Edith Wharton

“ I felt in her—poor fatuous idiot that I was!—that lack of objective imagination which had always seemed to me to account, at least in part, for many of the so-called heroic qualities in women. When their feelings are involved they simply can’t look ahead. Her unfaltering logic notwithstanding, I felt this about Paulina as I listened. She had a specious air of knowing where she was going, but she didn’t. She seemed the genius of logic and understanding, but the demon of illusion spoke through her lips.... ”

“ The best solution, of course, would have been to fall in love with another woman; but it was long before I could bring myself to wish that this might happen to me.... Then, at length, I suddenly and violently desired it; and as such impulses are seldom without some kind of imperfect issue I contrived, a year or two later, to work myself up into the wished-for state.... She was a woman in society, and with all the awe of that institution that Paulina lacked. Our relation was consequently one of those unavowed affairs in which triviality is the only alternative to tragedy. ”

“ The taunt, for a woman usually so sure of her aim, fell so short of the mark that its only effect was to increase my conviction of her helplessness. The very intensity of my longing for her made me tremble where she was fearless. I had to protect her first, and think of my own attitude afterward.
“She was too discerning not to see this too. Her face softened, grew inexpressibly appealing, and she dropped again into that chair you’re in, leaned forward, and looked up with her grave smile.
“‘You think I’m beside myself—raving? (You’re not thinking of yourself, I know.) ”

“ She knew (for hadn’t she often said it of others?) what is said of the woman who, by throwing in her lot with her lover’s, binds him to a lifelong duty which has the irksomeness without the dignity of marriage. Oh, she could talk on that side with the best of them: only she asked me to consider the other—the side of the man and woman who love each other deeply and completely enough to want their lives enlarged, and not diminished, by their love. ”

“ It came about through a sudden decision of Trant’s to start on a long tour with his wife. We had never foreseen that: he seemed rooted in his New York habits and convinced that the whole social and financial machinery of the metropolis would cease to function if he did not keep an eye on it through the columns of his morning paper, and pronounce judgment on it in the afternoon at his club. But something new had happened to him: he caught a cold, which was followed by a touch of pleurisy, and instantly he perceived the intense interest and importance which ill-health may add to life. ”

“ I know the instances you’re thinking of: the listless couples wearing out their lives in shabby watering places, and hanging on the favour of hotel acquaintances; or the proud quarrelling wretches shut up alone in a fine house because they’re too good for the only society they can get, and trying to cheat their boredom by squabbling with their tradesmen and spying on their servants. ”

“ A discerning doctor recommended travel in a warm climate; and suddenly, the morning paper, the afternoon club, Fifth Avenue, Wall Street, all the complex phenomena of the metropolis, faded into insignificance, and the rest of the terrestrial globe, from being a mere geographical hypothesis, useful in enabling one to determine the latitude of New York, acquired reality and magnitude as a factor in the convalescence of Mr. Philip Trant. ”

“ A woman like his wife couldn’t have asked a better foil; yet I’m sure she never consciously used his dullness to relieve her brilliancy. She may have felt that the case spoke for itself. But I believe her reserve was rather due to a lively sense of justice, and to the rare habit (you said she was rare) of looking at facts as they are, without any throwing of sentimental lime-lights. She knew Trant could no more help being Trant than she could help being herself—and there was an end of it. I’ve never known a woman who ‘made up’ so little mentally.... ”

“ And then sometimes one of these graven images moves and throws out live filaments toward us, and the line they make draws us across the world as the moon-track seems to draw a boat across the water.... ”

“ People shook their heads over the marriage, and divided, prematurely, into Philip’s partisans and hers: for no one thought it would work. And they were almost disappointed when, after all, it did. She and her wooden consort seemed to get on well enough. There was a ripple, at one time, over her friendship with young Jim Dalham, who was always with her during a summer at Newport and an autumn in Italy; then the talk died out, and she and Trant were seen together, as before, on terms of apparent good-fellowship. ”

“ There was one point I didn’t, of course, touch on; and that was the popular conviction (which I confess I shared) that when a man and a woman agree to defy the world together the man really sacrifices much more than the woman. I was not even conscious of thinking of this at the time, though it may have lurked somewhere in the shadow of my scruples for her; but she dragged it out into the daylight and held me face to face with it.
“‘Remember, I’m not attempting to lay down any general rule,’ she insisted; ‘I’m not theorizing about Man and Woman, I’m talking about you and me. ”

“ From the first my feeling for Paulina Trant seemed to me a grave business; but then the Enemy is given to producing that illusion. Many a man—I’m talking of the kind with imagination—has thought he was seeking a soul when all he wanted was a closer view of its tenement. ”

“ She never let her eyes stray or her smile drop; and at the proper moment I saw she was ready with the proper sentiment.
The party, like most of those that Mrs. Cumnor gathered about her, was not composed of exceptional beings. The people of the old vanished New York set were not exceptional: they were mostly cut on the same convenient and unobtrusive pattern; but they were often exceedingly “nice.” And this obsolete quality marked every look and gesture of the lady I was scrutinizing.
While these reflections were passing through my mind I was aware that Merrick’s eyes rested still on her. ”

