Characters
Lily Bart	The twenty-nine-year-old protagonist, Lily distinguishes herself from all other members of New York’s high society through her grace, intelligence, and, ultimately, moral righteousness. Although Lily is desperate to reach a stable position of wealth and power, and occasionally uses manipulation to achieve her goals, she proves unwilling to sacrifice her moral principles to the vicious social dynamics of high society. Instead, she remains committed to repaying all her debts and refusing to use blackmail against Bertha Dorset, despite the fact that Bertha’s cruel attitude condemns Lily to poverty and social isolation. Lily undergoes a moral transformation over the course of the novel, as she realizes that money does not necessarily bring happiness and that poverty is not synonymous with moral degradation. She also comes to realize that love, particularly her relationship with Lawrence Selden, is what has encouraged her to be a good person.
Lawrence Selden	A young man who comes from an impoverished yet respectable family, Lawrence Selden impresses Lily Bart with his capacity to take part in some aspects of high society while keeping from becoming a prisoner to its rules and norms. Despite criticizing Lily for her interest in materialistic things, Lawrence is in love with her, admires her intelligence and social shrewdness, and believes that there is a deeper part of her personality that does not come across in social settings. This attitude reveals his aversion to cynicism and his willingness to believe in elevated, spiritual ideals. He also proves reliable in trying to help Lily and protecting her from her harmful environment as best he can.
Carry Fisher	A twice-divorced woman who is adept at making the men around her give her money, Carry Fisher is in charge of organizing other people’s parties and integrating them in high society, which she does for Mr. and Mrs. Wellington Bry as well as Mr. and Mrs. Gormer. Despite initially following the other upper-class women in rejecting Lily Bart after the young woman’s separation from Bertha Dorset, Carry later proves that she is in fact a loyal friend to Lily. She repents for her actions and actively helps Lily with both emotional and job-related support, proving that she is both honest and reliable. However, Carry’s loyalty ultimately proves limited, as she distances herself from Lily when she fears becoming involved in a social scandal, proving that her desire to remain part of high society is stronger than her friendship.
Bertha Dorset	A woman universally known for her manipulation and cruelty, Bertha Dorset feels threatened by Lily Bart and experiences no remorse at taking revenge on her, ultimately condemning her to poverty and social exclusion. Bertha’s lack of morals also comes to light through her various adulterous relationships, which demonstrate a complete lack of regard for her husband, George Dorset, whom she manipulates at will. However, Bertha’s utter lack of feeling or morality does not keep her from becoming one of the most powerful members of society, as her impressive wealth is sufficient to make everyone want to be on her side.
George Dorset	Bertha Dorset’s husband George is weak and easy to manipulate. Although he shows sincere affection and interest in Lily Bart, he ultimately proves extremely cowardly, failing to defend Lily from his wife’s lies. His self-obsession and lack of courage later become even more obvious when he begs Lily to marry him, proving that he lacks even the boldness to divorce Bertha on his own. He is also characterized by physical weakness, as he constantly suffers from indigestion, which he claims is the result of jealousy about his wife’s adulterous affairs.
Simon Rosedale	A rich man who experiences extraordinary success on the stock market, Simon Rosedale is initially rejected by the high society he wants to integrate into. However, his financial savvy and his fierce determination to succeed at social climbing ultimately bear fruit, as he becomes increasingly accepted in upper-class circles. In love with Lily Bart, he often surprises her with his refreshing straightforwardness, which is at odds with the conventions of New York’s high society. At the same time, he shows little regard for moral principles when he tries to convince Lily to use Bertha Dorset’s letters to regain social clout, highlighting society’s cruelty and hypocrisy as justification for unethical behavior such as blackmail. Although Lily is initially repulsed by him, she comes to admire his sincerity and loyalty, as he proves committed to helping her even when she is living a working-class life.
Judy Trenor	Characterized by a sincere enjoyment of her duties as a hostess and a concern for people to enjoy themselves at her parties, Judy Trenor initially appears to be one of Lily Bart’s most reliable friends, as she actively helps Lily in her effort to seduce Percy Gryce. However, Judy is also highly sensitive to financial matters, such as women borrowing money from her husband Gus Trenor, and later punishes Lily for doing so by rejecting her from her social circle. Judy is also a keen social observer, and admits that she only accepts Bertha Dorset’s friendship because she knows it is better to keep potentially dangerous people on one’s side instead of antagonizing them.
Gus Trenor	An unsophisticated, physically repulsive man, and Judy Trenor’s husband. Gus falls in love with Lily Bart after agreeing to help her invest her money on the stock market. Despite his traditional social upbringing, Gus proves socially incompetent, unable to grasp Lily’s subtle verbal cues and often giving way to aggressive excitement instead of self-restraint. A manipulative, violent, and vengeful aspect of his personality comes to light when he tries to force Lily to give him sexual favors in exchange for money.
Gerty Farish	Lawrence Selden’s cousin Gerty Farish is Lily Bart’s most devoted friend. Living in a working-class apartment on her own, Gerty demonstrates both a strong capacity for independence and a rejection of materialistic values. Despite having feelings for Selden, Gerty distinguishes herself through her self-sacrifice and compassion when she agrees to help Lily, although she initially blamed Lily for taking Selden away from her. Gerty also proves devoted to charitable causes and naively believes in other people’s goodness, sometimes to the point of not noticing their selfish motives.
Mrs. Bart	Lily Bart’s mother dies when Lily is in her early twenties. Mrs. Bart has a strong influence on Lily’s attitude toward life, as she convinces her daughter that she will succeed in becoming rich by using her beauty to find a rich husband. Mrs. Bart’s ideology and spending habits instill in Lily a conviction that she belongs to no other class than the upper class, that money brings happiness and moral worth, and that it is also an inherently unstable possession, meant to bring alternate feelings of elation and worry. However, Lily differs from her mother in a crucial respect: her aversion to marrying a rich man for the sake of money alone.
Julia Peniston	Lily Bart’s aunt, Mrs. Peniston is a rich social recluse who abides by conservative values. Although she showed a degree of compassion in taking Lily in after Mrs. Bart’s death, she is not involved in Lily’s personal life. She is less interested in helping her niece than scolding her on a moral level, blaming Lily for the rumors that exist about her. She later proves particularly cruel in choosing to disinherit Lily, thus leaving the young woman in a situation of poverty.
Jack Stepney	Lily Bart’s cousin, Jack Stepney proves a shrewd social observer and just as capable of social calculation as Lily when he foresees that Simon Rosedale will become an important member of high society. When Lily sees him with his future wife Gwen Van Osburgh, she realizes that he is in a similar situation as her, since he is marrying for money and is bound to live a life that will bore him.
Percy Gryce	An extremely rich man of conservative, puritan values, Percy Gryce is universally known to be boring. Although he is initially fascinated by Lily Bart and considers marrying her, he later demonstrates his utter fear of socially unacceptable behavior when he flees Bellomont after hearing a rumor that Lily has borrowed money from a man.
Grace Stepney	Mrs. Peniston’s niece and Lily Bart’s cousin, Miss Grace Stepney proves resentful and unforgiving. After blaming Lily for excluding her from a fancy dinner at Mrs. Peniston’s house, Grace nurtures a lifelong grudge against Lily and refuses to help her when the young woman finds herself penniless. She uses morality and social convention as an excuse to take revenge on Lily, convincing Mrs. Peniston of Lily’s immoral behavior and blaming Lily for leading a degraded life.
Louisa Bry	A rich woman intent on integrating high society, Mrs. Bry depends on Carry Fisher to serve as her social intermediary. Organizing lavish parties to attract public attention, she proves particularly demanding in wanting to join the most elevated circles in society. At the same time, her exaggeratedly aristocratic attitude alienates important members of society, such as the Duchess of Beltshire.
Mattie Gormer	Mattie Gormer belongs to a social circle below Wellington and Louisa Bry’s, and initially seems more interested in throwing exciting, relaxed parties than in social climbing, but she ultimately proves just as vulnerable as other members of society to ambition and manipulation. Despite her apparent affection for Lily Bart, Mattie does not hesitate to reject Lily after becoming friends with Bertha Dorset, proving just as unreliable and unfaithful as members of high society.
Mr. Ned Van Alstyne	Mattie Gormer belongs to a social circle below Wellington and Louisa Bry’s, and initially seems more interested in throwing exciting, relaxed parties than in social climbing, but she ultimately proves just as vulnerable as other members of society to ambition and manipulation. Despite her apparent affection for Lily Bart, Mattie does not hesitate to reject Lily after becoming friends with Bertha Dorset, proving just as unreliable and unfaithful as members of high society.
The Duchess of Beltshire	A member of English aristocracy, the Duchess of Beltshire is known for living a liberal, potentially immoral life of unrestrained pleasure. She appreciates Lily Bart’s presence and personality enormously and integrates the young woman… read analysis of The Duchess of Beltshire
Norma Hatch	A rich divorcée from the West, Mrs. Hatch lives at the Emporium Hotel, where she enjoys a lavish, disorganized life of easy pleasures. Though shunned by formal high society, she entertains many members of society informally. Lily Bart works for her as a social secretary but resigns as soon as she discovers that Norma Hatch is trying to marry Freddy Van Osburgh—an event that later turns into a social scandal, because of the stark difference in social importance between the two characters.
Mrs. Haffen (the char-woman)	The cleaning woman at the Benedick, where Lawrence Selden lives, and at Mrs. Peniston’s house. She initially adopts a defiant attitude toward Lily Bart when she sees her leaving the Benedick, seemingly assuming that Lily is one of Selden’s lovers, and later launches negotiations for Lily to buy Bertha Dorset’s letters, revealing both her bargaining skills and her financial difficulties.
Wellington Bry	Although Mr. Bry plays a less prominent social role than Mrs. Bry, members of high society such as Carry Fisher and the Duchess of Beltshire consider him funnier and more agreeable than his wife.
Ned Silverton	A young, naïve man who enjoys writing poetry and is addicted to gambling, Ned Silverton falls in love with Carry Fisher and Bertha Dorset, although he fails to understand how calculating these high-society women can be.
Nettie Struther	A woman whom Lily Bart once helped through Gerty Farish’s charity, Nettie Struther impresses Lily with her strength and determination. Having overcome illness and poverty, Nettie now lives a happy live with her family, which proves to Lily that low means and moral worth are far from incompatible.
Lord Hubert Dacey	A gentleman who takes part in the festivities at Monte Carlo, Lord Hubert Dacey seems genuinely interested in Lily Bart’s personality and well-being, as he comments to Lawrence Selden that the Duchess of Beltshire has a bad influence on the young woman.
Gwen Van Osburgh / Mrs. Stepney	Jack Stepney’s wife is a rich but boring member of the wealthy Van Osburgh family. Although she is not described at length, she is characterized by indifference and lack of compassion, as Lily fears that Gwen might refuse to take her in when Bertha kicks Lily off the Sabrina.
Evie Van Osburgh	Leading an equally monotone and wealthy life as Percy Gryce, Evie Van Osburgh ultimately becomes engaged to him. This angers Lily Bart, who feels that she should have been the one to marry Gryce.
Lady Cressida Raith	The Duchess of Beltshire’s sister is a rich, religiously conservative woman whom Judy Trenor fears might ruin her party at Bellomont.
Paul Morpeth	An artist who forms part of Sam and Mattie Gormer’s circle, he admires Lily Bart’s beauty and wants to paint her portrait. He is responsible for designing the tableaux vivants at Wellington and Louisa Bry’s party.
Mr. Dabham	A journalist at Monte Carlo, Mr. Dabham proves ruthless in his desire to spread rumors about the upper class’s relationships. In particular, he spreads the rumor that Lily Bart and George Dorset returned alone from Nice, which gives credibility to Bertha Dorset’s later lies about Lily’s relationship with George.
Freddy Van Osburgh	An innocent, young boy who recently graduated from college, Freddy Van Osburg seems in love with Norma Hatch, and unaware of the scandalous nature of his relationship with her. To keep Freddy from marrying the rich divorcée, members of high society send him away to Europe.
Melville Stancy	Norma Hatch’s lawyer, intent on scheming to make Norma marry Freddy Van Osburgh.
Miss Jane Silverton	Ned Silverton’s sister, who asks Gerty Farish for financial help after Ned ruins the family because of his gambling addiction.
Sam Gormer	Mattie Gormer’s husband.
Mme. Regina	The milliner for whom Lily Bart works. Mme. Regina is initially reluctant to hire Lily, who lacks crucial hat-making skills, but accepts to do so at Carry Fisher’s insistence. However, she later fires Lily because of the young woman’s frequent absences and incompetence.
Miss Haines	Lily Bart’s supervisor at Mme. Regina’s. She demonstrates resentment and cruelty toward Lily by mocking her for not being skilled at making hats.
Miss Kilroy	Lily Bart’s coworker at the milliner’s. She proves kind and compassionate to her, insisting that Miss Haines behaved in a cruel way toward her.

CONTENTS


BOOK ONE

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15

BOOK TWO

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14



BOOK ONE




Chapter 1



Selden paused in surprise. In the afternoon rush of the Grand
Central Station his eyes had been refreshed by the sight of Miss
Lily Bart.

It was a Monday in early September, and he was returning to his
work from a hurried dip into the country; but what was Miss Bart
doing in town at that season? If she had appeared to be catching a
train, he might have inferred that he had come on her in the act
of transition between one and another of the country houses which
disputed her presence after the close of the Newport season; but
her desultory air perplexed him. She stood apart from the crowd,
letting it drift by her to the platform or the street, and wearing
an air of irresolution which might, as he surmised, be the mask of
a very definite purpose. It struck him at once that she was waiting
for some one, but he hardly knew why the idea arrested him. There
was nothing new about Lily Bart, yet he could never see her without
a faint movement of interest: it was characteristic of her that she
always roused speculation, that her simplest acts seemed the result
of far-reaching intentions.

An impulse of curiosity made him turn out of his direct line to the
door, and stroll past her. He knew that if she did not wish to be
seen she would contrive to elude him; and it amused him to think of
putting her skill to the test.

“Mr. Selden—what good luck!”

Selden had never seen her more radiant. Her vivid head, relieved
against the dull tints of the crowd, made her more conspicuous than
in a ball-room, and under her dark hat and veil she regained the
girlish smoothness, the purity of tint, that she was beginning to
lose after eleven years of late hours and indefatigable dancing.
Was it really eleven years, Selden found himself wondering, and had
she indeed reached the nine-and-twentieth birthday with which her
rivals credited her?

“What luck!” she repeated. “How nice of you to come to my rescue!”

He responded joyfully that to do so was his mission in life, and
asked what form the rescue was to take.

“Oh, almost any—even to sitting on a bench and talking to me. One
sits out a cotillion—why not sit out a train? It isn’t a bit hotter
here than in Mrs. Van Osburgh’s conservatory—and some of the women
are not a bit uglier.”

She broke off, laughing, to explain that she had come up to town
from Tuxedo, on her way to the Gus Trenors’ at Bellomont, and
had missed the three-fifteen train to Rhinebeck.

“And there isn’t another till half-past five.” She consulted the
little jewelled watch among her laces. “Just two hours to wait. And
I don’t know what to do with myself. My maid came up this morning
to do some shopping for me, and was to go on to Bellomont at one
o’clock, and my aunt’s house is closed, and I don’t know a soul in
town.” She glanced plaintively about the station. “It IS hotter
than Mrs. Van Osburgh’s, after all. If you can spare the time, do
take me somewhere for a breath of air.”

He declared himself entirely at her disposal: the adventure struck
him as diverting. As a spectator, he had always enjoyed Lily Bart;
and his course lay so far out of her orbit that it amused him to
be drawn for a moment into the sudden intimacy which her proposal
implied.

“Shall we go over to Sherry’s for a cup of tea?”

She smiled assentingly, and then made a slight grimace.

“So many people come up to town on a Monday—one is sure to meet
a lot of bores. I’m as old as the hills, of course, and it ought not
to make any difference; but if I’M old enough, you’re not,” she
objected gaily. “I’m dying for tea—but isn’t there a quieter place?”

He answered her smile, which rested on him vividly. Her discretions
interested him almost as much as her imprudences: he was so sure
that both were part of the same carefully-elaborated plan. In
judging Miss Bart, he had always made use of the “argument from
design.”

“The resources of New York are rather meagre,” he said; “but I’ll
find a hansom first, and then we’ll invent something.” He led her
through the throng of returning holiday-makers, past sallow-faced
girls in preposterous hats, and flat-chested women struggling with
paper bundles and palm-leaf fans. Was it possible that she belonged
to the same race? The dinginess, the crudity of this average section
of womanhood made him feel how highly specialized she was.

A rapid shower had cooled the air, and clouds still hung refreshingly
over the moist street.

“How delicious! Let us walk a little,” she said as they emerged
from the station.

They turned into Madison Avenue and began to stroll northward.
As she moved beside him, with her long light step, Selden was
conscious of taking a luxurious pleasure in her nearness: in the
modelling of her little ear, the crisp upward wave of her hair—
was it ever so slightly brightened by art?—and the thick planting
of her straight black lashes. Everything about her was at once
vigorous and exquisite, at once strong and fine. He had a confused
sense that she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great
many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have
been sacrificed to produce her. He was aware that the qualities
distinguishing her from the herd of her sex were chiefly external:
as though a fine glaze of beauty and fastidiousness had been
applied to vulgar clay. Yet the analogy left him unsatisfied, for a
coarse texture will not take a high finish; and was it not possible
that the material was fine, but that circumstance had fashioned it
into a futile shape?

As he reached this point in his speculations the sun came out, and
her lifted parasol cut off his enjoyment. A moment or two later she
paused with a sigh.

“Oh, dear, I’m so hot and thirsty—and what a hideous place New York
is!” She looked despairingly up and down the dreary thoroughfare.
“Other cities put on their best clothes in summer, but New York
seems to sit in its shirtsleeves.” Her eyes wandered down one of
the side streets. “Someone has had the humanity to plant a few
trees over there. Let us go into the shade.”

“I am glad my street meets with your approval,” said Selden as they
turned the corner.

“Your street? Do you live here?”

She glanced with interest along the new brick and limestone
house-fronts, fantastically varied in obedience to the American
craving for novelty, but fresh and inviting with their awnings and
flower-boxes.

“Ah, yes—to be sure: THE BENEDICK. What a nice-looking building!
I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before.” She looked across at the
flat-house with its marble porch and pseudo-Georgian facade. “Which
are your windows? Those with the awnings down?”

“On the top floor—yes.”

“And that nice little balcony is yours? How cool it looks up there!”

He paused a moment. “Come up and see,” he suggested. “I can give
you a cup of tea in no time—and you won’t meet any bores.”

Her colour deepened—she still had the art of blushing at the right
time—but she took the suggestion as lightly as it was made.

“Why not? It’s too tempting—I’ll take the risk,” she declared.

“Oh, I’m not dangerous,” he said in the same key. In truth, he
had never liked her as well as at that moment. He knew she had
accepted without afterthought: he could never be a factor in her
calculations, and there was a surprise, a refreshment almost, in
the spontaneity of her consent.

On the threshold he paused a moment, feeling for his latchkey.

“There’s no one here; but I have a servant who is supposed to come
in the mornings, and it’s just possible he may have put out the
tea-things and provided some cake.”

He ushered her into a slip of a hall hung with old prints. She
noticed the letters and notes heaped on the table among his gloves
and sticks; then she found herself in a small library, dark but
cheerful, with its walls of books, a pleasantly faded Turkey rug,
a littered desk and, as he had foretold, a tea-tray on a low table
near the window. A breeze had sprung up, swaying inward the muslin
curtains, and bringing a fresh scent of mignonette and petunias
from the flower-box on the balcony.

Lily sank with a sigh into one of the shabby leather chairs.

“How delicious to have a place like this all to one’s self! What a
miserable thing it is to be a woman.” She leaned back in a luxury
of discontent.

Selden was rummaging in a cupboard for the cake.

“Even women,” he said, “have been known to enjoy the privileges of
a flat.”

“Oh, governesses—or widows. But not girls—not poor, miserable,
marriageable girls!”

“I even know a girl who lives in a flat.”

She sat up in surprise. “You do?”

“I do,” he assured her, emerging from the cupboard with the
sought-for cake.

“Oh, I know—you mean Gerty Farish.” She smiled a little unkindly.
“But I said MARRIAGEABLE—and besides, she has a horrid little
place, and no maid, and such queer things to eat. Her cook does the
washing and the food tastes of soap. I should hate that, you know.”

“You shouldn’t dine with her on wash-days,” said Selden, cutting
the cake.

They both laughed, and he knelt by the table to light the lamp
under the kettle, while she measured out the tea into a little
tea-pot of green glaze. As he watched her hand, polished as a
bit of old ivory, with its slender pink nails, and the sapphire
bracelet slipping over her wrist, he was struck with the irony
of suggesting to her such a life as his cousin Gertrude Farish
had chosen. She was so evidently the victim of the civilization
which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like
manacles chaining her to her fate.

She seemed to read his thought. “It was horrid of me to say that of
Gerty,” she said with charming compunction. “I forgot she was your
cousin. But we’re so different, you know: she likes being good,
and I like being happy. And besides, she is free and I am not. If
I were, I daresay I could manage to be happy even in her flat. It
must be pure bliss to arrange the furniture just as one likes, and
give all the horrors to the ash-man. If I could only do over my
aunt’s drawing-room I know I should be a better woman.”

“Is it so very bad?” he asked sympathetically.

She smiled at him across the tea-pot which she was holding up to be
filled.

“That shows how seldom you come there. Why don’t you come oftener?”

“When I do come, it’s not to look at Mrs. Peniston’s furniture.”

“Nonsense,” she said. “You don’t come at all—and yet we get on so
well when we meet.”

“Perhaps that’s the reason,” he answered promptly. “I’m afraid
I haven’t any cream, you know—shall you mind a slice of lemon
instead?”

“I shall like it better.” She waited while he cut the lemon and
dropped a thin disk into her cup. “But that is not the reason,” she
insisted.

“The reason for what?”

“For your never coming.” She leaned forward with a shade of
perplexity in her charming eyes. “I wish I knew—I wish I could make
you out. Of course I know there are men who don’t like me—one can
tell that at a glance. And there are others who are afraid of me:
they think I want to marry them.” She smiled up at him frankly.
“But I don’t think you dislike me—and you can’t possibly think I
want to marry you.”

“No—I absolve you of that,” he agreed.

“Well, then——?”

He had carried his cup to the fireplace, and stood leaning against
the chimney-piece and looking down on her with an air of indolent
amusement. The provocation in her eyes increased his amusement—he
had not supposed she would waste her powder on such small game; but
perhaps she was only keeping her hand in; or perhaps a girl of her
type had no conversation but of the personal kind. At any rate, she
was amazingly pretty, and he had asked her to tea and must live up
to his obligations.

“Well, then,” he said with a plunge, “perhaps THAT’S the reason.”

“What?”

“The fact that you don’t want to marry me. Perhaps I don’t regard
it as such a strong inducement to go and see you.” He felt a slight
shiver down his spine as he ventured this, but her laugh reassured
him.

“Dear Mr. Selden, that wasn’t worthy of you. It’s stupid of you to
make love to me, and it isn’t like you to be stupid.” She leaned
back, sipping her tea with an air so enchantingly judicial that,
if they had been in her aunt’s drawing-room, he might almost have
tried to disprove her deduction.

“Don’t you see,” she continued, “that there are men enough to say
pleasant things to me, and that what I want is a friend who won’t
be afraid to say disagreeable ones when I need them? Sometimes I
have fancied you might be that friend—I don’t know why, except that
you are neither a prig nor a bounder, and that I shouldn’t have
to pretend with you or be on my guard against you.” Her voice had
dropped to a note of seriousness, and she sat gazing up at him with
the troubled gravity of a child.

“You don’t know how much I need such a friend,” she said. “My aunt
is full of copy-book axioms, but they were all meant to apply to
conduct in the early fifties. I always feel that to live up to them
would include wearing book-muslin with gigot sleeves. And the other
women—my best friends—well, they use me or abuse me; but they don’t
care a straw what happens to me. I’ve been about too long—people
are getting tired of me; they are beginning to say I ought to marry.”

There was a moment’s pause, during which Selden meditated one or
two replies calculated to add a momentary zest to the situation;
but he rejected them in favour of the simple question: “Well, why
don’t you?”

She coloured and laughed. “Ah, I see you ARE a friend after all,
and that is one of the disagreeable things I was asking for.”

“It wasn’t meant to be disagreeable,” he returned amicably. “Isn’t
marriage your vocation? Isn’t it what you’re all brought up for?”

She sighed. “I suppose so. What else is there?”

“Exactly. And so why not take the plunge and have it over?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “You speak as if I ought to marry the
first man who came along.”

“I didn’t mean to imply that you are as hard put to it as that. But
there must be some one with the requisite qualifications.”

She shook her head wearily. “I threw away one or two good chances
when I first came out—I suppose every girl does; and you know I
am horribly poor—and very expensive. I must have a great deal of
money.”

Selden had turned to reach for a cigarette-box on the mantelpiece.

“What’s become of Dillworth?” he asked.

“Oh, his mother was frightened—she was afraid I should have all the
family jewels reset. And she wanted me to promise that I wouldn’t
do over the drawing-room.”

“The very thing you are marrying for!”

“Exactly. So she packed him off to India.”

“Hard luck—but you can do better than Dillworth.”

He offered the box, and she took out three or four cigarettes,
putting one between her lips and slipping the others into a little
gold case attached to her long pearl chain.

“Have I time? Just a whiff, then.” She leaned forward, holding the
tip of her cigarette to his. As she did so, he noted, with a purely
impersonal enjoyment, how evenly the black lashes were set in her
smooth white lids, and how the purplish shade beneath them melted
into the pure pallor of the cheek.

She began to saunter about the room, examining the bookshelves
between the puffs of her cigarette-smoke. Some of the volumes
had the ripe tints of good tooling and old morocco, and her eyes
lingered on them caressingly, not with the appreciation of the
expert, but with the pleasure in agreeable tones and textures that
was one of her inmost susceptibilities. Suddenly her expression
changed from desultory enjoyment to active conjecture, and she
turned to Selden with a question.

“You collect, don’t you—you know about first editions and things?”

“As much as a man may who has no money to spend. Now and then I
pick up something in the rubbish heap; and I go and look on at the
big sales.”

She had again addressed herself to the shelves, but her eyes now
swept them inattentively, and he saw that she was preoccupied with
a new idea.

“And Americana—do you collect Americana?”

Selden stared and laughed.

“No, that’s rather out of my line. I’m not really a collector, you
see; I simply like to have good editions of the books I am fond of.”

She made a slight grimace. “And Americana are horribly dull, I
suppose?”

“I should fancy so—except to the historian. But your real collector
values a thing for its rarity. I don’t suppose the buyers of
Americana sit up reading them all night—old Jefferson Gryce
certainly didn’t.”

