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THE REEF
Summers world the unusual was regarded as either immoral
or ill-bred, and people with emotions were not visited. Sometimes, with a sense of groping in a topsy-turvy universe, Anna
had wondered why everybody about her seemed to ignore all
the passions and sensations which formed the stuff of great
poetry and memorable action. In a community composed entirely of people like her parents and her parents’ friends she
did not see how the magnifi cent things one read about could
ever have happened. She was sure that if anything of the kind
had occurred in her immediate circle her mother would have
consulted the family clergyman, and her father perhaps even
have rung up the police; and her sense of humour compelled
her to own that, in the given conditions, these precautions
might not have been unjustifi ed.
Little by little the conditions conquered her, and she
learned to regard the substance of life as a mere canvas for
the embroideries of poet and painter, and its little swept and
fenced and tended surface as its actual substance. It was in
the visioned region of action and emotion that her fullest hours were spent; but it hardly occurred to her that they
might be translated into experience, or connected with anything likely to happen to a young lady living in West Fiftyfi fth Street.
She perceived, indeed, that other girls, leading outwardly
the same life as herself, and seemingly unaware of her world of
hidden beauty, were yet possessed of some vital secret which
escaped her. There seemed to be a kind of freemasonry between them; they were wider awake than she, more alert, and
surer of their wants if not of their opinions. She supposed they
91
EDITH WHARTON
were “cleverer”, and accepted her inferiority good-humouredly, half aware, within herself, of a reserve of unused power
which the others gave no sign of possessing.
This partly consoled her for missing so much of what made
their “good time”; but the resulting sense of exclusion, of being somehow laughingly but fi rmly debarred from a share of
their privileges, threw her back on herself and deepened
the reserve which made envious mothers cite her as a model of
ladylike repression. Love, she told herself, would one day release her from this spell of unreality. She was persuaded that
the sublime passion was the key to the enigma; but it was diffi cult to relate her conception of love to the forms it wore in her
experience. Two or three of the girls she had envied for their
superior acquaintance with the arts of life had contracted, in
the course of time, what were variously described as “romantic” or “foolish” marriages; one even made a runaway match,
and languished for a while under a cloud of social reprobation. Here, then, was passion in action, romance converted to
reality; yet the heroines of these exploits returned from them
untransfi gured, and their husbands were as dull as ever when
one had to sit next to them at dinner.
Her own case, of course, would be different. Some day she
would fi nd the magic bridge between West Fifty-fi fth Street
and life; once or twice she had even fancied that the clue
was in her hand. The fi rst time was when she had met young
Darrow. She recalled even now the stir of the encounter. But
his passion swept over her like a wind that shakes the roof of
the forest without reaching its still glades or rippling its hidden pools. He was extraordinarily intelligent and agreeable,
92
THE REEF
and her heart beat faster when he was with her. He had a tall
fair easy presence and a mind in which the lights of irony
played pleasantly through the shades of feeling. She liked to
hear his voice almost as much as to listen to what he was saying, and to listen to what he was saying almost as much as to
feel that he was looking at her; but he wanted to kiss her, and
she wanted to talk to him about books and pictures, and have
him insinuate the eternal theme of their love into every subject they discussed.
Whenever they were apart a reaction set in. She wondered
how she could have been so cold, called herself a prude and
an idiot, questioned if any man could really care for her, and
got up in the dead of night to try new ways of doing her hair.
But as soon as he reappeared her head straightened itself on
her slim neck and she sped her little shafts of irony, or fl ew
her little kites of erudition, while hot and cold waves swept
over her, and the things she really wanted to say choked in her
throat and burned the palms of her hands.
Often she told herself that any silly girl who had waltzed
through a season would know better than she how to attract
a man and hold him; but when she said “a man” she did not
really mean George Darrow.
Then one day, at a dinner, she saw him sitting next to one of
the silly girls in question: the heroine of the elopement which
had shaken West Fifty-fi fth Street to its base. The young lady
had come back from her adventure no less silly than when she
went; and across the table the partner of her fl ight, a fat young
man with eye-glasses, sat stolidly eating terrapin and talking
about polo and investments.
93
EDITH WHARTON
The young woman was undoubtedly as silly as ever; yet after watching her for a few minutes Miss Summers perceived
that she had somehow grown luminous, perilous, obscurely
menacing to nice girls and the young men they intended eventually to accept. Suddenly, at the sight, a rage of possessorship
awoke in her. She must save Darrow, assert her right to him at
any price. Pride and reticence went down in a hurricane of jealousy. She heard him laugh, and there was something new in
his laugh . . . She watched him talking, talking . . . He sat slightly
sideways, a faint smile beneath his lids, lowering his voice as he
lowered it when he talked to her. She caught the same infl ections, but his eyes were different. It would have offended her
once if he had looked at her like that. Now her one thought
was that none but she had a right to be so looked at. And that
girl of all others! What illusions could he have about a girl
who, hardly a year ago, had made a fool of herself over the fat
young man stolidly eating terrapin across the table? If that was
where romance and passion ended, it was better to take to district visiting or algebra!
