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

She looked at him gently. 'Do you remember what you said to me once? That you could help me only by loving me? Well—you did love me for a moment; and it helped me. It has always helped me. But the moment is gone—it was I who let it go. And one must go on living. Goodbye.'

Once again, Lily had withdrawn from an ambiguous situation in time to save her self-respect, but too late for public vindication.

Lily was not of those to whom privation teaches the unimportance of what they have lost.

But she could not breathe long on the heights; there had been nothing in her training to develop any continuity of moral strength: what she craved, and really felt herself entitled to, was a situation in which the noblest attitude should also be the easiest.

Society did not tum away fom her, it simply drifted by, preoccupied and inattentive, letting her feel, to the fall measure of her humbled pride, how completely she had been the creature of its favour.

It was her exquisite inaccessibleness, the sense of distance she could convey without a hint of disdain, that made it most difficult for him to give her up.

And the power to make him so lay in her hand-lay there in a completeness he could not even remotely conjecture. Revenge and rehabilitation might be hers at a stroke—there was something dazzling in the completeness of the opportunity. She stood silent, gazing away from him down the autumnal stretch of the deserted lane. And suddenly fear possessed her—fear of herself, and of the terrible force of the temptation.

‘You asked me just now for the truth—well, the truth about any girl is that once she's talked about she's done for; and the more she explains her case the worse it looks.’

Gerty continued: 'The important thing is that you should clear yourself—should tell your friends the whole truth.'
'The whole truth?' Miss Bart laughed. 'What is truth? Where a woman is concerned, it's the story that's easiest to believe. In this case it's a great deal easier to believe Bertha Dorset's story than mine, because she has a big house and an opera box, and it's convenient to be on good terms with her.'

His real detachment from her had taken place where he saw her definitely divided from him by the crudeness of a choice. It was before him again in its completeness—the choice in which she was content to rest: in the stupid coscliness of the food and the showy dulness of the talk, in the freedom of speech which never arrived at wit and the freedom of act which never made for romance.