She was listening with keen attention. “And yet they fetch fabulous
prices, don’t they? It seems so odd to want to pay a lot for an
ugly badly-printed book that one is never going to read! And I
suppose most of the owners of Americana are not historians either?”

“No; very few of the historians can afford to buy them. They have
to use those in the public libraries or in private collections. It
seems to be the mere rarity that attracts the average collector.”

He had seated himself on an arm of the chair near which she was
standing, and she continued to question him, asking which were the
rarest volumes, whether the Jefferson Gryce collection was really
considered the finest in the world, and what was the largest price
ever fetched by a single volume.

It was so pleasant to sit there looking up at her, as she lifted
now one book and then another from the shelves, fluttering the
pages between her fingers, while her drooping profile was outlined
against the warm background of old bindings, that he talked on
without pausing to wonder at her sudden interest in so unsuggestive
a subject. But he could never be long with her without trying to
find a reason for what she was doing, and as she replaced his
first edition of La Bruyere and turned away from the bookcases,
he began to ask himself what she had been driving at. Her next
question was not of a nature to enlighten him. She paused before
him with a smile which seemed at once designed to admit him to her
familiarity, and to remind him of the restrictions it imposed.

“Don’t you ever mind,” she asked suddenly, “not being rich enough
to buy all the books you want?”

He followed her glance about the room, with its worn furniture and
shabby walls.

“Don’t I just? Do you take me for a saint on a pillar?”

“And having to work—do you mind that?”

“Oh, the work itself is not so bad—I’m rather fond of the law.”

“No; but the being tied down: the routine—don’t you ever want to
get away, to see new places and people?”

“Horribly—especially when I see all my friends rushing to the
steamer.”

She drew a sympathetic breath. “But do you mind enough—to marry to
get out of it?”

Selden broke into a laugh. “God forbid!” he declared.

She rose with a sigh, tossing her cigarette into the grate.

“Ah, there’s the difference—a girl must, a man may if he chooses.”
She surveyed him critically. “Your coat’s a little shabby—but who
cares? It doesn’t keep people from asking you to dine. If I were
shabby no one would have me: a woman is asked out as much for
her clothes as for herself. The clothes are the background, the
frame, if you like: they don’t make success, but they are a part
of it. Who wants a dingy woman? We are expected to be pretty and
well-dressed till we drop—and if we can’t keep it up alone, we have
to go into partnership.”

Selden glanced at her with amusement: it was impossible, even with
her lovely eyes imploring him, to take a sentimental view of her
case.

“Ah, well, there must be plenty of capital on the look-out for
such an investment. Perhaps you’ll meet your fate tonight at the
Trenors’.”

She returned his look interrogatively.

“I thought you might be going there—oh, not in that capacity! But
there are to be a lot of your set—Gwen Van Osburgh, the Wetheralls,
Lady Cressida Raith—and the George Dorsets.”

She paused a moment before the last name, and shot a query through
her lashes; but he remained imperturbable.

“Mrs. Trenor asked me; but I can’t get away till the end of the
week; and those big parties bore me.”

“Ah, so they do me,” she exclaimed.

“Then why go?”

“It’s part of the business—you forget! And besides, if I didn’t, I
should be playing bezique with my aunt at Richfield Springs.”

“That’s almost as bad as marrying Dillworth,” he agreed, and they
both laughed for pure pleasure in their sudden intimacy.

She glanced at the clock.

“Dear me! I must be off. It’s after five.”

She paused before the mantelpiece, studying herself in the mirror
while she adjusted her veil. The attitude revealed the long slope
of her slender sides, which gave a kind of wild-wood grace to
her outline—as though she were a captured dryad subdued to the
conventions of the drawing-room; and Selden reflected that it was
the same streak of sylvan freedom in her nature that lent such
savour to her artificiality.

He followed her across the room to the entrance-hall; but on the
threshold she held out her hand with a gesture of leave-taking.

“It’s been delightful; and now you will have to return my visit.”

“But don’t you want me to see you to the station?”

“No; good bye here, please.”

She let her hand lie in his a moment, smiling up at him adorably.

“Good bye, then—and good luck at Bellomont!” he said, opening the
door for her.

On the landing she paused to look about her. There were a thousand
chances to one against her meeting anybody, but one could never
tell, and she always paid for her rare indiscretions by a violent
reaction of prudence. There was no one in sight, however, but a
char-woman who was scrubbing the stairs. Her own stout person and
its surrounding implements took up so much room that Lily, to pass
her, had to gather up her skirts and brush against the wall. As
she did so, the woman paused in her work and looked up curiously,
resting her clenched red fists on the wet cloth she had just drawn
from her pail. She had a broad sallow face, slightly pitted with
small-pox, and thin straw-coloured hair through which her scalp
shone unpleasantly.

“I beg your pardon,” said Lily, intending by her politeness to
convey a criticism of the other’s manner.

The woman, without answering, pushed her pail aside, and contin-
ued to stare as Miss Bart swept by with a murmur of silken linings.
Lily felt herself flushing under the look. What did the creature
suppose? Could one never do the simplest, the most harmless thing,
without subjecting one’s self to some odious conjecture? Half way
down the next flight, she smiled to think that a char-woman’s stare
should so perturb her. The poor thing was probably dazzled by such
an unwonted apparition. But WERE such apparitions unwonted on
Selden’s stairs? Miss Bart was not familiar with the moral code of
bachelors’ flat-houses, and her colour rose again as it occurred to
her that the woman’s persistent gaze implied a groping among past
associations. But she put aside the thought with a smile at her own
fears, and hastened downward, wondering if she should find a cab
short of Fifth Avenue.

Under the Georgian porch she paused again, scanning the street for
a hansom. None was in sight, but as she reached the sidewalk she
ran against a small glossy-looking man with a gardenia in his coat,
who raised his hat with a surprised exclamation.

“Miss Bart? Well—of all people! This IS luck,” he declared; and she
caught a twinkle of amused curiosity between his screwed-up lids.

“Oh, Mr. Rosedale—how are you?” she said, perceiving that the
irrepressible annoyance on her face was reflected in the sudden
intimacy of his smile.

Mr. Rosedale stood scanning her with interest and approval. He
was a plump rosy man of the blond Jewish type, with smart London
clothes fitting him like upholstery, and small sidelong eyes which
gave him the air of appraising people as if they were bric-a-brac.
He glanced up interrogatively at the porch of the Benedick.

“Been up to town for a little shopping, I suppose?” he said, in a
tone which had the familiarity of a touch.

Miss Bart shrank from it slightly, and then flung herself into
precipitate explanations.

“Yes—I came up to see my dress-maker. I am just on my way to catch
the train to the Trenors’.”

“Ah—your dress-maker; just so,” he said blandly. “I didn’t know
there were any dress-makers in the Benedick.”

“The Benedick?” She looked gently puzzled. “Is that the name of
this building?”

“Yes, that’s the name: I believe it’s an old word for bachelor,
isn’t it? I happen to own the building—that’s the way I know.” His
smile deepened as he added with increasing assurance: “But you must
let me take you to the station. The Trenors are at Bellomont, of
course? You’ve barely time to catch the five-forty. The dress-maker
kept you waiting, I suppose.”

Lily stiffened under the pleasantry.

“Oh, thanks,” she stammered; and at that moment her eye caught
a hansom drifting down Madison Avenue, and she hailed it with a
desperate gesture.

“You’re very kind; but I couldn’t think of troubling you,” she
said, extending her hand to Mr. Rosedale; and heedless of his
protestations, she sprang into the rescuing vehicle, and called out
a breathless order to the driver.



Chapter 2



In the hansom she leaned back with a sigh. Why must a girl pay so
dearly for her least escape from routine? Why could one never do
a natural thing without having to screen it behind a structure of
artifice? She had yielded to a passing impulse in going to Lawrence
Selden’s rooms, and it was so seldom that she could allow herself
the luxury of an impulse! This one, at any rate, was going to cost
her rather more than she could afford. She was vexed to see that,
in spite of so many years of vigilance, she had blundered twice
within five minutes. That stupid story about her dress-maker was
bad enough—it would have been so simple to tell Rosedale that she
had been taking tea with Selden! The mere statement of the fact
would have rendered it innocuous. But, after having let herself
be surprised in a falsehood, it was doubly stupid to snub the
witness of her discomfiture. If she had had the presence of mind to
let Rosedale drive her to the station, the concession might have
purchased his silence. He had his race’s accuracy in the appraisal
of values, and to be seen walking down the platform at the crowded
afternoon hour in the company of Miss Lily Bart would have been
money in his pocket, as he might himself have phrased it. He knew,
of course, that there would be a large house-party at Bellomont,
and the possibility of being taken for one of Mrs. Trenor’s guests
was doubtless included in his calculations. Mr. Rosedale was still
at a stage in his social ascent when it was of importance to
produce such impressions.

The provoking part was that Lily knew all this—knew how easy it
would have been to silence him on the spot, and how difficult it
might be to do so afterward. Mr. Simon Rosedale was a man who
made it his business to know everything about every one, whose
idea of showing himself to be at home in society was to display
an inconvenient familiarity with the habits of those with whom
he wished to be thought intimate. Lily was sure that within
twenty-four hours the story of her visiting her dress-maker at
the Benedick would be in active circulation among Mr. Rosedale’s
acquaintances. The worst of it was that she had always snubbed and
ignored him. On his first appearance—when her improvident cousin,
Jack Stepney, had obtained for him (in return for favours too
easily guessed) a card to one of the vast impersonal Van Osburgh
“crushes”—Rosedale, with that mixture of artistic sensibility and
business astuteness which characterizes his race, had instantly
gravitated toward Miss Bart. She understood his motives, for
her own course was guided by as nice calculations. Training and
experience had taught her to be hospitable to newcomers, since the
most unpromising might be useful later on, and there were plenty
of available OUBLIETTES to swallow them if they were not. But
some intuitive repugnance, getting the better of years of social
discipline, had made her push Mr. Rosedale into his OUBLIETTE
without a trial. He had left behind only the ripple of amusement
which his speedy despatch had caused among her friends; and though
later (to shift the metaphor) he reappeared lower down the stream,
it was only in fleeting glimpses, with long submergences between.

Hitherto Lily had been undisturbed by scruples. In her little set
Mr. Rosedale had been pronounced “impossible,” and Jack Step-
ney roundly snubbed for his attempt to pay his debts in dinner
invitations. Even Mrs. Trenor, whose taste for variety had led
her into some hazardous experiments, resisted Jack’s attempts to
disguise Mr. Rosedale as a novelty, and declared that he was the
same little Jew who had been served up and rejected at the social
board a dozen times within her memory; and while Judy Trenor was
obdurate there was small chance of Mr. Rosedale’s penetrating
beyond the outer limbo of the Van Osburgh crushes. Jack gave up the
contest with a laughing “You’ll see,” and, sticking manfully to his
guns, showed himself with Rosedale at the fashionable restaurants,
in company with the personally vivid if socially obscure ladies who
are available for such purposes. But the attempt had hitherto been
vain, and as Rosedale undoubtedly paid for the dinners, the laugh
remained with his debtor.

Mr. Rosedale, it will be seen, was thus far not a factor to be
feared—unless one put one’s self in his power. And this was
precisely what Miss Bart had done. Her clumsy fib had let him see
that she had something to conceal; and she was sure he had a score
to settle with her. Something in his smile told her he had not
forgotten. She turned from the thought with a little shiver, but
it hung on her all the way to the station, and dogged her down the
platform with the persistency of Mr. Rosedale himself.

She had just time to take her seat before the train started; but
having arranged herself in her corner with the instinctive feeling
for effect which never forsook her, she glanced about in the hope
of seeing some other member of the Trenors’ party. She wanted to
get away from herself, and conversation was the only means of
escape that she knew.

Her search was rewarded by the discovery of a very blond young
man with a soft reddish beard, who, at the other end of the carriage,
appeared to be dissembling himself behind an unfolded newspaper.
Lily’s eye brightened, and a faint smile relaxed the drawn lines
of her mouth. She had known that Mr. Percy Gryce was to be at
Bellomont, but she had not counted on the luck of having him to
herself in the train; and the fact banished all perturbing thoughts
of Mr. Rosedale. Perhaps, after all, the day was to end more
favourably than it had begun.

She began to cut the pages of a novel, tranquilly studying her
prey through downcast lashes while she organized a method of
attack. Something in his attitude of conscious absorption told
her that he was aware of her presence: no one had ever been quite
so engrossed in an evening paper! She guessed that he was too shy
to come up to her, and that she would have to devise some means
of approach which should not appear to be an advance on her part.
It amused her to think that any one as rich as Mr. Percy Gryce
should be shy; but she was gifted with treasures of indulgence for
such idiosyncrasies, and besides, his timidity might serve her
purpose better than too much assurance. She had the art of giving
self-confidence to the embarrassed, but she was not equally sure of
being able to embarrass the self-confident.

She waited till the train had emerged from the tunnel and was
racing between the ragged edges of the northern suburbs. Then,
as it lowered its speed near Yonkers, she rose from her seat and
drifted slowly down the carriage. As she passed Mr. Gryce, the
train gave a lurch, and he was aware of a slender hand gripping the
back of his chair. He rose with a start, his ingenuous face looking
as though it had been dipped in crimson: even the reddish tint in
his beard seemed to deepen. The train swayed again, almost flinging
Miss Bart into his arms.

She steadied herself with a laugh and drew back; but he was
enveloped in the scent of her dress, and his shoulder had felt her
fugitive touch.

“Oh, Mr. Gryce, is it you? I’m so sorry—I was trying to find the
porter and get some tea.”

She held out her hand as the train resumed its level rush, and they
stood exchanging a few words in the aisle. Yes—he was going to
Bellomont. He had heard she was to be of the party—he blushed again
as he admitted it. And was he to be there for a whole week? How
delightful!

But at this point one or two belated passengers from the last
station forced their way into the carriage, and Lily had to retreat
to her seat.

“The chair next to mine is empty—do take it,” she said over her
shoulder; and Mr. Gryce, with considerable embarrassment, succeeded
in effecting an exchange which enabled him to transport himself and
his bags to her side.

“Ah—and here is the porter, and perhaps we can have some tea.”

She signalled to that official, and in a moment, with the ease that
seemed to attend the fulfilment of all her wishes, a little table
had been set up between the seats, and she had helped Mr. Gryce to
bestow his encumbering properties beneath it.

When the tea came he watched her in silent fascination while
her hands flitted above the tray, looking miraculously fine and
slender in contrast to the coarse china and lumpy bread. It seemed
wonderful to him that any one should perform with such careless
ease the difficult task of making tea in public in a lurching
train. He would never have dared to order it for himself, lest he
should attract the notice of his fellow-passengers; but, secure in
the shelter of her conspicuousness, he sipped the inky draught with
a delicious sense of exhilaration.

Lily, with the flavour of Selden’s caravan tea on her lips, had
no great fancy to drown it in the railway brew which seemed such
nectar to her companion; but, rightly judging that one of the
charms of tea is the fact of drinking it together, she proceeded
to give the last touch to Mr. Gryce’s enjoyment by smiling at him
across her lifted cup.

“Is it quite right—I haven’t made it too strong?” she asked
solicitously; and he replied with conviction that he had never
tasted better tea.

“I daresay it is true,” she reflected; and her imagination was
fired by the thought that Mr. Gryce, who might have sounded the
depths of the most complex self-indulgence, was perhaps actually
taking his first journey alone with a pretty woman.

It struck her as providential that she should be the instrument
of his initiation. Some girls would not have known how to
manage him. They would have over-emphasized the novelty of the
adventure, trying to make him feel in it the zest of an escapade.
But Lily’s methods were more delicate. She remembered that her
cousin Jack Stepney had once defined Mr. Gryce as the young man
who had promised his mother never to go out in the rain without
his overshoes; and acting on this hint, she resolved to impart a
gently domestic air to the scene, in the hope that her companion,
instead of feeling that he was doing something reckless or unusual,
would merely be led to dwell on the advantage of always having a
companion to make one’s tea in the train.

But in spite of her efforts, conversation flagged after the tray
had been removed, and she was driven to take a fresh measurement
of Mr. Gryce’s limitations. It was not, after all, opportunity but
imagination that he lacked: he had a mental palate which would
never learn to distinguish between railway tea and nectar. There
was, however, one topic she could rely on: one spring that she
had only to touch to set his simple machinery in motion. She had
refrained from touching it because it was a last resource, and she
had relied on other arts to stimulate other sensations; but as a
settled look of dulness began to creep over his candid features,
she saw that extreme measures were necessary.

“And how,” she said, leaning forward, “are you getting on with your
Americana?”

His eye became a degree less opaque: it was as though an incipient
film had been removed from it, and she felt the pride of a skilful
operator.

“I’ve got a few new things,” he said, suffused with pleasure, but
lowering his voice as though he feared his fellow-passengers might
be in league to despoil him.

She returned a sympathetic enquiry, and gradually he was drawn
on to talk of his latest purchases. It was the one subject which
enabled him to forget himself, or allowed him, rather, to remember
himself without constraint, because he was at home in it, and could
assert a superiority that there were few to dispute. Hardly any of
his acquaintances cared for Americana, or knew anything about them;
and the consciousness of this ignorance threw Mr. Gryce’s knowledge
into agreeable relief. The only difficulty was to introduce the
topic and to keep it to the front; most people showed no desire to
have their ignorance dispelled, and Mr. Gryce was like a merchant
whose warehouses are crammed with an unmarketable commodity.

But Miss Bart, it appeared, really did want to know about
Americana; and moreover, she was already sufficiently informed to
make the task of farther instruction as easy as it was agreeable.
She questioned him intelligently, she heard him submissively; and,
prepared for the look of lassitude which usually crept over his
listeners’ faces, he grew eloquent under her receptive gaze. The
“points” she had had the presence of mind to glean from Selden, in
anticipation of this very contingency, were serving her to such
good purpose that she began to think her visit to him had been the
luckiest incident of the day. She had once more shown her talent
for profiting by the unexpected, and dangerous theories as to the
advisability of yielding to impulse were germinating under the
surface of smiling attention which she continued to present to her
companion.

Mr. Gryce’s sensations, if less definite, were equally agreeable.
He felt the confused titillation with which the lower organisms
welcome the gratification of their needs, and all his senses
floundered in a vague well-being, through which Miss Bart’s
personality was dimly but pleasantly perceptible.

Mr. Gryce’s interest in Americana had not originated with himself:
it was impossible to think of him as evolving any taste of his
own. An uncle had left him a collection already noted among
bibliophiles; the existence of the collection was the only fact
that had ever shed glory on the name of Gryce, and the nephew took
as much pride in his inheritance as though it had been his own
work. Indeed, he gradually came to regard it as such, and to feel a
sense of personal complacency when he chanced on any reference to
the Gryce Americana. Anxious as he was to avoid personal notice, he
took, in the printed mention of his name, a pleasure so exquisite
and excessive that it seemed a compensation for his shrinking from
publicity.

To enjoy the sensation as often as possible, he subscribed to all
the reviews dealing with book-collecting in general, and American
history in particular, and as allusions to his library abounded
in the pages of these journals, which formed his only reading, he
came to regard himself as figuring prominently in the public eye,
and to enjoy the thought of the interest which would be excited
if the persons he met in the street, or sat among in travelling,
were suddenly to be told that he was the possessor of the Gryce
Americana.

Most timidities have such secret compensations, and Miss Bart was
discerning enough to know that the inner vanity is generally in
proportion to the outer self-depreciation. With a more confident
person she would not have dared to dwell so long on one topic,
or to show such exaggerated interest in it; but she had rightly
guessed that Mr. Gryce’s egoism was a thirsty soil, requiring
constant nurture from without. Miss Bart had the gift of following
an undercurrent of thought while she appeared to be sailing on the
surface of conversation; and in this case her mental excursion
took the form of a rapid survey of Mr. Percy Gryce’s future as
combined with her own. The Gryces were from Albany, and but lately
introduced to the metropolis, where the mother and son had come,
after old Jefferson Gryce’s death, to take possession of his house
in Madison Avenue—an appalling house, all brown stone without and
black walnut within, with the Gryce library in a fire-proof annex
that looked like a mausoleum. Lily, however, knew all about them:
young Mr. Gryce’s arrival had fluttered the maternal breasts of
New York, and when a girl has no mother to palpitate for her she
must needs be on the alert for herself. Lily, therefore, had not
only contrived to put herself in the young man’s way, but had made
the acquaintance of Mrs. Gryce, a monumental woman with the voice
of a pulpit orator and a mind preoccupied with the iniquities of
her servants, who came sometimes to sit with Mrs. Peniston and
learn from that lady how she managed to prevent the kitchen-maid’s
smuggling groceries out of the house. Mrs. Gryce had a kind of
impersonal benevolence: cases of individual need she regarded
with suspicion, but she subscribed to Institutions when their
annual reports showed an impressive surplus. Her domestic duties
were manifold, for they extended from furtive inspections of the
servants’ bedrooms to unannounced descents to the cellar; but she
had never allowed herself many pleasures. Once, however, she had
had a special edition of the Sarum Rule printed in rubric and
presented to every clergyman in the diocese; and the gilt album in
which their letters of thanks were pasted formed the chief ornament
of her drawing-room table.

Percy had been brought up in the principles which so excellent a
woman was sure to inculcate. Every form of prudence and suspicion
had been grafted on a nature originally reluctant and cautious,
with the result that it would have seemed hardly needful for Mrs.
Gryce to extract his promise about the overshoes, so little likely
was he to hazard himself abroad in the rain. After attaining his
majority, and coming into the fortune which the late Mr. Gryce had
made out of a patent device for excluding fresh air from hotels,
the young man continued to live with his mother in Albany; but
on Jefferson Gryce’s death, when another large property passed
into her son’s hands, Mrs. Gryce thought that what she called his
“interests” demanded his presence in New York. She accordingly
installed herself in the Madison Avenue house, and Percy, whose
sense of duty was not inferior to his mother’s, spent all his week
days in the handsome Broad Street office where a batch of pale men
on small salaries had grown grey in the management of the Gryce
estate, and where he was initiated with becoming reverence into
every detail of the art of accumulation.

As far as Lily could learn, this had hitherto been Mr. Gryce’s only
occupation, and she might have been pardoned for thinking it not
too hard a task to interest a young man who had been kept on such
low diet. At any rate, she felt herself so completely in command of
the situation that she yielded to a sense of security in which all
fear of Mr. Rosedale, and of the difficulties on which that fear
was contingent, vanished beyond the edge of thought.

The stopping of the train at Garrisons would not have distracted
her from these thoughts, had she not caught a sudden look of
distress in her companion’s eye. His seat faced toward the door,
and she guessed that he had been perturbed by the approach of an
acquaintance; a fact confirmed by the turning of heads and general
sense of commotion which her own entrance into a railway-carriage
was apt to produce.

She knew the symptoms at once, and was not surprised to be hailed
by the high notes of a pretty woman, who entered the train
accompanied by a maid, a bull-terrier, and a footman staggering
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 some one
be put somewhere else? I want to be with my friends. Oh, how do you
do, Mr. Gryce? Do please make him understand that I must have a
seat next to you and Lily.”

Mrs. George Dorset, regardless of the mild efforts of a traveller
with a carpet-bag, who was doing his best to make room for her
by getting out of the train, stood in the middle of the aisle,
diffusing about her that general sense of exasperation which a
pretty woman on her travels not infrequently creates.

She was smaller and thinner than Lily Bart, with a restless
pliability of pose, as if she could have been crumpled up and run
through a ring, like the sinuous draperies she affected. Her small
pale face seemed the mere setting of a pair of dark exaggerated
eyes, of which the visionary gaze contrasted curiously with her
self-assertive tone and gestures; so that, as one of her friends
observed, she was like a disembodied spirit who took up a great
deal of room.

Having finally discovered that the seat adjoining Miss Bart’s
was at her disposal, she possessed herself of it with a farther
displacement of her surroundings, explaining meanwhile that she had
come across from Mount Kisco in her motor-car that morning, and had
been kicking her heels for an hour at Garrisons, without even the
alleviation of a cigarette, her brute of a husband having neglected
to replenish her case before they parted that morning.

“And at this hour of the day I don’t suppose you’ve a single one
left, have you, Lily?” she plaintively concluded.

Miss Bart caught the startled glance of Mr. Percy Gryce, whose own
lips were never defiled by tobacco.

“What an absurd question, Bertha!” she exclaimed, blushing at the
thought of the store she had laid in at Lawrence Selden’s.

“Why, don’t you smoke? Since when have you given it up? What—you
never—— And you don’t either, Mr. Gryce? Ah, of course—how stupid
of me—I understand.”

And Mrs. Dorset leaned back against her travelling cushions with a
smile which made Lily wish there had been no vacant seat beside her
own.



Chapter 3



Bridge at Bellomont usually lasted till the small hours; and when
Lily went to bed that night she had played too long for her own
good.

Feeling no desire for the self-communion which awaited her in her
room, she lingered on the broad stairway, looking down into the
hall below, where the last card-players were grouped about the tray
of tall glasses and silver-collared decanters which the butler had
just placed on a low table near the fire.

The hall was arcaded, with a gallery supported on columns of
pale yellow marble. Tall clumps of flowering plants were grouped
against a background of dark foliage in the angles of the walls.
On the crimson carpet a deer-hound and two or three spaniels dozed
luxuriously before the fire, and the light from the great central
lantern overhead shed a brightness on the women’s hair and struck
sparks from their jewels as they moved.

There were moments when such scenes delighted Lily, when they
gratified her sense of beauty and her craving for the external
finish of life; there were others when they gave a sharper edge
to the meagreness of her own opportunities. This was one of the
moments when the sense of contrast was uppermost, and she turned
away impatiently as Mrs. George Dorset, glittering in serpentine
spangles, drew Percy Gryce in her wake to a confidential nook
beneath the gallery.

It was not that Miss Bart was afraid of losing her newly-acquired
hold over Mr. Gryce. Mrs. Dorset might startle or dazzle him,
but she had neither the skill nor the patience to effect his
capture. She was too self-engrossed to penetrate the recesses of
his shyness, and besides, why should she care to give herself the
trouble? At most it might amuse her to make sport of his simplicity
for an evening—after that he would be merely a burden to her, and
knowing this, she was far too experienced to encourage him. But
the mere thought of that other woman, who could take a man up and
toss him aside as she willed, without having to regard him as a
possible factor in her plans, filled Lily Bart with envy. She had
been bored all the afternoon by Percy Gryce—the mere thought seemed
to waken an echo of his droning voice—but she could not ignore him
on the morrow, she must follow up her success, must submit to more
boredom, must be ready with fresh compliances and adaptabilities,
and all on the bare chance that he might ultimately decide to do
her the honour of boring her for life.

