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

Selden please :(((

“‘A-hem—nothing of this, eh, Selden? As one of the family, I know I may count on you—appearances are deceptive—and Fifth Avenue is so imperfectly lighted—‘
‘Good night,’ said Selden, turning sharply down the side street without seeing the other’s extended hand.”
Fuck.

“‘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.”

“In the long moment before the curtain fell, he had time to feel the whole tragedy of her life. It was as though her beauty, thus detached from all that cheapened and vulgarized it, had held out suppliant hands to him from the world in which he and she had once met for a moment, and where he felt an overmastering longing to be with her again.”

“It is less mortifying to believe one’s self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness.”

“No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity; and the sense of being of importance among the insignificant was enough to restore to Miss Bart the gratifying consciousness of power.”

Oh, my dear Lily… this book will not be kind to you

“‘Why do you do this to me?’ she cried. ‘Why do you make the things I have chosen seem hateful to me, if you have nothing to give me instead?’
‘No, I have nothing to give you instead,’ he said, sitting up and turning so that he faced her. ‘If I had, it should be yours, you know.’”

“‘What a miserable future you foresee for me!’
‘Well—have you never foreseen it for yourself?’
The slow colour rose to her cheeks, not a blush of excitement but drawn from the deep wells of feeling; it was as if the effort of her spirit had produced it.
‘Often and often,’ she said. ‘But it looks so much darker when you show it to me!’”

“Selden had watched her manœuvres with lazy amusement. She had made no reply to his suggestion that they should spend the afternoon together, but as her plan unfolded itself he felt fairly confident of being included in it.”