House of Mirth (Barnes & Noble Classics - Edith Wharton [90]
Selden and Lily stood still, accepting the unreality of the scene as a part of their own dream-like sensations. It would not have surprised them to feel a summer breeze on their faces, or to see the lights among the boughs reduplicated in the arch of a starry sky. The strange solitude about them was no stranger than the sweetness of being alone in it together.
At length Lily withdrew her hand, and moved away a step, so that her white-robed slimness was outlined against the dusk of the branches. Selden followed her, and still without speaking they seated themselves on a bench beside the fountain.
Suddenly she raised her eyes with the beseeching earnestness of a child. “You never speak to me—you think hard things of me,” she murmured.
“I think of you at any rate, God knows!” he said.
“Then why do we never see each other? Why can’t we be friends? You promised once to help me,” she continued in the same tone, as though the words were drawn from her unwillingly.
“The only way I can help you is by loving you,” Selden said in a low voice.
She made no reply, but her face turned to him with the soft motion of a flower. His own met it slowly, and their lips touched.
She drew back and rose from her seat. Selden rose too, and they stood facing each other. Suddenly she caught his hand and pressed it a moment against her cheek.
“Ah, love me, love me—but don’t tell me so!” she sighed with her eyes in his; and before he could speak she had turned and slipped through the arch of boughs, disappearing in the brightness of the room beyond.
Selden stood where she had left him. He knew too well the transiency of exquisite moments to attempt to follow her; but presently he reentered the house and made his way through the deserted rooms to the door. A few sumptuously-cloaked ladies were already gathered in the marble vestibule, and in the coat-room he found Van Alstyne and Gus Trenor.
The former, at Selden’s approach, paused in the careful selection of a cigar from one of the silver boxes invitingly set out near the door.
“Hallo, Selden, going too? You’re an Epicureanbm like myself, I see: you don’t want to see all those goddesses gobbling terrapin. Gad, what a show of good-looking women; but not one of ‘em could touch that little cousin of mine. Talk of jewels—what’s a woman want with jewels when she’s got herself to show? The trouble is that all these fal-bals† they wear cover up their figures when they’ve got ’em. I never knew till tonight what an outline Lily has.”
“It’s not her fault if everybody don’t know it now,” growled Trenor, flushed with the struggle of getting into his fur-lined coat. “Damned bad taste, I call it—no, no cigar for me. You can’t tell what you’re smoking in one of these new houses—likely as not the chef buys the cigars. Stay for supper? Not if I know it! When people crowd their rooms so that you can’t get near any one you want to speak to, I’d as soon sup in the elevated at the rush hour. My wife was dead right to stay away: she says life’s too short to spend it in breaking in new people.”
13
LILY WOKE FROM HAPPY dreams to find two notes at her bedside.
One was from Mrs. Trenor, who announced that she was coming to town that afternoon for a flying visit, and hoped Miss Bart would be able to dine with her. The other was from Selden. He wrote briefly that an important case called him to Albany, whence he would be unable to return till the evening, and asked Lily to let him know at what hour on the following day she would see him.
Lily, leaning