“It would presently be his task to take the bandage from this young womans eyes, and bid her look forth on the world. But how many generations of the women who had gone to her making had descended bandaged to the family vault? He shivered a little, remembering some of the new ideas in his scientific books, and the much-cited instance of the Kentucky cave-fish, which had ceased to develop eyes because they had no use for them.”
Then he remembered that he had not put a card with the
roses, and was vexed at having spoken of them. He wanted to say: "I
called on your cousin yesterday," but hesitated. If Madame Olenska had
not spoken of his visit it might seem awkward that he should. Yet not
to do so gave the affair an air of mystery that he disliked. To shake
off the question he began to talk of their own plans, their future, and
Mrs. Welland's insistence on a long engagement.
"If you call it long! Isabel Chivers and Reggie were engaged for two
years: Grace and Thorley for nearly a year and a half. Why aren't we
very well off as we are?"
It was the traditional maidenly interrogation, and he felt ashamed of
himself for finding it singularly childish. No doubt she simply echoed
what was said for her; but she was nearing her twenty-second birthday,
and he wondered at what age "nice" women began to speak for themselves.
"Never, if we won't let them, I suppose," he mused, and recalled his
mad outburst to Mr. Sillerton Jackson: "Women ought to be as free as we
are--"
It would presently be his task to take the bandage from this young
woman's eyes, and bid her look forth on the world. But how many
generations of the women who had gone to her making had descended
bandaged to the family vault? He shivered a little, remembering some
of the new ideas in his scientific books, and the much-cited instance
of the Kentucky cave-fish, which had ceased to develop eyes because
they had no use for them. What if, when he had bidden May Welland to
open hers, they could only look out blankly at blankness?
"We might be much better off. We might be altogether together--we
might travel."
Her face lit up. "That would be lovely," she owned: she would love to
travel. But her mother would not understand their wanting to do things
so differently.
"As if the mere 'differently' didn't account for it!" the wooer
insisted.
"Newland! You're so original!" she exulted.
His heart sank, for he saw that he was saying all the things that young
men in the same situation were expected to say, and that she was making
the answers that instinct and tradition taught her to make--even to the
point of calling him original.
"Original! We're all as like each other as those dolls cut out of the
same folded paper. We're like patterns stencilled on a wall. Can't
you and I strike out for ourselves, May?"
He had stopped and faced her in the excitement of their discussion, and
her eyes rested on him with a bright unclouded admiration.
“But marriage is a one long sacrifice.”
The idea that
he could ever, in his senses, have dreamed of marrying the Countess
Olenska had become almost unthinkable, and she remained in his memory
simply as the most plaintive and poignant of a line of ghosts.
But all these abstractions and eliminations made of his mind a rather
empty and echoing place, and he supposed that was one of the reasons
why the busy animated people on the Beaufort lawn shocked him as if
they had been children playing in a grave-yard.
He heard a murmur of skirts beside him, and the Marchioness Manson
fluttered out of the drawing-room window. As usual, she was
extraordinarily festooned and bedizened, with a limp Leghorn hat
anchored to her head by many windings of faded gauze, and a little
black velvet parasol on a carved ivory handle absurdly balanced over
her much larger hatbrim.
"My dear Newland, I had no idea that you and May had arrived! You
yourself came only yesterday, you say? Ah,
business--business--professional duties ... I understand. Many
husbands, I know, find it impossible to join their wives here except
for the week-end." She cocked her head on one side and languished at
him through screwed-up eyes. "But marriage is one long sacrifice, as I
used often to remind my Ellen--"
Archer's heart stopped with the queer jerk which it had given once
before, and which seemed suddenly to slam a door between himself and
the outer world; but this break of continuity must have been of the
briefest, for he presently heard Medora answering a question he had
apparently found voice to put.
"No, I am not staying here, but with the Blenkers, in their delicious
solitude at Portsmouth. Beaufort was kind enough to send his famous
trotters for me this morning, so that I might have at least a glimpse
of one of Regina's garden-parties; but this evening I go back to rural
life. The Blenkers, dear original beings, have hired a primitive old
farm-house at Portsmouth where they gather about them representative
people ..." She drooped slightly beneath her protecting brim, and
added with a faint blush: "This week Dr. Agathon Carver is holding a
series of Inner Thought meetings there. A contrast indeed to this gay
scene of worldly pleasure--but then I have always lived on contrasts!
“Beware of monotony; its the mother of all the deadly sins.”
