Edith Wharton

“ The flowers grow differently in their vases, the lamps and easy-chairs have found a cleverer way of coming together, the books on the table are the very ones that one is longing to get hold of. The most perilous coquetry may not be in a woman’s way of arranging her dress but in her way of arranging her drawing-room; and in this art Mrs. Hazeldean excelled. ”

“ But it would have seemed to her an exceedingly odd thing to go out of town in winter, especially now that the New York houses were luxuriously warmed by the new hot-air furnaces, and searchingly illuminated by gas chandeliers. No, thank you—no country winters for the chilblained generation of prunella sandals and low-necked sarcenet, the generation brought up in unwarmed and unlit houses, and shipped off to die in Italy when they proved unequal to the struggle of living in New York! ”

“ Hazeldean’s temples ache as if she sat under a glare of light even brighter than that of the Struthers’ chandeliers—a glare in which each quiver of a half-formed thought might be as visible behind her forehead as the faint lines wrinkling its surface into an uncontrollable frown of anxiety. ”

“ I “SHE was bad ... always. They used to meet at the Fifth Avenue Hotel,” said my mother, as if the scene of the offence added to the guilt of the couple whose past she was revealing. Her spectacles slanted on her knitting, she dropped the words in a hiss that might have singed the snowy baby-blanket which engaged her indefatigable fingers. (It was typical of my mother to be always employed in benevolent actions while she uttered uncharitable words.) {4}
“They used to meet at the Fifth Avenue Hotel”; how the precision of the phrase characterized my old New York! ”

“ More people were coming in; and with her customary rough skill she was receiving, distributing, introducing them. Suddenly her smile deepened; she was evidently greeting an old friend. The group about her scattered, and Mrs. Hazeldean saw that, in her cordial absent-minded way, and while her wandering hostess-eye swept the rooms, she was saying a confidential word to a tall man whose hand she detained. They smiled at each other; then Mrs. Struthers’s glance turned toward the inner room, and her smile seemed to say: “You’ll find her there.” ”

“ Mant was a woman whose life revolved about a bunch of keys. What treasures they gave access to, what disasters would have ensued had they been forever lost, was not quite clear; but whenever they were missed the household was in an uproar, and as Mrs. Mant would trust them to no one but herself, these occasions were frequent. One of them arose at the very moment when Mrs. Mant was recovering from her enthusiasm for Miss Winter. ”

“ It was inconceivable to my mother’s generation that a portionless girl should not be provided for by her relations until she found a husband; and that, having found him, she should have to help him to earn a living, was more inconceivable still. The self-sufficing little society of that vanished New York attached no great importance to wealth, but regarded poverty as so distasteful that it simply took no account of it.
These things pleaded in favour of poor{155} Lizzie Hazeldean, though to superficial observers her daily life seemed to belie the plea. ”

“ I was used by now to mere unadjectived loveliness, the kind that youth and spirits hang like a rosy veil over commonplace features, an average outline and a pointless merriment. But this was something calculated, accomplished, finished—and just a little worn. It frightened me with my first glimpse of the infinity of beauty and the multiplicity of her pit-falls. What! There were women who need not fear crow’s-feet, were more beautiful for being pale, could let a silver hair or two show among the dark, and their eyes brood inwardly while they smiled and, chatted? ”

“ I was not wholly unprepared for my mother’s comment. There was no other lady in Mrs. Hazeldean’s box when we entered; none joined her during the evening, and our hostess offered no apology for her isolation. In the New York of my youth every one knew what to think of a woman who was seen “alone at the opera”; if Mrs. Hazeldean was not openly classed with Fanny Ring, our one conspicuous “professional,” it was because, out of respect for her social origin, New York preferred to avoid such juxtapositions. ”

“ Silently, almost morosely, we withdrew to the drawing-room hearth; where, after an interval of languid monosyllables, my mother, rising first, slipped her knitting into its bag, and turning on me with renewed severity, said: “This racing after fire-engines is what makes you too sleepy to prepare your lessons”—a comment so wide of the mark that once again I perceived, without understanding, the extent of the havoc wrought in her mind by the sight of Mrs. Hazeldean and Henry Prest coming out of the Fifth Avenue Hotel together. ”

“ Why, you goose, reading is the greatest rest in the world!—I want you to go to Mrs. Struthers’s, dear; I want to see you again in that black velvet dress,” he added with his coaxing smile.
The parlourmaid brought in the tray, and Mrs. Hazeldean busied herself with the tea-caddy. Her husband had stretched himself out in the deep armchair which was his habitual seat. He crossed his arms{41} behind his neck, leaning his head back wearily against them, so that, as she glanced at him across the hearth, she saw the salient muscles in his long neck, and the premature wrinkles about his ears and chin. ”

“ I should be loth to leave the picture at this point; my last vision of her is more satisfying. I had been away, travelling for a year at the other end of the world; the day I came back I ran across Hubert Wesson at my club. Hubert had grown pompous and heavy. He drew me into a corner, and said, turning red, and glancing cautiously over his shoulder: “Have you seen our old friend Mrs. Hazeldean? She’s very ill, I hear.” ”

“ She had not excluded Henry Prest more rigorously than the others; he had simply been one of the many who received, day by day, the same answer: “Mrs. Hazeldean sees no one but the family.”
Almost immediately after her husband’s death she had sailed for Europe on a long-deferred visit to her father, who was now settled at Nice; but from this expedition she had presumably brought back little comfort, for when she arrived in New York her relations were struck by her air of ill-health and depression. ”