It was a hateful fate—but how escape from it? What choice had she?
To be herself, or a Gerty Farish. As she entered her bedroom, with
its softly-shaded lights, her lace dressing-gown lying across
the silken bedspread, her little embroidered slippers before the
fire, a vase of carnations filling the air with perfume, and
the last novels and magazines lying uncut on a table beside the
reading-lamp, she had a vision of Miss Farish’s cramped flat, with
its cheap conveniences and hideous wall-papers. No; she was not
made for mean and shabby surroundings, for the squalid compromises
of poverty. Her whole being dilated in an atmosphere of luxury; it
was the background she required, the only climate she could breathe
in. But the luxury of others was not what she wanted. A few years
ago it had sufficed her: she had taken her daily meed of pleasure
without caring who provided it. Now she was beginning to chafe at
the obligations it imposed, to feel herself a mere pensioner on the
splendour which had once seemed to belong to her. There were even
moments when she was conscious of having to pay her way.

For a long time she had refused to play bridge. She knew she
could not afford it, and she was afraid of acquiring so expensive a
taste. She had seen the danger exemplified in more than one of her
associates—in young Ned Silverton, for instance, the charming fair
boy now seated in abject rapture at the elbow of Mrs. Fisher, a
striking divorcee with eyes and gowns as emphatic as the head-
lines of her “case.” Lily could remember when young Silverton
had stumbled into their circle, with the air of a strayed Arcadian
who has published charming sonnets in his college journal. Since
then he had developed a taste for Mrs. Fisher and bridge, and the
latter at least had involved him in expenses from which he had been
more than once rescued by harassed maiden sisters, who treasured
the sonnets, and went without sugar in their tea to keep their
darling afloat. Ned’s case was familiar to Lily: she had seen his
charming eyes—which had a good deal more poetry in them than the
sonnets—change from surprise to amusement, and from amusement
to anxiety, as he passed under the spell of the terrible god of
chance; and she was afraid of discovering the same symptoms in
her own case.

For in the last year she had found that her hostesses expected
her to take a place at the card-table. It was one of the taxes she
had to pay for their prolonged hospitality, and for the dresses
and trinkets which occasionally replenished her insufficient ward-
robe. And since she had played regularly the passion had grown
on her. Once or twice of late she had won a large sum, and in-
stead of keeping it against future losses, had spent it in dress or
jewelry; and the desire to atone for this imprudence, combined
with the increasing exhilaration of the game, drove her to risk
higher stakes at each fresh venture. She tried to excuse herself
on the plea that, in the Trenor set, if one played at all one must
either play high or be set down as priggish or stingy; but she knew
that the gambling passion was upon her, and that in her present
surroundings there was small hope of resisting it.

Tonight the luck had been persistently bad, and the little gold
purse which hung among her trinkets was almost empty when she
returned to her room. She unlocked the wardrobe, and taking out her
jewel-case, looked under the tray for the roll of bills from which
she had replenished the purse before going down to dinner. Only
twenty dollars were left: the discovery was so startling that for a
moment she fancied she must have been robbed. Then she took
paper and pencil, and seating herself at the writing-table, tried to
reckon up what she had spent during the day. Her head was throb-
bing with fatigue, and she had to go over the figures again and a-
gain; but at last it became clear to her that she had lost three hun-
dred dollars at cards. She took out her cheque-book to see if her
balance was larger than she remembered, but found she had erred
in the other direction. Then she returned to her calculations;
but figure as she would, she could not conjure back the vanished
three hundred dollars. It was the sum she had set aside to pacify
her dress-maker—unless she should decide to use it as a sop to
the jeweller. At any rate, she had so many uses for it that its very
insufficiency had caused her to play high in the hope of doubling
it. But of course she had lost—she who needed every penny, while
Bertha Dorset, whose husband showered money on her, must have
pocketed at least five hundred, and Judy Trenor, who could have
afforded to lose a thousand a night, had left the table clutching
such a heap of bills that she had been unable to shake hands with
her guests when they bade her good night.

A world in which such things could be seemed a miserable place
to Lily Bart; but then she had never been able to understand the
laws of a universe which was so ready to leave her out of its
calculations.

She began to undress without ringing for her maid, whom she had
sent to bed. She had been long enough in bondage to other people’s
pleasure to be considerate of those who depended on hers, and in
her bitter moods it sometimes struck her that she and her maid were
in the same position, except that the latter received her wages
more regularly.

As she sat before the mirror brushing her hair, her face looked
hollow and pale, and she was frightened by two little lines near
her mouth, faint flaws in the smooth curve of the cheek.

“Oh, I must stop worrying!” she exclaimed. “Unless it’s the
electric light——” she reflected, springing up from her seat and
lighting the candles on the dressing-table.

She turned out the wall-lights, and peered at herself between the
candle-flames. The white oval of her face swam out waveringly from
a background of shadows, the uncertain light blurring it like a
haze; but the two lines about the mouth remained.

Lily rose and undressed in haste.

“It is only because I am tired and have such odious things to think
about,” she kept repeating; and it seemed an added injustice that
petty cares should leave a trace on the beauty which was her only
defence against them.

But the odious things were there, and remained with her. She
returned wearily to the thought of Percy Gryce, as a wayfarer picks
up a heavy load and toils on after a brief rest. She was almost
sure she had “landed” him: a few days’ work and she would win her
reward. But the reward itself seemed unpalatable just then: she
could get no zest from the thought of victory. It would be a rest
from worry, no more—and how little that would have seemed to her
a few years earlier! Her ambitions had shrunk gradually in the
desiccating air of failure. But why had she failed? Was it her own
fault or that of destiny?

She remembered how her mother, after they had lost their money,
used to say to her with a kind of fierce vindictiveness: “But you’ll
get it all back—you’ll get it all back, with your face.”... The remem-
brance roused a whole train of association, and she lay in the dark-
ness reconstructing the past out of which her present had grown.

A house in which no one ever dined at home unless there was
“company”; a door-bell perpetually ringing; a hall-table showered
with square envelopes which were opened in haste, and oblong
envelopes which were allowed to gather dust in the depths of a
bronze jar; a series of French and English maids giving warning
amid a chaos of hurriedly-ransacked wardrobes and dress-closets;
an equally changing dynasty of nurses and footmen; quarrels in the
pantry, the kitchen and the drawing-room; precipitate trips to
Europe, and returns with gorged trunks and days of interminable
unpacking; semi-annual discussions as to where the summer should
be spent, grey interludes of economy and brilliant reactions of
expense—such was the setting of Lily Bart’s first memories.

Ruling the turbulent element called home was the vigorous and
determined figure of a mother still young enough to dance her
ball-dresses to rags, while the hazy outline of a neutral-tinted
father filled an intermediate space between the butler and the man
who came to wind the clocks. Even to the eyes of infancy, Mrs.
Hudson Bart had appeared young; but Lily could not recall the time
when her father had not been bald and slightly stooping, with
streaks of grey in his hair, and a tired walk. It was a shock to
her to learn afterward that he was but two years older than her
mother.

Lily seldom saw her father by daylight. All day he was “downtown”;
and in winter it was long after nightfall when she heard his fagged
step on the stairs and his hand on the school-room door. He would
kiss her in silence, and ask one or two questions of the nurse or
the governess; then Mrs. Bart’s maid would come to remind him that
he was dining out, and he would hurry away with a nod to Lily. In
summer, when he joined them for a Sunday at Newport or Southamp--
ton, he was even more effaced and silent than in winter. It seemed
to tire him to rest, and he would sit for hours staring at the
sea-line from a quiet corner of the verandah, while the clatter of
his wife’s existence went on unheeded a few feet off. Generally,
however, Mrs. Bart and Lily went to Europe for the summer, and
before the steamer was half way over Mr. Bart had dipped below the
horizon. Sometimes his daughter heard him denounced for having
neglected to forward Mrs. Bart’s remittances; but for the most part
he was never mentioned or thought of till his patient stooping
figure presented itself on the New York dock as a buffer between
the magnitude of his wife’s luggage and the restrictions of the
American custom-house.

In this desultory yet agitated fashion life went on through Lily’s
teens: a zig-zag broken course down which the family craft glided
on a rapid current of amusement, tugged at by the underflow of
a perpetual need—the need of more money. Lily could not recall
the time when there had been money enough, and in some vague
way her father seemed always to blame for the deficiency. It could
certainly not be the fault of Mrs. Bart, who was spoken of by her
friends as a “wonderful manager.” Mrs. Bart was famous for the
unlimited effect she produced on limited means; and to the lady and
her acquaintances there was something heroic in living as though
one were much richer than one’s bank-book denoted.

Lily was naturally proud of her mother’s aptitude in this line: she
had been brought up in the faith that, whatever it cost, one must
have a good cook, and be what Mrs. Bart called “decently dressed.”
Mrs. Bart’s worst reproach to her husband was to ask him if he
expected her to “live like a pig”; and his replying in the negative
was always regarded as a justification for cabling to Paris for an
extra dress or two, and telephoning to the jeweller that he might,
after all, send home the turquoise bracelet which Mrs. Bart had
looked at that morning.

Lily knew people who “lived like pigs,” and their appearance and
surroundings justified her mother’s repugnance to that form of
existence. They were mostly cousins, who inhabited dingy houses
with engravings from Cole’s Voyage of Life on the drawing-room
walls, and slatternly parlour-maids who said “I’ll go and see”
to visitors calling at an hour when all right-minded persons are
conventionally if not actually out. The disgusting part of it was
that many of these cousins were rich, so that Lily imbibed the idea
that if people lived like pigs it was from choice, and through the
lack of any proper standard of conduct. This gave her a sense of
reflected superiority, and she did not need Mrs. Bart’s comments on
the family frumps and misers to foster her naturally lively taste
for splendour.

Lily was nineteen when circumstances caused her to revise her view
of the universe.

The previous year she had made a dazzling debut fringed by a
heavy thunder-cloud of bills. The light of the debut still lingered
on the horizon, but the cloud had thickened; and suddenly it broke.
The suddenness added to the horror; and there were still times
when Lily relived with painful vividness every detail of the day
on which the blow fell. She and her mother had been seated at the
luncheon-table, over the CHAUFROIX and cold salmon of the previous
night’s dinner: it was one of Mrs. Bart’s few economies to consume
in private the expensive remnants of her hospitality. Lily was
feeling the pleasant languor which is youth’s penalty for dancing
till dawn; but her mother, in spite of a few lines about the mouth,
and under the yellow waves on her temples, was as alert, determined
and high in colour as if she had risen from an untroubled sleep.

In the centre of the table, between the melting MARRONS GLACES
and candied cherries, a pyramid of American Beauties lifted their
vigorous stems; they held their heads as high as Mrs. Bart, but
their rose-colour had turned to a dissipated purple, and Lily’s
sense of fitness was disturbed by their reappearance on the
luncheon-table.

“I really think, mother,” she said reproachfully, “we might
afford a few fresh flowers for luncheon. Just some jonquils or
lilies-of-the-valley—”

Mrs. Bart stared. Her own fastidiousness had its eye fixed on the
world, and she did not care how the luncheon-table looked when
there was no one present at it but the family. But she smiled at
her daughter’s innocence.

“Lilies-of-the-valley,” she said calmly, “cost two dollars a dozen
at this season.”

Lily was not impressed. She knew very little of the value of money.

“It would not take more than six dozen to fill that bowl,” she
argued.

“Six dozen what?” asked her father’s voice in the doorway.

The two women looked up in surprise; though it was a Saturday, the
sight of Mr. Bart at luncheon was an unwonted one. But neither
his wife nor his daughter was sufficiently interested to ask an
explanation.

Mr. Bart dropped into a chair, and sat gazing absently at the
fragment of jellied salmon which the butler had placed before him.

“I was only saying,” Lily began, “that I hate to see faded flowers
at luncheon; and mother says a bunch of lilies-of-the-valley would
not cost more than twelve dollars. Mayn’t I tell the florist to
send a few every day?”

She leaned confidently toward her father: he seldom refused her
anything, and Mrs. Bart had taught her to plead with him when her
own entreaties failed.

Mr. Bart sat motionless, his gaze still fixed on the salmon, and
his lower jaw dropped; he looked even paler than usual, and his
thin hair lay in untidy streaks on his forehead. Suddenly he looked
at his daughter and laughed. The laugh was so strange that Lily
coloured under it: she disliked being ridiculed, and her father
seemed to see something ridiculous in the request. Perhaps he
thought it foolish that she should trouble him about such a trifle.

“Twelve dollars—twelve dollars a day for flowers? Oh, certainly, my
dear—give him an order for twelve hundred.” He continued to laugh.

Mrs. Bart gave him a quick glance.

“You needn’t wait, Poleworth—I will ring for you,” she said to the
butler.

The butler withdrew with an air of silent disapproval, leaving the
remains of the CHAUFROIX on the sideboard.

“What is the matter, Hudson? Are you ill?” said Mrs. Bart severely.

She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making,
and it was odious to her that her husband should make a show of
himself before the servants.

“Are you ill?” she repeated.

“Ill?—— No, I’m ruined,” he said.

Lily made a frightened sound, and Mrs. Bart rose to her feet.

“Ruined——?” she cried; but controlling herself instantly, she
turned a calm face to Lily.

“Shut the pantry door,” she said.

Lily obeyed, and when she turned back into the room her father was
sitting with both elbows on the table, the plate of salmon between
them, and his head bowed on his hands.

Mrs. Bart stood over him with a white face which made her hair
unnaturally yellow. She looked at Lily as the latter approached:
her look was terrible, but her voice was modulated to a ghastly
cheerfulness.

“Your father is not well—he doesn’t know what he is saying. It
is nothing—but you had better go upstairs; and don’t talk to the
servants,” she added.

Lily obeyed; she always obeyed when her mother spoke in that
voice. She had not been deceived by Mrs. Bart’s words: she knew
at once that they were ruined. In the dark hours which followed,
that awful fact overshadowed even her father’s slow and difficult
dying. To his wife he no longer counted: he had become extinct
when he ceased to fulfil his purpose, and she sat at his side
with the provisional air of a traveller who waits for a belated
train to start. Lily’s feelings were softer: she pitied him in a
frightened ineffectual way. But the fact that he was for the most
part unconscious, and that his attention, when she stole into the
room, drifted away from her after a moment, made him even more of a
stranger than in the nursery days when he had never come home till
after dark. She seemed always to have seen him through a blur—first
of sleepiness, then of distance and indifference—and now the fog
had thickened till he was almost indistinguishable. If she could
have performed any little services for him, or have exchanged with
him a few of those affecting words which an extensive perusal of
fiction had led her to connect with such occasions, the filial
instinct might have stirred in her; but her pity, finding no active
expression, remained in a state of spectatorship, overshadowed by
her mother’s grim unflagging resentment. Every look and act of Mrs.
Bart’s seemed to say: “You are sorry for him now—but you will feel
differently when you see what he has done to us.”

It was a relief to Lily when her father died.

Then a long winter set in. There was a little money left, but to
Mrs. Bart it seemed worse than nothing—the mere mockery of what
she was entitled to. What was the use of living if one had to live
like a pig? She sank into a kind of furious apathy, a state of
inert anger against fate. Her faculty for “managing” deserted her,
or she no longer took sufficient pride in it to exert it. It was
well enough to “manage” when by so doing one could keep one’s own
carriage; but when one’s best contrivance did not conceal the fact
that one had to go on foot, the effort was no longer worth making.

Lily and her mother wandered from place to place, now paying long
visits to relations whose house-keeping Mrs. Bart criticized, and
who deplored the fact that she let Lily breakfast in bed when the
girl had no prospects before her, and now vegetating in cheap
continental refuges, where Mrs. Bart held herself fiercely aloof
from the frugal tea-tables of her companions in misfortune. She was
especially careful to avoid her old friends and the scenes of her
former successes. To be poor seemed to her such a confession of
failure that it amounted to disgrace; and she detected a note of
condescension in the friendliest advances.

Only one thought consoled her, and that was the contemplation of
Lily’s beauty. She studied it with a kind of passion, as though
it were some weapon she had slowly fashioned for her vengeance.
It was the last asset in their fortunes, the nucleus around which
their life was to be rebuilt. She watched it jealously, as though
it were her own property and Lily its mere custodian; and she
tried to instil into the latter a sense of the responsibility that
such a charge involved. She followed in imagination the career
of other beauties, pointing out to her daughter what might be
achieved through such a gift, and dwelling on the awful warning of
those who, in spite of it, had failed to get what they wanted: to
Mrs. Bart, only stupidity could explain the lamentable denouement
of some of her examples. She was not above the inconsistency of
charging fate, rather than herself, with her own misfortunes; but
she inveighed so acrimoniously against love-matches that Lily would
have fancied her own marriage had been of that nature, had not Mrs.
Bart frequently assured her that she had been “talked into it”—by
whom, she never made clear.

Lily was duly impressed by the magnitude of her opportunities. The
dinginess of her present life threw into enchanting relief the
existence to which she felt herself entitled. To a less illuminated
intelligence Mrs. Bart’s counsels might have been dangerous; but
Lily understood that beauty is only the raw material of conquest,
and that to convert it into success other arts are required. She
knew that to betray any sense of superiority was a subtler form of
the stupidity her mother denounced, and it did not take her long
to learn that a beauty needs more tact than the possessor of an
average set of features.

Her ambitions were not as crude as Mrs. Bart’s. It had been among
that lady’s grievances that her husband—in the early days, before
he was too tired—had wasted his evenings in what she vaguely
described as “reading poetry”; and among the effects packed off to
auction after his death were a score or two of dingy volumes which
had struggled for existence among the boots and medicine bottles of
his dressing-room shelves. There was in Lily a vein of sentiment,
perhaps transmitted from this source, which gave an idealizing
touch to her most prosaic purposes. She liked to think of her
beauty as a power for good, as giving her the opportunity to attain
a position where she should make her influence felt in the vague
diffusion of refinement and good taste. She was fond of pictures
and flowers, and of sentimental fiction, and she could not help
thinking that the possession of such tastes ennobled her desire for
worldly advantages. She would not indeed have cared to marry a man
who was merely rich: she was secretly ashamed of her mother’s crude
passion for money. Lily’s preference would have been for an English
nobleman with political ambitions and vast estates; or, for second
choice, an Italian prince with a castle in the Apennines and an
hereditary office in the Vatican. Lost causes had a romantic charm
for her, and she liked to picture herself as standing aloof from
the vulgar press of the Quirinal, and sacrificing her pleasure to
the claims of an immemorial tradition....

How long ago and how far off it all seemed! Those ambitions were
hardly more futile and childish than the earlier ones which had
centred about the possession of a French jointed doll with real
hair. Was it only ten years since she had wavered in imagination
between the English earl and the Italian prince? Relentlessly her
mind travelled on over the dreary interval....

After two years of hungry roaming Mrs. Bart had died——died of a
deep disgust. She had hated dinginess, and it was her fate to be
dingy. Her visions of a brilliant marriage for Lily had faded after
the first year.

“People can’t marry you if they don’t see you—and how can they see
you in these holes where we’re stuck?” That was the burden of her
lament; and her last adjuration to her daughter was to escape from
dinginess if she could.

“Don’t let it creep up on you and drag you down. Fight your way out
of it somehow—you’re young and can do it,” she insisted.

She had died during one of their brief visits to New York, and
there Lily at once became the centre of a family council composed
of the wealthy relatives whom she had been taught to despise
for living like pigs. It may be that they had an inkling of the
sentiments in which she had been brought up, for none of them
manifested a very lively desire for her company; indeed, the
question threatened to remain unsolved till Mrs. Peniston with a
sigh announced: “I’ll try her for a year.”

Every one was surprised, but one and all concealed their surprise,
lest Mrs. Peniston should be alarmed by it into reconsidering her
decision.

Mrs. Peniston was Mr. Bart’s widowed sister, and if she was by
no means the richest of the family group, its other members
nevertheless abounded in reasons why she was clearly destined by
Providence to assume the charge of Lily. In the first place she was
alone, and it would be charming for her to have a young companion.
Then she sometimes travelled, and Lily’s familiarity with foreign
customs—deplored as a misfortune by her more conservative
relatives—would at least enable her to act as a kind of courier.
But as a matter of fact Mrs. Peniston had not been affected by
these considerations. She had taken the girl simply because no one
else would have her, and because she had the kind of moral MAUVAISE
HONTE which makes the public display of selfishness difficult,
though it does not interfere with its private indulgence. It would
have been impossible for Mrs. Peniston to be heroic on a desert
island, but with the eyes of her little world upon her she took a
certain pleasure in her act.

She reaped the reward to which disinterestedness is entitled,
and found an agreeable companion in her niece. She had expected
to find Lily headstrong, critical and “foreign”—for even Mrs.
Peniston, though she occasionally went abroad, had the family dread
of foreignness—but the girl showed a pliancy, which, to a more
penetrating mind than her aunt’s, might have been less reassuring
than the open selfishness of youth. Misfortune had made Lily supple
instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to
break than a stiff one.

Mrs. Peniston, however, did not suffer from her niece’s
adaptability. Lily had no intention of taking advantage of her
aunt’s good-nature. She was in truth grateful for the refuge
offered her: Mrs. Peniston’s opulent interior was at least not
externally dingy. But dinginess is a quality which assumes all
manner of disguises; and Lily soon found that it was as latent
in the expensive routine of her aunt’s life as in the makeshift
existence of a continental pension.

Mrs. Peniston was one of the episodical persons who form the
padding of life. It was impossible to believe that she had herself
ever been a focus of activities. The most vivid thing about her
was the fact that her grandmother had been a Van Alstyne. This
connection with the well-fed and industrious stock of early New
York revealed itself in the glacial neatness of Mrs. Peniston’s
drawing-room and in the excellence of her cuisine. She belonged
to the class of old New Yorkers who have always lived well,
dressed expensively, and done little else; and to these inherited
obligations Mrs. Peniston faithfully conformed. She had always
been a looker-on at life, and her mind resembled one of those
little mirrors which her Dutch ancestors were accustomed to affix
to their upper windows, so that from the depths of an impenetrable
domesticity they might see what was happening in the street.

Mrs. Peniston was the owner of a country-place in New Jersey,
but she had never lived there since her husband’s death—a remote
event, which appeared to dwell in her memory chiefly as a dividing
point in the personal reminiscences that formed the staple of her
conversation. She was a woman who remembered dates with intensity,
and could tell at a moment’s notice whether the drawing-room
curtains had been renewed before or after Mr. Peniston’s last
illness.

Mrs. Peniston thought the country lonely and trees damp, and
cherished a vague fear of meeting a bull. To guard against such
contingencies she frequented the more populous watering-places,
where she installed herself impersonally in a hired house and
looked on at life through the matting screen of her verandah. In
the care of such a guardian, it soon became clear to Lily that
she was to enjoy only the material advantages of good food and
expensive clothing; and, though far from underrating these, she
would gladly have exchanged them for what Mrs. Bart had taught her
to regard as opportunities. She sighed to think what her mother’s
fierce energies would have accomplished, had they been coupled
with Mrs. Peniston’s resources. Lily had abundant energy of her
own, but it was restricted by the necessity of adapting herself to
her aunt’s habits. She saw that at all costs she must keep Mrs.
Peniston’s favour till, as Mrs. Bart would have phrased it, she
could stand on her own legs. Lily had no mind for the vagabond life
of the poor relation, and to adapt herself to Mrs. Peniston she
had, to some degree, to assume that lady’s passive attitude. She
had fancied at first that it would be easy to draw her aunt into
the whirl of her own activities, but there was a static force in
Mrs. Peniston against which her niece’s efforts spent themselves
in vain. To attempt to bring her into active relation with life
was like tugging at a piece of furniture which has been screwed
to the floor. She did not, indeed, expect Lily to remain equally
immovable: she had all the American guardian’s indulgence for the
volatility of youth.

She had indulgence also for certain other habits of her niece’s.
It seemed to her natural that Lily should spend all her money on
dress, and she supplemented the girl’s scanty income by occasional
“handsome presents” meant to be applied to the same purpose.
Lily, who was intensely practical, would have preferred a fixed
allowance; but Mrs. Peniston liked the periodical recurrence of
gratitude evoked by unexpected cheques, and was perhaps shrewd
enough to perceive that such a method of giving kept alive in her
niece a salutary sense of dependence.

Beyond this, Mrs. Peniston had not felt called upon to do anything
for her charge: she had simply stood aside and let her take the
field. Lily had taken it, at first with the confidence of assured
possessorship, then with gradually narrowing demands, till now
she found herself actually struggling for a foothold on the
broad space which had once seemed her own for the asking. How it
happened she did not yet know. Sometimes she thought it was because
Mrs. Peniston had been too passive, and again she feared it was
because she herself had not been passive enough. Had she shown an
undue eagerness for victory? Had she lacked patience, pliancy and
dissimulation? Whether she charged herself with these faults or
absolved herself from them, made no difference in the sum-total
of her failure. Younger and plainer girls had been married off by
dozens, and she was nine-and-twenty, and still Miss Bart.

She was beginning to have fits of angry rebellion against fate,
when she longed to drop out of the race and make an independent
life for herself. But what manner of life would it be? She had
barely enough money to pay her dress-makers’ bills and her gambling
debts; and none of the desultory interests which she dignified with
the name of tastes was pronounced enough to enable her to live
contentedly in obscurity. Ah, no—she was too intelligent not to be
honest with herself. She knew that she hated dinginess as much as
her mother had hated it, and to her last breath she meant to fight
against it, dragging herself up again and again above its flood
till she gained the bright pinnacles of success which presented
such a slippery surface to her clutch.



Chapter 4



The next morning, on her breakfast tray, Miss Bart found a note
from her hostess.

“Dearest Lily,” it ran, “if it is not too much of a bore to be
down by ten, will you come to my sitting-room to help me with some
tiresome things?”

Lily tossed aside the note and subsided on her pillows with a sigh.
It WAS a bore to be down by ten—an hour regarded at Bellomont as
vaguely synchronous with sunrise—and she knew too well the nature
of the tiresome things in question. Miss Pragg, the secretary,
had been called away, and there would be notes and dinner-cards
to write, lost addresses to hunt up, and other social drudgery to
perform. It was understood that Miss Bart should fill the gap in
such emergencies, and she usually recognized the obligation without
a murmur.

Today, however, it renewed the sense of servitude which the pre-
vious night’s review of her cheque-book had produced. Everything
in her surroundings ministered to feelings of ease and amenity.
The windows stood open to the sparkling freshness of the September
morning, and between the yellow boughs she caught a perspective of
hedges and parterres leading by degrees of lessening formality to
the free undulations of the park. Her maid had kindled a little
fire on the hearth, and it contended cheerfully with the sunlight
which slanted across the moss-green carpet and caressed the curved
sides of an old marquetry desk. Near the bed stood a table holding
her breakfast tray, with its harmonious porcelain and silver,
a handful of violets in a slender glass, and the morning paper
folded beneath her letters. There was nothing new to Lily in these
tokens of a studied luxury; but, though they formed a part of her
atmosphere, she never lost her sensitiveness to their charm. Mere
display left her with a sense of superior distinction; but she felt
an affinity to all the subtler manifestations of wealth.

