The House of Mirth, Book 1, Parts 13 and 14

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

When Lily awakes the next day, her focus towards Selden is still quite infatuated but now she is back to thinking as her rich friends do and blocking out her true feelings. She proposes to finally let him go once and for all the next day. However her current situation is given a rude awakening when she goes to visit Judy Trenor and instead meets Gus, in his house alone. In this situation, alone with a very irate Mr. Trenor, all subtitles are thrown out the window and Lily's usual adroit sense of diffusing the tension falls short. "But Trenor, with a promptness which did not escape her, had moved between herself and the door" (Wharton 116). Finally having her alone to himself, Mr. Trenor is very frank with Lily, basically informing her that he wants what he invested in, her. You would think that a smart, reasonable man such as Gus Trenor would have foreseen the folly in his actions producing the desired effect but,  by this point, he feels so dejected by Lily that it seems his main reason for the solitary meeting was to vex of his annoyance of her, putting it lightly. Still, the brief show of primitive anger from the massive man, leaves Lily feeling very alone as well as ashamed of herself. Wharton writes, "It was the loneliness that frightened her."

The next part in the book plays out Selden's day which is geared towards his perspective. It is interesting to enter back into Selden's point of view, mainly because the last you truly were involved in his thought processes was the very beginning of the book. The biggest development to note is that Selden now finds his entire mind inundated with thoughts of Lily. What I find the most interesting of this part in the book is when the narrator finds a new focus to fix attention to, Gerty Farish. At first the descriptions of Gerty's mood is kind of expected, an overall content and acceptance. However, we learn that Gerty is not as entirely simple and content as she seems. At one point, Wharton writes, "Such flashes of joy as Lily moved would have blinded Miss Farish, who was accustomed, in the way of happiness to such scant light as shone through the cracks of other people's lives" (Wharton 21). Her meaning is that Gerty is the kind of character who's own amusement and appeasement can come easily from the real luxuries of others. Well this originally static character becomes a much more dynamic person as we learn of her secret lust for Lawrence Selden. Not only this, but we witness to what great depths jealously can bring us when Gerty learns of Lily and Selden's secret relationship. Before this insight, Gerty would have sworn over that Lily was a misunderstood saint, now Wharton writes, "she lay face to face with the fact that she hated Lily Bart" (Wharton 132). However, when Gerty answers her door late at night to the sight of a sobbing, lost Lily Bart, her heart softens and she does what she can to console her old friend. Either this is the working of Gerty's charitable background coming to surface, or her bout of misery has ended swiftly.