University of Virginia Library

WOMEN AND BUSINESS

Mrs. Wharton's The House of Mirth is a splendid study of social conditions; but, as the reviewers have pointed out, it leaves us somewhat cold as to the fortunes of Lily Bart (very largely, I conceive, owing to the extreme unpleasantness of her name), and hence we shall not be shocking its readers too much if we discuss in cold blood certain financial matters which come up near the end of the book.

It will be remembered that Lily Bart's troubles are largely due to a phenomenal ignorance of money matters—so profound that she thinks that once a man is a member of the Stock Exchange he can take possession of the modest capital of any one of his acquaintances and with no trouble at all cause it to produce a delightfully large income. What I wish to call attention to here is that Lily Bart's creator (though, as an extremely successful author, if nothing more, she must have had wide financial experiences) is herself apparently less familiar with money matters than one might have a right to expect.

The day before her tragic end Lily Bart receives a cheque for ten thousand dollars as her share of her aunt's estate, and after a good deal of hesitation she

decides to use the greater part of this money in relieving herself of her indebtedness to her over-generous speculating friend. At the moment when this resolution was finally arrived at we are told that she «reached out suddenly, and drawing the cheque from her writing desk, enclosed it in an envelope, which she addressed to her bank. She then wrote out a cheque for Trenor, and placing it, without an accompanying word, in an envelope inscribed with his name, laid the two letters side by side on her desk.» Now, Lily Bart has here overlooked the fact that in order to make this a valid transaction it was necessary that the cheque should have been first endorsed to the bank; and as her creator does not call attention to this oversight, the inference is plain that to her also the situation had failed to present itself with sufficient vividness.

There is another element of the scene which goes to show financial inadvertence on the part of the writer. At this same time we are told that «a careful examination of her cheque-book, and of the unpaid bills in her desk, showed that when the latter had been settled she would have barely enough,» etc. The next morning, after the tragic death of Lily Bart, it falls to Lawrence Selden to be the first to look through the contents of her desk. «He opened the cheque-book and saw that the very night before a cheque of ten thousand dollars . . . had been entered in it. . . . But turning another page or two, he discovered with astonishment that in spite of this recent accession of funds the balance had already declined to a few dollars. A rapid glance at the stubs of the last cheques, all of which bore the date of the previous day, showed that between four and five hundred dollars of the legacy had been spent in the settlement of bills, while the remaining thousands were comprehended in one cheque, made out at the same time to Charles Augustus Trenor.» We have just been told, also, that, «to his surprise, he found that all the bills were receipted; there was not an unpaid account among them.» Now, this happened at nine o'clock in the morning, and it must have been already very late in the preceding evening when the cheque for the ten thousand dollars, contained in a belated letter, had been delivered to Lily; for it was «long after seven o'clock» when she returned home, and since then she had dressed for dinner, dined, «examined systematically the contents of her drawers and cupboard,» drawn out her remaining fine dresses from a trunk, allowed them to revive recollections of happier days, and then «put them back one by one.» The question that troubles me here is this: How did these bills, unpaid late the night before, come to be receipted early the next morning? Through the simple writing of the cheques? The ordinary way of securing receipted bills is to enclose the bills with the cheques by which they are to be paid, and to receive them back receipted, at best by return of mail. Can it be that Lily Bart, in a moment of inadvertence, receipted her bills herself instead of sending them to her creditors for their signatures?

Most readers, I take it, must have thought that Lily Bart's ignorance of business matters, on the part of so astute a person, accustomed to shifting for herself from her earliest years, is much overdrawn in the book; but if her creator, one of the acutest minds of the time in the construction of a story and in the psychological development of a character, can make mistakes like these in the plainest of every-day business transactions, it is possible that the situation among women in general is worse than one had thought. Certain it is that fathers who do not see to it that their daughters are thoroughly trained in the proper conduct of ordinary matters of business are preparing for them the possibility—as in the case of Lily Bart—of ruined lives, or at least of a very dangerous helplessness.