The House of Mirth

The library looked as she had pictured it.  The green-shaded lamps made tranquil circles of light in the gathering dusk, a little fire flickered on the hearth, and Selden’s easy-chair, which stood near it, had been pushed aside when he rose to admit her.

He had checked his first movement of surprise, and stood silent, waiting for her to speak, while she paused a moment on the threshold, assailed by a rush of memories.

The scene was unchanged.  She recognized the row of shelves from which he had taken down his La Bruyere, and the worn arm of the chair he had leaned against while she examined the precious volume.  But then the wide September light had filled the room, making it seem a part of the outer world:  now the shaded lamps and the warm hearth, detaching it from the gathering darkness of the street, gave it a sweeter touch of intimacy.

Becoming gradually aware of the surprise under Selden’s silence, Lily turned to him and said simply:  “I came to tell you that I was sorry for the way we parted—­for what I said to you that day at Mrs. Hatch’s.”

The words rose to her lips spontaneously.  Even on her way up the stairs, she had not thought of preparing a pretext for her visit, but she now felt an intense longing to dispel the cloud of misunderstanding that hung between them.

Selden returned her look with a smile.  “I was sorry too that we should have parted in that way; but I am not sure I didn’t bring it on myself.  Luckily I had foreseen the risk I was taking—–­”

“So that you really didn’t care—–?” broke from her with a flash of her old irony.

“So that I was prepared for the consequences,” he corrected good-humouredly.  “But we’ll talk of all this later.  Do come and sit by the fire.  I can recommend that arm-chair, if you’ll let me put a cushion behind you.”

While he spoke she had moved slowly to the middle of the room, and paused near his writing-table, where the lamp, striking upward, cast exaggerated shadows on the pallour of her delicately-hollowed face.

“You look tired—­do sit down,” he repeated gently.

She did not seem to hear the request.  “I wanted you to know that I left Mrs. Hatch immediately after I saw you,” she said, as though continuing her confession.

“Yes—­yes; I know,” he assented, with a rising tinge of embarrassment.

“And that I did so because you told me to.  Before you came I had already begun to see that it would be impossible to remain with her—­for the reasons you gave me; but I wouldn’t admit it—­I wouldn’t let you see that I understood what you meant.”

“Ah, I might have trusted you to find your own way out—­don’t overwhelm me with the sense of my officiousness!”

His light tone, in which, had her nerves been steadier, she would have recognized the mere effort to bridge over an awkward moment, jarred on her passionate desire to be understood.  In her strange state of extra-lucidity, which gave her the sense of being already at the heart of the situation, it seemed incredible that any one should think it necessary to linger in the conventional outskirts of word-play and evasion.

“It was not that—­I was not ungrateful,” she insisted.  But the power of expression failed her suddenly; she felt a tremor in her throat, and two tears gathered and fell slowly from her eyes.

Selden moved forward and took her hand.  “You are very tired.  Why won’t you sit down and let me make you comfortable?”

He drew her to the arm-chair near the fire, and placed a cushion behind her shoulders.

“And now you must let me make you some tea:  you know I always have that amount of hospitality at my command.”

She shook her head, and two more tears ran over.  But she did not weep easily, and the long habit of self-control reasserted itself, though she was still too tremulous to speak.

“You know I can coax the water to boil in five minutes,” Selden continued, speaking as though she were a troubled child.

His words recalled the vision of that other afternoon when they had sat together over his tea-table and talked jestingly of her future.  There were moments when that day seemed more remote than any other event in her life; and yet she could always relive it in its minutest detail.

She made a gesture of refusal.  “No:  I drink too much tea.  I would rather sit quiet—­I must go in a moment,” she added confusedly.

Selden continued to stand near her, leaning against the mantelpiece.  The tinge of constraint was beginning to be more distinctly perceptible under the friendly ease of his manner.  Her self-absorption had not allowed her to perceive it at first; but now that her consciousness was once more putting forth its eager feelers, she saw that her presence was becoming an embarrassment to him.  Such a situation can be saved only by an immediate outrush of feeling; and on Selden’s side the determining impulse was still lacking.

