The House of Mirth (12 page)

It was the unconscious prolongation of this thought which led her to say presently, with a laugh: “I have broken two engagements for you today. How many have you broken for me?”

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

She glanced down at him, faintly smiling.

“Did you really come to Bellomont to see me?”

“Of course I did.”

Her look deepened meditatively. “Why?” she murmured with an accent which took all tinge of coquetry from the question.

“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.”

“That's absurd—since if you were not here I could obviously not be taking a walk with you.”

“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.”

Lily smiled also; his words were too acute not to strike her sense of humour. It was true that she meant to use the accident of his presence as part of a very definite effect; or that, at least, was the secret pretext she had found for breaking her promise to walk with Mr. Gryce. She had sometimes been accused of being too eager—even Judy Trenor had warned her to go slowly. Well, she would not be too eager in this case; she would give her suitor a longer taste of suspense. Where duty and inclination jumped together, it was not in Lily's nature to hold them asunder. She had excused herself from the walk on the plea of a headache, the horrid headache which in the morning had prevented her venturing to church. Her appearance at luncheon justified the excuse. She looked languid, full of a suffering sweetness; she carried a scent-bottle in her hand. Mr. Gryce was new to such manifestations; he wondered rather nervously if she were delicate, having far-reaching fears about the future of his progeny. But sympathy won the day, and he besought her not to expose herself: he always connected the outer air with ideas of exposure.

Lily had received his sympathy with languid gratitude, urging him, since she should be such poor company, to join the rest of the party who, after luncheon, were starting in automobiles on a visit to the Van Osburghs at Peekskill. Mr. Gryce was touched by her disinterestedness, and to escape from the threatened vacuity of the afternoon, had taken her advice and departed mournfully in a dust-hood and goggles; as the motor car plunged down the avenue, she smiled at his resemblance to a baffled beetle.

Selden had watched her manoeuvres with lazy amusement. She had made no reply to his suggestion that they should spend the afternoon together, but as her plan unfolded itself he felt fairly confident of being included in it. The house was empty when at length he heard her step on the stair and strolled out of the billiard-room to join her. She had on a hat and walking-dress, and the dogs were bounding at her feet.

“I thought, after all, the air might do me good,” she explained; and he agreed that so simple a remedy was worth trying.

The excursionists would be gone at least four hours; Lily and Selden had the whole afternoon before them, and the sense of leisure and safety gave the last touch of lightness to her spirit. With so much time to talk and no definite object to be led up to, she could taste the rare joys of mental vagrancy.

She felt so free from ulterior motives that she took up his charge with a touch of resentment.

“I don't know,” she said, “why you are always accusing me of premeditation.”

“I thought you confessed to it: you told me the other day that you had to follow a certain line—and if one does a thing at all, it is a merit to do it thoroughly.”

“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.”

“Ah, but I don't suppose that; haven't I told you that your genius lies in converting impulses into intentions?”

“My genius?” she echoed with a sudden note of weariness. “Is there any final test of genius but success? And I certainly haven't succeeded.”

Selden pushed his hat back and took a side-glance at her. “Success—what is success? I shall be interested to have your definition.”

“Success?” She hesitated. “Why, to get as much as one can out of life, I suppose. It's a relative quality, after all. Isn't that your idea of it?”

“My idea of it? God forbid!” He sat up with sudden energy, resting his elbows on his knees and staring out upon the mellow fields. “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.”

She leaned forward with a responsive flash. “I know—I know—it's strange; but that's just what I've been feeling today.”

He met her eyes with the latent sweetness of his. “Is the feeling so rare with you?” he said.

She blushed a little under his gaze. “You think me horribly sordid, don't you? But perhaps it's rather that I never had any choice. 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.”

“But I should never have found my way there if you hadn't told me.”

“Ah, there are sign-posts—but one has to know how to read them.”

“Well, I have known, I have known!” she cried with a glow of eagerness. “Whenever I see you, I find myself spelling out a letter of the sign—and yesterday—last evening at dinner—I suddenly saw a little way into your republic.”

