The House of Mirth (Romance Classic). Edith Wharton

Table of Contents

      The next morning, on her breakfast tray, Miss Bart found a note from her hostess.

      “Dearest Lily,” it ran, “if it is not too much of a bore to be down by ten, will you come to my sitting-room to help me with some tiresome things?”

      Lily tossed aside the note and subsided on her pillows with a sigh. It WAS a bore to be down by ten—an hour regarded at Bellomont as vaguely synchronous with sunrise—and she knew too well the nature of the tiresome things in question. Miss Pragg, the secretary, had been called away, and there would be notes and dinner-cards to write, lost addresses to hunt up, and other social drudgery to perform. It was understood that Miss Bart should fill the gap in such emergencies, and she usually recognized the obligation without a murmur.

      Today, however, it renewed the sense of servitude which the previous night’s review of her cheque-book had produced. Everything in her surroundings ministered to feelings of ease and amenity. The windows stood open to the sparkling freshness of the September morning, and between the yellow boughs she caught a perspective of hedges and parterres leading by degrees of lessening formality to the free undulations of the park. Her maid had kindled a little fire on the hearth, and it contended cheerfully with the sunlight which slanted across the moss-green carpet and caressed the curved sides of an old marquetry desk. Near the bed stood a table holding her breakfast tray, with its harmonious porcelain and silver, a handful of violets in a slender glass, and the morning paper folded beneath her letters. There was nothing new to Lily in these tokens of a studied luxury; but, though they formed a part of her atmosphere, she never lost her sensitiveness to their charm. Mere display left her with a sense of superior distinction; but she felt an affinity to all the subtler manifestations of wealth.

      Mrs. Trenor’s summons, however, suddenly recalled her state of dependence, and she rose and dressed in a mood of irritability that she was usually too prudent to indulge. She knew that such emotions leave lines on the face as well as in the character, and she had meant to take warning by the little creases which her midnight survey had revealed.

      The matter-of-course tone of Mrs. Trenor’s greeting deepened her irritation. If one did drag one’s self out of bed at such an hour, and come down fresh and radiant to the monotony of note-writing, some special recognition of the sacrifice seemed fitting. But Mrs. Trenor’s tone showed no consciousness of the fact.

      “Oh, Lily, that’s nice of you,” she merely sighed across the chaos of letters, bills and other domestic documents which gave an incongruously commercial touch to the slender elegance of her writing-table.

      “There are such lots of horrors this morning,” she added, clearing a space in the centre of the confusion and rising to yield her seat to Miss Bart.

      Mrs. Trenor was a tall fair woman, whose height just saved her from redundancy. Her rosy blondness had survived some forty years of futile activity without showing much trace of ill-usage except in a diminished play of feature. It was difficult to define her beyond saying that she seemed to exist only as a hostess, not so much from any exaggerated instinct of hospitality as because she could not sustain life except in a crowd. The collective nature of her interests exempted her from the ordinary rivalries of her sex, and she knew no more personal emotion than that of hatred for the woman who presumed to give bigger dinners or have more amusing house-parties than herself. As her social talents, backed by Mr. Trenor’s bank-account, almost always assured her ultimate triumph in such competitions, success had developed in her an unscrupulous good nature toward the rest of her sex, and in Miss Bart’s utilitarian classification of her friends, Mrs. Trenor ranked as the woman who was least likely to “go back” on her.

      “It was simply inhuman of Pragg to go off now,” Mrs. Trenor declared, as her friend seated herself at the desk. “She says her sister is going to have a baby—as if that were anything to having a house-party! I’m sure I shall get most horribly mixed up and there will be some awful rows. When I was down at Tuxedo I asked a lot of people for next week, and I’ve mislaid the list and can’t remember who is coming. And this week is going to be a horrid failure too—and Gwen Van Osburgh will go back and tell her mother how bored people were. I did mean to ask the Wetheralls—that was a blunder of Gus’s. They disapprove of Carry Fisher, you know. As if one could help having Carry Fisher! It WAS foolish of her to get that second divorce—Carry always overdoes things—but she said the only way to get a penny out of Fisher was to divorce him and make him pay alimony. And poor Carry has to consider every dollar. It’s really absurd of Alice Wetherall to make such a fuss about meeting her, when one thinks of what society is coming to. Some one said the other day that there was a divorce and a case of appendicitis in every family one knows. Besides, Carry is the only person who can keep Gus in a good humour when we have bores in the house. Have you noticed that ALL the husbands like her? All, I mean, except her own. It’s rather clever of her to have made a specialty of devoting herself to dull people—the field is such a large one, and she has it practically to herself. She finds compensations, no doubt—I know she borrows money of Gus—but then I’d PAY her to keep him in a good humour, so I can’t complain, after all.”

      Mrs. Trenor paused to enjoy the spectacle of Miss Bart’s efforts to unravel her tangled correspondence.

      “But it is only the Wetheralls and Carry,” she resumed, with a fresh note of lament. “The truth is, I’m awfully disappointed in Lady Cressida Raith.”

      “Disappointed? Had you known her before?”

      “Mercy, no—never saw her till yesterday. Lady Skiddaw sent her over with letters to the Van Osburghs, and I heard that Maria Van Osburgh was asking a big party to meet her this week, so I thought it would be fun to get her away, and Jack Stepney, who knew her in India, managed it for me. Maria was furious, and actually had the impudence to make Gwen invite herself here, so that they shouldn’t be QUITE out of it—if I’d known what Lady Cressida was like, they could have had her and welcome! But I thought any friend of the Skiddaws’ was sure to be amusing. You remember what fun Lady Skiddaw was? There were times when I simply had to send the girls out of the room. Besides, Lady Cressida is the Duchess of Beltshire’s sister, and I naturally supposed she was the same sort; but you never can tell in those English families. They are so big that there’s room for all kinds, and it turns out that Lady Cressida is the moral one—married a clergyman and does missionary work in the East End. Think of my taking such a lot of trouble about a clergyman’s wife, who wears Indian jewelry and botanizes! She made Gus take her all through the glass-houses yesterday, and bothered him to death by asking him the names of the plants. Fancy treating Gus as if he were the gardener!”

      Mrs. Trenor brought this out in a CRESCENDO of indignation.

      “Oh, well, perhaps Lady Cressida will reconcile the Wetheralls to meeting Carry Fisher,” said Miss Bart pacifically.

      “I’m sure I hope so! But she is boring all the men horribly, and if she takes to distributing tracts, as I hear she does, it will be too depressing. The worst of it is that she would have been so useful at the right time. You know we have to have the Bishop once a year, and she would have given just the right tone to things. I always have horrid luck about the Bishop’s visits,” added Mrs. Trenor, whose present misery was being fed by a rapidly rising tide of reminiscence; “last year, when he came, Gus forgot all about his being here, and brought home the Ned Wintons and the Farleys—five divorces and six sets of children between them!”

      “When is Lady Cressida going?” Lily enquired.

      Mrs. Trenor cast up her eyes in despair. “My dear, if one only knew! I was in such a hurry to get her away from Maria that I actually forgot to name a date, and Gus says she told some one she meant to stop here all winter.”

      “To stop here? In this house?”

      “Don’t be silly—in America. But if no one else asks her—you know they NEVER go to hotels.”

      “Perhaps Gus only said it to frighten you.”

      “No—I heard her tell Bertha Dorset that she had six months to put in while her husband was taking