All night she lay awake and wondered: “What was she
saying to him? How shall I learn to say such things?” and
she decided that her heart would tell her – that the next
time they were alone together the irresistible word would
spring to her lips. He came the next day, and they were alone,
and all she found was: “I didn’t know that you and Kitty
Mayne were such friends.”
He answered with indifference that he didn’t know it either, and in the reaction of relief she declared: “She’s certainly
ever so much prettier than she was . . . ”
94
THE REEF
“She’s rather good fun,” he admitted, as though he had not
noticed her other advantages; and suddenly Anna saw in his
eyes the look she had seen there the previous evening.
She felt as if he were leagues and leagues away from her.
All her hopes dissolved, and she was conscious of sitting rigidly, with high head and straight lips, while the irresistible
word fl ed with a last wing-beat into the golden mist of her
illusions . . .
She was still quivering with the pain and bewilderment of this adventure when Fraser Leath appeared. She met
him fi rst in Italy, where she was travelling with her parents;
and the following winter he came to New York. In Italy he
had seemed interesting: in New York he became remarkable. He seldom spoke of his life in Europe, and let drop
but the most incidental allusions to the friends, the tastes,
the pursuits which fi lled his cosmopolitan days; but in the atmosphere of West Fifty-fi fth Street he seemed the embodiment of a storied past. He presented Miss Summers with
a prettily-bound anthology of the old French poets and, when
she showed a discriminating pleasure in the gift, observed
with his grave smile: “I didn’t suppose I should fi nd any one
here who would feel about these things as I do.” On another
occasion he asked her acceptance of a half-effaced eighteenth
century pastel which he had surprisingly picked up in a New
York auction-room. “I know no one but you who would really appreciate it,” he explained.
He permitted himself no other comments, but these conveyed with suffi cient directness that he thought her worthy of
a different setting. That she should be so regarded by a man
95
EDITH WHARTON
living in an atmosphere of art and beauty, and esteeming them
the vital elements of life, made her feel for the fi rst time that
she was understood. Here was some one whose scale of values was the same as hers, and who thought her opinion worth
hearing on the very matters which they both considered of supreme importance. The discovery restored her self-confi dence,
and she revealed herself to Mr. Leath as she had never known
how to reveal herself to Darrow.
As the courtship progressed, and they grew more confi dential, her suitor surprised and delighted her by little explosions of revolutionary sentiment. He said: “Shall you mind,
I wonder, if I tell you that you live in a dread-fully conventional atmosphere?” and, seeing that she manifestly did not
mind: “Of course I shall say things now and then that will
horrify your dear delightful parents – I shall shock them awfully, I warn you.”
In confi rmation of this warning he permitted himself
an occasional playful fl ing at the regular church-going of Mr.
and Mrs. Summers, at the innocuous character of the literature in their library, and at their guileless appreciations in art.
He even ventured to banter Mrs. Summers on her refusal to
receive the irrepressible Kitty Mayne who, after a rapid passage with George Darrow, was now involved in another and
more fl agrant adventure.
“In Europe, you know, the husband is regarded as the only
judge in such matters. As long as he accepts the situation – ”
Mr. Leath explained to Anna, who took his view the more emphatically in order to convince herself that, personally, she
had none but the most tolerant sentiments toward the lady.
96
THE REEF
The subversiveness of Mr. Leath’s opinions was enhanced
by the distinction of his appearance and the reserve of his
manners. He was like the anarchist with a gardenia in his buttonhole who fi gures in the higher melodrama. Every word,
every allusion, every note of his agreeably-modulated voice,
gave Anna a glimpse of a society at once freer and fi ner, which
observed the traditional forms but had discarded the underlying prejudices; whereas the world she knew had discarded
many of the forms and kept almost all the prejudices.
In such an atmosphere as his an eager young woman, curious as to all the manifestations of life, yet instinctively desiring that they should come to her in terms of beauty and fi ne
feeling, must surely fi nd the largest scope for self-expression.
Study, travel, the contact of the world, the comradeship of
a polished and enlightened mind, would combine to enrich
her days and form her character; and it was only in the rare
moments when Mr. Leath’s symmetrical blond mask bent over
hers, and his kiss dropped on her like a cold smooth pebble,
that she questioned the completeness of the joys he offered.
