The House of Mirth Edith Wharton (romantic love story reading .txt) 📖

was the temptation she was always struggling to resist. Her craving for the keen stimulant was forever conflicting with that other craving for sleep⁠—the midnight craving which only the little phial in her hand could still. But today, at any rate, the tea could hardly be too strong: she counted on it to pour warmth and resolution into her empty veins.

As she leaned back before him, her lids drooping in utter lassitude, though the first warm draught already tinged her face with returning life, Rosedale was seized afresh by the poignant surprise of her beauty. The dark pencilling of fatigue under her eyes, the morbid blue-veined pallour of the temples, brought out the brightness of her hair and lips, as though all her ebbing vitality were centred there. Against the dull chocolate-coloured background of the restaurant, the purity of her head stood out as it had never done in the most brightly-lit ballroom. He looked at her with a startled uncomfortable feeling, as though her beauty were a forgotten enemy that had lain in ambush and now sprang out on him unawares.

To clear the air he tried to take an easy tone with her. “Why, Miss Lily, I haven’t seen you for an age. I didn’t know what had become of you.”

As he spoke, he was checked by an embarrassing sense of the complications to which this might lead. Though he had not seen her he had heard of her; he knew of her connection with Mrs. Hatch, and of the talk resulting from it. Mrs. Hatch’s milieu was one which he had once assiduously frequented, and now as devoutly shunned.

Lily, to whom the tea had restored her usual clearness of mind, saw what was in his thoughts and said with a slight smile: “You would not be likely to know about me. I have joined the working classes.”

He stared in genuine wonder. “You don’t mean⁠—? Why, what on earth are you doing?”

“Learning to be a milliner⁠—at least trying to learn,” she hastily qualified the statement.

Rosedale suppressed a low whistle of surprise. “Come off⁠—you ain’t serious, are you?”

“Perfectly serious. I’m obliged to work for my living.”

“But I understood⁠—I thought you were with Norma Hatch.”

“You heard I had gone to her as her secretary?”

“Something of the kind, I believe.” He leaned forward to refill her cup.

Lily guessed the possibilities of embarrassment which the topic held for him, and raising her eyes to his, she said suddenly: “I left her two months ago.”

Rosedale continued to fumble awkwardly with the teapot, and she felt sure that he had heard what had been said of her. But what was there that Rosedale did not hear?

“Wasn’t it a soft berth?” he enquired, with an attempt at lightness.

“Too soft⁠—one might have sunk in too deep.” Lily rested one arm on the edge of the table, and sat looking at him more intently than she had ever looked before. An uncontrollable impulse was urging her to put her case to this man, from whose curiosity she had always so fiercely defended herself.

“You know Mrs. Hatch, I think? Well, perhaps you can understand that she might make things too easy for one.”

Rosedale looked faintly puzzled, and she remembered that allusiveness was lost on him.

“It was no place for you, anyhow,” he agreed, so suffused and immersed in the light of her full gaze that he found himself being drawn into strange depths of intimacy. He who had had to subsist on mere fugitive glances, looks winged in flight and swiftly lost under covert, now found her eyes settling on him with a brooding intensity that fairly dazzled him.

“I left,” Lily continued, “lest people should say I was helping Mrs. Hatch to marry Freddy Van Osburgh⁠—who is not in the least too good for her⁠—and as they still continue to say it, I see that I might as well have stayed where I was.”

“Oh, Freddy⁠—” Rosedale brushed aside the topic with an air of its unimportance which gave a sense of the immense perspective he had acquired. “Freddy don’t count⁠—but I knew you weren’t mixed up in that. It ain’t your style.”

Lily coloured slightly: she could not conceal from herself that the words gave her pleasure. She would have liked to sit there, drinking more tea, and continuing to talk of herself to Rosedale. But the old habit of observing the conventions reminded her that it was time to bring their colloquy to an end, and she made a faint motion to push back her chair.

Rosedale stopped her with a protesting gesture. “Wait a minute⁠—don’t go yet; sit quiet and rest a little longer. You look thoroughly played out. And you haven’t told me⁠—” He broke off, conscious of going farther than he had meant. She saw the struggle and understood it; understood also the nature of the spell to which he yielded as, with his eyes on her face, he began again abruptly: “What on earth did you mean by saying just now that you were learning to be a milliner?”

“Just what I said. I am an apprentice at Regina’s.”

“Good Lord⁠—you? But what for? I knew your aunt had turned you down: Mrs. Fisher told me about it. But I understood you got a legacy from her⁠—”

“I got ten thousand dollars; but the legacy is not to be paid till next summer.”

“Well, but⁠—look here: you could borrow on it any time you wanted.”

She shook her head gravely. “No; for I owe it already.”

“Owe it? The whole ten thousand?”

“Every penny.” She paused, and then continued abruptly, with her eyes on his face: “I think Gus Trenor spoke to you once about having made some money for me in stocks.”

She waited, and Rosedale, congested with embarrassment, muttered that he remembered something of the kind.

“He made about nine thousand dollars,” Lily pursued, in the same tone of eager communicativeness. “At the time, I understood that he was speculating with my own money: it was incredibly stupid of me, but I knew nothing of business. Afterward I found out that he had not used my money⁠—that what