But marriage is one long sacrifice, as I
used often to remind my Ellen--"
Archer's heart stopped with the queer jerk which it had given once
before, and which seemed suddenly to slam a door between himself and
the outer world; but this break of continuity must have been of the
briefest, for he presently heard Medora answering a question he had
apparently found voice to put.
"No, I am not staying here, but with the Blenkers, in their delicious
solitude at Portsmouth. Beaufort was kind enough to send his famous
trotters for me this morning, so that I might have at least a glimpse
of one of Regina's garden-parties; but this evening I go back to rural
life. The Blenkers, dear original beings, have hired a primitive old
farm-house at Portsmouth where they gather about them representative
people ..." She drooped slightly beneath her protecting brim, and
added with a faint blush: "This week Dr. Agathon Carver is holding a
series of Inner Thought meetings there. A contrast indeed to this gay
scene of worldly pleasure--but then I have always lived on contrasts!
To me the only death is monotony. I always say to Ellen: Beware of
monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins. But my poor child is
going through a phase of exaltation, of abhorrence of the world. You
know, I suppose, that she has declined all invitations to stay at
Newport, even with her grandmother Mingott? I could hardly persuade
her to come with me to the Blenkers', if you will believe it! The life
she leads is morbid, unnatural. Ah, if she had only listened to me
when it was still possible ... When the door was still open ... But
shall we go down and watch this absorbing match? I hear your May is
one of the competitors."
Strolling toward them from the tent Beaufort advanced over the lawn,
tall, heavy, too tightly buttoned into a London frock-coat, with one of
his own orchids in its buttonhole. Archer, who had not seen him for
two or three months, was struck by the change in his appearance. In
the hot summer light his floridness seemed heavy and bloated, and but
for his erect square-shouldered walk he would have looked like an
over-fed and over-dressed old man.
There were all sorts of rumours afloat about Beaufort.
Each time you happen to me all over again.
Meanwhile the carriage had worked its way out
of the coil about the station, and they were crawling down the slippery
incline to the wharf, menaced by swaying coal-carts, bewildered horses,
dishevelled express-wagons, and an empty hearse--ah, that hearse! She
shut her eyes as it passed, and clutched at Archer's hand.
"If only it doesn't mean--poor Granny!"
"Oh, no, no--she's much better--she's all right, really. There--we've
passed it!" he exclaimed, as if that made all the difference. Her hand
remained in his, and as the carriage lurched across the gang-plank onto
the ferry he bent over, unbuttoned her tight brown glove, and kissed
her palm as if he had kissed a relic. She disengaged herself with a
faint smile, and he said: "You didn't expect me today?"
"Oh, no."
"I meant to go to Washington to see you. I'd made all my
arrangements--I very nearly crossed you in the train."
"Oh--" she exclaimed, as if terrified by the narrowness of their escape.
"Do you know--I hardly remembered you?"
"Hardly remembered me?"
"I mean: how shall I explain? I--it's always so. EACH TIME YOU HAPPEN
TO ME ALL OVER AGAIN."
"Oh, yes: I know! I know!"
"Does it--do I too: to you?" he insisted.
She nodded, looking out of the window.
"Ellen--Ellen--Ellen!"
She made no answer, and he sat in silence, watching her profile grow
indistinct against the snow-streaked dusk beyond the window. What had
she been doing in all those four long months, he wondered? How little
they knew of each other, after all! The precious moments were slipping
away, but he had forgotten everything that he had meant to say to her
and could only helplessly brood on the mystery of their remoteness and
their proximity, which seemed to be symbolised by the fact of their
sitting so close to each other, and yet being unable to see each
other's faces.
"What a pretty carriage! Is it May's?" she asked, suddenly turning her
face from the window.
"Yes."
"It was May who sent you to fetch me, then? How kind of her!"
He made no answer for a moment; then he said explosively: "Your
husband's secretary came to see me the day after we met in Boston.
Do you remember what you said to me once? That you could help me only by loving me? Well-you did love me for a moment and it helped me. It has always helped me.
“You always told me I should have to come to it sooner or later!”
she said with a faint smile.
“And you have come to it now?”
“I shall have to come to it—presently. But there is something else
I must come to first.” She paused again, trying to transmit to her
voice the steadiness of her recovered smile. “There is some one
I must say goodbye to. Oh, not YOU—we are sure to see each other
again—but the Lily Bart you knew. I have kept her with me all this
time, but now we are going to part, and I have brought her back
to you—I am going to leave her here. When I go out presently she
will not go with me. I shall like to think that she has stayed with
you—and she’ll be no trouble, she’ll take up no room.”
