholding eyes. Cultural circumstances have obviously contributed to the event, especially the dimensionally increased attention of late to the artistic achievements of American women. But when all that is taken into account, something pleasingly mysterious is left over. In some inexplicable way, The House of Mirth has become a masterpiece.

R. W. B. Lewis, Gray Professor of Rhetoric at Yale, is the author of Edith Wharton: A Biography.

BOOK ONE

CHAPTER 1

SELDEN PAUSED in surprise. In the afternoon rush of the Grand Central Station his eyes had been refreshed by the sight of Miss Lily Bart.

It was a Monday in early September, and he was returning to his work from a hurried dip into the country; but what was Miss Bart doing in town at that season? If she had appeared to be catching a train, he might have inferred that he had come on her in the act of transition between one and another of the country-houses which disputed her presence after the close of the Newport season; but her desultory air perplexed him. She stood apart from the crowd, letting it drift by her to the platform or the street, and wearing an air of irresolution which might, as he surmised, be the mask of a very definite purpose. It struck him at once that she was waiting for some one, but he hardly knew why the idea arrested him. There was nothing new about Lily Bart, yet he could never see her without a faint movement of interest: it was characteristic of her that she always roused speculation, that her simplest acts seemed the result of far-reaching intentions.

An impulse of curiosity made him turn out of his direct line to the door, and stroll past her. He knew that if she did not wish to be seen she would contrive to elude him; and it amused him to think of putting her skill to the test.

Mr. Selden—what good luck!

She came forward smiling, eager almost, in her resolve to intercept him. One or two persons, in brushing past them, lingered to look; for Miss Bart was a figure to arrest even the suburban traveller rushing to his last train.

Selden had never seen her more radiant. Her vivid head, relieved against the dull tints of the crowd, made her more conspicuous than in a ball-room, and under her dark hat and veil she regained the girlish smoothness, the purity of tint, that she was beginning to lose after eleven years of late hours and indefatigable dancing. Was it really eleven years, Selden found himself wondering, and had she indeed reached the nine-and-twentieth birthday with which her rivals credited her?

What luck! she repeated. How nice of you to come to my rescue!

He responded joyfully that to do so was his mission in life, and asked what form the rescue was to take.

Oh, almost any—even to sitting on a bench and talking to me. One sits out a cotillion—why not sit out a train? It isn’t a bit hotter here than in Mrs. Van Osburgh’s conservatory—and some of the women are not a bit uglier.

She broke off, laughing, to explain that she had come up to town from Tuxedo, on her way to the Gus Trenors’ at Bellomont, and had missed the three-fifteen train to Rhinebeck.

And there isn’t another till half-past five. She consulted the little jewelled watch among her laces. Just two hours to wait. And I don’t know what to do with myself. My maid came up this morning to do some shopping for me, and was to go on to Bellomont at one o’clock, and my aunt’s house is closed, and I don’t know a soul in town. She glanced plaintively about the station. "It is hotter than Mrs. Van Osburgh’s, after all. If you can spare the time, do take me somewhere for a breath of air."

He declared himself entirely at her disposal: the adventure struck him as diverting. As a spectator, he had always enjoyed Lily Bart; and his course lay so far out of her orbit that it amused him to be drawn for a moment into the sudden intimacy which her proposal implied.

Shall we go over to Sherry’s for a cup of tea?

She smiled assentingly, and then made a slight grimace.

"So many people come up to town on a Monday—one is sure to meet a lot of bores. I’m as old as the hills, of course, and it ought not to make any difference; but if I’m old enough, you’re not, she objected gaily. I’m dying for tea—but isn’t there a quieter place?"

He answered her smile, which rested on him vividly. Her discretions interested him almost as much as her imprudences: he was so sure that both were part of the same carefully-elaborated plan. In judging Miss Bart, he had always made use of the argument from design.

The resources of New York are rather meagre, he said; but I’ll find a hansom first, and then we’ll invent something.