The discovery did not disturb Lily as it might once have done.  She had passed beyond the phase of well-bred reciprocity, in which every demonstration must be scrupulously proportioned to the emotion it elicits, and generosity of feeling is the only ostentation condemned.  But the sense of loneliness returned with redoubled force as she saw herself forever shut out from Selden’s inmost self.  She had come to him with no definite purpose; the mere longing to see him had directed her; but the secret hope she had carried with her suddenly revealed itself in its death-pang.

“I must go,” she repeated, making a motion to rise from her chair.  “But I may not see you again for a long time, and I wanted to tell you that I have never forgotten the things you said to me at Bellomont, and that sometimes—­sometimes when I seemed farthest from remembering them—­they have helped me, and kept me from mistakes; kept me from really becoming what many people have thought me.”

Strive as she would to put some order in her thoughts, the words would not come more clearly; yet she felt that she could not leave him without trying to make him understand that she had saved herself whole from the seeming ruin of her life.

A change had come over Selden’s face as she spoke.  Its guarded look had yielded to an expression still untinged by personal emotion, but full of a gentle understanding.

“I am glad to have you tell me that; but nothing I have said has really made the difference.  The difference is in yourself—­it will always be there.  And since it is there, it can’t really matter to you what people think:  you are so sure that your friends will always understand you.”

“Ah, don’t say that—­don’t say that what you have told me has made no difference.  It seems to shut me out—­to leave me all alone with the other people.”  She had risen and stood before him, once more completely mastered by the inner urgency of the moment.  The consciousness of his half-divined reluctance had vanished.  Whether he wished it or not, he must see her wholly for once before they parted.

Her voice had gathered strength, and she looked him gravely in the eyes as she continued.  “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 anywhere else.  What can one do when one finds that one only fits into one hole?  One must get back to it or be thrown out into the rubbish heap—­and you don’t know what it’s like in the rubbish heap!”

Her lips wavered into a smile—­she had been distracted by the whimsical remembrance of the confidences she had made to him, two years earlier, in that very room.  Then she had been planning to marry Percy Gryce—­what was it she was planning now?

The blood had risen strongly under Selden’s dark skin, but his emotion showed itself only in an added seriousness of manner.

“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 goodbye 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 who let it go.  And one must go on living.  Goodbye.”

She laid her other hand on his, and they looked at each other with a kind of solemnity, as though they stood in the presence of death.  Something in truth lay dead between them—­the love she had killed in him and could no longer call to life.  But something lived between them also, and leaped up in her like an imperishable flame:  it was the love his love had kindled, the passion of her soul for his.

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.

Selden had retained her hand, and continued to scrutinize her with a strange sense of foreboding.  The external aspect of the situation had vanished for him as completely as for her:  he felt it only as one of those rare moments which lift the veil from their faces as they pass.

“Lily,” he said in a low voice, “you mustn’t speak in this way.  I can’t let you go without knowing what you mean to do.  Things may change—­but they don’t pass.  You can never go out of my life.”

She met his eyes with an illumined look.  “No,” she said.  “I see that now.  Let us always be friends.  Then I shall feel safe, whatever happens.”

“Whatever happens?  What do you mean?  What is going to happen?”

She turned away quietly and walked toward the hearth.

“Nothing at present—­except that I am very cold, and that before I go you must make up the fire for me.”

She knelt on the hearth-rug, stretching her hands to the embers.  Puzzled by the sudden change in her tone, he mechanically gathered a handful of wood from the basket and tossed it on the fire.  As he did so, he noticed how thin her hands looked against the rising light of the flames.  He saw too, under the loose lines of her dress, how the curves of her figure had shrunk to angularity; he remembered long afterward how the red play of the flame sharpened the depression of her nostrils, and intensified the blackness of the shadows which struck up from her cheekbones to her eyes.  She knelt there for a few moments in silence; 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 went up to him and laid her hands on his shoulders.  “Goodbye,” she said, and as he bent over her she touched his forehead with her lips.