The House of Mirth. Edith Wharton

church with them. It’s too late to walk there, you say? Well, I shall have the credit of trying, at any rate—and the advantage of escaping part of the service. I’m not so sorry for myself, after all!”

      And with a bright nod to the couple on whom she had intruded, Miss Bart strolled through the glass doors and carried her rustling grace down the long perspective of the garden walk.

      She was taking her way churchward, but at no very quick pace; a fact not lost on one of her observers, who stood in the doorway looking after her with an air of puzzled amusement. The truth is that she was conscious of a somewhat keen shock of disappointment. All her plans for the day had been built on the assumption that it was to see her that Selden had come to Bellomont. She had expected, when she came downstairs, to find him on the watch for her; and she had found him, instead, in a situation which might well denote that he had been on the watch for another lady. Was it possible, after all, that he had come for Bertha Dorset? The latter had acted on the assumption to the extent of appearing at an hour when she never showed herself to ordinary mortals, and Lily, for the moment, saw no way of putting her in the wrong. It did not occur to her that Selden might have been actuated merely by the desire to spend a Sunday out of town: women never learn to dispense with the sentimental motive in their judgments of men. But Lily was not easily disconcerted; competition put her on her mettle, and she reflected that Selden’s coming, if it did not declare him to be still in Mrs. Dorset’s toils, showed him to be so completely free from them that he was not afraid of her proximity.

      These thoughts so engaged her that she fell into a gait hardly likely to carry her to church before the sermon, and at length, having passed from the gardens to the wood-path beyond, so far forgot her intention as to sink into a rustic seat at a bend of the walk. The spot was charming, and Lily was not insensible to the charm, or to the fact that her presence enhanced it; but she was not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in company, and the combination of a handsome girl and a romantic scene struck her as too good to be wasted. No one, however, appeared to profit by the opportunity; and after a half hour of fruitless waiting she rose and wandered on. She felt a stealing sense of fatigue as she walked; the sparkle had died out of her, and the taste of life was stale on her lips. She hardly knew what she had been seeking, or why the failure to find it had so blotted the light from her sky: she was only aware of a vague sense of failure, of an inner isolation deeper than the loneliness about her.

      Her footsteps flagged, and she stood gazing listlessly ahead, digging the ferny edge of the path with the tip of her sunshade. As she did so a step sounded behind her, and she saw Selden at her side.

      “How fast you walk!” he remarked. “I thought I should never catch up with you.”

      She answered gaily: “You must be quite breathless! I’ve been sitting under that tree for an hour.”

      “Waiting for me, I hope?” he rejoined; and she said with a vague laugh:

      “Well—waiting to see if you would come.”

      “I seize the distinction, but I don’t mind it, since doing the one involved doing the other. But weren’t you sure that I should come?”

      “If I waited long enough—but you see I had only a limited time to give to the experiment.”

      “Why limited? Limited by luncheon?”

      “No; by my other engagement.”

      “Your engagement to go to church with Muriel and Hilda?”

      “No; but to come home from church with another person.”

      “Ah, I see; I might have known you were fully provided with alternatives. And is the other person coming home this way?”

      Lily laughed again. “That’s just what I don’t know; and to find out, it is my business to get to church before the service is over.”

      “Exactly; and it is my business to prevent your doing so; in which case the other person, piqued by your absence, will form the desperate resolve of driving back in the omnibus.”

      Lily received this with fresh appreciation; his nonsense was like the bubbling of her inner mood. “Is that what you would do in such an emergency?” she enquired.

      Selden looked at her with solemnity. “I am here to prove to you,” he cried, “what I am capable of doing in an emergency!”

      “Walking a mile in an hour—you must own that the omnibus would be quicker!”

      “Ah—but will he find you in the end? That’s the only test of success.”

      They looked at each other with the same luxury of enjoyment that they had felt in exchanging absurdities over his tea-table; but suddenly Lily’s face changed, and she said: “Well, if it is, he has succeeded.”

      Selden, following her glance, perceived a party of people advancing toward them from the farther bend of the path. Lady Cressida had evidently insisted on walking home, and the rest of the church-goers had thought it their duty to accompany her. Lily’s companion looked rapidly from one to the other of the two men of the party; Wetherall walking respectfully at Lady Cressida’s side with his little sidelong look of nervous attention, and Percy Gryce bringing up the rear with Mrs. Wetherall and the Trenors.

      “Ah—now I see why you were getting up your Americana!” Selden exclaimed with a note of the freest admiration but the blush with which the sally was received checked whatever amplifications he had meant to give it.

      That Lily Bart should object to being bantered about her suitors, or even about her means of attracting them, was so new to Selden that he had a momentary flash of surprise, which lit up a number of possibilities; but she rose gallantly to the defence of her confusion, by saying, as its object approached: “That was why I was waiting for you—to thank you for having given me so many points!”

      “Ah, you can hardly do justice to the subject in such a short time,” said Selden, as the Trenor girls caught sight of Miss Bart; and while she signalled a response to their boisterous greeting, he added quickly: “Won’t you devote your afternoon to it? You know I must be off tomorrow morning. We’ll take a walk, and you can thank me at your leisure.”

       CHAPTER 6

      The afternoon was perfect. A deeper stillness possessed the air, and the glitter of the American autumn was tempered by a haze which diffused the brightness without dulling it.

      In the woody hollows of the park there was already a faint chill; but as the ground rose the air grew lighter, and ascending the long slopes beyond the high-road, Lily and her companion reached a zone of lingering summer. The path wound across a meadow with scattered trees; then it dipped into a lane plumed with asters and purpling sprays of bramble, whence, through the light quiver of ash-leaves, the country unrolled itself in pastoral distances.

      Higher up, the lane showed thickening tufts of fern and of the creeping glossy verdure of shaded slopes; trees began to overhang it, and the shade deepened to the checkered dusk of a beech-grove. The boles of the trees stood well apart, with only a light feathering of undergrowth; the path wound along the edge of the wood, now and then looking out on a sunlit pasture or on an orchard spangled with fruit.

      Lily had no real intimacy with nature, but she had a passion for the appropriate and could be keenly sensitive to a scene which was the fitting background of her own sensations. 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. On the nearer slopes the sugar-maples wavered like pyres of light; lower down was a massing of grey orchards, and here and there the lingering green of an oak-grove. Two or three red farm-houses dozed under the apple-trees, and the white wooden spire of a village church showed beyond the shoulder of the hill; while far below, in a haze of dust, the high-road ran between the fields.

      “Let us sit here,” Selden suggested, as they reached an open ledge of rock above which the beeches