Mrs. Trenor’s summons, however, suddenly recalled her state of
dependence, and she rose and dressed in a mood of irritability that
she was usually too prudent to indulge. She knew that such emotions
leave lines on the face as well as in the character, and she had
meant to take warning by the little creases which her midnight
survey had revealed.

The matter of course tone of Mrs. Trenor’s greeting deepened her
irritation. If one did drag one’s self out of bed at such an hour,
and come down fresh and radiant to the monotony of note-writing,
some special recognition of the sacrifice seemed fitting. But Mrs.
Trenor’s tone showed no consciousness of the fact.

“Oh, Lily, that’s nice of you,” she merely sighed across the
chaos of letters, bills and other domestic documents which gave
an incongruously commercial touch to the slender elegance of her
writing-table.

“There are such lots of horrors this morning,” she added, clearing
a space in the centre of the confusion and rising to yield her seat
to Miss Bart.

Mrs. Trenor was a tall fair woman, whose height just saved her
from redundancy. Her rosy blondness had survived some forty years
of futile activity without showing much trace of ill-usage except
in a diminished play of feature. It was difficult to define her
beyond saying that she seemed to exist only as a hostess, not so
much from any exaggerated instinct of hospitality as because she
could not sustain life except in a crowd. The collective nature
of her interests exempted her from the ordinary rivalries of her
sex, and she knew no more personal emotion than that of hatred for
the woman who presumed to give bigger dinners or have more amusing
house-parties than herself. As her social talents, backed by Mr.
Trenor’s bank-account, almost always assured her ultimate triumph
in such competitions, success had developed in her an unscrupulous
good nature toward the rest of her sex, and in Miss Bart’s
utilitarian classification of her friends, Mrs. Trenor ranked as
the woman who was least likely to “go back” on her.

“It was simply inhuman of Pragg to go off now,” Mrs. Trenor
declared, as her friend seated herself at the desk. “She says her
sister is going to have a baby—as if that were anything to having
a house-party! I’m sure I shall get most horribly mixed up and
there will be some awful rows. When I was down at Tuxedo I asked
a lot of people for next week, and I’ve mislaid the list and can’t
remember who is coming. And this week is going to be a horrid
failure too—and Gwen Van Osburgh will go back and tell her mother
how bored people were. I did mean to ask the Wetheralls—that was a
blunder of Gus’s. They disapprove of Carry Fisher, you know. As if
one could help having Carry Fisher! It WAS foolish of her to get
that second divorce—Carry always overdoes things—but she said the
only way to get a penny out of Fisher was to divorce him and make
him pay alimony. And poor Carry has to consider every dollar. It’s
really absurd of Alice Wetherall to make such a fuss about meeting
her, when one thinks of what society is coming to. Some one said
the other day that there was a divorce and a case of appendicitis
in every family one knows. Besides, Carry is the only person who
can keep Gus in a good humour when we have bores in the house. Have
you noticed that ALL the husbands like her? All, I mean, except her
own. It’s rather clever of her to have made a specialty of devoting
herself to dull people—the field is such a large one, and she has
it practically to herself. She finds compensations, no doubt—I know
she borrows money of Gus—but then I’d PAY her to keep him in a good
humour, so I can’t complain, after all.”

Mrs. Trenor paused to enjoy the spectacle of Miss Bart’s efforts to
unravel her tangled correspondence.

“But it is only the Wetheralls and Carry,” she resumed, with a
fresh note of lament. “The truth is, I’m awfully disappointed in
Lady Cressida Raith.”

“Disappointed? Had you known her before?”

“Mercy, no—never saw her till yesterday. Lady Skiddaw sent her
over with letters to the Van Osburghs, and I heard that Maria Van
Osburgh was asking a big party to meet her this week, so I thought
it would be fun to get her away, and Jack Stepney, who knew her
in India, managed it for me. Maria was furious, and actually had
the impudence to make Gwen invite herself here, so that they
shouldn’t be QUITE out of it—if I’d known what Lady Cressida was
like, they could have had her and welcome! But I thought any
friend of the Skiddaws’ was sure to be amusing. You remember what
fun Lady Skiddaw was? There were times when I simply had to send
the girls out of the room. Besides, Lady Cressida is the Duchess
of Beltshire’s sister, and I naturally supposed she was the same
sort; but you never can tell in those English families. They are
so big that there’s room for all kinds, and it turns out that Lady
Cressida is the moral one—married a clergyman and does missionary
work in the East End. Think of my taking such a lot of trouble
about a clergyman’s wife, who wears Indian jewelry and botanizes!
She made Gus take her all through the glass-houses yesterday, and
bothered him to death by asking him the names of the plants. Fancy
treating Gus as if he were the gardener!”

Mrs. Trenor brought this out in a CRESCENDO of indignation.

“Oh, well, perhaps Lady Cressida will reconcile the Wetheralls to
meeting Carry Fisher,” said Miss Bart pacifically.

“I’m sure I hope so! But she is boring all the men horribly, and
if she takes to distributing tracts, as I hear she does, it will
be too depressing. The worst of it is that she would have been so
useful at the right time. You know we have to have the Bishop once
a year, and she would have given just the right tone to things.
I always have horrid luck about the Bishop’s visits,” added Mrs.
Trenor, whose present misery was being fed by a rapidly rising tide
of reminiscence; “last year, when he came, Gus forgot all about his
being here, and brought home the Ned Wintons and the Farleys—five
divorces and six sets of children between them!”

“When is Lady Cressida going?” Lily enquired.

Mrs. Trenor cast up her eyes in despair. “My dear, if one only
knew! I was in such a hurry to get her away from Maria that I
actually forgot to name a date, and Gus says she told some one she
meant to stop here all winter.”

“To stop here? In this house?”

“Don’t be silly—in America. But if no one else asks her—you know
they NEVER go to hotels.”

“Perhaps Gus only said it to frighten you.”

“No—I heard her tell Bertha Dorset that she had six months to put
in while her husband was taking the cure in the Engadine. You
should have seen Bertha look vacant! But it’s no joke, you know—if
she stays here all the autumn she’ll spoil everything, and Maria
Van Osburgh will simply exult.”

At this affecting vision Mrs. Trenor’s voice trembled with
self-pity.

“Oh, Judy—as if any one were ever bored at Bellomont!” Miss Bart
tactfully protested. “You know perfectly well that, if Mrs. Van
Osburgh were to get all the right people and leave you with all the
wrong ones, you’d manage to make things go off, and she wouldn’t.”

Such an assurance would usually have restored Mrs. Trenor’s
complacency; but on this occasion it did not chase the cloud from
her brow.

“It isn’t only Lady Cressida,” she lamented. “Everything has gone
wrong this week. I can see that Bertha Dorset is furious with me.”

“Furious with you? Why?”

“Because I told her that Lawrence Selden was coming; but he
wouldn’t, after all, and she’s quite unreasonable enough to think
it’s my fault.”

Miss Bart put down her pen and sat absently gazing at the note she
had begun.

“I thought that was all over,” she said.

“So it is, on his side. And of course Bertha has been idle since.
But I fancy she’s out of a job just at present—and some one gave me
a hint that I had better ask Lawrence. Well, I DID ask him—but I
couldn’t make him come; and now I suppose she’ll take it out of me
by being perfectly nasty to every one else.”

“Oh, she may take it out of HIM by being perfectly charming—to some
one else.”

Mrs. Trenor shook her head dolefully. “She knows he wouldn’t mind.
And who else is there? Alice Wetherall won’t let Lucius out of her
sight. Ned Silverton can’t take his eyes off Carry Fisher—poor boy!
Gus is bored by Bertha, Jack Stepney knows her too well—and—well,
to be sure, there’s Percy Gryce!”

She sat up smiling at the thought.

Miss Bart’s countenance did not reflect the smile.

“Oh, she and Mr. Gryce would not be likely to hit it off.”

“You mean that she’d shock him and he’d bore her? Well, that’s not
such a bad beginning, you know. But I hope she won’t take it into
her head to be nice to him, for I asked him here on purpose for
you.”

Lily laughed. “MERCI DU COMPLIMENT! I should certainly have no show
against Bertha.”

“Do you think I am uncomplimentary? I’m not really, you know. Every
one knows you’re a thousand times handsomer and cleverer than
Bertha; but then you’re not nasty. And for always getting what she
wants in the long run, commend me to a nasty woman.”

Miss Bart stared in affected reproval. “I thought you were so fond
of Bertha.”

“Oh, I am—it’s much safer to be fond of dangerous people. But she
IS dangerous—and if I ever saw her up to mischief it’s now. I can
tell by poor George’s manner. That man is a perfect barometer—he
always knows when Bertha is going to——”

“To fall?” Miss Bart suggested.

“Don’t be shocking! You know he believes in her still. And of
course I don’t say there’s any real harm in Bertha. Only she
delights in making people miserable, and especially poor George.”

“Well, he seems cut out for the part—I don’t wonder she likes more
cheerful companionship.”

“Oh, George is not as dismal as you think. If Bertha did worry him
he would be quite different. Or if she’d leave him alone, and let
him arrange his life as he pleases. But she doesn’t dare lose her
hold of him on account of the money, and so when HE isn’t jealous
she pretends to be.”

Miss Bart went on writing in silence, and her hostess sat following
her train of thought with frowning intensity.

“Do you know,” she exclaimed after a long pause, “I believe I’ll
call up Lawrence on the telephone and tell him he simply MUST come?”

“Oh, don’t,” said Lily, with a quick suffusion of colour. The blush
surprised her almost as much as it did her hostess, who, though
not commonly observant of facial changes, sat staring at her with
puzzled eyes.

“Good gracious, Lily, how handsome you are! Why? Do you dislike him
so much?”

“Not at all; I like him. But if you are actuated by the benevolent
intention of protecting me from Bertha—I don’t think I need your
protection.”

Mrs. Trenor sat up with an exclamation. “Lily!——PERCY? Do you mean
to say you’ve actually done it?”

Miss Bart smiled. “I only mean to say that Mr. Gryce and I are
getting to be very good friends.”

“H’m—I see.” Mrs. Trenor fixed a rapt eye upon her. “You know they
say he has eight hundred thousand a year—and spends nothing, except
on some rubbishy old books. And his mother has heart-disease and
will leave him a lot more. OH, LILY, DO GO SLOWLY,” her friend
adjured her.

Miss Bart continued to smile without annoyance. “I shouldn’t, for
instance,” she remarked, “be in any haste to tell him that he had a
lot of rubbishy old books.”

“No, of course not; I know you’re wonderful about getting up
people’s subjects. But he’s horribly shy, and easily shocked,
and—and——”

“Why don’t you say it, Judy? I have the reputation of being on the
hunt for a rich husband?”

“Oh, I don’t mean that; he wouldn’t believe it of you—at first,”
said Mrs. Trenor, with candid shrewdness. “But you know things are
rather lively here at times—I must give Jack and Gus a hint—and
if he thought you were what his mother would call fast—oh, well,
you know what I mean. Don’t wear your scarlet CREPE-DE-CHINE for
dinner, and don’t smoke if you can help it, Lily dear!”

Lily pushed aside her finished work with a dry smile. “You’re very
kind, Judy: I’ll lock up my cigarettes and wear that last year’s
dress you sent me this morning. And if you are really interested
in my career, perhaps you’ll be kind enough not to ask me to play
bridge again this evening.”

“Bridge? Does he mind bridge, too? Oh, Lily, what an awful life
you’ll lead! But of course I won’t—why didn’t you give me a hint
last night? There’s nothing I wouldn’t do, you poor duck, to see
you happy!”

And Mrs. Trenor, glowing with her sex’s eagerness to smooth the
course of true love, enveloped Lily in a long embrace.

“You’re quite sure,” she added solicitously, as the latter
extricated herself, “that you wouldn’t like me to telephone for
Lawrence Selden?”

“Quite sure,” said Lily.

* * * * *

The next three days demonstrated to her own complete satisfaction
Miss Bart’s ability to manage her affairs without extraneous aid.

As she sat, on the Saturday afternoon, on the terrace at Bellomont,
she smiled at Mrs. Trenor’s fear that she might go too fast. If
such a warning had ever been needful, the years had taught her a
salutary lesson, and she flattered herself that she now knew how to
adapt her pace to the object of pursuit. In the case of Mr. Gryce
she had found it well to flutter ahead, losing herself elusively
and luring him on from depth to depth of unconscious intimacy. The
surrounding atmosphere was propitious to this scheme of courtship.
Mrs. Trenor, true to her word, had shown no signs of expecting Lily
at the bridge-table, and had even hinted to the other card-players
that they were to betray no surprise at her unwonted defection. In
consequence of this hint, Lily found herself the centre of that
feminine solicitude which envelops a young woman in the mating
season. A solitude was tacitly created for her in the crowded
existence of Bellomont, and her friends could not have shown a
greater readiness for self-effacement had her wooing been adorned
with all the attributes of romance. In Lily’s set this conduct
implied a sympathetic comprehension of her motives, and Mr. Gryce
rose in her esteem as she saw the consideration he inspired.

The terrace at Bellomont on a September afternoon was a spot
propitious to sentimental musings, and as Miss Bart stood leaning
against the balustrade above the sunken garden, at a little
distance from the animated group about the tea-table, she might
have been lost in the mazes of an inarticulate happiness. In
reality, her thoughts were finding definite utterance in the
tranquil recapitulation of the blessings in store for her. From
where she stood she could see them embodied in the form of Mr.
Gryce, who, in a light overcoat and muffler, sat somewhat nervously
on the edge of his chair, while Carry Fisher, with all the energy
of eye and gesture with which nature and art had combined to
endow her, pressed on him the duty of taking part in the task of
municipal reform.

Mrs. Fisher’s latest hobby was municipal reform. It had been
preceded by an equal zeal for socialism, which had in turn replaced
an energetic advocacy of Christian Science. Mrs. Fisher was
small, fiery and dramatic; and her hands and eyes were admirable
instruments in the service of whatever causes she happened to
espouse. She had, however, the fault common to enthusiasts of
ignoring any slackness of response on the part of her hearers, and
Lily was amused by her unconsciousness of the resistance displayed
in every angle of Mr. Gryce’s attitude. Lily herself knew that
his mind was divided between the dread of catching cold if he
remained out of doors too long at that hour, and the fear that, if
he retreated to the house, Mrs. Fisher might follow him up with a
paper to be signed. Mr. Gryce had a constitutional dislike to what
he called “committing himself,” and tenderly as he cherished his
health, he evidently concluded that it was safer to stay out of
reach of pen and ink till chance released him from Mrs. Fisher’s
toils. Meanwhile he cast agonized glances in the direction of Miss
Bart, whose only response was to sink into an attitude of more
graceful abstraction. She had learned the value of contrast in
throwing her charms into relief, and was fully aware of the extent
to which Mrs. Fisher’s volubility was enhancing her own repose.

She was roused from her musings by the approach of her cousin Jack
Stepney who, at Gwen Van Osburgh’s side, was returning across the
garden from the tennis court.

The couple in question were engaged in the same kind of romance
in which Lily figured, and the latter felt a certain annoyance in
contemplating what seemed to her a caricature of her own situation.
Miss Van Osburgh was a large girl with flat surfaces and no high
lights: Jack Stepney had once said of her that she was as reliable
as roast mutton. His own taste was in the line of less solid and
more highly-seasoned diet; but hunger makes any fare palatable, and
there had been times when Mr. Stepney had been reduced to a crust.

Lily considered with interest the expression of their faces: the
girl’s turned toward her companion’s like an empty plate held up to
be filled, while the man lounging at her side already betrayed the
encroaching boredom which would presently crack the thin veneer of
his smile.

“How impatient men are!” Lily reflected. “All Jack has to do to get
everything he wants is to keep quiet and let that girl marry him;
whereas I have to calculate and contrive, and retreat and advance,
as if I were going through an intricate dance, where one misstep
would throw me hopelessly out of time.”

As they drew nearer she was whimsically struck by a kind of family
likeness between Miss Van Osburgh and Percy Gryce. There was no
resemblance of feature. Gryce was handsome in a didactic way—he
looked like a clever pupil’s drawing from a plaster-cast—while
Gwen’s countenance had no more modelling than a face painted on
a toy balloon. But the deeper affinity was unmistakable: the two
had the same prejudices and ideals, and the same quality of making
other standards non-existent by ignoring them. This attribute was
common to most of Lily’s set: they had a force of negation which
eliminated everything beyond their own range of perception. Gryce
and Miss Van Osburgh were, in short, made for each other by every
law of moral and physical correspondence——“Yet they wouldn’t look
at each other,” Lily mused, “they never do. Each of them wants a
creature of a different race, of Jack’s race and mine, with all
sorts of intuitions, sensations and perceptions that they don’t
even guess the existence of. And they always get what they want.”

She stood talking with her cousin and Miss Van Osburgh, till a
slight cloud on the latter’s brow advised her that even cousinly
amenities were subject to suspicion, and Miss Bart, mindful of the
necessity of not exciting enmities at this crucial point of her
career, dropped aside while the happy couple proceeded toward the
tea-table.

Seating herself on the upper step of the terrace, Lily leaned
her head against the honeysuckles wreathing the balustrade. The
fragrance of the late blossoms seemed an emanation of the tranquil
scene, a landscape tutored to the last degree of rural elegance.
In the foreground glowed the warm tints of the gardens. Beyond the
lawn, with its pyramidal pale-gold maples and velvety firs, sloped
pastures dotted with cattle; and through a long glade the river
widened like a lake under the silver light of September. Lily did
not want to join the circle about the tea-table. They represented
the future she had chosen, and she was content with it, but in no
haste to anticipate its joys. The certainty that she could marry
Percy Gryce when she pleased had lifted a heavy load from her
mind, and her money troubles were too recent for their removal not
to leave a sense of relief which a less discerning intelligence
might have taken for happiness. Her vulgar cares were at an end.
She would be able to arrange her life as she pleased, to soar
into that empyrean of security where creditors cannot penetrate.
She would have smarter gowns than Judy Trenor, and far, far more
jewels than Bertha Dorset. She would be free forever from the
shifts, the expedients, the humiliations of the relatively poor.
Instead of having to flatter, she would be flattered; instead of
being grateful, she would receive thanks. There were old scores
she could pay off as well as old benefits she could return. And
she had no doubts as to the extent of her power. She knew that Mr.
Gryce was of the small chary type most inaccessible to impulses
and emotions. He had the kind of character in which prudence is
a vice, and good advice the most dangerous nourishment. But Lily
had known the species before: she was aware that such a guarded
nature must find one huge outlet of egoism, and she determined to
be to him what his Americana had hitherto been: the one possession
in which he took sufficient pride to spend money on it. She knew
that this generosity to self is one of the forms of meanness, and
she resolved so to identify herself with her husband’s vanity that
to gratify her wishes would be to him the most exquisite form of
self-indulgence. The system might at first necessitate a resort
to some of the very shifts and expedients from which she intended
it should free her; but she felt sure that in a short time she
would be able to play the game in her own way. How should she have
distrusted her powers? Her beauty itself was not the mere ephemeral
possession it might have been in the hands of inexperience: her
skill in enhancing it, the care she took of it, the use she made
of it, seemed to give it a kind of permanence. She felt she could
trust it to carry her through to the end.

And the end, on the whole, was worthwhile. Life was not the mockery
she had thought it three days ago. There was room for her, after
all, in this crowded selfish world of pleasure whence, so short a
time since, her poverty had seemed to exclude her. These people
whom she had ridiculed and yet envied were glad to make a place for
her in the charmed circle about which all her desires revolved.
They were not as brutal and self-engrossed as she had fancied—or
rather, since it would no longer be necessary to flatter and humour
them, that side of their nature became less conspicuous. Society is
a revolving body which is apt to be judged according to its place
in each man’s heaven; and at present it was turning its illuminated
face to Lily.

In the rosy glow it diffused her companions seemed full of amiable
qualities. She liked their elegance, their lightness, their lack
of emphasis: even the self-assurance which at times was so like
obtuseness now seemed the natural sign of social ascendency. They
were lords of the only world she cared for, and they were ready to
admit her to their ranks and let her lord it with them. Already
she felt within her a stealing allegiance to their standards, an
acceptance of their limitations, a disbelief in the things they did
not believe in, a contemptuous pity for the people who were not
able to live as they lived.

The early sunset was slanting across the park. Through the boughs
of the long avenue beyond the gardens she caught the flash of
wheels, and divined that more visitors were approaching. There
was a movement behind her, a scattering of steps and voices:
it was evident that the party about the tea-table was breaking
up. Presently she heard a tread behind her on the terrace. She
supposed that Mr. Gryce had at last found means to escape from his
predicament, and she smiled at the significance of his coming to
join her instead of beating an instant retreat to the fireside.

She turned to give him the welcome which such gallantry deserved;
but her greeting wavered into a blush of wonder, for the man who
had approached her was Lawrence Selden.

“You see I came after all,” he said; but before she had time
to answer, Mrs. Dorset, breaking away from a lifeless colloquy
with her host, had stepped between them with a little gesture of
appropriation.



Chapter 5



The observance of Sunday at Bellomont was chiefly marked by the
punctual appearance of the smart omnibus destined to convey the
household to the little church at the gates. Whether any one got
into the omnibus or not was a matter of secondary importance,
since by standing there it not only bore witness to the orthodox
intentions of the family, but made Mrs. Trenor feel, when she
finally heard it drive away, that she had somehow vicariously made
use of it.

It was Mrs. Trenor’s theory that her daughters actually did go
to church every Sunday; but their French governess’s convictions
calling her to the rival fane, and the fatigues of the week keeping
their mother in her room till luncheon, there was seldom any one
present to verify the fact. Now and then, in a spasmodic burst of
virtue—when the house had been too uproarious over night—Gus
Trenor forced his genial bulk into a tight frock-coat and routed his
daughters from their slumbers; but habitually, as Lily explained to
Mr. Gryce, this parental duty was forgotten till the church bells
were ringing across the park, and the omnibus had driven away empty.

Lily had hinted to Mr. Gryce that this neglect of religious
observances was repugnant to her early traditions, and that during
her visits to Bellomont she regularly accompanied Muriel and Hilda
to church. This tallied with the assurance, also confidentially
imparted, that, never having played bridge before, she had been
“dragged into it” on the night of her arrival, and had lost an
appalling amount of money in consequence of her ignorance of
the game and of the rules of betting. Mr. Gryce was undoubtedly
enjoying Bellomont. He liked the ease and glitter of the life, and
the lustre conferred on him by being a member of this group of rich
and conspicuous people. But he thought it a very materialistic
society; there were times when he was frightened by the talk of the
men and the looks of the ladies, and he was glad to find that Miss
Bart, for all her ease and self-possession, was not at home in so
ambiguous an atmosphere. For this reason he had been especially
pleased to learn that she would, as usual, attend the young Trenors
to church on Sunday morning; and as he paced the gravel sweep
before the door, his light overcoat on his arm and his prayer-book
in one carefully-gloved hand, he reflected agreeably on the
strength of character which kept her true to her early training in
surroundings so subversive to religious principles.

For a long time Mr. Gryce and the omnibus had the gravel sweep to
themselves; but, far from regretting this deplorable indifference
on the part of the other guests, he found himself nourishing the
hope that Miss Bart might be unaccompanied. The precious minutes
were flying, however; the big chestnuts pawed the ground and
flecked their impatient sides with foam; the coachman seemed to be
slowly petrifying on the box, and the groom on the doorstep; and
still the lady did not come. Suddenly, however, there was a sound
of voices and a rustle of skirts in the doorway, and Mr. Gryce,
restoring his watch to his pocket, turned with a nervous start;
but it was only to find himself handing Mrs. Wetherall into the
carriage.

The Wetheralls always went to church. They belonged to the vast
group of human automata who go through life without neglecting to
perform a single one of the gestures executed by the surrounding
puppets. It is true that the Bellomont puppets did not go to
church; but others equally important did—and Mr. and Mrs.
Wetherall’s circle was so large that God was included in their
visiting-list. They appeared, therefore, punctual and resigned,
with the air of people bound for a dull “At Home,” and after them
Hilda and Muriel straggled, yawning and pinning each other’s veils
and ribbons as they came. They had promised Lily to go to church
with her, they declared, and Lily was such a dear old duck that
they didn’t mind doing it to please her, though they couldn’t
fancy what had put the idea in her head, and though for their own
part they would much rather have played lawn tennis with Jack and
Gwen, if she hadn’t told them she was coming. The Misses Trenor
were followed by Lady Cressida Raith, a weather-beaten person in
Liberty silk and ethnological trinkets, who, on seeing the omnibus,
expressed her surprise that they were not to walk across the park;
but at Mrs. Wetherall’s horrified protest that the church was
a mile away, her ladyship, after a glance at the height of the
other’s heels, acquiesced in the necessity of driving, and poor
Mr. Gryce found himself rolling off between four ladies for whose
spiritual welfare he felt not the least concern.

It might have afforded him some consolation could he have known
that Miss Bart had really meant to go to church. She had even risen
earlier than usual in the execution of her purpose. She had an idea
that the sight of her in a grey gown of devotional cut, with her
famous lashes drooped above a prayer-book, would put the finishing
touch to Mr. Gryce’s subjugation, and render inevitable a certain
incident which she had resolved should form a part of the walk they
were to take together after luncheon. Her intentions in short had
never been more definite; but poor Lily, for all the hard glaze of
her exterior, was inwardly as malleable as wax. Her faculty for
adapting herself, for entering into other people’s feelings, if it
served her now and then in small contingencies, hampered her in the
decisive moments of life. She was like a water-plant in the flux
of the tides, and today the whole current of her mood was carrying
her toward Lawrence Selden. Why had he come? Was it to see herself
or Bertha Dorset? It was the last question which, at that moment,
should have engaged her. She might better have contented herself
with thinking that he had simply responded to the despairing
summons of his hostess, anxious to interpose him between herself
and the ill-humour of Mrs. Dorset. But Lily had not rested till she
learned from Mrs. Trenor that Selden had come of his own accord.
“He didn’t even wire me—he just happened to find the trap at the
station. Perhaps it’s not over with Bertha after all,” Mrs. Trenor
musingly concluded; and went away to arrange her dinner-cards
accordingly.

Perhaps it was not, Lily reflected; but it should be soon, unless
she had lost her cunning. If Selden had come at Mrs. Dorset’s call,
it was at her own that he would stay. So much the previous evening
had told her. Mrs. Trenor, true to her simple principle of making
her married friends happy, had placed Selden and Mrs. Dorset next
to each other at dinner; but, in obedience to the time-honoured
traditions of the match-maker, she had separated Lily and Mr.
Gryce, sending in the former with George Dorset, while Mr. Gryce
was coupled with Gwen Van Osburgh.