Selden was still looking at her, but with a changed eye. 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. He had come on her that morning in a moment of disarray; her face had been pale and altered, and the diminution of her beauty had lent her a poignant charm.
That is how she looks when she is alone!
had been his first thought; and the second was to note in her the change which his coming produced. It was the danger-point of their intercourse that he could not doubt the spontaneity of her liking. From whatever angle he viewed their dawning intimacy, he could not see it as part of her scheme of life; and to be the unforeseen element in a career so accurately planned was stimulating even to a man who had renounced sentimental experiments.

“Well,” he said, “did it make you want to see more? Are you going to become one of us?”

He had drawn out his cigarettes as he spoke, and she reached her hand toward the case.

“Oh, do give me one; I haven't smoked for days!”

“Why such unnatural abstinence? Everybody smokes at Bellomont.”

“Yes, but it is not considered becoming in a
jeune fille à marier
; and at the present moment I am a
jeune fille
à
marier
.”

“Ah, then I'm afraid we can't let you into the republic.”

“Why not? Is it a celibate order?”

“Not in the least, though I'm bound to say there are not many married people in it. But you will marry some one very rich, and it's as hard for rich people to get into as the kingdom of heaven.”

“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!”

Lily sat gazing absently through the blue rings of her cigarette-smoke.

“It seems to me,” she said at length, “that you spend a good deal of your time in the element you disapprove of.”

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?”

“That is certainly the sane view; but the queer thing about society is that the people who regard it as an end are those who are in it, and not the critics on the fence. It's just the other way with most shows: the audience may be under the illusion, but the actors know that real life is on the other side of the footlights. 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.” Selden raised himself on his elbow. “Good heavens!” he went on; “I don't underrate the decorative side of life. It seems to me the sense of splendour has justified itself by what it has produced. 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. And a society like ours wastes such good material in producing its little patch of purple! Look at a boy like Ned Silverton—he's really too good to be used to refurbish anybody's social shabbiness. There's a lad just setting out to discover the universe. Isn't it a pity he should end by finding it in Mrs. Fisher's drawing-room?”

“Ned is a dear boy, and I hope he will keep his illusions long enough to write some nice poetry about them; but do you think it is only in society that he is likely to lose them?”

Selden answered her with a shrug. “Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths? Isn't it a sufficient condemnation of society to find one's self accepting such phraseology? I very nearly acquired the jargon at Silverton's age, and I know how names can alter the colour of beliefs.”

She had never heard him speak with such energy of affirmation. His habitual touch was that of the eclectic, who lightly turns over and compares; and she was moved by this sudden glimpse into the laboratory where his faiths were formed.

“Ah, you are as bad as the other sectarians,” she exclaimed; “why do you call your republic a republic? It is a close corporation, and you create arbitrary objections in order to keep people out.”

“It is not
my
republic; if it were, I should have a
coup d'état
and seat you on the throne.”

“Whereas, in reality, you think I can never even get my foot across the threshold? Oh, I understand what you mean. You despise my ambitions; you think them unworthy of me!”

Selden smiled, but not ironically. “Well, isn't that a tribute? I think them quite worthy of most of the people who live by them.”

She had turned to gaze on him gravely. “But isn't it possible that if I had the opportunities of these people, I might make a better use of them? Money stands for all kinds of things; its purchasing quality isn't limited to diamonds and motor-cars.”

“Not in the least; you might expiate your enjoyment of them by founding a hospital.”

“But if you think they are what I should really enjoy, you must think my ambitions are good enough for me.”

Selden met this appeal with a laugh. “Ah, my dear Miss Bart, I am not Divine Providence, to guarantee your enjoying the things you are trying to get!”

“Then the best you can say for me is that after struggling to get them I probably shan't like them?” She drew a deep breath. “What a miserable future you foresee for me!”

“Well, have you never foreseen it for yourself?”

The slow colour rose to her cheek, not a blush of excitement but drawn from the deep wells of feeling; it was as if the effort of her spirit had produced it.

“Often and often,” she said. “But it looks so much darker when you show it to me!”

He made no answer to this exclamation, and for a while they sat silent while something throbbed between them in the wide quiet of the air. But suddenly she turned on him with a kind of vehemence.

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

The words roused Selden from the musing fit into which he had fallen. He himself did not know why he had led their talk along such lines; it was the last use he would have imagined himself making of an afternoon's solitude with Miss Bart. But it was one of those moments when neither seemed to speak deliberately, when an indwelling voice in each called to the other across unsounded depths of feeling.