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

“‘Lily—can’t I help you?’ he exclaimed.
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.’”

“What, then, if the passion persisted, though the other motive had ceased to sustain it? She had never tried to please him—he had been drawn to her in spite of her manifest disdain. What if she now chose to exert the power which, even in its passive state, he had felt to strongly? What if she made him marry her for love, now that he had no other reason for marrying her?”

“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.”

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.

“‘Go up and welcome; but my wife is at Bellomont.’
But Lily had a flash of reassurance. ‘If she hadn’t come she would have sent me word—‘
‘She did; she telephoned me this afternoon to let you know.’
‘I received no message.’
‘I didn’t send any.’”
EWW GUS LEAVE HER ALONE PLEASE

“‘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.”