She went toward him, and put out her hand, still smiling. “Will you
let her stay with you?” she asked.
He caught her hand, and she felt in his the vibration of feeling
that had not yet risen to his lips. “Lily—can’t I help you?” he
exclaimed.
She looked at him gently. “Do you remember what you said to me
once? That you could help me only by loving me? Well—you did love
me for a moment; and it helped me. It has always helped me. But the
moment is gone—it was I who let it go. And one must go on living.
Goodbye.”
She laid her other hand on his, and they looked at each other with
a kind of solemnity, as though they stood in the presence of death.
Something in truth lay dead between them—the love she had killed in
him and could no longer call to life. But something lived between
them also, and leaped up in her like an imperishable flame: it was
the love his love had kindled, the passion of her soul for his.
In its light everything else dwindled and fell away from her. She
understood now that she could not go forth and leave her old self
with him: that self must indeed live on in his presence, but it
must still continue to be hers.
Selden had retained her hand, and continued to scrutinize her with
a strange sense of foreboding. The external aspect of the situation
had vanished for him as completely as for her: he felt it only as
one of those rare moments which lift the veil from their faces as
they pass.
Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair.
The sense of mental equality had been gratifying to his raw
ambition; but as his self-knowledge defined itself, his understanding of
her also increased; and if man is at times indirectly flattered by the
moral superiority of woman, her mental ascendency is extenuated by no
such oblique tribute to his powers. The attitude of looking up is a
strain on the muscles; and it was becoming more and more Glennard's
opinion that brains, in a woman, should be merely the obverse of beauty.
To beauty Mrs. Aubyn could lay no claim; and while she had enough
prettiness to exasperate him by her incapacity to make use of it, she
seemed invincibly ignorant of any of the little artifices whereby women
contrive to palliate their defects and even to turn them into graces.
Her dress never seemed a part of her; all her clothes had an impersonal
air, as though they had belonged to someone else and been borrowed in an
emergency that had somehow become chronic. She was conscious enough of
her deficiencies to try to amend them by rash imitations of the most
approved models; but no woman who does not dress well intuitively will
ever do so by the light of reason, and Mrs. Aubyn's plagiarisms, to
borrow a metaphor of her trade, somehow never seemed to be incorporated
with the text.
Genius is of small use to a woman who does not know how to do her hair.
The fame that came to Mrs. Aubyn with her second book left Glennard's
imagination untouched, or had at most the negative effect of removing
her still farther from the circle of his contracting sympathies. We are
all the sport of time; and fate had so perversely ordered the chronology
of Margaret Aubyn's romance that when her husband died Glennard felt as
though he had lost a friend.
It was not in his nature to be needlessly unkind; and though he was
in the impregnable position of the man who has given a woman no more
definable claim on him than that of letting her fancy that he loves
her, he would not for the world have accentuated his advantage by any
betrayal of indifference. During the first year of her widowhood their
friendship dragged on with halting renewals of sentiment, becoming more
and more a banquet of empty dishes from which the covers were never
removed; then Glennard went to New York to live and exchanged the faded
pleasures of intercourse for the comparative novelty of correspondence.
“If only wed stop trying to be happy wed have a pretty good time.”
“A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.”
“In spite of illness, in spite even of the archenemy sorrow, one can remain alive log past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.”
“I have often regretted my speech, but never my silence”
“When people ask for time, its always for time to say no. Yes has one more letter in it, but it doesnt take half as long to say.”
“After all, one knows ones weak points so well, that its rather bewildering to have the critics overlook them and invent others.”
“Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive.”
“Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.”
“If wed stop trying to be happy we could have a pretty good time.”
“Old age, calm, expanded, broad with the haughty breadth of the universe, old age flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.”
“In any really good subject, one has only to probe deep enough to come to tears.”
“True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.”
“I wonder, among all the tangles of this mortal coil, which one contains tighter knots to undo, and consequently suggests more tugging, and pain, and diversified elements of misery, than the marriage tie.”
“I despair of the Republic! Such dreariness, such whining sallow women, such utter absence of the amenities, such crass food, crass manners, crass landscape!! What a horror it is for a whole nation to be developing without the sense of beauty, and eating bananas for breakfast.”
