Edith Wharton

“ Mrs. Linton trailed her Doucet draperies up and down the garden with the same challenging air, while her husband, smoking innumerable cigarettes, dragged himself dejectedly in her wake; but neither of them, after the first encounter with Lady Susan, made any attempt to extend their acquaintance. They simply ignored their ignorers. As Miss Pinsent resentfully observed, they behaved exactly as though the hotel were empty. ”

“ You will help me, dear?"
Lydia, who had remained standing, looked away uncomfortably.
"If you mean by finding out what Lord Trevenna has told my husband, I'm afraid it's impossible."
"Why impossible?"
"Because I infer that is was told in confidence."
Mrs. Cope stared incredulously.
"Well, what of that? Your husband looks such a dear anyone can see he's awfully gone on you. What's to prevent your getting it out of him?"
Lydia flushed.
"I'm not a spy!" she exclaimed.
"A spy a spy? How dare you?" Mrs. Cope flamed out. "Oh, I don't mean that either! Don't be angry with me I'm so miserable." ”

“ The train rattled on and he groped for a third cigarette. Lydia remained silent.
"I haven't offended you?" he ventured at length, in the tone of a man who feels his way.
She shook her head with a sigh. "I thought you understood," she moaned. Their eyes met and she moved back to his side. ”

“ The one thing that mattered to me at that moment was my standing with Lady Susan!"
Gannett did not speak.
"And you you've felt it too!" she broke out accusingly. "You've enjoyed being with these people as much as I have; you've let the chaplain talk to you by the hour about The Reign of Law and Professor Drummond. When they asked you to hand the plate in church I was watching you you wanted to accept."
She stepped close, laying her hand on his arm.
"Do you know, I begin to see what marriage is for. It's to keep people away from each other. ”

“ Ainger says, one can't exactly tell them so."
"She's very handsome," Lydia ventured, with her eyes on the lady, who showed, under the dome of a vivid sunshade, the hourglass figure and superlative coloring of a Christmas chromo.
"That's the worst of it. She's too handsome."
"Well, after all, she can't help that."
"Other people manage to," said Miss Pinsent skeptically.
"But isn't it rather unfair of Lady Susan considering that nothing is known about them?"
"But my dear, that's the very thing that's against them. It's infinitely worse than any actual knowledge." ”

“ Tillotson's visiting list. It may be necessary that the world should be ruled by conventions but if we believed in them, why did we break through them? And if we don't believe in them, is it honest to take advantage of the protection they afford?"
Gannett hesitated. "One may believe in them or not; but as long as they do rule the world it is only by taking advantage of their protection that one can find a modus vivendi."
"Do outlaws need a modus vivendi?"
He looked at her hopelessly. Nothing is more perplexing to man than the mental process of a woman who reasons her emotions. ”

“ We neither of us believe in the abstract 'sacredness' of marriage; we both know that no ceremony is needed to consecrate our love for each other; what object can we have in marrying, except the secret fear of each that the other may escape, or the secret longing to work our way back graduallyoh, very gradually into the esteem of the people whose conventional morality we have always ridiculed and hated? ”

“ Tillotson's dinners."
He smiled slightly. "I didn't know that we ran away to found a new system of ethics. I supposed it was because we loved each other."
"Life is complex, of course; isn't it the very recognition of that fact that separates us from the people who see it tout d'une piece? If they are right, if marriage is sacred in itself and the individual must always be sacrificed to the family then there can be no real marriage between us, since our being together is a protest against the sacrifice of the individual to the family." ”

“ Lydia mentally agreed that, in the case of Mrs. Linton, it possibly might be.
"I wonder why they came here?" she mused.
"That's against them too. It's always a bad sign when loud people come to a quiet place. And they've brought van loads of boxes her maid told Mrs. Ainger's that they meant to stop indefinitely."
"And Lady Susan actually turned her back on her in the salon?"
"My dear, she said it was for our sakes; that makes it so unanswerable! But poor Grossart is in a way! ”

“ And the very fact that, after a decent interval, these same people would come and dine with us the women who would let me die in a gutter today because I am 'leading a life of sin doesn't that disgust you more than their turning their backs on us now? I can stand being cut by them, but I couldn't stand their coming to call and asking what I meant to do about visiting that unfortunate Mrs. So-and-so!"
She paused, and Gannett maintained a perplexed silence.
"You judge things too theoretically," he said at length, slowly. "Life is made up of compromises." ”

“ Miss Pinsent glanced across the lake and adjusted her auburn front.
"But of course I don't deny that the stand Lady Susan takes is not always easy to live up to for the rest of us, I mean. Monsieur Grossart, our good proprietor, finds it trying at times, I know he has said as much, privately, to Mrs. Ainger and me. After all, the poor man is not to blame for wanting to fill his hotel, is he? And Lady Susan is so difficult so very difficult about new people. ”

“ And you should have seen her when they started. She was radiant shaking hands with everybody waving her handkerchief from the deck 8212distributing bows and smiles like an empress. If ever a woman got what she wanted just in the nick of time that woman did. She'll be Lady Trevenna within a week, I'll wager."
"You think she has her divorce?"
"I'm sure of it. And she must have got it just after her talk with you."
Lydia was silent.
At length she said, with a kind of reluctance, "She was horribly angry when she left me. It wouldn't have taken long to tell Lady Susan Condit." ”

“ Would he approve of that? I know how very particular nice Americans are. I think your action might make a difference; it would certainly carry weight with Lady Susan."
"Dear Miss Pinsent, you flatter me!"
Lydia rose and gathered up her book and sunshade.
"Well, if you're asked for an opinion if Lady Susan asks you for one I think you ought to be prepared," Miss Pinsent admonished her as she moved away.
III
Lady Susan held her own. She ignored the Lintons, and her little family, as Miss Pinsent phrased it, followed suit. Even Mrs. Ainger agreed that it was obligatory. ”

“ If Lady Susan owed it to the others not to speak to the Lintons, the others clearly owed it to Lady Susan to back her up. It was generally found expedient, at the Hotel Bellosguardo, to adopt this form of reasoning. ”

“ Gannett, for a moment, made no reply. At length he said, avoiding her eye as carefully as she avoided his: "It might be different now; I can't tell, of course, till I try. A writer ought not be dependent on his milieu, it's a mistake to humor oneself in that way; and I thought that just at first you might prefer to be."
She faced him. "To be what?"
"Well quiet. I mean."
"What do you mean by 'at first'?" she interruped.
He paused again. "I mean after we are married."
She thrust up her chin and turned toward the window. "Thank you!" she tossed back at him.
"Lydia!" he exclaimed blankly ”

“ Her experience of smokers was limited (her husband had disapproved of the use of tobacco) but she knew from hearsay that men sometimes smoked to get away from things; that a cigar might be the masculine equivalent of darkened windows and a headache. Gannett, after a puff or two, returned to his review. ”

“ Gannett was intellectual, by the magazines you took in; but you know what I mean. Lady Susan is so very well, I won't say prejudiced, as Mrs. Ainger does but so prepared not to like new people, that her taking to you in that way was a surprise to us all, I confess."
Miss Pinsent sent a significant glance down the long laurustinus alley from the other end of which two people a lady and a gentleman were strolling toward them through the smiling neglect of the garden.
"In this case, of course, it's very different; that I'm willing to admit. Their looks are against them ”

“ Of course one acts as one can as one must, perhaps pulled by all sorts of invisible threads; but at least one needn't pretend, for social advantages, to subscribe to a creed that ignores the complexity of human motives that classifies people by arbitrary signs, and puts it in everybody's reach to be on Mrs. ”