The House of Mirth
A beautiful woman, a world that keeps her and will not keep her, and the one chance at happiness she lets slip through her fingers
Page 1
In New York, at the turn of the century, a beautiful young woman named Lily Bart stood waiting for a train at Grand Central Station. She was twenty-nine, admired everywhere she went, and yet she owned nothing of her own — no fortune, no house, only a gift for being charming in other people's drawing rooms. While she waited, she ran into Lawrence Selden, a lawyer she had known for years and quietly cared for more than she let herself admit. On an impulse she went back to his rooms for tea, though she knew a woman in her position was not supposed to visit a bachelor's apartment alone. Selden watched her with the clear, fond eye of a man who understood her completely and loved her anyway, though neither of them said so plainly. Lily was on her way to Bellomont, the country house of her friends the Trenors, to try her luck with Percy Gryce, a rich, dull young man she had decided, coldly, to marry.
Page 2
At Bellomont, the Trenors' country house, Lily spent her evenings exactly as everyone around her did — playing bridge for money she did not have. She lost more than she could afford, again and again, smiling the whole time so that no one would guess how little was left in her purse. Judy Trenor, her warm, careless hostess, noticed nothing; she only wanted her weekend to be a success and her guests well amused. It was Judy's husband, Gus, who noticed. He had long admired Lily, and now he saw his opening. He offered, in a friendly, fatherly way, to put her small savings into some stocks he had a special knowledge of — he would manage the investing, he said, and she need not trouble herself with the details at all. Lily, worried about her debts and glad of an older man's help, thanked him and agreed, never once asking exactly how such easy money was made.
Page 3
The next morning, the house party set off for the little church down the valley, where Percy Gryce was waiting, hoping to walk back with Lily afterward and perhaps say something important. But Selden had also come down to Bellomont for the day, and when he suggested a walk instead of a sermon, Lily could not resist him. She let the others go on ahead without her. For an hour she was simply happy, walking beside a man she liked for himself and not for his money, talking of nothing in particular under the autumn trees. It was the finest morning she had spent in a long time. But by not sitting beside Percy Gryce in his pew, by not being there to catch his eye and keep him hoping, she let her best and safest chance slip quietly away, and she knew it even as she laughed.
Page 4
Some time later, Lily found herself a guest aboard the Sabrina, the yacht of her old friend Bertha Dorset, cruising the Mediterranean. Bertha, carrying on a love affair of her own under her husband George's nose, had brought Lily along for one purpose only: to give George something else to look at, so he would not look too closely at his wife. For a while the plan worked well enough. Then, anchored off Monte Carlo, Bertha felt herself in danger of being found out, and she turned the whole situation around in an instant. In front of the other guests, on the open deck, she declared that it was Lily who had been chasing after George, that Lily could not be trusted near any husband. George, confused and wounded, did not know what to believe. Lily, who had done nothing but be useful to a friend, stood in the center of the deck with every eye on her and understood that her reputation had just been taken from her in a single sentence.
Page 5
By the time Lily came home to New York, the story Bertha had told on the yacht had already arrived ahead of her, growing uglier with every retelling. Her aunt, Mrs. Peniston, a proper and easily shocked woman who had always been Lily's only real guardian, was horrified to find her own family name dragged through such gossip. She had planned to leave Lily a comfortable fortune when she died. Now, scandalized and unwilling to forgive what she only half understood, she quietly changed her will, leaving Lily only a small sum instead of the inheritance she had always counted on. Not long afterward, Mrs. Peniston died, and Lily learned at the reading of the will exactly how little her aunt's love had turned out to be worth, and exactly how alone, and how poor, she now truly was.
Page 6
Needing to understand her finances at last, Lily went to call on Judy Trenor one evening, only to find, once she was inside and the door shut behind her, that Judy was not at home at all and never had been expected. Gus Trenor had arranged the whole thing himself. Alone with her in his own front hall, he finally said plainly what the money he had been giving her really was — not stock-market profits at all, but his own money, given with the clear expectation that she owed him something in return for it. Lily, cornered and horrified, understood for the first time exactly what she had let herself accept without asking enough questions. She refused him outright, and when he moved toward her she did not wait to argue further. She got past him to the door, down the steps, and out into the street alone, shaken but unhurt, with the whole shameful truth of the money now perfectly clear to her.
Page 7
With her small inheritance running out and her old friends drawing away, Lily had to find paying work for the first time in her life. She took a position as companion to a wealthy, loud, ambitious woman named Mrs. Hatch, who lived in a glittering hotel suite and wanted nothing more than to use Lily's old name and old manners to push her own way into fashionable society. It was exactly the kind of life Lily had once looked down on from a great distance, and now she was living inside it, answering letters, arranging introductions, smiling at people she would once never have noticed. She did the work quietly and competently, telling herself it was only temporary, while every week that passed carried her further from the world she had been raised to belong to.
Page 8
When even the position with Mrs. Hatch came to nothing, Lily went lower still, taking work at a milliner's shop, trimming hats alongside women who had been doing the work since they were girls. Her hands, so long trained only for embroidery and cards, were slow and clumsy at the fine, fast stitching the other workers managed without thinking. She was paid by the piece and earned far less than they did, and she knew that every woman in the room understood exactly how far she had fallen, even if none of them said so aloud. She kept at it anyway, bent over the worktable in the gray afternoon light, because there was nothing else left for her to do, and because she still had, after everything, too much pride to simply give up and admit defeat.
Page 9
Near the end, Lily went once more to see Selden, in the quiet rooms where this whole story had begun. She was poorer now, and plainer, and far more honest than she had ever let herself be with him before. For a little while they talked as they had always talked, carefully, almost to the point of saying everything that had been left unsaid between them for years — what the money had cost her, what she had refused to do with the letters that could have ruined Bertha Dorset and saved herself, what she still felt for him after everything. Selden came close to asking her to stay, and she came close to telling him she would. But the moment passed, as it always had with the two of them, and Lily rose, said goodbye gently, and let herself out into the evening alone.
Page 10
Lily went home that night to her small, plain rented room, carrying with her the very last of her money. Before she slept, she paid off, in full, the debt she still owed Gus Trenor, and she burned, unread by anyone else, the letters that could have ruined Bertha Dorset and saved her own reputation if she had only been willing to use them. Then, as she had done on many sleepless nights before, she measured out a dose of the chloral drops she relied on to find any rest at all. This time she did not wake. In the morning, Lawrence Selden came to her door at last, carrying the words he had never quite managed to say to her, and found the small room silent, and Lily still, and the chance between them finally, completely gone.
About this story
- Audience: general readers
Read Wonder Novels on your phone
Wonder Novels is available on Android. Get Wonder Novels on Google Play.