George Dorset’s talk did not interfere with the range of his
neighbour’s thoughts. He was a mournful dyspeptic, intent on
finding out the deleterious ingredients of every dish and divert-
ed from this care only by the sound of his wife’s voice. On this
occasion, however, Mrs. Dorset took no part in the general
conversation. She sat talking in low murmurs with Selden, and
turning a contemptuous and denuded shoulder toward her host,
who, far from resenting his exclusion, plunged into the excesses
of the MENU with the joyous irresponsibility of a free man. To Mr.
Dorset, however, his wife’s attitude was a subject of such evident
concern that, when he was not scraping the sauce from his fish, or
scooping the moist bread-crumbs from the interior of his roll, he
sat straining his thin neck for a glimpse of her between the lights.

Mrs. Trenor, as it chanced, had placed the husband and wife on
opposite sides of the table, and Lily was therefore able to observe
Mrs. Dorset also, and by carrying her glance a few feet farther, to
set up a rapid comparison between Lawrence Selden and Mr. Gryce.
It was that comparison which was her undoing. Why else had she
suddenly grown interested in Selden? She had known him for eight
years or more: ever since her return to America he had formed a
part of her background. She had always been glad to sit next to
him at dinner, had found him more agreeable than most men, and
had vaguely wished that he possessed the other qualities needful to
fix her attention; but till now she had been too busy with her own
affairs to regard him as more than one of the pleasant accessories
of life. Miss Bart was a keen reader of her own heart, and she saw
that her sudden preoccupation with Selden was due to the fact that
his presence shed a new light on her surroundings. Not that he was
notably brilliant or exceptional; in his own profession he was sur-
passed by more than one man who had bored Lily through many a
weary dinner. It was rather that he had preserved a certain social
detachment, a happy air of viewing the show objectively, of having
points of contact outside the great gilt cage in which they were
all huddled for the mob to gape at. How alluring the world outside
the cage appeared to Lily, as she heard its door clang on her! In
reality, as she knew, the door never clanged: it stood always open;
but most of the captives were like flies in a bottle, and having
once flown in, could never regain their freedom. It was Selden’s
distinction that he had never forgotten the way out.

That was the secret of his way of readjusting her vision. Lily,
turning her eyes from him, found herself scanning her little world
through his retina: it was as though the pink lamps had been shut
off and the dusty daylight let in. She looked down the long table,
studying its occupants one by one, from Gus Trenor, with his
heavy carnivorous head sunk between his shoulders, as he preyed
on a jellied plover, to his wife, at the opposite end of the long
bank of orchids, suggestive, with her glaring good-looks, of a
jeweller’s window lit by electricity. And between the two, what a
long stretch of vacuity! How dreary and trivial these people were!
Lily reviewed them with a scornful impatience: Carry Fisher, with
her shoulders, her eyes, her divorces, her general air of embodying
a “spicy paragraph”; young Silverton, who had meant to live on
proof-reading and write an epic, and who now lived on his friends
and had become critical of truffles; Alice Wetherall, an animated
visiting-list, whose most fervid convictions turned on the wording
of invitations and the engraving of dinner-cards; Wetherall, with
his perpetual nervous nod of acquiescence, his air of agreeing with
people before he knew what they were saying; Jack Stepney, with his
confident smile and anxious eyes, half way between the sheriff and
an heiress; Gwen Van Osburgh, with all the guileless confidence of
a young girl who has always been told that there is no one richer
than her father.

Lily smiled at her classification of her friends. How different
they had seemed to her a few hours ago! Then they had symbolized
what she was gaining, now they stood for what she was giving
up. That very afternoon they had seemed full of brilliant
qualities; now she saw that they were merely dull in a loud way.
Under the glitter of their opportunities she saw the poverty
of their achievement. It was not that she wanted them to be
more disinterested; but she would have liked them to be more
picturesque. And she had a shamed recollection of the way in which,
a few hours since, she had felt the centripetal force of their
standards. She closed her eyes an instant, and the vacuous routine
of the life she had chosen stretched before her like a long white
road without dip or turning: it was true she was to roll over it
in a carriage instead of trudging it on foot, but sometimes the
pedestrian enjoys the diversion of a short cut which is denied to
those on wheels.

She was roused by a chuckle which Mr. Dorset seemed to eject from
the depths of his lean throat.

“I say, do look at her,” he exclaimed, turning to Miss Bart with
lugubrious merriment—“I beg your pardon, but do just look at my
wife making a fool of that poor devil over there! One would really
suppose she was gone on him—and it’s all the other way round, I
assure you.”

Thus adjured, Lily turned her eyes on the spectacle which was
affording Mr. Dorset such legitimate mirth. It certainly appeared,
as he said, that Mrs. Dorset was the more active participant in
the scene: her neighbour seemed to receive her advances with a
temperate zest which did not distract him from his dinner. The
sight restored Lily’s good humour, and knowing the peculiar
disguise which Mr. Dorset’s marital fears assumed, she asked gaily:
“Aren’t you horribly jealous of her?”

Dorset greeted the sally with delight. “Oh, abominably—you’ve
just hit it—keeps me awake at night. The doctors tell me that’s
what has knocked my digestion out—being so infernally jealous of
her.—I can’t eat a mouthful of this stuff, you know,” he added
suddenly, pushing back his plate with a clouded countenance;
and Lily, unfailingly adaptable, accorded her radiant attention
to his prolonged denunciation of other people’s cooks, with a
supplementary tirade on the toxic qualities of melted butter.

It was not often that he found so ready an ear; and, being a man
as well as a dyspeptic, it may be that as he poured his grievances
into it he was not insensible to its rosy symmetry. At any rate he
engaged Lily so long that the sweets were being handed when she
caught a phrase on her other side, where Miss Corby, the comic
woman of the company, was bantering Jack Stepney on his approaching
engagement. Miss Corby’s role was jocularity: she always entered
the conversation with a handspring.

“And of course you’ll have Sim Rosedale as best man!” Lily heard
her fling out as the climax of her prognostications; and Stepney
responded, as if struck: “Jove, that’s an idea. What a thumping
present I’d get out of him!”

SIM ROSEDALE! The name, made more odious by its diminutive,
obtruded itself on Lily’s thoughts like a leer. It stood for one
of the many hated possibilities hovering on the edge of life. If
she did not marry Percy Gryce, the day might come when she would
have to be civil to such men as Rosedale. IF SHE DID NOT MARRY
HIM? But she meant to marry him—she was sure of him and sure of
herself. She drew back with a shiver from the pleasant paths in
which her thoughts had been straying, and set her feet once more in
the middle of the long white road.... When she went upstairs that
night she found that the late post had brought her a fresh batch of
bills. Mrs. Peniston, who was a conscientious woman, had forwarded
them all to Bellomont.

* * * * *

Miss Bart, accordingly, rose the next morning with the most earnest
conviction that it was her duty to go to church. She tore herself
betimes from the lingering enjoyment of her breakfast tray, rang to
have her grey gown laid out, and despatched her maid to borrow a
prayer-book from Mrs. Trenor.

But her course was too purely reasonable not to contain the germs
of rebellion. No sooner were her preparations made than they roused
a smothered sense of resistance. A small spark was enough to
kindle Lily’s imagination, and the sight of the grey dress and the
borrowed prayer-book flashed a long light down the years. She would
have to go to church with Percy Gryce every Sunday. They would have
a front pew in the most expensive church in New York, and his name
would figure handsomely in the list of parish charities. In a few
years, when he grew stouter, he would be made a warden. Once in the
winter the rector would come to dine, and her husband would beg
her to go over the list and see that no DIVORCEES were included,
except those who had showed signs of penitence by being re-married
to the very wealthy. There was nothing especially arduous in this
round of religious obligations; but it stood for a fraction of that
great bulk of boredom which loomed across her path. And who could
consent to be bored on such a morning? Lily had slept well, and
her bath had filled her with a pleasant glow, which was becomingly
reflected in the clear curve of her cheek. No lines were visible
this morning, or else the glass was at a happier angle.

And the day was the accomplice of her mood: it was a day for
impulse and truancy. The light air seemed full of powdered gold;
below the dewy bloom of the lawns the woodlands blushed and
smouldered, and the hills across the river swam in molten blue.
Every drop of blood in Lily’s veins invited her to happiness.

The sound of wheels roused her from these musings, and leaning
behind her shutters she saw the omnibus take up its freight. She
was too late, then—but the fact did not alarm her. A glimpse of Mr.
Gryce’s crestfallen face even suggested that she had done wisely
in absenting herself, since the disappointment he so candidly
betrayed would surely whet his appetite for the afternoon walk.
That walk she did not mean to miss; one glance at the bills on her
writing-table was enough to recall its necessity. But meanwhile
she had the morning to herself, and could muse pleasantly on the
disposal of its hours. She was familiar enough with the habits of
Bellomont to know that she was likely to have a free field till
luncheon. She had seen the Wetheralls, the Trenor girls and Lady
Cressida packed safely into the omnibus; Judy Trenor was sure to
be having her hair shampooed; Carry Fisher had doubtless carried
off her host for a drive; Ned Silverton was probably smoking
the cigarette of young despair in his bedroom; and Kate Corby
was certain to be playing tennis with Jack Stepney and Miss Van
Osburgh. Of the ladies, this left only Mrs. Dorset unaccounted for,
and Mrs. Dorset never came down till luncheon: her doctors, she
averred, had forbidden her to expose herself to the crude air of
the morning.

To the remaining members of the party Lily gave no special thought;
wherever they were, they were not likely to interfere with her
plans. These, for the moment, took the shape of assuming a dress
somewhat more rustic and summerlike in style than the garment she
had first selected, and rustling downstairs, sunshade in hand, with
the disengaged air of a lady in quest of exercise. The great hall
was empty but for the knot of dogs by the fire, who, taking in at
a glance the outdoor aspect of Miss Bart, were upon her at once
with lavish offers of companionship. She put aside the ramming paws
which conveyed these offers, and assuring the joyous volunteers
that she might presently have a use for their company, sauntered
on through the empty drawing-room to the library at the end of the
house. The library was almost the only surviving portion of the
old manor-house of Bellomont: a long spacious room, revealing the
traditions of the mother-country in its classically-cased doors,
the Dutch tiles of the chimney, and the elaborate hob-grate with
its shining brass urns. A few family portraits of lantern-jawed
gentlemen in tie-wigs, and ladies with large head-dresses and small
bodies, hung between the shelves lined with pleasantly-shabby
books: books mostly contemporaneous with the ancestors in question,
and to which the subsequent Trenors had made no perceptible
additions. The library at Bellomont was in fact never used for
reading, though it had a certain popularity as a smoking room or
a quiet retreat for flirtation. It had occurred to Lily, however,
that it might on this occasion have been resorted to by the only
member of the party in the least likely to put it to its original
use. She advanced noiselessly over the dense old rug scattered
with easy-chairs, and before she reached the middle of the room
she saw that she had not been mistaken. Lawrence Selden was in
fact seated at its farther end; but though a book lay on his knee,
his attention was not engaged with it, but directed to a lady
whose lace-clad figure, as she leaned back in an adjoining chair,
detached itself with exaggerated slimness against the dusky leather
upholstery.

Lily paused as she caught sight of the group; for a moment she
seemed about to withdraw, but thinking better of this, she
announced her approach by a slight shake of her skirts which made
the couple raise their heads, Mrs. Dorset with a look of frank
displeasure, and Selden with his usual quiet smile. The sight of
his composure had a disturbing effect on Lily; but to be disturbed
was in her case to make a more brilliant effort at self-possession.

“Dear me, am I late?” she asked, putting a hand in his as he
advanced to greet her.

“Late for what?” enquired Mrs. Dorset tartly. “Not for luncheon,
certainly—but perhaps you had an earlier engagement?”

“Yes, I had,” said Lily confidingly.

“Really? Perhaps I am in the way, then? But Mr. Selden is entirely
at your disposal.” Mrs. Dorset was pale with temper, and her
antagonist felt a certain pleasure in prolonging her distress.

“Oh, dear, no—do stay,” she said good-humouredly. “I don’t in the
least want to drive you away.”

“You’re awfully good, dear, but I never interfere with Mr. Selden’s
engagements.”

The remark was uttered with a little air of proprietorship not lost
on its object, who concealed a faint blush of annoyance by stooping
to pick up the book he had dropped at Lily’s approach. The latter’s
eyes widened charmingly and she broke into a light laugh.

“But I have no engagement with Mr. Selden! My engagement was to go
to church; and I’m afraid the omnibus has started without me. HAS
it started, do you know?”

She turned to Selden, who replied that he had heard it drive away
some time since.

“Ah, then I shall have to walk; I promised Hilda and Muriel to go
to church with them. It’s too late to walk there, you say? Well, I
shall have the credit of trying, at any rate—and the advantage of
escaping part of the service. I’m not so sorry for myself, after
all!”

And with a bright nod to the couple on whom she had intruded, Miss
Bart strolled through the glass doors and carried her rustling
grace down the long perspective of the garden walk.

She was taking her way churchward, but at no very quick pace; a
fact not lost on one of her observers, who stood in the doorway
looking after her with an air of puzzled amusement. The truth is
that she was conscious of a somewhat keen shock of disappointment.
All her plans for the day had been built on the assumption that it
was to see her that Selden had come to Bellomont. She had expected,
when she came downstairs, to find him on the watch for her; and
she had found him, instead, in a situation which might well denote
that he had been on the watch for another lady. Was it possible,
after all, that he had come for Bertha Dorset? The latter had
acted on the assumption to the extent of appearing at an hour when
she never showed herself to ordinary mortals, and Lily, for the
moment, saw no way of putting her in the wrong. It did not occur
to her that Selden might have been actuated merely by the desire
to spend a Sunday out of town: women never learn to dispense with
the sentimental motive in their judgments of men. But Lily was not
easily disconcerted; competition put her on her mettle, and she
reflected that Selden’s coming, if it did not declare him to be
still in Mrs. Dorset’s toils, showed him to be so completely free
from them that he was not afraid of her proximity.

These thoughts so engaged her that she fell into a gait hardly
likely to carry her to church before the sermon, and at length,
having passed from the gardens to the wood-path beyond, so far
forgot her intention as to sink into a rustic seat at a bend of the
walk. The spot was charming, and Lily was not insensible to the
charm, or to the fact that her presence enhanced it; but she was
not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in company,
and the combination of a handsome girl and a romantic scene struck
her as too good to be wasted. No one, however, appeared to profit
by the opportunity; and after a half hour of fruitless waiting she
rose and wandered on. She felt a stealing sense of fatigue as she
walked; the sparkle had died out of her, and the taste of life
was stale on her lips. She hardly knew what she had been seeking,
or why the failure to find it had so blotted the light from her
sky: she was only aware of a vague sense of failure, of an inner
isolation deeper than the loneliness about her.

Her footsteps flagged, and she stood gazing listlessly ahead,
digging the ferny edge of the path with the tip of her sunshade.
As she did so a step sounded behind her, and she saw Selden at her
side.

“How fast you walk!” he remarked. “I thought I should never catch
up with you.”

She answered gaily: “You must be quite breathless! I’ve been
sitting under that tree for an hour.”

“Waiting for me, I hope?” he rejoined; and she said with a vague
laugh:

“Well—waiting to see if you would come.”

“I seize the distinction, but I don’t mind it, since doing the one
involved doing the other. But weren’t you sure that I should come?”

“If I waited long enough—but you see I had only a limited time to
give to the experiment.”

“Why limited? Limited by luncheon?”

“No; by my other engagement.”

“Your engagement to go to church with Muriel and Hilda?”

“No; but to come home from church with another person.”

“Ah, I see; I might have known you were fully provided with
alternatives. And is the other person coming home this way?”

Lily laughed again. “That’s just what I don’t know; and to find
out, it is my business to get to church before the service is over.”

“Exactly; and it is my business to prevent your doing so; in which
case the other person, piqued by your absence, will form the
desperate resolve of driving back in the omnibus.”

Lily received this with fresh appreciation; his nonsense was like
the bubbling of her inner mood. “Is that what you would do in such
an emergency?” she enquired.

Selden looked at her with solemnity. “I am here to prove to you,”
he cried, “what I am capable of doing in an emergency!”

“Walking a mile in an hour—you must own that the omnibus would be
quicker!”

“Ah—but will he find you in the end? That’s the only test of
success.”

They looked at each other with the same luxury of enjoyment that
they had felt in exchanging absurdities over his tea-table; but
suddenly Lily’s face changed, and she said: “Well, if it is, he has
succeeded.”

Selden, following her glance, perceived a party of people advancing
toward them from the farther bend of the path. Lady Cressida
had evidently insisted on walking home, and the rest of the
church-goers had thought it their duty to accompany her. Lily’s
companion looked rapidly from one to the other of the two men of
the party; Wetherall walking respectfully at Lady Cressida’s side
with his little sidelong look of nervous attention, and Percy Gryce
bringing-up the rear with Mrs. Wetherall and the Trenors.

“Ah—now I see why you were getting up your Americana!” Selden
exclaimed with a note of the freest admiration but the blush with
which the sally was received checked whatever amplifications he had
meant to give it.

That Lily Bart should object to being bantered about her suitors,
or even about her means of attracting them, was so new to Selden
that he had a momentary flash of surprise, which lit up a number
of possibilities; but she rose gallantly to the defence of her
confusion, by saying, as its object approached: “That was why I was
waiting for you—to thank you for having given me so many points!”

“Ah, you can hardly do justice to the subject in such a short
time,” said Selden, as the Trenor girls caught sight of Miss Bart;
and while she signalled a response to their boisterous greeting, he
added quickly: “Won’t you devote your afternoon to it? You know I
must be off tomorrow morning. We’ll take a walk, and you can thank
me at your leisure.”



Chapter 6



The afternoon was perfect. A deeper stillness possessed the air,
and the glitter of the American autumn was tempered by a haze which
diffused the brightness without dulling it.

In the woody hollows of the park there was already a faint chill;
but as the ground rose the air grew lighter, and ascending the long
slopes beyond the high-road, Lily and her companion reached a zone
of lingering summer. The path wound across a meadow with scattered
trees; then it dipped into a lane plumed with asters and purpling
sprays of bramble, whence, through the light quiver of ash-leaves,
the country unrolled itself in pastoral distances.

Higher up, the lane showed thickening tufts of fern and of the
creeping glossy verdure of shaded slopes; trees began to overhang
it, and the shade deepened to the checkered dusk of a beech-grove.
The boles of the trees stood well apart, with only a light feather-
ing of undergrowth; the path wound along the edge of the wood,
now and then looking out on a sunlit pasture or on an orchard
spangled with fruit.

Lily had no real intimacy with nature, but she had a passion for
the appropriate and could be keenly sensitive to a scene which
was the fitting background of her own sensations. The landscape
outspread below her seemed an enlargement of her present mood, and
she found something of herself in its calmness, its breadth, its
long free reaches. On the nearer slopes the sugar-maples wavered
like pyres of light; lower down was a massing of grey orchards, and
here and there the lingering green of an oak-grove. Two or three
red farm-houses dozed under the apple-trees, and the white wooden
spire of a village church showed beyond the shoulder of the hill;
while far below, in a haze of dust, the high-road ran between the
fields.

“Let us sit here,” Selden suggested, as they reached an open ledge
of rock above which the beeches rose steeply between mossy boulders.

Lily dropped down on the rock, glowing with her long climb. She
sat quiet, her lips parted by the stress of the ascent, her eyes
wandering peacefully over the broken ranges of the landscape.
Selden stretched himself on the grass at her feet, tilting his hat
against the level sun-rays, and clasping his hands behind his head,
which rested against the side of the rock. He had no wish to make
her talk; her quick-breathing silence seemed a part of the general
hush and harmony of things. In his own mind there was only a lazy
sense of pleasure, veiling the sharp edges of sensation as the
September haze veiled the scene at their feet. But Lily, though her
attitude was as calm as his, was throbbing inwardly with a rush of
thoughts. There were in her at the moment two beings, one drawing
deep breaths of freedom and exhilaration, the other gasping for
air in a little black prison-house of fears. But gradually the
captive’s gasps grew fainter, or the other paid less heed to them:
the horizon expanded, the air grew stronger, and the free spirit
quivered for flight.

She could not herself have explained the sense of buoyancy which
seemed to lift and swing her above the sun-suffused world at her
feet. Was it love, she wondered, or a mere fortuitous combination
of happy thoughts and sensations? How much of it was owing to the
spell of the perfect afternoon, the scent of the fading woods, the
thought of the dulness she had fled from? Lily had no definite
experience by which to test the quality of her feelings. She had
several times been in love with fortunes or careers, but only
once with a man. That was years ago, when she first came out, and
had been smitten with a romantic passion for a young gentleman
named Herbert Melson, who had blue eyes and a little wave in
his hair. Mr. Melson, who was possessed of no other negotiable
securities, had hastened to employ these in capturing the eldest
Miss Van Osburgh: since then he had grown stout and wheezy, and
was given to telling anecdotes about his children. If Lily recalled
this early emotion it was not to compare it with that which now
possessed her; the only point of comparison was the sense of
lightness, of emancipation, which she remembered feeling, in the
whirl of a waltz or the seclusion of a conservatory, during the
brief course of her youthful romance. She had not known again
till today that lightness, that glow of freedom; but now it was
something more than a blind groping of the blood. The peculiar
charm of her feeling for Selden was that she understood it; she
could put her finger on every link of the chain that was drawing
them together. Though his popularity was of the quiet kind,
felt rather than actively expressed among his friends, she had
never mistaken his inconspicuousness for obscurity. His reputed
cultivation was generally regarded as a slight obstacle to easy
intercourse, but Lily, who prided herself on her broad-minded
recognition of literature, and always carried an Omar Khayam in
her travelling-bag, was attracted by this attribute, which she
felt would have had its distinction in an older society. It was,
moreover, one of his gifts to look his part; to have a height which
lifted his head above the crowd, and the keenly-modelled dark
features which, in a land of amorphous types, gave him the air of
belonging to a more specialized race, of carrying the impress of a
concentrated past. Expansive persons found him a little dry, and
very young girls thought him sarcastic; but this air of friendly
aloofness, as far removed as possible from any assertion of
personal advantage, was the quality which piqued Lily’s interest.
Everything about him accorded with the fastidious element in her
taste, even to the light irony with which he surveyed what seemed
to her most sacred. She admired him most of all, perhaps, for being
able to convey as distinct a sense of superiority as the richest
man she had ever met.

It was the unconscious prolongation of this thought which led her
to say presently, with a laugh: “I have broken two engagements for
you today. How many have you broken for me?”

“None,” said Selden calmly. “My only engagement at Bellomont was
with you.”

She glanced down at him, faintly smiling.

“Did you really come to Bellomont to see me?”

“Of course I did.”

Her look deepened meditatively. “Why?” she murmured, with an accent
which took all tinge of coquetry from the question.

“Because you’re such a wonderful spectacle: I always like to see
what you are doing.”

“How do you know what I should be doing if you were not here?”

Selden smiled. “I don’t flatter myself that my coming has deflected
your course of action by a hair’s breadth.”

“That’s absurd—since, if you were not here, I could obviously not
be taking a walk with you.”

“No; but your taking a walk with me is only another way of making
use of your material. You are an artist and I happen to be the bit
of colour you are using today. It’s a part of your cleverness to be
able to produce premeditated effects extemporaneously.”

Lily smiled also: his words were too acute not to strike her sense
of humour. It was true that she meant to use the accident of his
presence as part of a very definite effect; or that, at least,
was the secret pretext she had found for breaking her promise to
walk with Mr. Gryce. She had sometimes been accused of being too
eager—even Judy Trenor had warned her to go slowly. Well, she would
not be too eager in this case; she would give her suitor a longer
taste of suspense. Where duty and inclination jumped together, it
was not in Lily’s nature to hold them asunder. She had excused
herself from the walk on the plea of a headache: the horrid
headache which, in the morning, had prevented her venturing to
church. Her appearance at luncheon justified the excuse. She looked
languid, full of a suffering sweetness; she carried a scent-bottle
in her hand. Mr. Gryce was new to such manifestations; he wondered
rather nervously if she were delicate, having far-reaching fears
about the future of his progeny. But sympathy won the day, and he
besought her not to expose herself: he always connected the outer
air with ideas of exposure.

Lily had received his sympathy with languid gratitude, urging him,
since she should be such poor company, to join the rest of the
party who, after luncheon, were starting in automobiles on a visit
to the Van Osburghs at Peekskill. Mr. Gryce was touched by her
disinterestedness, and, to escape from the threatened vacuity of
the afternoon, had taken her advice and departed mournfully, in a
dust-hood and goggles: as the motor-car plunged down the avenue she
smiled at his resemblance to a baffled beetle. Selden had watched
her manoeuvres with lazy amusement. She had made no reply to his
suggestion that they should spend the afternoon together, but as
her plan unfolded itself he felt fairly confident of being included
in it. The house was empty when at length he heard her step on the
stair and strolled out of the billiard-room to join her.

She had on a hat and walking-dress, and the dogs were bounding at
her feet.

“I thought, after all, the air might do me good,” she explained;
and he agreed that so simple a remedy was worth trying.

The excursionists would be gone at least four hours; Lily and
Selden had the whole afternoon before them, and the sense of
leisure and safety gave the last touch of lightness to her spirit.
With so much time to talk, and no definite object to be led up to,
she could taste the rare joys of mental vagrancy.

She felt so free from ulterior motives that she took up his charge
with a touch of resentment.

“I don’t know,” she said, “why you are always accusing me of
premeditation.”

“I thought you confessed to it: you told me the other day that you
had to follow a certain line—and if one does a thing at all it is a
merit to do it thoroughly.”

“If you mean that a girl who has no one to think for her is obliged
to think for herself, I am quite willing to accept the imputation.
But you must find me a dismal kind of person if you suppose that I
never yield to an impulse.”

“Ah, but I don’t suppose that: haven’t I told you that your genius
lies in converting impulses into intentions?”

“My genius?” she echoed with a sudden note of weariness. “Is
there any final test of genius but success? And I certainly haven’t
succeeded.”

Selden pushed his hat back and took a side-glance at her.
“Success—what is success? I shall be interested to have your
definition.”

“Success?” She hesitated. “Why, to get as much as one can out of
life, I suppose. It’s a relative quality, after all. Isn’t that your idea
of it?”

“My idea of it? God forbid!” He sat up with sudden energy, resting
his elbows on his knees and staring out upon the mellow fields. “My
idea of success,” he said, “is personal freedom.”

“Freedom? Freedom from worries?”

“From everything—from money, from poverty, from ease and anxiety,
from all the material accidents. To keep a kind of republic of the
spirit—that’s what I call success.”

She leaned forward with a responsive flash. “I know—I know—it’s
strange; but that’s just what I’ve been feeling today.”

He met her eyes with the latent sweetness of his. “Is the feeling
so rare with you?” he said.

