The House of Mirth

Seeing your own dinner party through a guest's eyes, and wishing you hadn't.

That was the secret of his way of readjusting her vision. Lily, turning her eyes from him, found herself scanning her little world through his retina: it was as though the pink lamps had been shut off and the dusty daylight let in. She looked down the long table, studying its occupants one by one, from Gus Trenor, with his heavy carnivorous head sunk between his shoulders, as he preyed on a jellied plover, to his wife, at the opposite end of the long bank of orchids, suggestive, with her glaring good-looks, of a jeweller’s window lit by electricity. And between the two, what a long stretch of vacuity! How dreary and trivial these people were!

Some people dress for a life they never quite begin.

Mrs. Peniston was a small plump woman, with a colourless skin lined with trivial wrinkles. Her grey hair was arranged with precision, and her clothes looked excessively new and yet slightly old-fashioned. They were always black and tightly fitting, with an expensive glitter: she was the kind of woman who wore jet at breakfast. Lily had never seen her when she was not cuirassed in shining black, with small tight boots, and an air of being packed and ready to start; yet she never started.

The invoice that comes due after years of other people's hospitality.

“What things? Well, poverty, for one—and I don’t know any that’s more dreadful.” Lily turned away and sank with sudden weariness into the easy-chair near the tea-table. “You asked me just now if I could understand why Ned Silverton spent so much money. Of course I understand—he spends it on living with the rich. You think we live on the rich, rather than with them: and so we do, in a sense—but it’s a privilege we have to pay for! We eat their dinners, and drink their wine, and smoke their cigarettes, and use their carriages and their opera-boxes and their private cars—yes, but there’s a tax to pay on every one of those luxuries.