Chapters 7-8 Book II

How can you marry someone you know you will never love, just for financial security and as revenge to an enemy.  It seems that in the time of Wharton's The House of Mirth nearly all marriages were strictly business and strategic.  It reminds me so much of two of my favorite movies, Jane Austin's Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility.  The young women in both of these worried a great deal about marrying into money; how else were they to survive?  But, being the helpless romantic that she is, Miss Jane Austin ended up providing both groups of sisters with husbands they truly loved and cared about.  I have a strong feeling that won't be the case for Lily.  "As the wife of Rosedale -- the Rosedale she felt it in her power to create -- she would at least present an invulnerable front to her enemy" (Wharton, 205).  That doesn't sound like a passionate and promising start of a possible engagement.

How can Rosedale, after pretty much threatening Lily the entire book, just insult her by saying that marrying her would ruin everything he'd ever worked for?  And how is Lily supposed to use the letters against Bertha?  Her husband has already been shown that she in an unfaithful flirt.