She blushed a little under his gaze. “You think me horribly sordid,
don’t you? But perhaps it’s rather that I never had any choice.
There was no one, I mean, to tell me about the republic of the
spirit.”

“There never is—it’s a country one has to find the way to one’s
self.”

“But I should never have found my way there if you hadn’t told me.”

“Ah, there are sign-posts—but one has to know how to read them.”

“Well, I have known, I have known!” she cried with a glow of
eagerness. “Whenever I see you, I find myself spelling out a letter
of the sign—and yesterday—last evening at dinner—I suddenly saw a
little way into your republic.”

Selden was still looking at her, but with a changed eye. Hitherto
he had found, in her presence and her talk, the aesthetic amusement
which a reflective man is apt to seek in desultory intercourse with
pretty women. His attitude had been one of admiring spectatorship,
and he would have been almost sorry to detect in her any emotional
weakness which should interfere with the fulfilment of her aims.
But now the hint of this weakness had become the most interesting
thing about her. He had come on her that morning in a moment of
disarray; her face had been pale and altered, and the diminution
of her beauty had lent her a poignant charm. THAT IS HOW SHE LOOKS
WHEN SHE IS ALONE! had been his first thought; and the second was
to note in her the change which his coming produced. It was the
danger-point of their intercourse that he could not doubt the
spontaneity of her liking. From whatever angle he viewed their
dawning intimacy, he could not see it as part of her scheme of
life; and to be the unforeseen element in a career so accurately
planned was stimulating even to a man who had renounced sentimental
experiments.

“Well,” he said, “did it make you want to see more? Are you going
to become one of us?”

He had drawn out his cigarettes as he spoke, and she reached her
hand toward the case.

“Oh, do give me one—I haven’t smoked for days!”

“Why such unnatural abstinence? Everybody smokes at Bellomont.”

“Yes—but it is not considered becoming in a JEUNE FILLE A MARIER;
and at the present moment I am a JEUNE FILLE A MARIER.”

“Ah, then I’m afraid we can’t let you into the republic.”

“Why not? Is it a celibate order?”

“Not in the least, though I’m bound to say there are not many
married people in it. But you will marry some one very rich, and
it’s as hard for rich people to get into as the kingdom of heaven.”

“That’s unjust, I think, because, as I understand it, one of the
conditions of citizenship is not to think too much about money, and
the only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of
it.”

“You might as well say that the only way not to think about air is
to have enough to breathe. That is true enough in a sense; but your
lungs are thinking about the air, if you are not. And so it is with
your rich people—they may not be thinking of money, but they’re
breathing it all the while; take them into another element and see
how they squirm and gasp!”

Lily sat gazing absently through the blue rings of her cigarette-
smoke.

“It seems to me,” she said at length, “that you spend a good deal
of your time in the element you disapprove of.”

Selden received this thrust without discomposure. “Yes; but I have
tried to remain amphibious: it’s all right as long as one’s lungs
can work in another air. The real alchemy consists in being able
to turn gold back again into something else; and that’s the secret
that most of your friends have lost.”

Lily mused. “Don’t you think,” she rejoined after a moment, “that
the people who find fault with society are too apt to regard it as
an end and not a means, just as the people who despise money speak
as if its only use were to be kept in bags and gloated over? Isn’t
it fairer to look at them both as opportunities, which may be used
either stupidly or intelligently, according to the capacity of the
user?”

“That is certainly the sane view; but the queer thing about society
is that the people who regard it as an end are those who are in it,
and not the critics on the fence. It’s just the other way with most
shows—the audience may be under the illusion, but the actors
know that real life is on the other side of the footlights. The peo-
ple who take society as an escape from work are putting it to its
proper use; but when it becomes the thing worked for it distorts
all the relations of life.” Selden raised himself on his elbow.
“Good heavens!” he went on, “I don’t underrate the decorative side
of life. It seems to me the sense of splendour has justified itself
by what it has produced. The worst of it is that so much human
nature is used up in the process. If we’re all the raw stuff of the
cosmic effects, one would rather be the fire that tempers a sword
than the fish that dyes a purple cloak. And a society like ours
wastes such good material in producing its little patch of purple!
Look at a boy like Ned Silverton—he’s really too good to be used to
refurbish anybody’s social shabbiness. There’s a lad just setting
out to discover the universe: isn’t it a pity he should end by
finding it in Mrs. Fisher’s drawing-room?”

“Ned is a dear boy, and I hope he will keep his illusions long
enough to write some nice poetry about them; but do you think
it is only in society that he is likely to lose them?”

Selden answered her with a shrug. “Why do we call all our gene-
rous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths? Isn’t it a suffi-
cient condemnation of society to find one’s self accepting such
phraseology? I very nearly acquired the jargon at Silverton’s age,
and I know how names can alter the colour of beliefs.”

She had never heard him speak with such energy of affirmation.
His habitual touch was that of the eclectic, who lightly turns over
and compares; and she was moved by this sudden glimpse into the
laboratory where his faiths were formed.

“Ah, you are as bad as the other sectarians,” she exclaimed; “why
do you call your republic a republic? It is a closed corporation,
and you create arbitrary objections in order to keep people out.”

“It is not MY republic; if it were, I should have a COUP D’ETAT and
seat you on the throne.”

“Whereas, in reality, you think I can never even get my foot across
the threshold? Oh, I understand what you mean. You despise my
ambitions—you think them unworthy of me!”

Selden smiled, but not ironically. “Well, isn’t that a tribute? I
think them quite worthy of most of the people who live by them.”

She had turned to gaze on him gravely. “But isn’t it possible that,
if I had the opportunities of these people, I might make a better
use of them? Money stands for all kinds of things—its purchasing
quality isn’t limited to diamonds and motor-cars.”

“Not in the least: you might expiate your enjoyment of them by
founding a hospital.”

“But if you think they are what I should really enjoy, you must
think my ambitions are good enough for me.”

Selden met this appeal with a laugh. “Ah, my dear Miss Bart, I am
not divine Providence, to guarantee your enjoying the things you
are trying to get!”

“Then the best you can say for me is, that after struggling to get
them I probably shan’t like them?” She drew a deep breath. “What a
miserable future you foresee for me!”

“Well—have you never foreseen it for yourself?” The slow colour
rose to her cheek, not a blush of excitement but drawn from the
deep wells of feeling; it was as if the effort of her spirit had
produced it.

“Often and often,” she said. “But it looks so much darker when you
show it to me!”

He made no answer to this exclamation, and for a while they sat
silent, while something throbbed between them in the wide quiet of
the air.

But suddenly she turned on him with a kind of vehemence. “Why do
you do this to me?” she cried. “Why do you make the things I have
chosen seem hateful to me, if you have nothing to give me instead?”

The words roused Selden from the musing fit into which he had
fallen. He himself did not know why he had led their talk along
such lines; it was the last use he would have imagined himself
making of an afternoon’s solitude with Miss Bart. But it was one
of those moments when neither seemed to speak deliberately, when
an indwelling voice in each called to the other across unsounded
depths of feeling.

“No, I have nothing to give you instead,” he said, sitting up and
turning so that he faced her. “If I had, it should be yours, you
know.”

She received this abrupt declaration in a way even stranger than
the manner of its making: she dropped her face on her hands and he
saw that for a moment she wept.

It was for a moment only, however; for when he leaned nearer and
drew down her hands with a gesture less passionate than grave, she
turned on him a face softened but not disfigured by emotion, and he
said to himself, somewhat cruelly, that even her weeping was an art.

The reflection steadied his voice as he asked, between pity and
irony: “Isn’t it natural that I should try to belittle all the
things I can’t offer you?”

Her face brightened at this, but she drew her hand away, not with
a gesture of coquetry, but as though renouncing something to which
she had no claim.

“But you belittle ME, don’t you,” she returned gently, “in being so
sure they are the only things I care for?”

Selden felt an inner start; but it was only the last quiver of his
egoism. Almost at once he answered quite simply: “But you do care
for them, don’t you? And no wishing of mine can alter that.”

He had so completely ceased to consider how far this might carry
him, that he had a distinct sense of disappointment when she turned
on him a face sparkling with derision.

“Ah,” she cried, “for all your fine phrases you’re really as great
a coward as I am, for you wouldn’t have made one of them if you
hadn’t been so sure of my answer.”

The shock of this retort had the effect of crystallizing Selden’s
wavering intentions.

“I am not so sure of your answer,” he said quietly. “And I do you
the justice to believe that you are not either.”

It was her turn to look at him with surprise; and after a moment—
“Do you want to marry me?” she asked.

He broke into a laugh. “No, I don’t want to—but perhaps I should if
you did!”

“That’s what I told you—you’re so sure of me that you can amuse
yourself with experiments.” She drew back the hand he had regained,
and sat looking down on him sadly.

“I am not making experiments,” he returned. “Or if I am, it is
not on you but on myself. I don’t know what effect they are going
to have on me—but if marrying you is one of them, I will take the
risk.”

She smiled faintly. “It would be a great risk, certainly—I have
never concealed from you how great.”

“Ah, it’s you who are the coward!” he exclaimed.

She had risen, and he stood facing her with his eyes on hers. The
soft isolation of the falling day enveloped them: they seemed lift-
ed into a finer air. All the exquisite influences of the hour trembled
in their veins, and drew them to each other as the loosened leaves
were drawn to the earth.

“It’s you who are the coward,” he repeated, catching her hands in
his.

She leaned on him for a moment, as if with a drop of tired wings:
he felt as though her heart were beating rather with the stress
of a long flight than the thrill of new distances. Then, drawing
back with a little smile of warning—“I shall look hideous in dowdy
clothes; but I can trim my own hats,” she declared.

They stood silent for a while after this, smiling at each other
like adventurous children who have climbed to a forbidden height
from which they discover a new world. The actual world at their
feet was veiling itself in dimness, and across the valley a clear
moon rose in the denser blue.

Suddenly they heard a remote sound, like the hum of a giant insect,
and following the high-road, which wound whiter through the
surrounding twilight, a black object rushed across their vision.

Lily started from her attitude of absorption; her smile faded and
she began to move toward the lane.

“I had no idea it was so late! We shall not be back till after
dark,” she said, almost impatiently.

Selden was looking at her with surprise: it took him a moment to
regain his usual view of her; then he said, with an uncontrollable
note of dryness: “That was not one of our party; the motor was
going the other way.”

“I know—I know——” She paused, and he saw her redden through the
twilight. “But I told them I was not well—that I should not go out.
Let us go down!” she murmured.

Selden continued to look at her; then he drew his cigarette-case
from his pocket and slowly lit a cigarette. It seemed to him
necessary, at that moment, to proclaim, by some habitual gesture
of this sort, his recovered hold on the actual: he had an almost
puerile wish to let his companion see that, their flight over, he
had landed on his feet.

She waited while the spark flickered under his curved palm; then he
held out the cigarettes to her.

She took one with an unsteady hand, and putting it to her lips,
leaned forward to draw her light from his. In the indistinctness
the little red gleam lit up the lower part of her face, and he saw
her mouth tremble into a smile.

“Were you serious?” she asked, with an odd thrill of gaiety
which she might have caught up, in haste, from a heap of stock
inflections, without having time to select the just note. Selden’s
voice was under better control. “Why not?” he returned. “You see I
took no risks in being so.” And as she continued to stand before
him, a little pale under the retort, he added quickly: “Let us go
down.”



Chapter 7



It spoke much for the depth of Mrs. Trenor’s friendship that her
voice, in admonishing Miss Bart, took the same note of personal
despair as if she had been lamenting the collapse of a house-party.

“All I can say is, Lily, that I can’t make you out!” She leaned
back, sighing, in the morning abandon of lace and muslin, turning
an indifferent shoulder to the heaped-up importunities of her desk,
while she considered, with the eye of a physician who has given up
the case, the erect exterior of the patient confronting her.

“If you hadn’t told me you were going in for him seriously—but I’m
sure you made that plain enough from the beginning! Why else did
you ask me to let you off bridge, and to keep away Carry and Kate
Corby? I don’t suppose you did it because he amused you; we could
none of us imagine your putting up with him for a moment unless
you meant to marry him. And I’m sure everybody played fair! They
all wanted to help it along. Even Bertha kept her hands off—I will
say that—till Lawrence came down and you dragged him away from
her. After that she had a right to retaliate—why on earth did you
interfere with her? You’ve known Lawrence Selden for years—why did
you behave as if you had just discovered him? If you had a grudge
against Bertha it was a stupid time to show it—you could have paid
her back just as well after you were married! I told you Bertha
was dangerous. She was in an odious mood when she came here, but
Lawrence’s turning up put her in a good humour, and if you’d only
let her think he came for HER it would have never occurred to her
to play you this trick. Oh, Lily, you’ll never do anything if
you’re not serious!”

Miss Bart accepted this exhortation in a spirit of the purest
impartiality. Why should she have been angry? It was the voice
of her own conscience which spoke to her through Mrs. Trenor’s
reproachful accents. But even to her own conscience she must trump
up a semblance of defence. “I only took a day off—I thought he
meant to stay on all this week, and I knew Mr. Selden was leaving
this morning.”

Mrs. Trenor brushed aside the plea with a gesture which laid bare
its weakness.

“He did mean to stay—that’s the worst of it. It shows that he’s
run away from you; that Bertha’s done her work and poisoned him
thoroughly.”

Lily gave a slight laugh. “Oh, if he’s running I’ll overtake him!”

Her friend threw out an arresting hand. “Whatever you do, Lily, do
nothing!”

Miss Bart received the warning with a smile. “I don’t mean,
literally, to take the next train. There are ways——” But she did
not go on to specify them.

Mrs. Trenor sharply corrected the tense. “There WERE ways—plenty
of them! I didn’t suppose you needed to have them pointed out.
But don’t deceive yourself—he’s thoroughly frightened. He has run
straight home to his mother, and she’ll protect him!”

“Oh, to the death,” Lily agreed, dimpling at the vision.

“How you can LAUGH——” her friend rebuked her; and she dropped back
to a soberer perception of things with the question: “What was it
Bertha really told him?”

“Don’t ask me—horrors! She seemed to have raked up everything. Oh,
you know what I mean—of course there isn’t anything, REALLY; but
I suppose she brought in Prince Varigliano—and Lord Hubert—and
there was some story of your having borrowed money of old Ned Van
Alstyne: did you ever?”

“He is my father’s cousin,” Miss Bart interposed.

“Well, of course she left THAT out. It seems Ned told Carry Fisher;
and she told Bertha, naturally. They’re all alike, you know: they
hold their tongues for years, and you think you’re safe, but when
their opportunity comes they remember everything.”

Lily had grown pale: her voice had a harsh note in it. “It was
some money I lost at bridge at the Van Osburghs’. I repaid it, of
course.”

“Ah, well, they wouldn’t remember that; besides, it was the idea
of the gambling debt that frightened Percy. Oh, Bertha knew her
man—she knew just what to tell him!”

In this strain Mrs. Trenor continued for nearly an hour to admon-
ish her friend. Miss Bart listened with admirable equanimity. Her
naturally good temper had been disciplined by years of enforced
compliance, since she had almost always had to attain her ends
by the circuitous path of other people’s; and, being naturally
inclined to face unpleasant facts as soon as they presented
themselves, she was not sorry to hear an impartial statement of
what her folly was likely to cost, the more so as her own thoughts
were still insisting on the other side of the case. Presented
in the light of Mrs. Trenor’s vigorous comments, the reckoning
was certainly a formidable one, and Lily, as she listened, found
herself gradually reverting to her friend’s view of the situation.
Mrs. Trenor’s words were moreover emphasized for her hearer by
anxieties which she herself could scarcely guess. Affluence, unless
stimulated by a keen imagination, forms but the vaguest notion of
the practical strain of poverty. Judy knew it must be “horrid” for
poor Lily to have to stop to consider whether she could afford
real lace on her petticoats, and not to have a motor-car and a
steam-yacht at her orders; but the daily friction of unpaid bills,
the daily nibble of small temptations to expenditure, were trials
as far out of her experience as the domestic problems of the
char-woman. Mrs. Trenor’s unconsciousness of the real stress of
the situation had the effect of making it more galling to Lily. While
her friend reproached her for missing the opportunity to eclipse
her rivals, she was once more battling in imagination with the
mounting tide of indebtedness from which she had so nearly escap-
ed. What wind of folly had driven her out again on those dark seas?

If anything was needed to put the last touch to her self-abasement
it was the sense of the way her old life was opening its ruts again
to receive her. Yesterday her fancy had fluttered free pinions
above a choice of occupations; now she had to drop to the level of
the familiar routine, in which moments of seeming brilliancy and
freedom alternated with long hours of subjection.

She laid a deprecating hand on her friend’s. “Dear Judy! I’m sorry
to have been such a bore, and you are very good to me. But you must
have some letters for me to answer—let me at least be useful.”

She settled herself at the desk, and Mrs. Trenor accepted her
resumption of the morning’s task with a sigh which implied that,
after all, she had proved herself unfit for higher uses.

The luncheon-table showed a depleted circle. All the men but Jack
Stepney and Dorset had returned to town (it seemed to Lily a last
touch of irony that Selden and Percy Gryce should have gone in the
same train), and Lady Cressida and the attendant Wetheralls had
been despatched by motor to lunch at a distant country-house. At
such moments of diminished interest it was usual for Mrs. Dorset to
keep her room till the afternoon; but on this occasion she drifted
in when luncheon was half over, hollowed-eyed and drooping, but
with an edge of malice under her indifference.

She raised her eyebrows as she looked about the table. “How few
of us are left! I do so enjoy the quiet—don’t you, Lily? I wish the
men would always stop away—it’s really much nicer without them.
Oh, you don’t count, George: one doesn’t have to talk to one’s
husband. But I thought Mr. Gryce was to stay for the rest of the
week?” she added enquiringly. “Didn’t he intend to, Judy? He’s such
a nice boy—I wonder what drove him away? He is rather shy, and I’m
afraid we may have shocked him: he has been brought up in such an
old-fashioned way. Do you know, Lily, he told me he had never seen
a girl play cards for money till he saw you doing it the other
night? And he lives on the interest of his income, and always has a
lot left over to invest!”

Mrs. Fisher leaned forward eagerly. “I do believe it is some one’s
duty to educate that young man. It is shocking that he has never
been made to realize his duties as a citizen. Every wealthy man
should be compelled to study the laws of his country.”

Mrs. Dorset glanced at her quietly. “I think he HAS studied the
divorce laws. He told me he had promised the Bishop to sign some
kind of a petition against divorce.”

Mrs. Fisher reddened under her powder, and Stepney said with
a laughing glance at Miss Bart: “I suppose he is thinking of
marriage, and wants to tinker up the old ship before he goes
aboard.”

His betrothed looked shocked at the metaphor, and George Dorset
exclaimed with a sardonic growl: “Poor devil! It isn’t the ship
that will do for him, it’s the crew.”

“Or the stowaways,” said Miss Corby brightly. “If I contemplated a
voyage with him I should try to start with a friend in the hold.”

Miss Van Osburgh’s vague feeling of pique was struggling for
appropriate expression. “I’m sure I don’t see why you laugh at him;
I think he’s very nice,” she exclaimed; “and, at any rate, a girl
who married him would always have enough to be comfortable.”

She looked puzzled at the redoubled laughter which hailed her
words, but it might have consoled her to know how deeply they had
sunk into the breast of one of her hearers.

Comfortable! At that moment the word was more eloquent to Lily
Bart than any other in the language. She could not even pause to
smile over the heiress’s view of a colossal fortune as a mere
shelter against want: her mind was filled with the vision of what
that shelter might have been to her. Mrs. Dorset’s pin-pricks did
not smart, for her own irony cut deeper: no one could hurt her as
much as she was hurting herself, for no one else—not even Judy
Trenor—knew the full magnitude of her folly.

She was roused from these unprofitable considerations by a whis-
pered request from her hostess, who drew her apart as they left
the luncheon-table.

“Lily, dear, if you’ve nothing special to do, may I tell Carry
Fisher that you intend to drive to the station and fetch Gus? He
will be back at four, and I know she has it in her mind to meet
him. Of course I’m very glad to have him amused, but I happen to
know that she has bled him rather severely since she’s been here,
and she is so keen about going to fetch him that I fancy she must
have got a lot more bills this morning. It seems to me,” Mrs.
Trenor feelingly concluded, “that most of her alimony is paid by
other women’s husbands!”

Miss Bart, on her way to the station, had leisure to muse over
her friend’s words, and their peculiar application to herself.
Why should she have to suffer for having once, for a few hours,
borrowed money of an elderly cousin, when a woman like Carry
Fisher could make a living unrebuked from the good-nature of her
men friends and the tolerance of their wives? It all turned on the
tiresome distinction between what a married woman might, and a
girl might not, do. Of course it was shocking for a married woman
to borrow money—and Lily was expertly aware of the implication
involved—but still, it was the mere MALUM PROHIBITUM which the
world decries but condones, and which, though it may be punished by
private vengeance, does not provoke the collective disapprobation
of society. To Miss Bart, in short, no such opportunities were
possible. She could of course borrow from her women friends—a
hundred here or there, at the utmost—but they were more ready to
give a gown or a trinket, and looked a little askance when she
hinted her preference for a cheque. Women are not generous lenders,
and those among whom her lot was cast were either in the same
case as herself, or else too far removed from it to understand
its necessities. The result of her meditations was the decision
to join her aunt at Richfield. She could not remain at Bellomont
without playing bridge, and being involved in other expenses;
and to continue her usual series of autumn visits would merely
prolong the same difficulties. She had reached a point where abrupt
retrenchment was necessary, and the only cheap life was a dull
life. She would start the next morning for Richfield.

At the station she thought Gus Trenor seemed surprised, and not
wholly unrelieved, to see her. She yielded up the reins of the
light runabout in which she had driven over, and as he climbed
heavily to her side, crushing her into a scant third of the seat,
he said: “Halloo! It isn’t often you honour me. You must have been
uncommonly hard up for something to do.”

The afternoon was warm, and propinquity made her more than usually
conscious that he was red and massive, and that beads of moisture
had caused the dust of the train to adhere unpleasantly to the
broad expanse of cheek and neck which he turned to her; but she was
aware also, from the look in his small dull eyes, that the contact
with her freshness and slenderness was as agreeable to him as the
sight of a cooling beverage.

The perception of this fact helped her to answer gaily: “It’s not
often I have the chance. There are too many ladies to dispute the
privilege with me.”

“The privilege of driving me home? Well, I’m glad you won the race,
anyhow. But I know what really happened—my wife sent you. Now
didn’t she?”

He had the dull man’s unexpected flashes of astuteness, and Lily
could not help joining in the laugh with which he had pounced on
the truth.

“You see, Judy thinks I’m the safest person for you to be with; and
she’s quite right,” she rejoined.

“Oh, is she, though? If she is, it’s because you wouldn’t waste
your time on an old hulk like me. We married men have to put up
with what we can get: all the prizes are for the clever chaps
who’ve kept a free foot. Let me light a cigar, will you? I’ve had a
beastly day of it.”

He drew up in the shade of the village street, and passed the
reins to her while he held a match to his cigar. The little flame
under his hand cast a deeper crimson on his puffing face, and Lily
averted her eyes with a momentary feeling of repugnance. And yet
some women thought him handsome!

As she handed back the reins, she said sympathetically: “Did you
have such a lot of tiresome things to do?”

“I should say so—rather!” Trenor, who was seldom listened to,
either by his wife or her friends, settled down into the rare
enjoyment of a confidential talk. “You don’t know how a fellow
has to hustle to keep this kind of thing going.” He waved his
whip in the direction of the Bellomont acres, which lay outspread
before them in opulent undulations. “Judy has no idea of what she
spends—not that there isn’t plenty to keep the thing going,” he
interrupted himself, “but a man has got to keep his eyes open and
pick up all the tips he can. My father and mother used to live
like fighting-cocks on their income, and put by a good bit of it
too—luckily for me—but at the pace we go now, I don’t know where I
should be if it weren’t for taking a flyer now and then. The women
all think—I mean Judy thinks—I’ve nothing to do but to go downtown
once a month and cut off coupons, but the truth is it takes a
devilish lot of hard work to keep the machinery running. Not that I
ought to complain today, though,” he went on after a moment, “for
I did a very neat stroke of business, thanks to Stepney’s friend
Rosedale: by the way, Miss Lily, I wish you’d try to persuade Judy
to be decently civil to that chap. He’s going to be rich enough to
buy us all out one of these days, and if she’d only ask him to dine
now and then I could get almost anything out of him. The man is mad
to know the people who don’t want to know him, and when a fellow’s
in that state there is nothing he won’t do for the first woman who
takes him up.”

Lily hesitated a moment. The first part of her companion’s
discourse had started an interesting train of thought, which was
rudely interrupted by the mention of Mr. Rosedale’s name. She
uttered a faint protest.

“But you know Jack did try to take him about, and he was
impossible.”

“Oh, hang it—because he’s fat and shiny, and has a sloppy manner!
Well, all I can say is that the people who are clever enough to be
civil to him now will make a mighty good thing of it. A few years
from now he’ll be in it whether we want him or not, and then he
won’t be giving away a half-a-million tip for a dinner.”

Lily’s mind had reverted from the intrusive personality of Mr.
Rosedale to the train of thought set in motion by Trenor’s first
words. This vast mysterious Wall Street world of “tips” and
“deals”—might she not find in it the means of escape from her
dreary predicament? She had often heard of women making money in
this way through their friends: she had no more notion than most of
her sex of the exact nature of the transaction, and its vagueness
seemed to diminish its indelicacy. She could not, indeed, imagine
herself, in any extremity, stooping to extract a “tip” from Mr.
Rosedale; but at her side was a man in possession of that precious
commodity, and who, as the husband of her dearest friend, stood to
her in a relation of almost fraternal intimacy.

In her inmost heart Lily knew it was not by appealing to the
fraternal instinct that she was likely to move Gus Trenor; but this
way of explaining the situation helped to drape its crudity, and
she was always scrupulous about keeping up appearances to herself.
Her personal fastidiousness had a moral equivalent, and when she
made a tour of inspection in her own mind there were certain closed
doors she did not open.

As they reached the gates of Bellomont she turned to Trenor with a
smile. “The afternoon is so perfect—don’t you want to drive me a
little farther? I’ve been rather out of spirits all day, and it’s
so restful to be away from people, with some one who won’t mind if
I’m a little dull.”

She looked so plaintively lovely as she proffered the request, so
trustfully sure of his sympathy and understanding, that Trenor felt
himself wishing that his wife could see how other women treated
him—not battered wire-pullers like Mrs. Fisher, but a girl that
most men would have given their boots to get such a look from.

“Out of spirits? Why on earth should you ever be out of spirits? Is
your last box of Doucet dresses a failure, or did Judy rook you out
of everything at bridge last night?”