He led her through the throng of returning holidaymakers, past shallow-faced girls in preposterous hats, and flat-chested women struggling with paper bundles and palm-leaf fans. Was it possible that she belonged to the same race? The dinginess, the crudity of this average section of womanhood made him feel how highly specialized she was.

A rapid shower had cooled the air, and clouds still hung refreshingly over the moist street.

How delicious! Let us walk a little, she said as they emerged from the station.

They turned into Madison Avenue and began to stroll northward. As she moved beside him, with her long light step, Selden was conscious of taking a luxurious pleasure in her nearness: in the modelling of her little ear, the crisp upward wave of her hair—was it ever so slightly brightened by art?—and the thick planting of her straight black lashes. Everything about her was at once vigorous and exquisite, at once strong and fine. He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her. He was aware that the qualities distinguishing her from the herd of her sex were chiefly external: as though a fine glaze of beauty and fastidiousness had been applied to vulgar clay. Yet the analogy left him unsatisfied, for a coarse texture will not take a high finish; and was it not possible that the material was fine, but that circumstance had fashioned it into a futile shape?

As he reached this point in his speculations the sun came out, and her lifted parasol cut off his enjoyment. A moment or two later she paused with a sigh.

Oh, dear, I’m so hot and thirsty—and what a hideous place New York is! She looked despairingly up and down the dreary thoroughfare. Other cities put on their best clothes in summer, but New York seems to sit in its shirtsleeves. Her eyes wandered down one of the side-streets. Some one has had the humanity to plant a few trees over there. Let us go into the shade.

I am glad my street meets with your approval, said Selden as they turned the corner.

Your street? Do you live here?

She glanced with interest along the new brick and limestone house-fronts, fantastically varied in obedience to the American craving for novelty, but fresh and inviting with their awnings and flower-boxes.

"Ah, yes—to be sure: The Benedick. What a nice-looking building! I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before. She looked across at the flat-house with its marble porch and pseudo-Georgian façade. Which are your windows? Those with the awnings down?"

On the top floor—yes.

And that nice little balcony is yours? How cool it looks up there!

He paused a moment. Come up and see, he suggested. I can give you a cup of tea in no time—and you won’t meet any bores.

Her colour deepened—she still had the art of blushing at the right time—but she took the suggestion as lightly as it was made.

Why not? It’s too tempting—I’ll take the risk, she declared.

Oh, I’m not dangerous, he said in the same key. In truth, he had never liked her as well as at that moment. He knew she had accepted without afterthought: he could never be a factor in her calculations, and there was a surprise, a refreshment almost, in the spontaneity of her consent.

On the threshold he paused a moment, feeling for his latch-key.

There’s no one here; but I have a servant who is supposed to come in the mornings, and it’s just possible he may have put out the tea-things and provided some cake.

He ushered her into a slip of a hall hung with old prints. She noticed the letters and notes heaped on the table among his gloves and sticks; then she found herself in a small library, dark but cheerful, with its walls of books, a pleasantly faded Turkey rug, a littered desk, and, as he had foretold, a tea-tray on a low table near the window. A breeze had sprung up, swaying inward the muslin curtains, and bringing a fresh scent of mignonette and petunias from the flower-box on the balcony.

Lily sank with a sigh into one of the shabby leather chairs.

How delicious to have a place like this all to one’s self! What a miserable thing it is to be a woman. She leaned back in a luxury of discontent.

Selden was rummaging in a cupboard for the cake.

Even women, he said, have been known to enjoy the privileges of a flat.

Oh, governesses—or widows. But not girls—not poor, miserable, marriageable girls!

I even know a girl who lives in a flat.

She sat up in surprise. You do?

I do, he assured her, emerging from the cupboard with the sought-for cake.

Oh, I know—you mean Gerty Farish. She smiled a little unkindly. "But I said marriageable—and besides, she has a horrid little place, and no maid, and such queer things to eat. Her cook does the washing and the food tastes of soap. I should hate that, you know."

