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

a sense of something hard and self-contained behind the superficial warmth of his manner.

They had been seated for some time in the seclusion of a rocky glen above the lake, when she suddenly cut short the culmination of an impassioned period by turning upon him the grave loveliness of her gaze.

“I do believe what you say, Mr. Rosedale,” she said quietly; “and I am ready to marry you whenever you wish.”

Rosedale, reddening to the roots of his glossy hair, received this announcement with a recoil which carried him to his feet, where he halted before her in an attitude of almost comic discomfiture.

“For I suppose that is what you do wish,” she continued, in the same quiet tone. “And, though I was unable to consent when you spoke to me in this way before, I am ready, now that I know you so much better, to trust my happiness to your hands.”

She spoke with the noble directness which she could command on such occasions, and which was like a large steady light thrown across the tortuous darkness of the situation. In its inconvenient brightness Rosedale seemed to waver a moment, as though conscious that every avenue of escape was unpleasantly illuminated.

Then he gave a short laugh, and drew out a gold cigarette-case, in which, with plump jewelled fingers, he groped for a gold-tipped cigarette. Selecting one, he paused to contemplate it a moment before saying: “My dear Miss Lily, I’m sorry if there’s been any little misapprehension between us-but you made me feel my suit was so hopeless that I had really no intention of renewing it.”

Lily’s blood tingled with the grossness of the rebuff; but she checked the first leap of her anger, and said in a tone of gentle dignity: “I have no one but myself to blame if I gave you the impression that my decision was final.”

Her wordplay was always too quick for him, and this reply held him in puzzled silence while she extended her hand and added, with the faintest inflection of sadness in her voice: “Before we bid each other goodbye, I want at least to thank you for having once thought of me as you did.”

The touch of her hand, the moving softness of her look, thrilled a vulnerable fibre in Rosedale. It was her exquisite inaccessibleness, the sense of distance she could convey without a hint of disdain, that made it most difficult for him to give her up.

“Why do you talk of saying goodbye? Ain’t we going to be good friends all the same?” he urged, without releasing her hand.

She drew it away quietly. “What is your idea of being good friends?” she returned with a slight smile. “Making love to me without asking me to marry you?”

Rosedale laughed with a recovered sense of ease. “Well, that’s about the size of it, I suppose. I can’t help making love to you⁠—I don’t see how any man could; but I don’t mean to ask you to marry me as long as I can keep out of it.”

She continued to smile. “I like your frankness; but I am afraid our friendship can hardly continue on those terms.”

She turned away, as though to mark that its final term had in fact been reached, and he followed her for a few steps with a baffled sense of her having after all kept the game in her own hands.

“Miss Lily⁠—” he began impulsively; but she walked on without seeming to hear him.

He overtook her in a few quick strides, and laid an entreating hand on her arm. “Miss Lily⁠—don’t hurry away like that. You’re beastly hard on a fellow; but if you don’t mind speaking the truth I don’t see why you shouldn’t allow me to do the same.”

She had paused a moment with raised brows, drawing away instinctively from his touch, though she made no effort to evade his words.

“I was under the impression,” she rejoined, “that you had done so without waiting for my permission.”

“Well⁠—why shouldn’t you hear my reasons for doing it, then? We’re neither of us such new hands that a little plain speaking is going to hurt us. I’m all broken up on you: there’s nothing new in that. I’m more in love with you than I was this time last year; but I’ve got to face the fact that the situation is changed.”

She continued to confront him with the same air of ironic composure. “You mean to say that I’m not as desirable a match as you thought me?”

“Yes; that’s what I do mean,” he answered resolutely. “I won’t go into what’s happened. I don’t believe the stories about you⁠—I don’t want to believe them. But they’re there, and my not believing them ain’t going to alter the situation.”

She flushed to her temples, but the extremity of her need checked the retort on her lip and she continued to face him composedly. “If they are not true,” she said, “doesn’t that alter the situation?”

He met this with a steady gaze of his small stocktaking eyes, which made her feel herself no more than some superfine human merchandise. “I believe it does in novels; but I’m certain it don’t in real life. You know that as well as I do: if we’re speaking the truth, let’s speak the whole truth. Last year I was wild to marry you, and you wouldn’t look at me: this year⁠—well, you appear to be willing. Now, what has changed in the interval? Your situation, that’s all. Then you thought you could do better; now⁠—”

“You think you can?” broke from her ironically.

“Why, yes, I do: in one way, that is.” He stood before her, his hands in his pockets, his chest sturdily expanded under its vivid waistcoat. “It’s this way, you see: I’ve had a pretty steady grind of it these last years, working up my social position. Think it’s funny I should say that? Why should I mind saying I want to get into society? A man ain’t ashamed to say he wants to own