The House of Mirth

  The title is a phrase taken from Ecclesiastes: The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning while the heart of fools is in the House of Mirth

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Your street? Do you live here?” 

She glanced with interest along the mew brick and lime. stone house-fronts, fantastically varied in obedience to the American craving for novelty, but fresh and inviting with their awnings and flower-boxes. 

“Ah, yes—to be sure: The Benedick. What a nice-looking building! I don’t think I ve ever seen it before.” She looked across at the flat-house with its marble porch and pseudoGeorgian facade. “Which are your windows? Those with the awnings down?”

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Of the ladies, this left onlv Mrs. Dorset unaccounted for, and Mrs. Dorset never came down till luncheon: her doctors, she averred, had forbidden her to expose herself to the crude air of the morning. 

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 The young lady who thus formulated her admiration of her brilliant friend did not in her own person suggest such happy possibilities. Miss Gertrude Farish, in fact, typified the mediocre and the ineffectual. If there were compensating qualities in her wide frank glance and the freshness of her smile, these were qualities which only the sympathetic observer would perceive before noticing that her eyes were of a workaday grey and her lips without haunting curves. Lily’s own view of her wavered between pity for her limitations and ympatience at her cheerful acceptance of them. To Miss Bart, as to her mother, acquiescence in dinginess was evidence of stupidity; and there were moments when, in the consciousness of her own power to look and to be so exactly what the occasion required, she almost felt that other girls were plain and inferior from choice. Certainly no one need have confessed such acquiescence in her lot as was revealed in the “useful” colour of Gerty Farish’s gown and the subdued lines of her hat: it is almost as stupid to let your clothes betray that vou know you are ugly as to have them proclaim that you think you are beautiful. 

Of course, being fatally poor and dingy, it was wise of Gerty to have taken up philanthropy and symphony concerts; but there was something irritating in her assumption that existence vielded no higher pleasures, and that one might get as much interest and excitement out of life in a cramped flat as in the splendours of the Van Osburgh establishment. Today, however, her chirping enthusiasms did not irritate Lily. They seemed only to throw her own exceptionalness into becoming telicf, and give a soaring vastness to her scheme of life. 

“Do fet us go and take a peep at the presents before every One else leaves the dining-room!” suggested Miss Farish, linking her arm in her friend’s. It was characteristic of her to take 4 sentimental and unenvious interest in all the details of a Wedding: she was the kind of person who always kept her handkerchief out during the service, and departed clutching a box of wedding-cake. 

“Is n’t everything beautifully done?” she pursued, as they fntered the distant drawing-room assigned to the display of Miss Van Osburgh’s bridal spoils. “I always say no one does things better than cousin Grace! Did you ever taste anything More delicious than that mousse of lobster with champagne sauce? I made up my mind weeks ago that I would n’t miss this wedding. 

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 “We had an awful row this morning. You know, of course, that the Duchess chucked her at dinner last night, and she thinks it was my fault—my want of management. The worst of it is, the message—just a mere word by telephone—came so late that the dinner had to be paid for; and Bécassin had rung it up—it had been so drummed into him that the Duchess was coming!” Mrs. Fisher indulged in a faint laugh at the remembrance. “Paying for what she does n’t get rankles so dreadfully with Louisa: I can’t make her see that it’s one of the preliminary steps to getting what you have n’t paid for—and as I was the nearest thing to smash, she smashed me to atoms, poor dear!” 

Lily murmured her commiseration. Impulses of sympathy came naturally to her, and it was instinctive to proffer her help to Mrs. Fisher. 

“If there ’s anything I can do—if it’s only a question of meeting the Duchess! I heard her say she thought Mr. Bry amusing ——” 

But Mrs. Fisher interposed with a decisive gesture. “My dear, I have my pride: the pride of my trade. I could n’t manage the Duchess, and I can’t palm off your arts on Louisa Bry as mine. I ve taken the final step: I go to Paris tonight with the Sam Gormers. They ’re still in the elementary stage; an Italian Prince is a great deal more than a Prince to them, and they ‘re always on the brink of taking a courier for one. To save them from that is my present mission.” She laughed again at the picture. “But before I go I want to make my last will and testament—TI want to leave you the Brys.” 

“Me?” Miss Bart joined in her amusement. “It ’s charming of vou to remember me, dear; but really——” 

“You ’re already so well provided for?” Mrs. Fisher flashed a sharp glance at her. “Are you, though, Lily—to the point of rejecting my offer?” 

Miss Bart coloured slowly. “What I really meant was, that the Brys would n’t in the least care to be so disposed of.” 

Mrs. Fisher continued to probe her embarrassment with an unflinching eye. “What you really meant was that you ’ve ‘ubbed the Brys horribly; and you know that they know it"

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...was brought home to Lily with increasing clearness during the early weeks of the winter. Hitherto, she had kept up a semblance of movement outside the main flow of the social current; but with the return to town, and the concentrating of scattered activities, the mere fact of not slipping back naturally into her old habits of life marked her as being unmistakably excluded from them. If one were not a part of the gason’s fixed routine, one swung unsphered in a void of socal non-existence. Lily, for all her dissatisfied dreaming, had never really conceived the possibility of revolving about a different centre: it was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region. Her sense of irony never quite deserted her, and she could still note, with self-directed derision, the abnormal value suddenlv acquired by the most tiresome and insignificant details of her former life. Its very drudgeries had a charm now that she was involuntarily released from them: card-leaving, note-writing, enforced civilities to the dull and elderly, and the smiling endurance of tedious dinners—how pleasantly such obligations would have filled the emptiness of her days! She did indeed leave cards in plenty; she kept herself, with a smiling and vallant persistence, well in the eye of her world; nor did she uffer any of those gross rebuffs which sometimes produce a wholesome reaction of contempt in their victim. Society did hot turn away from her, it simply drifted by, preoccupied and inattentive, lecting her feel, to the full measure of her humie pride, how completely she had been the creature of its favour.