You shouldn’t dine with her on wash-days, said Selden, cutting the cake.

They both laughed, and he knelt by the table to light the lamp under the kettle, while she measured out the tea into a little tea-pot of green glaze. As he watched her hand, polished as a bit of old ivory, with its slender pink nails, and the sapphire bracelet slipping over her wrist, he was struck with the irony of suggesting to her such a life as his cousin Gertrude Farish had chosen. 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.

She seemed to read his thought. It was horrid of me to say that of Gerty, she said with charming compunction. I forgot she was your cousin. 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. It must be pure bliss to arrange the furniture just as one likes, and give all the horrors to the ash-man. If I could only do over my aunt’s drawing-room I know I should be a better woman.

Is it so very bad? he asked sympathetically.

She smiled at him across the tea-pot which she was holding up to be filled.

That shows how seldom you come there. Why don’t you come oftener?

When I do come, it’s not to look at Mrs. Peniston’s furniture.

Nonsense, she said. You don’t come at all—and yet we get on so well when we meet.

Perhaps that’s the reason, he answered promptly. I’m afraid I haven’t any cream, you know—shall you mind a slice of lemon instead?

I shall like it better. She waited while he cut the lemon and dropped a thin disk into her cup. But that is not the reason, she insisted.

The reason for what?

For your never coming. She leaned forward with a shade of perplexity in her charming eyes. I wish I knew—I wish I could make you out. Of course I know there are men who don’t like me—one can tell that at a glance. And there are others who are afraid of me: they think I want to marry them. She smiled up at him frankly. But I don’t think you dislike me—and you can’t possibly think I want to marry you.

No—I absolve you of that, he agreed.

Well, then——?

He had carried his cup to the fireplace, and stood leaning against the chimney-piece and looking down on her with an air of indolent amusement. The provocation in her eyes increased his amusement—he had not supposed she would waste her powder on such small game; but perhaps she was only keeping her hand in; or perhaps a girl of her type had no conversation but of the personal kind. At any rate, she was amazingly pretty, and he had asked her to tea and must live up to his obligations.

Well, then, he said with a plunge, "perhaps that’s the reason."

What?

The fact that you don’t want to marry me. Perhaps I don’t regard it as such a strong inducement to go and see you. He felt a slight shiver down his spine as he ventured this, but her laugh reassured him.

Dear Mr. Selden, that wasn’t worthy of you. It’s stupid of you to make love to me, and it isn’t like you to be stupid. She leaned back, sipping her tea with an air so enchantingly judicial that, if they had been in her aunt’s drawing-room, he might almost have tried to disprove her deduction.

Don’t you see, she continued, that there are men enough to say pleasant things to me, and that what I want is a friend who won’t be afraid to say disagreeable ones when I need them? Sometimes I have fancied you might be that friend—I don’t know why, except that you are neither a prig nor a bounder, and that I shouldn’t have to pretend with you or be on my guard against you. Her voice had dropped to a note of seriousness, and she sat gazing up at him with the troubled gravity of a child.

You don’t know how much I need such a friend, she said. My aunt is full of copy-book axioms, but they were all meant to apply to conduct in the early fifties. I always feel that to live up to them would include wearing book-muslin with gigot sleeves. And the other women—my best friends—well, they use me or abuse me; but they don’t care a straw what happens to me. I’ve been about too long—people are getting tired of me; they are beginning to say I ought to marry.

There was a moment’s pause, during which Selden meditated one or two replies calculated to add a momentary zest to the situation; but he rejected them in favour of the simple question: Well, why don’t you?

She coloured and laughed. "Ah, I see you are a friend after all, and that is one of the disagreeable things I was asking for."

It wasn’t meant to be disagreeable, he returned amicably. Isn’t marriage your vocation? Isn’t it what you’re all brought up for?

She sighed. I suppose so. What else is there?

Exactly. And so why not take the plunge and have it over?

She shrugged her shoulders. You speak as if I ought to marry the first man who came along.

"I didn’t mean to imply that