“ Composure and presence of mind were so necessary to a woman in her situation that they had become almost a second nature to her, and in a few minutes her thick uneven heart-beats began to subside and to grow steadier. As if to test their regularity, she paused before a florist’s window, and looked appreciatively at the jars of roses and forced lilac, the compact bunches of lilies-of-the-valley and violets, the first pots of close-budded azaleas. ”

“ His income dwindled; and, indifferent for himself, he fretted ceaselessly at the thought of depriving Lizzie of the least of her luxuries.
At heart she was indifferent to them too; but she could not convince him of it. He had been brought up in the old New York tradition, which decreed that a man, at whatever cost, must provide his wife with what she had always “been accustomed to” ”

“ They were mostly younger than their hostess, and still, though precariously, within the social pale: pretty trivial creatures, bored with a monotonous prosperity, and yearning for such unlawful joys as cigarettes, plain speaking, and a drive home in the small{138} hours with the young man of the moment. But such daring spirits were few in old New York, their appearances infrequent and somewhat furtive. Mrs. Hazeldean’s society consisted mainly of men, men of all ages, from her bald or grey-headed contemporaries to youths of Hubert’s accomplished years and raw novices of mine. ”

“ Wesson saw us.”
“So I supposed. I remember now that she went out of her way to cut me that evening at Mrs. Struthers’s.”
“Exactly. And she was not the only person who saw us. If people had not been disarmed by your husband’s falling ill that very day you would have found yourself—ostracized.{127}”
She made no comment, and he pursued, with a last effort: “In your grief, your solitude, you haven’t yet realized what your future will be—how difficult. It is what I wished to guard you against—it was my purpose in asking you to marry me.” ”

“ As for the Hazeldean tribe, which was larger and stronger (though nothing like the great organized Wesson-Parrett gens, with half New York and all Albany at its back) —well, the Hazeldeans were not much to be counted on, and would even, perhaps, in a furtive negative way, be not too sorry (“if it were not for poor Charlie”) that poor Charlie’s wife should at last be made to pay for her good looks, her popularity,{78} above all for being, in spite of her origin, treated by poor Charlie as if she were one of them! ”

“ At any rate, I had forgotten everything I might ever have picked up about her when, on the evening after my return, my cousin Hubert Wesson—now towering above me as a pillar of the Knickerbocker Club, and a final authority on the ways of the world—suggested our joining her at the opera.
“Mrs. Hazeldean? But I don’t know her. What will she think?”
“That it’s all right. Come along. She’s the jolliest woman I know. We’ll go{132} back afterward and have supper with her—jolliest house I know.” Hubert twirled a self-conscious moustache. ”

“ Among the young women now growing up about me I find none with enough imagination to picture the helpless incapacity of the pretty girl of the ’seventies, the girl without money or vocation, seemingly put into the world only to please, and unlearned in any way of maintaining herself there by her own efforts. ”

“ The spare-room sheets had not been out of lavender for twenty years—and Miss Winter always left the blinds up in her room, and the carpet and curtains, unused to such exposure, suffered accordingly. Then young men began to call—they called in{80} numbers. Mrs. Mant had not supposed that the daughter of a clergyman—and a clergyman “under a cloud”—would expect visitors. She had imagined herself taking Lizzie Winter to Church Fairs, and having the stitches of her knitting picked up by the young girl, whose “eyes were better” than her benefactress’s. ”

“ Such a brilliant recruit to the clan was not to be disowned. Mrs. Mant was left to nurse her grievance in solitude, till she too fell into line, carelessly but handsomely forgiven.
Ah, those first years of triumph! They frightened Lizzie now as she looked back. One day, the friendless defenceless daughter of a discredited man; the next, almost, the wife of Charlie Hazeldean, the popular successful young lawyer, with a good practice already assured, and the best of professional and private prospects. His own parents were dead, and had died poor ”

“ As they stood behind us in the windows, looking over our heads, we heard chuckles of amusement mingled with ironic comment.
“Oh, my dear, look—here they all come!{12} The New Year ladies! Low neck and short sleeves in broad daylight, every one of them! Oh, and the fat one with the paper roses in her hair ... they are paper, my dear ... off the frosted cake, probably! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!”
Aunt Sabina Wesson was obliged to stuff her lace handkerchief between her lips, while her firm poplin-cased figure rocked with delight. ”

“ It was the peculiar irony of her lot to be secured from temptation when all danger of temptation was over; for she would never, I am certain, have held out the tip of her finger to any man to obtain such luxuries for her own enjoyment. ”

“ She saw Campanini’s low-necked throat subside into silence above the piano, and the clapping of many tightly-fitting gloves was succeeded by a general movement, and the usual irrepressible outburst of talk. ”

“ No one else has that particularly silvery gray hair.” She shivered, for{24} everyone in New York knew that Sillerton Jackson saw everything, and could piece together seemingly unrelated fragments of fact with the art of a skilled china-mender.
Meanwhile, after sending through her veil the circular glance which she always shot about her at that particular corner, she had begun to walk up Broadway. She walked well—fast, but not too fast; easily, assuredly, with the air of a woman who knows that she has a good figure, and expects rather than fears to be identified by it. ”