Lily shook her head with a sigh. “I have had to give up Doucet;
and bridge too—I can’t afford it. In fact I can’t afford any of
the things my friends do, and I am afraid Judy often thinks me a
bore because I don’t play cards any longer, and because I am not as
smartly dressed as the other women. But you will think me a bore
too if I talk to you about my worries, and I only mention them
because I want you to do me a favour—the very greatest of favours.”

Her eyes sought his once more, and she smiled inwardly at the tinge
of apprehension that she read in them.

“Why, of course—if it’s anything I can manage——” He broke off, and
she guessed that his enjoyment was disturbed by the remembrance of
Mrs. Fisher’s methods.

“The greatest of favours,” she rejoined gently. “The fact is, Judy
is angry with me, and I want you to make my peace.”

“Angry with you? Oh, come, nonsense——” his relief broke through in
a laugh. “Why, you know she’s devoted to you.”

“She is the best friend I have, and that is why I mind having to
vex her. But I daresay you know what she has wanted me to do. She
has set her heart—poor dear—on my marrying—marrying a great deal of
money.”

She paused with a slight falter of embarrassment, and Trenor,
turning abruptly, fixed on her a look of growing intelligence.

“A great deal of money? Oh, by Jove—you don’t mean Gryce? What—you
do? Oh, no, of course I won’t mention it—you can trust me to keep
my mouth shut—but Gryce—good Lord, GRYCE! Did Judy really think you
could bring yourself to marry that portentous little ass? But you
couldn’t, eh? And so you gave him the sack, and that’s the reason
why he lit out by the first train this morning?” He leaned back,
spreading himself farther across the seat, as if dilated by the
joyful sense of his own discernment. “How on earth could Judy think
you would do such a thing? I could have told her you’d never put up
with such a little milksop!”

Lily sighed more deeply. “I sometimes think,” she murmured, “that
men understand a woman’s motives better than other women do.”

“Some men—I’m certain of it! I could have TOLD Judy,” he repeated,
exulting in the implied superiority over his wife.

“I thought you would understand; that’s why I wanted to speak to
you,” Miss Bart rejoined. “I can’t make that kind of marriage; it’s
impossible. But neither can I go on living as all the women in my
set do. I am almost entirely dependent on my aunt, and though she
is very kind to me she makes me no regular allowance, and lately
I’ve lost money at cards, and I don’t dare tell her about it. I
have paid my card debts, of course, but there is hardly anything
left for my other expenses, and if I go on with my present life I
shall be in horrible difficulties. I have a tiny income of my own,
but I’m afraid it’s badly invested, for it seems to bring in less
every year, and I am so ignorant of money matters that I don’t
know if my aunt’s agent, who looks after it, is a good adviser.”
She paused a moment, and added in a lighter tone: “I didn’t mean
to bore you with all this, but I want your help in making Judy
understand that I can’t, at present, go on living as one must
live among you all. I am going away tomorrow to join my aunt at
Richfield, and I shall stay there for the rest of the autumn, and
dismiss my maid and learn how to mend my own clothes.”

At this picture of loveliness in distress, the pathos of which
was heightened by the light touch with which it was drawn, a
murmur of indignant sympathy broke from Trenor. Twenty-four
hours earlier, if his wife had consulted him on the subject of Miss
Bart’s future, he would have said that a girl with extravagant
tastes and no money had better marry the first rich man she could
get; but with the subject of discussion at his side, turning to
him for sympathy, making him feel that he understood her better
than her dearest friends, and confirming the assurance by the
appeal of her exquisite nearness, he was ready to swear that such
a marriage was a desecration, and that, as a man of honour, he was
bound to do all he could to protect her from the results of her
disinterestedness. This impulse was reinforced by the reflection
that if she had married Gryce she would have been surrounded
by flattery and approval, whereas, having refused to sacrifice
herself to expediency, she was left to bear the whole cost of
her resistance. Hang it, if he could find a way out of such
difficulties for a professional sponge like Carry Fisher, who was
simply a mental habit corresponding to the physical titillations
of the cigarette or the cock-tail, he could surely do as much for
a girl who appealed to his highest sympathies, and who brought her
troubles to him with the trustfulness of a child.

Trenor and Miss Bart prolonged their drive till long after sunset;
and before it was over he had tried, with some show of success, to
prove to her that, if she would only trust him, he could make a
handsome sum of money for her without endangering the small amount
she possessed. She was too genuinely ignorant of the manipulations
of the stock-market to understand his technical explanations, or
even perhaps to perceive that certain points in them were slurred;
the haziness enveloping the transaction served as a veil for her
embarrassment, and through the general blur her hopes dilated like
lamps in a fog. She understood only that her modest investments
were to be mysteriously multiplied without risk to herself; and the
assurance that this miracle would take place within a short time,
that there would be no tedious interval for suspense and reaction,
relieved her of her lingering scruples.

Again she felt the lightening of her load, and with it the release
of repressed activities. Her immediate worries conjured, it was
easy to resolve that she would never again find herself in such
straits, and as the need of economy and self-denial receded
from her foreground she felt herself ready to meet any other
demand which life might make. Even the immediate one of letting
Trenor, as they drove homeward, lean a little nearer and rest
his hand reassuringly on hers, cost her only a momentary shiver
of reluctance. It was part of the game to make him feel that her
appeal had been an uncalculated impulse, provoked by the liking he
inspired; and the renewed sense of power in handling men, while it
consoled her wounded vanity, helped also to obscure the thought of
the claim at which his manner hinted. He was a coarse dull man who,
under all his show of authority, was a mere supernumerary in the
costly show for which his money paid: surely, to a clever girl, it
would be easy to hold him by his vanity, and so keep the obligation
on his side.



Chapter 8



The first thousand dollar cheque which Lily received with a blotted
scrawl from Gus Trenor strengthened her self-confidence in the
exact degree to which it effaced her debts.

The transaction had justified itself by its results: she saw now
how absurd it would have been to let any primitive scruple deprive
her of this easy means of appeasing her creditors. Lily felt really
virtuous as she dispensed the sum in sops to her tradesmen, and the
fact that a fresh order accompanied each payment did not lessen her
sense of disinterestedness. How many women, in her place, would
have given the orders without making the payment!

She had found it reassuringly easy to keep Trenor in a good humour.
To listen to his stories, to receive his confidences and laugh at
his jokes, seemed for the moment all that was required of her, and
the complacency with which her hostess regarded these attentions
freed them of the least hint of ambiguity. Mrs. Trenor evidently
assumed that Lily’s growing intimacy with her husband was simply an
indirect way of returning her own kindness.

“I’m so glad you and Gus have become such good friends,” she said
approvingly. “It’s too delightful of you to be so nice to him, and
put up with all his tiresome stories. I know what they are, because
I had to listen to them when we were engaged—I’m sure he is telling
the same ones still. And now I shan’t always have to be asking
Carry Fisher here to keep him in a good humour. She’s a perfect
vulture, you know; and she hasn’t the least moral sense. She is
always getting Gus to speculate for her, and I’m sure she never
pays when she loses.”

Miss Bart could shudder at this state of things without the
embarrassment of a personal application. Her own position was
surely quite different. There could be no question of her not
paying when she lost, since Trenor had assured her that she was
certain not to lose. In sending her the cheque he had explained
that he had made five thousand for her out of Rosedale’s “tip,” and
had put four thousand back in the same venture, as there was the
promise of another “big rise”; she understood therefore that he
was now speculating with her own money, and that she consequently
owed him no more than the gratitude which such a trifling service
demanded. She vaguely supposed that, to raise the first sum, he had
borrowed on her securities; but this was a point over which her
curiosity did not linger. It was concentrated, for the moment, on
the probable date of the next “big rise.”

The news of this event was received by her some weeks later, on
the occasion of Jack Stepney’s marriage to Miss Van Osburgh. As
a cousin of the bridegroom, Miss Bart had been asked to act as
bridesmaid; but she had declined on the plea that, since she was
much taller than the other attendant virgins, her presence might
mar the symmetry of the group. The truth was, she had attended too
many brides to the altar: when next seen there she meant to be the
chief figure in the ceremony. She knew the pleasantries made at the
expense of young girls who have been too long before the public,
and she was resolved to avoid such assumptions of youthfulness as
might lead people to think her older than she really was.

The Van Osburgh marriage was celebrated in the village church
near the paternal estate on the Hudson. It was the “simple country
wedding” to which guests are convoyed in special trains, and
from which the hordes of the uninvited have to be fended off by
the intervention of the police. While these sylvan rites were
taking place, in a church packed with fashion and festooned with
orchids, the representatives of the press were threading their
way, note-book in hand, through the labyrinth of wedding presents,
and the agent of a cinematograph syndicate was setting up his
apparatus at the church door. It was the kind of scene in which
Lily had often pictured herself as taking the principal part, and
on this occasion the fact that she was once more merely a casual
spectator, instead of the mystically veiled figure occupying
the centre of attention, strengthened her resolve to assume the
latter part before the year was over. The fact that her immediate
anxieties were relieved did not blind her to a possibility of
their recurrence; it merely gave her enough buoyancy to rise once
more above her doubts and feel a renewed faith in her beauty, her
power, and her general fitness to attract a brilliant destiny.
It could not be that one conscious of such aptitudes for mastery
and enjoyment was doomed to a perpetuity of failure; and her
mistakes looked easily reparable in the light of her restored
self-confidence.

A special appositeness was given to these reflections by the
discovery, in a neighbouring pew, of the serious profile and
neatly-trimmed beard of Mr. Percy Gryce. There was something
almost bridal in his own aspect: his large white gardenia had a
symbolic air that struck Lily as a good omen. After all, seen
in an assemblage of his kind he was not ridiculous-looking: a
friendly critic might have called his heaviness weighty, and he
was at his best in the attitude of vacant passivity which brings
out the oddities of the restless. She fancied he was the kind
of man whose sentimental associations would be stirred by the
conventional imagery of a wedding, and she pictured herself, in the
seclusion of the Van Osburgh conservatories, playing skillfully
upon sensibilities thus prepared for her touch. In fact, when she
looked at the other women about her, and recalled the image she
had brought away from her own glass, it did not seem as though any
special skill would be needed to repair her blunder and bring him
once more to her feet.

The sight of Selden’s dark head, in a pew almost facing her, dis-
turbed for a moment the balance of her complacency. The rise of
her blood as their eyes met was succeeded by a contrary motion,
a wave of resistance and withdrawal. She did not wish to see him
again, not because she feared his influence, but because his
presence always had the effect of cheapening her aspirations, of
throwing her whole world out of focus. Besides, he was a living
reminder of the worst mistake in her career, and the fact that he
had been its cause did not soften her feelings toward him. She
could still imagine an ideal state of existence in which, all else
being superadded, intercourse with Selden might be the last touch
of luxury; but in the world as it was, such a privilege was likely
to cost more than it was worth.

“Lily, dear, I never saw you look so lovely! You look as if
something delightful had just happened to you!”

The young lady who thus formulated her admiration of her
brilliant friend did not, in her own person, suggest such happy
possibilities. Miss Gertrude Farish, in fact, typified the mediocre
and the ineffectual. If there were compensating qualities in her
wide frank glance and the freshness of her smile, these were
qualities which only the sympathetic observer would perceive
before noticing that her eyes were of a workaday grey and her lips
without haunting curves. Lily’s own view of her wavered between
pity for her limitations and impatience at her cheerful acceptance
of them. To Miss Bart, as to her mother, acquiescence in dinginess
was evidence of stupidity; and there were moments when, in the
consciousness of her own power to look and to be so exactly what
the occasion required, she almost felt that other girls were plain
and inferior from choice. Certainly no one need have confessed such
acquiescence in her lot as was revealed in the “useful” colour of
Gerty Farish’s gown and the subdued lines of her hat: it is almost
as stupid to let your clothes betray that you know you are ugly as
to have them proclaim that you think you are beautiful.

Of course, being fatally poor and dingy, it was wise of Gerty to
have taken up philanthropy and symphony concerts; but there was
something irritating in her assumption that existence yielded no
higher pleasures, and that one might get as much interest and
excitement out of life in a cramped flat as in the splendours
of the Van Osburgh establishment. Today, however, her chirping
enthusiasms did not irritate Lily. They seemed only to throw her
own exceptionalness into becoming relief, and give a soaring
vastness to her scheme of life.

“Do let us go and take a peep at the presents before everyone else
leaves the dining-room!” suggested Miss Farish, linking her arm in
her friend’s. It was characteristic of her to take a sentimental
and unenvious interest in all the details of a wedding: she was
the kind of person who always kept her handkerchief out during the
service, and departed clutching a box of wedding-cake.

“Isn’t everything beautifully done?” she pursued, as they entered
the distant drawing-room assigned to the display of Miss Van
Osburgh’s bridal spoils. “I always say no one does things better
than cousin Grace! Did you ever taste anything more delicious than
that MOUSSE of lobster with champagne sauce? I made up my mind
weeks ago that I wouldn’t miss this wedding, and just fancy how
delightfully it all came about. When Lawrence Selden heard I was
coming, he insisted on fetching me himself and driving me to the
station, and when we go back this evening I am to dine with him at
Sherry’s. I really feel as excited as if I were getting married
myself!”

Lily smiled: she knew that Selden had always been kind to his dull
cousin, and she had sometimes wondered why he wasted so much time
in such an unremunerative manner; but now the thought gave her a
vague pleasure.

“Do you see him often?” she asked.

“Yes; he is very good about dropping in on Sundays. And now and
then we do a play together; but lately I haven’t seen much of him.
He doesn’t look well, and he seems nervous and unsettled. The
dear fellow! I do wish he would marry some nice girl. I told him so
today, but he said he didn’t care for the really nice ones, and
the other kind didn’t care for him—but that was just his joke, of
course. He could never marry a girl who WASN’T nice. Oh, my dear,
did you ever see such pearls?”

They had paused before the table on which the bride’s jewels were
displayed, and Lily’s heart gave an envious throb as she caught
the refraction of light from their surfaces—the milky gleam of
perfectly matched pearls, the flash of rubies relieved against
contrasting velvet, the intense blue rays of sapphires kindled into
light by surrounding diamonds: all these precious tints enhanced
and deepened by the varied art of their setting. The glow of the
stones warmed Lily’s veins like wine. More completely than any
other expression of wealth they symbolized the life she longed to
lead, the life of fastidious aloofness and refinement in which
every detail should have the finish of a jewel, and the whole form
a harmonious setting to her own jewel-like rareness.

“Oh, Lily, do look at this diamond pendant—it’s as big as a dinner-
plate! Who can have given it?” Miss Farish bent short-sightedly
over the accompanying card. “MR. SIMON ROSEDALE. What, that
horrid man? Oh, yes—I remember he’s a friend of Jack’s, and I
suppose cousin Grace had to ask him here today; but she must
rather hate having to let Gwen accept such a present from him.”

Lily smiled. She doubted Mrs. Van Osburgh’s reluctance, but was
aware of Miss Farish’s habit of ascribing her own delicacies of
feeling to the persons least likely to be encumbered by them.

“Well, if Gwen doesn’t care to be seen wearing it she can always
exchange it for something else,” she remarked.

“Ah, here is something so much prettier,” Miss Farish continued.
“Do look at this exquisite white sapphire. I’m sure the person who
chose it must have taken particular pains. What is the name? Percy
Gryce? Ah, then I’m not surprised!” She smiled significantly as
she replaced the card. “Of course you’ve heard that he’s perfectly
devoted to Evie Van Osburgh? Cousin Grace is so pleased about
it—it’s quite a romance! He met her first at the George Dorsets’,
only about six weeks ago, and it’s just the nicest possible
marriage for dear Evie. Oh, I don’t mean the money—of course she
has plenty of her own—but she’s such a quiet stay-at-home kind of
girl, and it seems he has just the same tastes; so they are exactly
suited to each other.”

Lily stood staring vacantly at the white sapphire on its velvet
bed. Evie Van Osburgh and Percy Gryce? The names rang derisively
through her brain. EVIE VAN OSBURGH? The youngest, dumpiest,
dullest of the four dull and dumpy daughters whom Mrs. Van Osburgh,
with unsurpassed astuteness, had “placed” one by one in enviable
niches of existence! Ah, lucky girls who grow up in the shelter of
a mother’s love—a mother who knows how to contrive opportunities
without conceding favours, how to take advantage of propinquity
without allowing appetite to be dulled by habit! The cleverest girl
may miscalculate where her own interests are concerned, may yield
too much at one moment and withdraw too far at the next: it takes
a mother’s unerring vigilance and foresight to land her daughters
safely in the arms of wealth and suitability.

Lily’s passing light-heartedness sank beneath a renewed sense
of failure. Life was too stupid, too blundering! Why should Percy
Gryce’s millions be joined to another great fortune, why should
this clumsy girl be put in possession of powers she would never
know how to use?

She was roused from these speculations by a familiar touch on her
arm, and turning saw Gus Trenor beside her. She felt a thrill of
vexation: what right had he to touch her? Luckily Gerty Farish had
wandered off to the next table, and they were alone.

Trenor, looking stouter than ever in his tight frock-coat, and
unbecomingly flushed by the bridal libations, gazed at her with
undisguised approval.

“By Jove, Lily, you do look a stunner!” He had slipped insensibly
into the use of her Christian name, and she had never found the
right moment to correct him. Besides, in her set all the men and
women called each other by their Christian names; it was only
on Trenor’s lips that the familiar address had an unpleasant
significance.

“Well,” he continued, still jovially impervious to her annoyance,
“have you made up your mind which of these little trinkets you mean
to duplicate at Tiffany’s tomorrow? I’ve got a cheque for you in my
pocket that will go a long way in that line!”

Lily gave him a startled look: his voice was louder than usual,
and the room was beginning to fill with people. But as her glance
assured her that they were still beyond ear-shot a sense of
pleasure replaced her apprehension.

“Another dividend?” she asked, smiling and drawing near him in the
desire not to be overheard.

“Well, not exactly: I sold out on the rise and I’ve pulled off four
thou’ for you. Not so bad for a beginner, eh? I suppose you’ll
begin to think you’re a pretty knowing speculator. And perhaps you
won’t think poor old Gus such an awful ass as some people do.”

“I think you the kindest of friends; but I can’t thank you properly
now.”

She let her eyes shine into his with a look that made up for the
hand-clasp he would have claimed if they had been alone—and how
glad she was that they were not! The news filled her with the
glow produced by a sudden cessation of physical pain. The world
was not so stupid and blundering after all: now and then a stroke
of luck came to the unluckiest. At the thought her spirits began
to rise: it was characteristic of her that one trifling piece of
good fortune should give wings to all her hopes. Instantly came
the reflection that Percy Gryce was not irretrievably lost; and
she smiled to think of the excitement of recapturing him from
Evie Van Osburgh. What chance could such a simpleton have against
her if she chose to exert herself? She glanced about, hoping to
catch a glimpse of Gryce; but her eyes lit instead on the glossy
countenance of Mr. Rosedale, who was slipping through the crowd
with an air half obsequious, half obtrusive, as though, the moment
his presence was recognized, it would swell to the dimensions of
the room.

Not wishing to be the means of effecting this enlargement, Lily
quickly transferred her glance to Trenor, to whom the expression of
her gratitude seemed not to have brought the complete gratification
she had meant it to give.

“Hang thanking me—I don’t want to be thanked, but I SHOULD like
the chance to say two words to you now and then,” he grumbled. “I
thought you were going to spend the whole autumn with us, and I’ve
hardly laid eyes on you for the last month. Why can’t you come back
to Bellomont this evening? We’re all alone, and Judy is as cross
as two sticks. Do come and cheer a fellow up. If you say yes I’ll
run you over in the motor, and you can telephone your maid to bring
your traps from town by the next train.”

Lily shook her head with a charming semblance of regret. “I wish I
could—but it’s quite impossible. My aunt has come back to town, and
I must be with her for the next few days.”

“Well, I’ve seen a good deal less of you since we’ve got to be such
pals than I used to when you were Judy’s friend,” he continued with
unconscious penetration.

“When I was Judy’s friend? Am I not her friend still? Really, you
say the most absurd things! If I were always at Bellomont you would
tire of me much sooner than Judy—but come and see me at my aunt’s
the next afternoon you are in town; then we can have a nice quiet
talk, and you can tell me how I had better invest my fortune.”

It was true that, during the last three or four weeks, she had
absented herself from Bellomont on the pretext of having other
visits to pay; but she now began to feel that the reckoning she had
thus contrived to evade had rolled up interest in the interval.

The prospect of the nice quiet talk did not appear as all-sufficing
to Trenor as she had hoped, and his brows continued to lower as he
said: “Oh, I don’t know that I can promise you a fresh tip every
day. But there’s one thing you might do for me; and that is, just
to be a little civil to Rosedale. Judy has promised to ask him to
dine when we get to town, but I can’t induce her to have him at
Bellomont, and if you would let me bring him up now it would make
a lot of difference. I don’t believe two women have spoken to him
this afternoon, and I can tell you he’s a chap it pays to be decent
to.”

Miss Bart made an impatient movement, but suppressed the words
which seemed about to accompany it. After all, this was an
unexpectedly easy way of acquitting her debt; and had she not
reasons of her own for wishing to be civil to Mr. Rosedale?

“Oh, bring him by all means,” she said smiling; “perhaps I can get
a tip out of him on my own account.”

Trenor paused abruptly, and his eyes fixed themselves on hers with
a look which made her change colour.

“I say, you know—you’ll please remember he’s a blooming bounder,”
he said; and with a slight laugh she turned toward the open window
near which they had been standing.

The throng in the room had increased, and she felt a desire for
space and fresh air. Both of these she found on the terrace, where
only a few men were lingering over cigarettes and liqueur, while
scattered couples strolled across the lawn to the autumn-tinted
borders of the flower-garden.

As she emerged, a man moved toward her from the knot of smokers,
and she found herself face to face with Selden. The stir of the
pulses which his nearness always caused was increased by a slight
sense of constraint. They had not met since their Sunday afternoon
walk at Bellomont, and that episode was still so vivid to her
that she could hardly believe him to be less conscious of it. But
his greeting expressed no more than the satisfaction which every
pretty woman expects to see reflected in masculine eyes; and the
discovery, if distasteful to her vanity, was reassuring to her
nerves. Between the relief of her escape from Trenor, and the vague
apprehension of her meeting with Rosedale, it was pleasant to rest
a moment on the sense of complete understanding which Lawrence
Selden’s manner always conveyed.

“This is luck,” he said smiling. “I was wondering if I should be
able to have a word with you before the special snatches us away. I
came with Gerty Farish, and promised not to let her miss the train,
but I am sure she is still extracting sentimental solace from the
wedding presents. She appears to regard their number and value as
evidence of the disinterested affection of the contracting parties.”

There was not the least trace of embarrassment in his voice, and
as he spoke, leaning slightly against the jamb of the window, and
letting his eyes rest on her in the frank enjoyment of her grace,
she felt with a faint chill of regret that he had gone back without
an effort to the footing on which they had stood before their last
talk together. Her vanity was stung by the sight of his unscathed
smile. She longed to be to him something more than a piece of
sentient prettiness, a passing diversion to his eye and brain; and
the longing betrayed itself in her reply.

“Ah,” she said, “I envy Gerty that power she has of dressing
up with romance all our ugly and prosaic arrangements! I have
never recovered my self-respect since you showed me how poor and
unimportant my ambitions were.”

The words were hardly spoken when she realized their infelicity. It
seemed to be her fate to appear at her worst to Selden.

“I thought, on the contrary,” he returned lightly, “that I had been
the means of proving they were more important to you than anything
else.”

It was as if the eager current of her being had been checked by
a sudden obstacle which drove it back upon itself. She looked at
him helplessly, like a hurt or frightened child: this real self of
hers, which he had the faculty of drawing out of the depths, was so
little accustomed to go alone!

The appeal of her helplessness touched in him, as it always did,
a latent chord of inclination. It would have meant nothing to him
to discover that his nearness made her more brilliant, but this
glimpse of a twilight mood to which he alone had the clue seemed
once more to set him in a world apart with her.

“At least you can’t think worse things of me than you say!” she
exclaimed with a trembling laugh; but before he could answer, the
flow of comprehension between them was abruptly stayed by the
reappearance of Gus Trenor, who advanced with Mr. Rosedale in his
wake.

“Hang it, Lily, I thought you’d given me the slip: Rosedale and I
have been hunting all over for you!”

His voice had a note of conjugal familiarity: Miss Bart fancied she
detected in Rosedale’s eye a twinkling perception of the fact, and
the idea turned her dislike of him to repugnance.

She returned his profound bow with a slight nod, made more
disdainful by the sense of Selden’s surprise that she should number
Rosedale among her acquaintances. Trenor had turned away, and his
companion continued to stand before Miss Bart, alert and expectant,
his lips parted in a smile at whatever she might be about to say,
and his very back conscious of the privilege of being seen with her.

It was the moment for tact; for the quick bridging over of gaps;
but Selden still leaned against the window, a detached observer
of the scene, and under the spell of his observation Lily felt
herself powerless to exert her usual arts. The dread of Selden’s
suspecting that there was any need for her to propitiate such a man
as Rosedale checked the trivial phrases of politeness. Rosedale
still stood before her in an expectant attitude, and she continued
to face him in silence, her glance just level with his polished
baldness. The look put the finishing touch to what her silence
implied.

He reddened slowly, shifting from one foot to the other, fingered
the plump black pearl in his tie, and gave a nervous twist to his
moustache; then, running his eye over her, he drew back, and said,
with a side-glance at Selden: “Upon my soul, I never saw a more
ripping get-up. Is that the last creation of the dress-maker you go
to see at the Benedick? If so, I wonder all the other women don’t
go to her too!”

The words were projected sharply against Lily’s silence, and she
saw in a flash that her own act had given them their emphasis. In
ordinary talk they might have passed unheeded; but following on
her prolonged pause they acquired a special meaning. She felt,
without looking, that Selden had immediately seized it, and would
inevitably connect the allusion with her visit to himself. The
consciousness increased her irritation against Rosedale, but also
her feeling that now, if ever, was the moment to propitiate him,
hateful as it was to do so in Selden’s presence.

“How do you know the other women don’t go to my dress-maker?”
she returned. “You see I’m not afraid to give her address to my
friends!”

Her glance and accent so plainly included Rosedale in this
privileged circle that his small eyes puckered with gratification,
and a knowing smile drew up his moustache.

“By Jove, you needn’t be!” he declared. “You could give ’em the
whole outfit and win at a canter!”

“Ah, that’s nice of you; and it would be nicer still if you would
carry me off to a quiet corner, and get me a glass of lemonade or
some innocent drink before we all have to rush for the train.”

She turned away as she spoke, letting him strut at her side through
the gathering groups on the terrace, while every nerve in her
throbbed with the consciousness of what Selden must have thought
of the scene.

