Edith Wharton - The House of Mirth

“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 charwoman. 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 someone’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.