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

She was realizing for the first time that a woman's dignity may cost more to keep up than her carriage; and that the maintenance of a moral attribute should be dependent on dollars and cents, made the world appear a more sordid place than she had conceived it.

"I am bad through and through want admiration, I want excitement, I want money—" yes, money!
That's my shame, Gerty—and it's known, it's said of me—it's what men think of me—If I said it all to him—told him the whole story—said plainly: "I've sunk lower than the lowest, for I've taken what they take, and not paid as they pay"—if I told him everything would he loathe me?

Everything about her was warm and soft and scented: even the stains of her grief became her as rain-drops do the beaten rose.

Lily might be incapable of marrying for money, but she was equally incapable of living without it.

But he would see clearer, breathe freer in her presence: she was at once the dead weight at his breast and the spar which should float them to safety.

Selden was in the state of impassioned self-absorption that the first surrender to love produces. His craving was for the companionship of one whose point of view should justify his own, who should confirm, by deliberate observation, the truth to which his intuitions had leaped.

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.

‘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.

The strange solitude about them was no stranger than the sweetness of being alone in it together.

Selden had heard Lily's beauty lightly remarked on, and hitherto the tone of the comments had imperceptibly coloured his view of her. But now it woke only a motion of indignant contempt. This was the world she lived in, these were the standards by which she was fated to be measured! Does one go to Caliban for a judgment on Miranda?