The House of Mirth

Lily walks on until she rests on a bench, exhausted. Lily is troubled by the fact that the bottle of choral she uses to induce sleep at night is diminishing in power. She recalls the chemist’s warning against taking too much of the drug, yet she dreads another sleepless night. A young woman, Nettie Struther, passes by the bench and recognizes Lily. While helping Gerty’s charity for working girls, Lily provided the money to send Nettie to a sanitorium in the mountains when she had a lung illness. Nettie greatly admires Lily and was worried about not seeing Lily’s name in the newspapers for a long time. Now the previously frail Nettie is healthy and hopeful.

Nettie is concerned that Lily is sick. Nettie persuades Lily to come to her warm kitchen while she prepares supper for her baby. After being abandoned by a man, Nettie married George whom she had grown up with; she is thriving because of his love. Lily enjoys holding Nettie’s baby before promising to visit again.

Lily feels that the time with Nettie has done her good. In her own room, Lily decides to examine her remaining dresses, recalling the pleasant associations they evoked—she was “like some rare flower grown for exhibition, a flower from which every bud had been nipped except the crowning blossom of her beauty” (334). When Lily views the dress that she wore for the Bry tableaux, she recalls a fateful moment with Selden. She puts the clothing away in her trunk.

A business letter arrives from her aunt’s executors containing her legacy, a $10,000 check, paid earlier than expected. When Lily figures up her unpaid debts, she will barely have enough to live on for the next few months after settling her bills. In addition to her material impoverishment, Lily has a deeper sense of destitution, “the feeling of being something rootless and ephemeral” (336). She was raised without any place being dearer to her than another and without any inherited traditions from which to draw strength. For Lily, Nettie Struther grasped the central truth, building a life that “had the frail audacious permanence of a bird’s nest built on the edge of a cliff” (337). Two built the nest: Nettie’s husband had faith in her and that gave Nettie courage. Lily felt that Selden twice offered his faith in her, but the third trial was too difficult for him.

Afraid of the temptation of tolerating Gus’s debt, Lily writes the check to repay Gus before she goes to bed. She encloses the executors’ check in another envelope to her bank. When Lily wearily tries to sleep, her entire past is reenacting itself. She yearns for relief and increases the dose of the drug. Her unhappiness leaves and she senses the warmth of Nettie Struther’s child lying on her arm. Lily feels that there is a word she must tell Selden to make life clear between them, but sleep enfolds her.

Selden joyfully hastens to Lily’s boarding house at nine o’clock in the morning. The hour is early for a visit, but Selden needs to see Lily at once because he has found “the word” (342) he wants to say to her. He was unable to speak it the night before, but now he has “cut loose from the familiar shores of habit and launched himself on uncharted seas of emotion; all the old tests and measures were left behind, and his course was to be shaped by new stars” (342). Surprisingly, his cousin Gerty opens the boarding house door. Gerty exclaims in a strange voice when she sees Selden, asking how he could arrive so quickly. Selden notices fear on people’s faces and hears someone speak about the doctor returning at any minute. Gerty gently takes Selden’s hand and leads him up three flights of stairs to Lily’s room.

Lily is dead in her narrow bed. Gerty tells the shocked Selden that Lily was having trouble sleeping for a long time and that she must have mistakenly taken an overdose of the sedative, chloral. Selden feels that the real Lily is still there yet inaccessible to him behind an invisible barrier. Recognizing Selden’s love for Lily, Gerty tenderly leaves him alone with her, telling him that the doctor will return in a half hour to complete the formalities.

Although his impulse is to kneel next to Lily’s bed, Selden realizes that he must go through Lily’s effects. He finds two letters on her desk. One stamped, sealed letter is addressed to her bank. The other letter, not yet sealed, is addressed to Gus Trenor. The sight of the second letter’s address throws Selden back into doubts about Lily. Tempted to read the letter, Selden decides against it. When Selden opens Lily’s desk, he sees that Lily preserved the note Selden wrote to her. He realizes that his own cowardice caused him to flee from her when they might have come together. Selden is surprised to discover that Lily settled all her bills. In Lily’s checkbook, he finds that she received her aunt’s legacy, but that Lily used almost all of it in a check to Gus Trenor. Selden finally understands that Lily received money from Trenor. This debt was intolerable to her, and she freed herself from it as soon as possible, even though this action left her in poverty.

Selden comprehends that his detachment from the external influences that affected Lily made him more critical of her. They loved each other even if the moment passed before they could unite. Selden’s faith in Lily is still alive and he penitently kisses her, conveying the love that clarifies everything.