Just before Lily dies, she imagines herself (for the first and only time) as a mother and with a baby sleeping in her arms.

Lily’s nemesis Bertha Dorset makes a dramatic and domineering entrance on the train to Bellomont: “a pretty woman, who entered the train accompanied by a maid, a bull-terrier, and a footman struggling under a load of bags and dressing-cases. ‘Oh, Lily—are you going to Bellomont? Then you can’t let me have your seat, I suppose? But I must have a seat in this carriage—porter, you must find me a place at once. Can’t someone be put somewhere else? I want to be with my friends’” (p. 26). Bertha interrupts Lily’s courtship of the excessively rich and exceedingly shy Percy Gryce. Once at Bellomont and jealous of Selden’s romantic interest in her friend, Bertha detaches Gryce from Lily, who loses him to another woman.

Lily obtains a potentially lethal hold over Bertha when Mrs. Haffen, the charwoman in Selden’s building, sells her the incriminating love letters that Bertha has written to Selden in the course of their affair. The normally cautious and fastidious Selden quite un-characteristically (a minor flaw in the plot) had torn them up and thrown them into the wastebasket. The innocent “girl” is disillusioned and shocked by this evidence of their sexual passion, later echoed in the illicit relations between Bertha and Silverton, Carry Fisher and Gus Trenor, Nettie and the unnamed gentleman who seduced her.

The young Edith Wharton had been as innocent as Lily. Her mother, who insisted on approving all the novels Wharton read before she married, never explained the nature of sexual relations, which remained a mystery to Wharton until well after her wedding. Wharton’s astonishing pornographic passage—describing incestuous relations and found among her papers after her death—explicitly reveals the sexual feelings that lie beneath the surface of the novel but cannot be expressed. In the “Beatrice Palmato” fragment, the father caresses his daughter’s sexual parts:

As his hand stole higher she felt the secret bud of her body swelling, yearning, quivering hotly to burst into bloom. Ah, here was his subtle fore-finger pressing it, forcing its tight petals softly apart, and laying on their sensitive edges a circular touch so soft and yet so fiery that already lightnings of heat shot from that palpitating centre all over her surrendered body.24

The most crucial scene in The House of Mirth and the one that comes closest to overt sexuality is Lily’s tableau vivant during the party at Wellington Bry’s palatial residence. The mansion, well designed for a theatrical display, blurs—like the performance itself—the distinction between appearance and reality: “so rapidly-evoked was the whole mise-en-scène that one had to touch the marble columns to learn they were not of cardboard, to seat one’s self in one of the damask-and-gold arm-chairs to be sure it was not painted against the wall” (p. 141).

Lily’s sensational appearance as Mrs. Lloyd (1776) was the fin-de-siècle equivalent of modeling a bikini in a modern fashion show. In Sir Joshua Reynolds’s painting of the same name, the tall beauty is portrayed in profile, standing and leaning slightly forward, her left hand resting on a stone plinth and right hand carving her husband’s name on a tree. Her brown hair is piled high on her head; she wears a classical gown with a sash and low neckline, decorated by a pin, and blue sandals on her crossed feet. Though not quite dressed for a ramble in the woods, her body is as willowy as the increasingly slender trees in the background. A shaft of light-focusing on her belly, genitals, and thighs—seems to foreshadow the children she will bear. Carving a lover’s name on a tree was once a familiar poetic conceit. In As You Like It (act 3, scene 2), for example, Shakespeare wrote: “Run, run, Orlando, carve on every tree / The fair, the chaste, and unexpressive she.” Since the first “L” in “Lloyd” is rather faint, it looks as if Mrs. Lloyd is beginning to carve the word “LOVE”—the “unspoken word” in the last sentence of The House of Mirth.

Wharton offers a rapturous description of Lily posing as Mrs. Lloyd: “Her pale draperies, and the background of foliage against which she stood, served only to relieve the long dryad-like curves that swept upward from her poised foot to her lifted arm. The noble buoyancy of her attitude, its suggestion of soaring grace, revealed the touch of poetry in her beauty that Selden always felt in her presence” (p. 144). Lily’s appearance, which shows her as she appears to be rather than she really is, has seismic effects on all the men. It provokes Ned Van Alstyne’s crude remarks about her voluptuous figure, Trenor’s assault, George Dorset’s proposal, and (as word gets around) Rosedale’s offer of marriage. Later on, Lily rejects a tableau-like role as model at the milliner’s and perversely tries to earn her keep by sewing hats.

The spectacular setting and theatrical performance at the Brys’ was based on an actual event that took place a few years before The House of Mirth was published and was attended by August Belmont, a model for Gus Trenor. In The Robber Barons, Matthew Josephson wrote that Belmont’s gold armor reappears in the novel in a story from Roman history that Rosedale tells Lily.