Lucky’s Reviews > The House of Mirth > Status Update

Under the glitter of their opportunities she saw the poverty of their achievement.

Mr and Mrs Wetherall's circle was so large that God was included in their visiting-list.

'It was simply inhuman of Pragg to go off now,' Mrs Trenor declared, as her friend seated herself at the desk. 'She says her sister is going to have a baby—as if that were anything to having a house-party!'

She was fond of pictures and flowers, and of sentimental fiction, and she could not help thinking that the possession of such tastes ennobled her desire for wordly advantages. She would not indeed have cared to marry a man who was merely rich: she was secretly ashamed of her mother's crude passion for money.

Lily understood that beauty is only the raw material of conquest, and that to convert it into success other arts are required.

She remembered how her mother, after they had lost their money, used to say to her with a kind of fierce vindictiveness: 'But you'll get it all back you'll get it all back, with your face.'…The remembrance roused a whole train of association, and she lay in the darkness reconstructing the past out of which her present had grown.

The white oval of her face swam out waveringly from a background of shadows, the uncertain light blurring it like a haze; but the two lines about the mouth remained.

'It is only because I am tired and have such odious things to think about,' she kept repeating; and it seemed an added injustice that petty cares should leave a trace on the beauty which was her only defence against them.

She began to undress without ringing for her maid, whom she had sent to bed. She had been long enough in bondage to other people's pleasure to be considerate of those who depended on hers, and in her bitter moods it sometimes struck her that she and her maid were in the same position, except that the latter received her wages more regularly.

For a long time she had refused to play bridge. She knew she could not afford it. She had seen the danger exemplified in more than one of her associates. For in the last year she had found that her hostesses expected her to take a place at the card-table. It was one of the taxes she had to pay for their prolonged hospitality, and for the dresses and trinkets which occasionally replenished her insufficient wardrobe.

No; she was not made for mean and shabby surroundings, for the squalid compromises of poverty. Her whole being dilated in an atmosphere of luxury; it was the background she required, the only climate she could breathe in. But the luxury of others was not what she wanted.