“ Here, on the following Saturday afternoon I found him awaiting me in a pleasant setting of books and prints and faded parental furniture.
We dined late, and smoked and talked afterward in his book-walled study till the terrier on the hearth-rug stood up and yawned for bed. When we took the hint and moved toward the staircase I felt, not that I had found the old Merrick again, but that I was on his track, had come across traces of his passage here and there in the thick jungle that had grown up between us. But I had a feeling that when I finally came on the man himself he might be dead.... ”

“ We were alone again that evening, and after dinner, wishing to efface the impression of the afternoon, and above all to show that I wanted him to talk about himself, I reverted to his work. “You must need an outlet of that sort. When a man’s once had it in him, as you have—and when other things begin to dwindle—”
He laughed. “Your theory is that a man ought to be able to return to the Muse as he comes back to his wife after he’s ceased to interest other women?” ”

“ I said.
“Ah,” he exclaimed, “so am I. Resigned.” He switched the bare brambles by the roadside. “A man can’t serve two masters.”
“You mean business and literature?”
“No; I mean theory and instinct. The gray tree and the green. You’ve got to choose which fruit you’ll try; and you don’t know till afterward which of the two has the dead core.”
“How can anybody be sure that only one of them has?”
“I’m sure,” said Merrick sharply. ”

“ Now I have to think of all the tedious trifles I can pack the days with, because I’m afraid—I’m afraid—to hear the voice of the real me, down below, in the windowless underground hole where I keep her....
“‘Remember again, please, it’s not Woman, it’s Paulina Trant, I’m talking of. The woman in the next house may have all sorts of reasons—honest reasons—for staying there. There may be some one there who needs her badly: for whom the light would go out if she went. ”

“ She had been poor and fond of enjoyment, and she had married that pompous stick Philip Trant because she needed a home, and perhaps also because she wanted a little luxury. Queer how we sneer at women for wanting the thing that gives them half their attraction! ”

“ No doubt there are such cases; but I don’t recognize either of us in those dismal figures. Why, to do it would be to admit that our life, yours and mine, is in the people about us and not in ourselves; that we’re parasites and not self-sustaining creatures ”

“ The only possible consolation would have been to find in a life of business routine and social submission such moral compensations as may reward the citizen if they fail the man; but to attain to these I should have had to accept the old delusion that the social and the individual man are two. ”

“ I don’t know how else to describe my feeling that she wasn’t playing fair, that in coming to my house, in throwing herself at my head (I called things by their names) , she had perhaps not so much obeyed an irresistible impulse as deeply, deliberately reckoned on the dissolvent effect of her generosity, her rashness and her beauty....
“From the moment that this mean doubt raised its head in me I was once more the creature of all the conventional scruples: I was repeating, before the looking-glass of my self-consciousness, all the stereotyped gestures of the ‘man of honour.’... ”

“ It’s generally the weak heads that commit follies, when it’s the strong ones that ought to: and my point is that you and I are both strong enough to behave like fools if we want to....
“‘Take your own case first—because, in spite of the sentimentalists, it’s the man who stands to lose most. You’ll have to give up the Iron Works: which you don’t much care about—because it won’t be particularly agreeable for us to live in New York: which you don’t care much about either. ”

“ To abstain and refrain; and then see what we become, or what we don’t become, in the long run, and to draw our inferences. That’s the game that almost everybody about us is playing, I suppose; there’s hardly one of the dull people one meets at dinner who hasn’t had, just once, the chance of a berth on a ship that was off for the Happy Isles, and hasn’t refused it for fear of sticking on a sand-bank!
“‘I’m doing my best, you know,’ she continued, ‘to see the sequel as you see it, as you believe it’s your duty to me to see it. ”

“ How do I know what’s best for the woman in the next house? Very likely she’ll bolt when it would have been better for her to stay at home. And it’s the same with the man: he’ll probably do the wrong thing. ”

“ III
“The Muse?” (said Merrick, refilling my glass and stooping to pat the terrier as he went back to his chair) —“well, you’ve met the Muse in the little volume of sonnets you used to like; and you’ve met the woman too, and you used to like her; though you didn’t know her when you saw her the other evening....
“No, I won’t ask you how she struck you when you talked to her: I know. She struck you like that stuff I gave you to read last night. She’s conformed—I’ve conformed—the mills have caught us and ground us: ground us, oh, exceedingly small! ”

“ Cumnor.”
I looked across the broken groupings and saw a large glossy man with straw-coloured hair and a red face, whose shirt and shoes and complexion seemed all to have received a coat of the same expensive varnish.
As I looked there was a drop in the talk about us, and I heard Mr. Reardon pronounce in a big booming voice: “What I say is: what’s the good of disturbing things? Thank the Lord, I’m content with what I’ve got!”
“Is that her husband? What’s he like?”
“Oh, the best fellow in the world,” said Merrick, going. ”