Edith Wharton
The Lamp of Psyche
About the print version
The Lamp of Psyche
Wharton, Edith
Scribner's Magazine
New York
1895
Note: Volume 18
Published: 1895
Wharton, Edith. "The Lamp of Psyche."
Scribner's Magazine 18 (Oct. 1895): 418-28.
I
DELIA CORBETT was too happy; her happiness frightened her. Not on
theological grounds, however; she was sure that people had a right to be happy;
but she was equally sure that it was a right seldom recognized by destiny. And
her happiness almost touched the confines of pain -- it bordered on that sharp
ecstasy which she had known, through one sleepless night after another, when
what had now become a reality had haunted her as an unattainable longing.
Delia Corbett was not in the habit of using what the French call gros mots in
the rendering of her own emotions; she took herself, as a rule, rather
flippantly, with a dash of contemptuous pity. But she felt that she had now
entered upon a phase of existence wherein it became her to pay herself an almost
reverential regard. Love had set his golden crown upon her forehead, and the awe
of the office allotted to her subdued her doubting heart. To her had been given
the one portion denied to all other women on earth, the immense, the
unapproachable privilege of becoming Laurence Corbett's wife.
Here she burst out laughing at the sound of her own thoughts, and rising from
her seat walked across the drawing-room and looked at herself in the mirror
above the mantel-piece. She was past thirty and had never been very pretty; but
she knew herself to be capable of loving her husband better and pleasing him
longer than any other woman in the world. She was not afraid of rivals; he and
she had seen each other's souls.
She turned away, smiling carelessly at her insignificant reflection, and went
back to her arm-chair near the balcony. The room in which she sat was very
beautiful; it pleased Corbett to make all his surroundings beautiful. It was the
drawing-room of his hotel in Paris, and the balcony near which his wife sat
overlooked a small bosky garden framed in ivied walls, with a mouldering
terra-cotta statue in the centre of its cup-shaped lawn. They had now been
married some two months, and, after travelling for several weeks, had both
desired to return to Paris; Corbett because he was really happier there than
elsewhere, Delia because she passionately longed to enter as a wife the house
where she had so often come and gone as a guest. How she used to find herself
dreaming in the midst of one of Corbett's delightful dinners (to which she and
her husband were continually being summoned) of a day when she might sit at the
same table, but facing its master, a day when no carriage should wait to whirl
her away from the brightly lit porte-cochere, and when, after the guests had
gone, he and she should be left alone in his library, and she might sit down
beside him and put her hand in his! The high-minded reader may infer from this
that I am presenting him, in the person of Delia Corbett, with a heroine whom he
would not like his wife to meet; but how many of us could face each other in the
calm consciousness of moral rectitude if our inmost desire were not hidden under
a convenient garb of lawful observance?
Delia Corbett, as Delia Benson, had been a very good wife to her first
husband; some people (Corbett among them) had even thought her laxly tolerant of
"poor Benson's" weaknesses. But then she knew her own; and it is admitted that
nothing goes so far toward making us blink the foibles of others as the wish to
have them extend a like mercy to ourselves. Not that Delia's foibles were of a
tangible nature; they belonged to the order which escapes analysis by the coarse
process of our social standards. Perhaps their very immateriality, the
consciousness that she could never be brought to book for them before any human tribunal, made her the more restive under their
weight; for she was of a nature to prefer buying her happiness to stealing it.
But her rising scruples were perpetually being allayed by some fresh
indiscretion of Benson's, to which she submitted with an undeviating amiability
which flung her into the opposite extreme of wondering if she didn't really
influence him to do wrong -- if she mightn't help him to do better. All these
psychological subtleties exerted, however, no influence over her conduct which,
since the day of her marriage, had been a model of delicate circumspection. It
was only necessary to look at Benson to see that the most eager reformer could
have done little to improve him. In the first place he must have encountered the
initial difficulty, most disheartening to reformers, of making his neophyte
distinguish between right and wrong. Undoubtedly it was within the measure even
of Benson's primitive perceptions to recognize that some actions were
permissible and others were not; but his sole means of classifying them was to
try both, and then deny having committed those of which his wife disapproved.
Delia had once owned a poodle who greatly desired to sleep on a white fur rug
which she destined to other uses. She and the poodle disagreed on the subject,
and the later, though submitting to her authority (when reinforced by a whip),
could never be made to see the justice of her demand, and consequently (as the
rug frequently revealed) never missed an opportunity of evading it when her back
was turned. Her husband often reminded her of the poodle, and, not having a whip
or its moral equivalent to control him with, she had long since resigned herself
to seeing him smudge the whiteness of her early illusions. The worst of it was
that her resignation was such a cheap virtue. She had to be perpetually rousing
herself to a sense of Benson's enormities; through the ever-lengthening
perspective of her indifference they looked as small as the details of a
landscape seen through the wrong end of a telescope. Now and then she tried to
remind herself that she had married him for love; but she was well aware that
the sentiment she had once entertained for him had nothing in common with the
state of mind which the words now represented to her; and this naturally
diminished the force of the argument. She had married him at nineteen, because
he had beautiful blue eyes and always wore a gardenia in his coat; really, as
far as she could remember, these considerations had been the determining factors
in her choice. Delia as a child (her parents were since dead) had been a
much-indulged daughter, with a liberal allowance of pocket-money, and permission
to spend it unquestioned and unadvised. Subsequently, she used sometimes to
look, in a critical humor, at the various articles which she had purchased in
her teens; futile chains and lockets, valueless china knick-knacks, and poor
engravings of sentimental pictures. These, as a chastisement to her taste, she
religiously preserved; and they often made her think of Benson. No one, she
could not but reflect, would have blamed her if, with the acquirement of a
fuller discrimination, she had thrown them all out of the window and replaced
them by some object of permanent merit; but she was expected not only to keep
Benson for life, but to conceal the fact that her taste had long since discarded
him.
It could hardly be expected that a woman who reasoned so dispassionately
about her mistakes should attempt to deceive herself about her preferences.
Corbett personified all those finer amenities of mind and manners which may
convert the mere act of being into a beneficent career; to Delia he seemed the
most admirable man she had ever met, and she would have thought it disloyal to
her best aspirations not to admire him. But she did not attempt to palliate her
warmer feeling under the mask of a plausible esteem; she knew that she loved
him, and scorned to disavow that also. So well, however, did she keep her secret
that Corbett himself never suspected it, until her husband's death freed her
from the obligation of concealment. Then, indeed, she gloried in its confession;
and after two years of widowhood, and more than two months of marriage, she was still under the spell of that moment of exquisite avowal.
She was reliving it now, as she often did in the rare hours which separated
her from her husband; when presently she heard his step on the stairs, and
started up with the blush of eighteen. As she walked across the room to meet him
she asked herself perversely (she was given ...
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