Edith Wharton

“ She would leave the house with her boy and Andora. It was a relief to feel a definite plan forming itself in her mind—something that her uprooted thoughts could fasten on. She would go away, of course; and meanwhile, in order not to see him, she would feign a headache, and remain in her room till after luncheon. Then she and Andora would pack a few things, and fly with the child while he was dawdling about up-stairs in the studio. When one's house fell, one fled from the ruins: nothing could be simpler, more inevitable. ”

“ Such feelings, however, were not communicable, even had one desired to express them: they were no more to be distinguished from the sense of life itself than bees from the lime-blossoms in which they murmur.
“Oh, do look at him, Lizzie! He's found out how to open the bag!”
Lizzie lifted her head to smile a moment at her son, who sat throned on a heap of studio rubbish, with Andora before him on adoring knees. She thought vaguely, “Poor Andora!” ”

“ All that was only two weeks ago, and here she was, as happy as a lark, mounting the hill to his door in the spring sunshine. So weak a heart did not deserve such a radiant fate; and Lizzie said to herself that she would never again distrust her star. ”

“ He should see that she had courage and gaiety to face their coming separation, and yet give herself meanwhile to this completer nearness; but she waited, as always, for him to strike the opening note.
Looking back at it later, she wondered at the mild suavity of the hour. Her heart was unversed in happiness, but he had found the tone to lull her apprehensions, and make her trust her fate for any golden wonder. Deepest of all, he gave her the sense of something tacit and confirmed between them, as if his tenderness were a habit of the heart hardly needing the support of outward proof. ”

“ Lizzie looked and listened, not unhopeful of the miracle.
“I never saw anything like the way these Frenchmen stare! Doesn't it make you nervous, Lizzie?” Mrs. Mears broke out suddenly, ruffling her feather boa about an outraged bosom. Mrs. Mears was still in that stage of development when her countrywomen taste to the full the peril of being exposed to the gaze of the licentious Gaul.
Lizzie roused herself from the contemplation of Mr. Benn's round baby cheeks and the square blue jaw resting on his perpendicular collar. “Is some one staring at me?” she asked. ”

“ Lizzie herself, on the day in question, was engaged in a more arduous task than the study of the morning's news. She had never unlearned the habit of orderly activity, and the trait she least understood in her husband's character was his way of letting the loose ends of life hang as they would. She had been disposed at first to ascribe this to the chronic incoherence of his first ménage; but now she knew that, though he basked under the rule of her beneficent hand, he would never feel any active impulse to further its work. ”

“ And then, taking her hands, and looking up from them into her happy, dizzy eyes: “You don't know much about being in love, do you, Lizzie?” he laughingly ended.
It seemed easy enough to reject this imputation in a kiss; but she wondered afterward if she had not deserved it. Was she really cold and conventional, and did other women give more richly and recklessly? She found that it was possible to turn about every one of her reserves and delicacies so that they looked like selfish scruples and petty pruderies, and at this game she came in time to exhaust all the resources of casuistry. ”

“ Deering was not dazzled by money; his altered fortunes had tempted him to no excesses: he was simply too lazy to draw the cheque, as he had been too lazy to remember the debt it cancelled.
“No, dear! No!” Lizzie lifted the Chelsea figure higher. “Can't you find something for him, Andora, among that rubbish over there? Where's the beaded bag you had in your hand just now? I don't think it could hurt him to lick that.”
Miss Macy, bag in hand, rose from her knees, and stumbled through the slough of frayed garments and old studio properties. ”

“ Her life had given her a certain acquaintance with the arts of defence: girls in her situation were supposed to know them all, and to use them as occasion called. But Lizzie's very need of them had intensified her disdain. Just because she was so poor, and had always, materially, so to count her change and calculate her margin, she would at least know the joy of emotional prodigality, would give her heart as recklessly as the rich their millions. ”

“ Clopin's Pension Suisse at Passy, and if one has pretty brown hair and eyes that reach out trustfully to other eyes—one does not, under these common but defenceless conditions, arrive at the age of twenty-five without being now and then kissed—waylaid once by a noisy student between two doors, surprised once by one's grey-bearded professor as one bent over the “theme” he was correcting—but these episodes, if they tarnish the surface, do not reach the heart: it is not the kiss endured, but the kiss returned, that lives. And Lizzie West's first kiss was for Vincent Deering. ”

“ Every nerve in her clamoured for her lost happiness, angrily, unreasonably, as the boy had clamoured for his bag! It was horrible to know too much; there was always blood in the foundations. Parents “kept things” from children—protected them from all the dark secrets of pain and evil. And was any life livable unless it were thus protected? Could any one look in the Medusa's face and live?
But why should she leave the house, since it was hers? Here, with her boy and Andora, she could still make for herself the semblance of a life. It was Deering who would have to go ”

“ Andora surveyed her dramatically. “Doesn't it make you utterly miserable to think that some woman may have made it for him?”
Lizzie, bowed in anxious scrutiny above the shirts, broke into a laugh. “Really, Andora, really! Six, seven, nine; no, there isn't even a dozen. There isn't a whole dozen of anything. I don't see how men live alone!” ”

“ Lizzie sat silent, spell-bound, as she listened, by the sudden evocation of Mr. Jackson Benn. He stood there again, between herself and Deering, perpendicular and reproachful, but less solid and sharply outlined than before, with a look in his small hard eyes that desperately wailed for re-embodiment.
Deering was continuing his farewell speech. “You're rich now, you're free. You will marry.” ”

