The House of Mirth - Edith Wharton (phonics reader .txt) 📗

her loveliness was no mere fixed quality, but an element shaping all emotions to fresh forms of grace.

Mrs. Fisher’s measures had been well-taken, and society, surprised in a dull moment, succumbed to the temptation of Mrs. Bry’s hospitality. The protesting minority were forgotten in the throng which abjured and came; and the audience was almost as brilliant as the show.

Lawrence Selden was among those who had yielded to the proffered inducements. If he did not often act on the accepted social axiom that a man may go where he pleases, it was because he had long since learned that his pleasures were mainly to be found in a small group of the like-minded. But he enjoyed spectacular effects, and was not insensible to the part money plays in their production: all he asked was that the very rich should live up to their calling as stage-managers, and not spend their money in a dull way. This the Brys could certainly not be charged with doing. Their recently built house, whatever it might lack as a frame for domesticity, was almost as well-designed for the display of a festal assemblage as one of those airy pleasure-halls which the Italian architects improvised to set off the hospitality of princes. The air of improvisation was in fact strikingly present: so recent, so rapidly-evoked was the whole mise-en-scène that one had to touch the marble columns to learn they were not of cardboard, to seat one’s self in one of the damask-and-gold armchairs to be sure it was not painted against the wall.

Selden, who had put one of these seats to the test, found himself, from an angle of the ballroom, surveying the scene with frank enjoyment. The company, in obedience to the decorative instinct which calls for fine clothes in fine surroundings, had dressed rather with an eye to Mrs. Bry’s background than to herself. The seated throng, filling the immense room without undue crowding, presented a surface of rich tissues and jewelled shoulders in harmony with the festooned and gilded walls, and the flushed splendours of the Venetian ceiling. At the farther end of the room a stage had been constructed behind a proscenium arch curtained with folds of old damask; but in the pause before the parting of the folds there was little thought of what they might reveal, for every woman who had accepted Mrs. Bry’s invitation was engaged in trying to find out how many of her friends had done the same.

Gerty Farish, seated next to Selden, was lost in that indiscriminate and uncritical enjoyment so irritating to Miss Bart’s finer perceptions. It may be that Selden’s nearness had something to do with the quality of his cousin’s pleasure; but Miss Farish was so little accustomed to refer her enjoyment of such scenes to her own share in them, that she was merely conscious of a deeper sense of contentment.

“Wasn’t it dear of Lily to get me an invitation? Of course it would never have occurred to Carry Fisher to put me on the list, and I should have been so sorry to miss seeing it all⁠—and especially Lily herself. Someone told me the ceiling was by Veronese⁠—you would know, of course, Lawrence. I suppose it’s very beautiful, but his women are so dreadfully fat. Goddesses? Well, I can only say that if they’d been mortals and had to wear corsets, it would have been better for them. I think our women are much handsomer. And this room is wonderfully becoming⁠—everyone looks so well! Did you ever see such jewels? Do look at Mrs. George Dorset’s pearls⁠—I suppose the smallest of them would pay the rent of our Girls’ Club for a year. Not that I ought to complain about the club; everyone has been so wonderfully kind. Did I tell you that Lily had given us three hundred dollars? Wasn’t it splendid of her? And then she collected a lot of money from her friends⁠—Mrs. Bry gave us five hundred, and Mr. Rosedale a thousand. I wish Lily were not so nice to Mr. Rosedale, but she says it’s no use being rude to him, because he doesn’t see the difference. She really can’t bear to hurt people’s feelings⁠—it makes me so angry when I hear her called cold and conceited! The girls at the club don’t call her that. Do you know she has been there with me twice?⁠—yes, Lily! And you should have seen their eyes! One of them said it was as good as a day in the country just to look at her. And she sat there, and laughed and talked with them⁠—not a bit as if she were being charitable, you know, but as if she liked it as much as they did. They’ve been asking ever since when she’s coming back; and she’s promised me⁠—oh!”

Miss Farish’s confidences were cut short by the parting of the curtain on the first tableau⁠—a group of nymphs dancing across flower-strewn sward in the rhythmic postures of Botticelli’s Spring. Tableaux vivants depend for their effect not only on the happy disposal of lights and the delusive-interposition of layers of gauze, but on a corresponding adjustment of the mental vision. To unfurnished minds they remain, in spite of every enhancement of art, only a superior kind of waxworks; but to the responsive fancy they may give magic glimpses of the boundary world between fact and imagination. Selden’s mind was of this order: he could yield to vision-making influences as completely as a child to the spell of a fairytale. Mrs. Bry’s tableaux wanted none of the qualities which go to the producing of such illusions, and under Morpeth’s organizing hand the pictures succeeded each other with the rhythmic march of some splendid frieze, in which the fugitive curves of living flesh and the wandering light of young eyes have been subdued to plastic harmony without losing the charm of life.

The scenes were taken from old pictures, and the participators had been cleverly fitted with characters suited to their types. No one,