There had been a time when the walls on which her gaze
now rested had shed a glare of irony on these early dreams. In
the fi rst years of her marriage the sober symmetry of Givre had
suggested only her husband’s neatly-balanced mind. It was
a mind, she soon learned, contentedly absorbed in formulating the conventions of the unconventional. West Fifty-fi fth
Street was no more conscientiously concerned than Givre
with the momentous question of “what people did”; it was only
the type of deed investigated that was different. Mr. Leath collected his social instances with the same seriousness and pa-
97
EDITH WHARTON
tience as his snuff-boxes. He exacted a rigid conformity to his
rules of non-conformity and his scepticism had the absolute
accent of a dogma. He even cherished certain exceptions to
his rules as the book-collector prizes a “defective” fi rst edition.
The Protestant church-going of Anna’s parents had provoked
his gentle sarcasm; but he prided himself on his mother’s devoutness, because Madame de Chantelle, in embracing her
second husband’s creed, had become part of a society which
still observes the outward rites of piety.
Anna, in fact, had discovered in her amiable and elegant
mother-in-law an unexpected embodiment of the West Fiftyfi fth Street ideal. Mrs. Summers and Madame de Chantelle,
however strongly they would have disagreed as to the authorized source of Christian dogma, would have found themselves
completely in accord on all the momentous minutiae of drawing-room conduct; yet Mr. Leath treated his mother’s foibles
with a respect which Anna’s experience of him forbade her to
attribute wholly to fi lial affection.
In the early days, when she was still questioning the Sphinx
instead of trying to fi nd an answer to it, she ventured to tax
her husband with his inconsistency.
“You say your mother won’t like it if I call on that amusing little woman who came here the other day, and was let in
by mistake; but Madame de Chantelle tells me she lives with
her husband, and when mother refused to visit Kitty Mayne
you said — ”
Mr. Leath’s smile arrested her. “My dear child, I don’t
pretend to apply the principles of logic to my poor mother’s
prejudices.”
98
THE REEF
“But if you admit that they ARE prejudices — ?”
“There are prejudices and prejudices. My mother, of
course, got hers from Monsieur de Chantelle, and they
seem to me as much in their place in this house as the potpourri in your hawthorn jar. They preserve a social tradition of which I should be sorry to lose the least perfume.
Of course I don’t expect you, just at fi rst, to feel the difference, to see the nuance. In the case of little Madame de Vireville, for instance: you point out that she’s still under her
husband’s roof. Very true; and if she were merely a Paris
acquaintance – especially if you had met her, as one still
might, in the RIGHT KIND of house in Paris – I should be
the last to object to your visiting her. But in the country it’s
different. Even the best provincial society is what you would
call narrow: I don’t deny it; and if some of our friends met
Madame de Vireville at Givre – well, it would produce a bad
impression. You’re inclined to ridicule such considerations,
but gradually you’ll come to see their importance; and meanwhile, do trust me when I ask you to be guided by my mother.
It is always well for a stranger in an old society to err a little on the side of what you call its prejudices but I should
rather describe as its traditions.”
After that she no longer tried to laugh or argue her husband
out of his convictions. They WERE convictions, and therefore
unassailable. Nor was any insincerity implied in the fact that
they sometimes seemed to coincide with hers. There were occasions when he really did look at things as she did; but for
reasons so different as to make the distance between them all
99
EDITH WHARTON
the greater. Life, to Mr. Leath, was like a walk through a carefully classifi ed museum, where, in moments of doubt, one had
only to look at the number and refer to one’s catalogue; to his
wife it was like groping about in a huge dark lumber-room
where the exploring ray of curiosity lit up now some shape of
breathing beauty and now a mummy’s grin.
In the fi rst bewilderment of her new state these discoveries
had had the effect of dropping another layer of gauze between
herself and reality. She seemed farther than ever removed
from the strong joys and pangs for which she felt herself made.
She did not adopt her husband’s views, but insensibly she began to live his life. She tried to throw a compensating ardour
into the secret excursions of her spirit, and thus the old vicious
distinction between romance and reality was re-established
for her, and she resigned herself again to the belief that “real
life” was neither real nor alive.
The birth of her little girl swept away this delusion. At last
she felt herself in contact with the actual business of living:
but even this impression was not enduring.
Everything but the irreducible crude fact of child-bearing
assumed, in the Leath household, the same ghostly tinge of
unreality. Her husband, at the time, was all that his own ideal of a husband required. He was attentive, and even suitably
moved: but as he sat by her bedside, and thoughtfully proffered to her the list of people who had “called to enquire”, she
looked fi rst at him, and then at the child between them, and
wondered at the blundering alchemy of Nature . . .
With the exception of the little girl herself, everything
connected with that time had grown curiously remote and un-
100
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