“ III That they must see each other again before his departure, in some place less exposed than their usual haunts, was as clear to Lizzie as it appeared to be to Deering. His expressing the wish seemed, indeed, the sweetest testimony to the quality of his feeling, since, in the first weeks of the most perfunctory widowerhood, a man of his stamp is presumed to abstain from light adventures. If, then, at such a moment, he wished so much to be quietly and gravely with her, it could be only for reasons she did not call by name, but of which she felt the sacred tremor in her heart ”

“ Andora Macy had wailed in the first days of her friend's transfigured fortune, when Lizzie West had waked one morning to find herself among the heirs of an ancient miserly cousin whose testamentary dispositions had formed, since her earliest childhood, the subject of pleasantry and conjecture in her own improvident family. Old Hezron Mears had never given any sign of life to the luckless Wests ”

“ Lizzie had noted all this in Juliet's case, but had taken for granted that her own was different; that she formed, for Deering, the exception which every woman secretly supposes herself to form in the experience of the man she loves. ”

“ Jackson Benn, with shoulders preternaturally squared by the cut of his tight black coat, and a tall shiny collar sustaining his baby cheeks and hard blue chin. Then the vision faded as Deering began to speak.
“Three years,” he repeated, musingly. “I've so often wondered what they'd brought you.”
She lifted her head with a quick blush, and the terrified wish that he should not—at the cost of all his notions of correctness—lapse into the blunder of becoming “personal.” ”

“ But even as the impulse rose, it was stayed by another sensation. Once again, as so often in the past, she became aware of a fact which, in his absence, she always failed to reckon with—the fact of the deep irreducible difference between his image in her mind and his actual self, the mysterious alteration in her judgment produced by the inflections of his voice, the look of his eyes, the whole complex pressure of his personality. ”

“ Now they had been tossed down helter-skelter among the rubbish there on the floor, and had themselves turned to rubbish like the rest. Yes, there lay her life at her feet, among all that tarnished trash.
She picked up her letters, ten in all, and examined the flaps of the envelops. Not one had been opened—not one. As she looked, every word she had written fluttered to life, and every feeling prompting it sent a tremor through her. ”

“ If little Juliet was as she was, it was because of the mother up-stairs—the mother who had given her child her frivolous impulses, and grudged her the care that might have corrected them. The case so obviously revolved in its own vicious circle that when Mr. Deering had murmured, “Of course if my wife were not an invalid,” they both turned with a simultaneous spring to the flagrant “bad example” of Céleste and Suzanne, fastening on that with a mutual insistence that ended in his crying out, “All the more, then, how can you leave her to them?”
“But if I do her no good?” Lizzie wailed ”

“ As she spoke, she suddenly recalled the day when, in Mme. Clopin's pension, she had addressed a similar behest to Andora Macy.
Andora had lifted a look of startled conjecture. “Why, this one's never been opened! Do you suppose that awful woman could have kept it from him?”
Lizzie laughed. Andora's imaginings were really puerile. “What awful woman? His landlady? Don't be such a goose, Andora. ”

“ Even the experienced waiter ushering them into an upper room of the quiet restaurant on the Seine could hardly have supposed their quest for seclusion to be based on sentimental motive, so soberly did Deering give his orders, while his companion sat small and grave at his side. She did not, indeed, mean to let her private pang obscure their hour together: she was already learning that Deering shrank from sadness. ”

“ If you let him have it too quickly, he won't care for it. He's just like any man, I think.”
Andora slowly lowered the shining bag till the heir of the Deerings closed his masterful fist upon it. “There—my Chelsea's safe!” Lizzie smiled, setting her boy on the floor, and watching him stagger away with his booty.
Andora stood beside her, watching too. “Have you any idea where that bag came from, Lizzie?”
Mrs. Deering, bent above a pile of discollared shirts, shook an inattentive head. “I never saw such wicked washing! There isn't one that's fit to mend. The bag? No; I've not the least idea.” ”

“ Lizzie's adieux to Deering had been made on a rainy afternoon in the damp corridors of the Aquarium at the Trocadéro. She could not receive him at her own pension. That a teacher should be visited by the father of a pupil, especially when that father was still, as Madame Clopin said, si bien, was against that lady's austere Helvetian code. From Deering's first tentative hint of another solution Lizzie had recoiled in a wild unreasoned flurry of all her scruples, he took her “No, no, no!” ”

“ The sooner we get it over the better.”
She followed Lizzie, who without answering her had turned mechanically back to the window. As they stood there, the gate moved again, and Deering entered the garden.
“There he is now!” Lizzie felt Andora's fervent clutch upon her arm. “Where are the letters? I will go down at once. You allow me to speak for you? You trust my woman's heart? Oh, believe me, darling,” Miss Macy panted, “I shall know just what to say to him!” ”

“ It was extraordinary and unbelievable that any one so naturally eminent and exceptional should have been subject to the same vulgar necessities that governed her own life, should have known poverty and obscurity and indifference. ”

“ Benn, perhaps aware that his situation demanded a more punctilious attitude, sternly revolved upon the parapet of his high collar in the direction of Mrs. Mears's glance.
“What, that fellow all alone over there? Why, he's not French; he's an American,” he then proclaimed with a perceptible relaxing of the facial muscles. ”