But under her angry sense of the perverseness of things, and the
light surface of her talk with Rosedale, a third idea persisted:
she did not mean to leave without an attempt to discover the truth
about Percy Gryce. Chance, or perhaps his own resolve, had kept
them apart since his hasty withdrawal from Bellomont; but Miss
Bart was an expert in making the most of the unexpected, and the
distasteful incidents of the last few minutes—the revelation to
Selden of precisely that part of her life which she most wished
him to ignore—increased her longing for shelter, for escape from
such humiliating contingencies. Any definite situation would be
more tolerable than this buffeting of chances, which kept her in
an attitude of uneasy alertness toward every possibility of life.

Indoors there was a general sense of dispersal in the air, as of
an audience gathering itself up for departure after the principal
actors had left the stage; but among the remaining groups, Lily
could discover neither Gryce nor the youngest Miss Van Osburgh.
That both should be missing struck her with foreboding; and she
charmed Mr. Rosedale by proposing that they should make their
way to the conservatories at the farther end of the house.
There were just enough people left in the long suite of rooms
to make their progress conspicuous, and Lily was aware of being
followed by looks of amusement and interrogation, which glanced
off as harmlessly from her indifference as from her companion’s
self-satisfaction. She cared very little at that moment about
being seen with Rosedale: all her thoughts were centred on the
object of her search. The latter, however, was not discoverable
in the conservatories, and Lily, oppressed by a sudden conviction
of failure, was casting about for a way to rid herself of her
now superfluous companion, when they came upon Mrs. Van Osburgh,
flushed and exhausted, but beaming with the consciousness of duty
performed.

She glanced at them a moment with the benign but vacant eye of the
tired hostess, to whom her guests have become mere whirling spots
in a kaleidoscope of fatigue; then her attention became suddenly
fixed, and she seized on Miss Bart with a confidential gesture.
“My dear Lily, I haven’t had time for a word with you, and now I
suppose you are just off. Have you seen Evie? She’s been looking
everywhere for you: she wanted to tell you her little secret;
but I daresay you have guessed it already. The engagement is not
to be announced till next week—but you are such a friend of Mr.
Gryce’s that they both wished you to be the first to know of their
happiness.”



Chapter 9



In Mrs. Peniston’s youth, fashion had returned to town in October;
therefore on the tenth day of the month the blinds of her Fifth
Avenue residence were drawn up, and the eyes of the Dying Gladiator
in bronze who occupied the drawing-room window resumed their survey
of that deserted thoroughfare.

The first two weeks after her return represented to Mrs. Peniston
the domestic equivalent of a religious retreat. She “went through”
the linen and blankets in the precise spirit of the penitent
exploring the inner folds of conscience; she sought for moths
as the stricken soul seeks for lurking infirmities. The topmost
shelf of every closet was made to yield up its secret, cellar and
coal-bin were probed to their darkest depths and, as a final stage
in the lustral rites, the entire house was swathed in penitential
white and deluged with expiatory soapsuds.

It was on this phase of the proceedings that Miss Bart entered
on the afternoon of her return from the Van Osburgh wedding. The
journey back to town had not been calculated to soothe her nerves.
Though Evie Van Osburgh’s engagement was still officially a secret,
it was one of which the innumerable intimate friends of the family
were already possessed; and the trainful of returning guests buzzed
with allusions and anticipations. Lily was acutely aware of her
own part in this drama of innuendo: she knew the exact quality
of the amusement the situation evoked. The crude forms in which
her friends took their pleasure included a loud enjoyment of such
complications: the zest of surprising destiny in the act of playing
a practical joke. Lily knew well enough how to bear herself in
difficult situations. She had, to a shade, the exact manner between
victory and defeat: every insinuation was shed without an effort
by the bright indifference of her manner. But she was beginning to
feel the strain of the attitude; the reaction was more rapid, and
she lapsed to a deeper self-disgust.

As was always the case with her, this moral repulsion found a
physical outlet in a quickened distaste for her surroundings. She
revolted from the complacent ugliness of Mrs. Peniston’s black
walnut, from the slippery gloss of the vestibule tiles, and the
mingled odour of sapolio and furniture-polish that met her at the
door.

The stairs were still carpetless, and on the way up to her room she
was arrested on the landing by an encroaching tide of soapsuds.
Gathering up her skirts, she drew aside with an impatient gesture;
and as she did so she had the odd sensation of having already found
herself in the same situation but in different surroundings. It
seemed to her that she was again descending the staircase from
Selden’s rooms; and looking down to remonstrate with the dispenser
of the soapy flood, she found herself met by a lifted stare which
had once before confronted her under similar circumstances. It was
the char-woman of the Benedick who, resting on crimson elbows,
examined her with the same unflinching curiosity, the same apparent
reluctance to let her pass. On this occasion, however, Miss Bart
was on her own ground.

“Don’t you see that I wish to go by? Please move your pail,” she
said sharply.

The woman at first seemed not to hear; then, without a word of
excuse, she pushed back her pail and dragged a wet floor-cloth
across the landing, keeping her eyes fixed on Lily while the latter
swept by. It was insufferable that Mrs. Peniston should have such
creatures about the house; and Lily entered her room resolved that
the woman should be dismissed that evening.

Mrs. Peniston, however, was at the moment inaccessible to
remonstrance: since early morning she had been shut up with her
maid, going over her furs, a process which formed the culminating
episode in the drama of household renovation. In the evening also
Lily found herself alone, for her aunt, who rarely dined out, had
responded to the summons of a Van Alstyne cousin who was passing
through town. The house, in its state of unnatural immaculateness
and order, was as dreary as a tomb, and as Lily, turning from
her brief repast between shrouded sideboards, wandered into the
newly-uncovered glare of the drawing-room she felt as though
she were buried alive in the stifling limits of Mrs. Peniston’s
existence.

She usually contrived to avoid being at home during the season
of domestic renewal. On the present occasion, however, a variety
of reasons had combined to bring her to town; and foremost among
them was the fact that she had fewer invitations than usual for
the autumn. She had so long been accustomed to pass from one
country-house to another, till the close of the holidays brought
her friends to town, that the unfilled gaps of time confronting
her produced a sharp sense of waning popularity. It was as she
had said to Selden—people were tired of her. They would welcome
her in a new character, but as Miss Bart they knew her by heart.
She knew herself by heart too, and was sick of the old story.
There were moments when she longed blindly for anything different,
anything strange, remote and untried; but the utmost reach of
her imagination did not go beyond picturing her usual life in a
new setting. She could not figure herself as anywhere but in a
drawing-room, diffusing elegance as a flower sheds perfume.

Meanwhile, as October advanced she had to face the alternative
of returning to the Trenors or joining her aunt in town. Even
the desolating dulness of New York in October, and the soapy
discomforts of Mrs. Peniston’s interior, seemed preferable to what
might await her at Bellomont; and with an air of heroic devotion
she announced her intention of remaining with her aunt till the
holidays.

Sacrifices of this nature are sometimes received with feelings as
mixed as those which actuate them; and Mrs. Peniston remarked to
her confidential maid that, if any of the family were to be with
her at such a crisis (though for forty years she had been thought
competent to see to the hanging of her own curtains), she would
certainly have preferred Miss Grace to Miss Lily. Grace Stepney was
an obscure cousin, of adaptable manners and vicarious interests,
who “ran in” to sit with Mrs. Peniston when Lily dined out too
continuously; who played bezique, picked up dropped stitches, read
out the deaths from the Times, and sincerely admired the purple
satin drawing-room curtains, the Dying Gladiator in the window, and
the seven-by-five painting of Niagara which represented the one
artistic excess of Mr. Peniston’s temperate career.

Mrs. Peniston, under ordinary circumstances, was as much bored
by her excellent cousin as the recipient of such services usually
is by the person who performs them. She greatly preferred the
brilliant and unreliable Lily, who did not know one end of a
crochet-needle from the other, and had frequently wounded her
susceptibilities by suggesting that the drawing-room should be
“done over.” But when it came to hunting for missing napkins, or
helping to decide whether the backstairs needed re-carpeting,
Grace’s judgment was certainly sounder than Lily’s: not to mention
the fact that the latter resented the smell of beeswax and brown
soap, and behaved as though she thought a house ought to keep clean
of itself, without extraneous assistance.

Seated under the cheerless blaze of the drawing-room
chandelier—Mrs. Peniston never lit the lamps unless there was
“company”—Lily seemed to watch her own figure retreating down
vistas of neutral-tinted dulness to a middle-age like Grace
Stepney’s. When she ceased to amuse Judy Trenor and her friends she
would have to fall back on amusing Mrs. Peniston; whichever way she
looked she saw only a future of servitude to the whims of others,
never the possibility of asserting her own eager individuality.

A ring at the door-bell, sounding emphatically through the empty
house, roused her suddenly to the extent of her boredom. It was
as though all the weariness of the past months had culminated in
the vacuity of that interminable evening. If only the ring meant a
summons from the outer world—a token that she was still remembered
and wanted!

After some delay a parlour-maid presented herself with the
announcement that there was a person outside who was asking to see
Miss Bart; and on Lily’s pressing for a more specific description,
she added:

“It’s Mrs. Haffen, Miss; she won’t say what she wants.”

Lily, to whom the name conveyed nothing, opened the door upon a
woman in a battered bonnet, who stood firmly planted under the
hall-light. The glare of the unshaded gas shone familiarly on her
pock-marked face and the reddish baldness visible through thin
strands of straw-coloured hair. Lily looked at the char-woman in
surprise.

“Do you wish to see me?” she asked.

“I should like to say a word to you, Miss.” The tone was neither
aggressive nor conciliatory: it revealed nothing of the speaker’s
errand. Nevertheless, some precautionary instinct warned Lily to
withdraw beyond ear-shot of the hovering parlour-maid.

She signed to Mrs. Haffen to follow her into the drawing-room, and
closed the door when they had entered.

“What is it that you wish?” she enquired.

The char-woman, after the manner of her kind, stood with her arms
folded in her shawl. Unwinding the latter, she produced a small
parcel wrapped in dirty newspaper.

“I have something here that you might like to see, Miss Bart.”
She spoke the name with an unpleasant emphasis, as though her
knowing it made a part of her reason for being there. To Lily the
intonation sounded like a threat.

“You have found something belonging to me?” she asked, extending
her hand.

Mrs. Haffen drew back. “Well, if it comes to that, I guess it’s
mine as much as anybody’s,” she returned.

Lily looked at her perplexedly. She was sure, now, that her
visitor’s manner conveyed a threat; but, expert as she was in
certain directions, there was nothing in her experience to prepare
her for the exact significance of the present scene. She felt,
however, that it must be ended as promptly as possible.

“I don’t understand; if this parcel is not mine, why have you asked
for me?”

The woman was unabashed by the question. She was evidently pre-
pared to answer it, but like all her class she had to go a long way
back to make a beginning, and it was only after a pause that she
replied: “My husband was janitor to the Benedick till the first of
the month; since then he can’t get nothing to do.”

Lily remained silent and she continued: “It wasn’t no fault of our
own, neither: the agent had another man he wanted the place for,
and we was put out, bag and baggage, just to suit his fancy. I had
a long sickness last winter, and an operation that ate up all we’d
put by; and it’s hard for me and the children, Haffen being so long
out of a job.”

After all, then, she had come only to ask Miss Bart to find a
place for her husband; or, more probably, to seek the young lady’s
intervention with Mrs. Peniston. Lily had such an air of always
getting what she wanted that she was used to being appealed to as
an intermediary, and, relieved of her vague apprehension, she took
refuge in the conventional formula.

“I am sorry you have been in trouble,” she said.

“Oh, that we have, Miss, and it’s on’y just beginning. If on’y we’d
’a got another situation—but the agent, he’s dead against us. It
ain’t no fault of ours, neither, but——”

At this point Lily’s impatience overcame her. “If you have anything
to say to me——” she interposed.

The woman’s resentment of the rebuff seemed to spur her lagging
ideas.

“Yes, Miss; I’m coming to that,” she said. She paused again,
with her eyes on Lily, and then continued, in a tone of diffuse
narrative: “When we was at the Benedick I had charge of some of the
gentlemen’s rooms; leastways, I swep’ ’em out on Saturdays. Some
of the gentlemen got the greatest sight of letters: I never saw
the like of it. Their waste-paper baskets ’d be fairly brimming,
and papers falling over on the floor. Maybe havin’ so many is how
they get so careless. Some of ’em is worse than others. Mr. Selden,
Mr. Lawrence Selden, he was always one of the carefullest: burnt
his letters in winter, and tore ’em in little bits in summer. But
sometimes he’d have so many he’d just bunch ’em together, the
way the others did, and tear the lot through once—like this.”

While she spoke she had loosened the string from the parcel in her
hand, and now she drew forth a letter which she laid on the table
between Miss Bart and herself. As she had said, the letter was torn
in two; but with a rapid gesture she laid the torn edges together
and smoothed out the page.

A wave of indignation swept over Lily. She felt herself in the
presence of something vile, as yet but dimly conjectured—the kind
of vileness of which people whispered, but which she had never
thought of as touching her own life. She drew back with a motion
of disgust, but her withdrawal was checked by a sudden discovery:
under the glare of Mrs. Peniston’s chandelier she had recognized
the hand-writing of the letter. It was a large disjointed hand,
with a flourish of masculinity which but slightly disguised
its rambling weakness, and the words, scrawled in heavy ink on
pale-tinted notepaper, smote on Lily’s ear as though she had heard
them spoken.

At first she did not grasp the full import of the situation. She
understood only that before her lay a letter written by Bertha
Dorset, and addressed, presumably, to Lawrence Selden. There was
no date, but the blackness of the ink proved the writing to be
comparatively recent. The packet in Mrs. Haffen’s hand doubtless
contained more letters of the same kind—a dozen, Lily conjectured
from its thickness. The letter before her was short, but its few
words, which had leapt into her brain before she was conscious
of reading them, told a long history—a history over which, for
the last four years, the friends of the writer had smiled and
shrugged, viewing it merely as one among the countless “good
situations” of the mundane comedy. Now the other side presented
itself to Lily, the volcanic nether side of the surface over which
conjecture and innuendo glide so lightly till the first fissure
turns their whisper to a shriek. Lily knew that there is nothing
society resents so much as having given its protection to those who
have not known how to profit by it: it is for having betrayed its
connivance that the body social punishes the offender who is found
out. And in this case there was no doubt of the issue. The code
of Lily’s world decreed that a woman’s husband should be the only
judge of her conduct: she was technically above suspicion while
she had the shelter of his approval, or even of his indifference.
But with a man of George Dorset’s temper there could be no thought
of condonation—the possessor of his wife’s letters could overthrow
with a touch the whole structure of her existence. And into what
hands Bertha Dorset’s secret had been delivered! For a moment
the irony of the coincidence tinged Lily’s disgust with a confused
sense of triumph. But the disgust prevailed—all her instinctive
resistances, of taste, of training, of blind inherited scruples,
rose against the other feeling. Her strongest sense was one of
personal contamination.

She moved away, as though to put as much distance as possible
between herself and her visitor. “I know nothing of these letters,”
she said; “I have no idea why you have brought them here.”

Mrs. Haffen faced her steadily. “I’ll tell you why, Miss. I brought
’em to you to sell, because I ain’t got no other way of raising
money, and if we don’t pay our rent by tomorrow night we’ll be put
out. I never done anythin’ of the kind before, and if you’d speak
to Mr. Selden or to Mr. Rosedale about getting Haffen taken on
again at the Benedick—I seen you talking to Mr. Rosedale on the
steps that day you come out of Mr. Selden’s rooms——”

The blood rushed to Lily’s forehead. She understood now—Mrs.
Haffen supposed her to be the writer of the letters. In the first leap
of her anger she was about to ring and order the woman out; but
an obscure impulse restrained her. The mention of Selden’s name
had started a new train of thought. Bertha Dorset’s letters were
nothing to her—they might go where the current of chance carried
them! But Selden was inextricably involved in their fate. Men
do not, at worst, suffer much from such exposure; and in this
instance the flash of divination which had carried the meaning
of the letters to Lily’s brain had revealed also that they were
appeals—repeated and therefore probably unanswered—for the renewal
of a tie which time had evidently relaxed. Nevertheless, the fact
that the correspondence had been allowed to fall into strange hands
would convict Selden of negligence in a matter where the world
holds it least pardonable; and there were graver risks to consider
where a man of Dorset’s ticklish balance was concerned.

If she weighed all these things it was unconsciously: she was
aware only of feeling that Selden would wish the letters rescued,
and that therefore she must obtain possession of them. Beyond
that her mind did not travel. She had, indeed, a quick vision of
returning the packet to Bertha Dorset, and of the opportunities the
restitution offered; but this thought lit up abysses from which she
shrank back ashamed.

Meanwhile Mrs. Haffen, prompt to perceive her hesitation, had
already opened the packet and ranged its contents on the table. All
the letters had been pieced together with strips of thin paper.
Some were in small fragments, the others merely torn in half.
Though there were not many, thus spread out they nearly covered the
table. Lily’s glance fell on a word here and there—then she said in
a low voice: “What do you wish me to pay you?”

Mrs. Haffen’s face reddened with satisfaction. It was clear that
the young lady was badly frightened, and Mrs. Haffen was the woman
to make the most of such fears. Anticipating an easier victory than
she had foreseen, she named an exorbitant sum.

But Miss Bart showed herself a less ready prey than might have been
expected from her imprudent opening. She refused to pay the price
named, and after a moment’s hesitation, met it by a counter-offer
of half the amount.

Mrs. Haffen immediately stiffened. Her hand travelled toward the
outspread letters, and folding them slowly, she made as though to
restore them to their wrapping.

“I guess they’re worth more to you than to me, Miss, but the poor
has got to live as well as the rich,” she observed sententiously.

Lily was throbbing with fear, but the insinuation fortified her
resistance.

“You are mistaken,” she said indifferently. “I have offered all I
am willing to give for the letters; but there may be other ways of
getting them.”

Mrs. Haffen raised a suspicious glance: she was too experienced not
to know that the traffic she was engaged in had perils as great as
its rewards, and she had a vision of the elaborate machinery of
revenge which a word of this commanding young lady’s might set in
motion.

She applied the corner of her shawl to her eyes, and murmured
through it that no good came of bearing too hard on the poor, but
that for her part she had never been mixed up in such a business
before, and that on her honour as a Christian all she and Haffen
had thought of was that the letters mustn’t go any farther.

Lily stood motionless, keeping between herself and the char-woman
the greatest distance compatible with the need of speaking in low
tones. The idea of bargaining for the letters was intolerable to
her, but she knew that, if she appeared to weaken, Mrs. Haffen
would at once increase her original demand.

She could never afterward recall how long the duel lasted, or
what was the decisive stroke which finally, after a lapse of time
recorded in minutes by the clock, in hours by the precipitate beat
of her pulses, put her in possession of the letters; she knew only
that the door had finally closed, and that she stood alone with the
packet in her hand.

She had no idea of reading the letters; even to unfold Mrs.
Haffen’s dirty newspaper would have seemed degrading. But what did
she intend to do with its contents? The recipient of the letters
had meant to destroy them, and it was her duty to carry out his
intention. She had no right to keep them—to do so was to lessen
whatever merit lay in having secured their possession. But how
destroy them so effectually that there should be no second risk of
their falling in such hands? Mrs. Peniston’s icy drawing-room grate
shone with a forbidding lustre: the fire, like the lamps, was never
lit except when there was company.

Miss Bart was turning to carry the letters upstairs when she
heard the opening of the outer door, and her aunt entered the
drawing-room. Mrs. Peniston was a small plump woman, with a
colourless skin lined with trivial wrinkles. Her grey hair was
arranged with precision, and her clothes looked excessively new
and yet slightly old-fashioned. They were always black and tightly
fitting, with an expensive glitter: she was the kind of woman who
wore jet at breakfast. Lily had never seen her when she was not
cuirassed in shining black, with small tight boots, and an air of
being packed and ready to start; yet she never started.

She looked about the drawing-room with an expression of minute
scrutiny. “I saw a streak of light under one of the blinds as I
drove up: it’s extraordinary that I can never teach that woman to
draw them down evenly.”

Having corrected the irregularity, she seated herself on one of
the glossy purple arm-chairs; Mrs. Peniston always sat on a chair,
never in it.

Then she turned her glance to Miss Bart. “My dear, you look tired;
I suppose it’s the excitement of the wedding. Cornelia Van Alstyne
was full of it: Molly was there, and Gerty Farish ran in for a
minute to tell us about it. I think it was odd, their serving melons
before the CONSOMME: a wedding breakfast should always begin
with CONSOMME. Molly didn’t care for the bridesmaids’ dresses.
She had it straight from Julia Melson that they cost three hundred
dollars apiece at Celeste’s, but she says they didn’t look it. I’m
glad you decided not to be a bridesmaid; that shade of salmon-pink
wouldn’t have suited you.” Mrs. Peniston delighted in discussing
the minutest details of festivities in which she had not taken
part. Nothing would have induced her to undergo the exertion and
fatigue of attending the Van Osburgh wedding, but so great was her
interest in the event that, having heard two versions of it, she
now prepared to extract a third from her niece. Lily, however,
had been deplorably careless in noting the particulars of the
entertainment. She had failed to observe the colour of Mrs. Van
Osburgh’s gown, and could not even say whether the old Van Osburgh
Sevres had been used at the bride’s table: Mrs. Peniston, in short,
found that she was of more service as a listener than as a narrator.

“Really, Lily, I don’t see why you took the trouble to go to the
wedding, if you don’t remember what happened or whom you saw there.
When I was a girl I used to keep the MENU of every dinner I went
to, and write the names of the people on the back; and I never
threw away my cotillion favours till after your uncle’s death,
when it seemed unsuitable to have so many coloured things about
the house. I had a whole closet-full, I remember; and I can tell
to this day what balls I got them at. Molly Van Alstyne reminds me
of what I was at that age; it’s wonderful how she notices. She was
able to tell her mother exactly how the wedding-dress was cut, and
we knew at once, from the fold in the back, that it must have come
from Paquin.”

Mrs. Peniston rose abruptly, and, advancing to the ormolu
clock surmounted by a helmeted Minerva, which throned on the
chimney-piece between two malachite vases, passed her lace
handkerchief between the helmet and its visor.

“I knew it—the parlour-maid never dusts there!” she exclaimed,
triumphantly displaying a minute spot on the handkerchief; then,
reseating herself, she went on: “Molly thought Mrs. Dorset the
best-dressed woman at the wedding. I’ve no doubt her dress DID
cost more than any one else’s, but I can’t quite like the idea—a
combination of sable and POINT DE MILAN. It seems she goes to a
new man in Paris, who won’t take an order till his client has spent
a day with him at his villa at Neuilly. He says he must study his
subject’s home life—a most peculiar arrangement, I should say!
But Mrs. Dorset told Molly about it herself: she said the villa
was full of the most exquisite things and she was really sorry to
leave. Molly said she never saw her looking better; she was in
tremendous spirits, and said she had made a match between Evie
Van Osburgh and Percy Gryce. She really seems to have a very good
influence on young men. I hear she is interesting herself now in
that silly Silverton boy, who has had his head turned by Carry
Fisher, and has been gambling so dreadfully. Well, as I was saying,
Evie is really engaged: Mrs. Dorset had her to stay with Percy
Gryce, and managed it all, and Grace Van Osburgh is in the seventh
heaven—she had almost despaired of marrying Evie.”

Mrs. Peniston again paused, but this time her scrutiny addressed
itself, not to the furniture, but to her niece.

“Cornelia Van Alstyne was so surprised: she had heard that you
were to marry young Gryce. She saw the Wetheralls just after they
had stopped with you at Bellomont, and Alice Wetherall was quite
sure there was an engagement. She said that when Mr. Gryce left
unexpectedly one morning, they all thought he had rushed to town
for the ring.”

Lily rose and moved toward the door.

“I believe I AM tired: I think I will go to bed,” she said; and
Mrs. Peniston, suddenly distracted by the discovery that the easel
sustaining the late Mr. Peniston’s crayon-portrait was not exactly
in line with the sofa in front of it, presented an absent-minded
brow to her kiss.

In her own room Lily turned up the gas-jet and glanced toward the
grate. It was as brilliantly polished as the one below, but here at
least she could burn a few papers with less risk of incurring her
aunt’s disapproval. She made no immediate motion to do so, however,
but dropping into a chair looked wearily about her. Her room was
large and comfortably-furnished—it was the envy and admiration of
poor Grace Stepney, who boarded; but, contrasted with the light
tints and luxurious appointments of the guest-rooms where so many
weeks of Lily’s existence were spent, it seemed as dreary as a
prison. The monumental wardrobe and bedstead of black walnut had
migrated from Mr. Peniston’s bedroom, and the magenta “flock”
wall-paper, of a pattern dear to the early ’sixties, was hung with
large steel engravings of an anecdotic character. Lily had tried to
mitigate this charmless background by a few frivolous touches, in
the shape of a lace-decked toilet table and a little painted desk
surmounted by photographs; but the futility of the attempt struck
her as she looked about the room. What a contrast to the subtle
elegance of the setting she had pictured for herself—an apartment
which should surpass the complicated luxury of her friends’
surroundings by the whole extent of that artistic sensibility
which made her feel herself their superior; in which every tint
and line should combine to enhance her beauty and give distinction
to her leisure! Once more the haunting sense of physical ugliness
was intensified by her mental depression, so that each piece of
the offending furniture seemed to thrust forth its most aggressive
angle.

Her aunt’s words had told her nothing new; but they had revived
the vision of Bertha Dorset, smiling, flattered, victorious, holding
her up to ridicule by insinuations intelligible to every member of
their little group. The thought of the ridicule struck deeper than
any other sensation: Lily knew every turn of the allusive jargon
which could flay its victims without the shedding of blood. Her
cheek burned at the recollection, and she rose and caught up the
letters. She no longer meant to destroy them: that intention had
been effaced by the quick corrosion of Mrs. Peniston’s words.

Instead, she approached her desk, and lighting a taper, tied
and sealed the packet; then she opened the wardrobe, drew out a
despatch-box, and deposited the letters within it. As she did so,
it struck her with a flash of irony that she was indebted to Gus
Trenor for the means of buying them.



Chapter 10



The autumn dragged on monotonously. Miss Bart had received one or
two notes from Judy Trenor, reproaching her for not returning to
Bellomont; but she replied evasively, alleging the obligation to
remain with her aunt. In truth, however, she was fast wearying of
her solitary existence with Mrs. Peniston, and only the excitement
of spending her newly-acquired money lightened the dulness of the
days.

All her life Lily had seen money go out as quickly as it came in,
and whatever theories she cultivated as to the prudence of setting
aside a part of her gains, she had unhappily no saving vision of
the risks of the opposite course. It was a keen satisfaction to
feel that, for a few months at least, she would be independent of
her friends’ bounty, that she could show herself abroad without
wondering whether some penetrating eye would detect in her dress
the traces of Judy Trenor’s refurbished splendour. The fact that
the money freed her temporarily from all minor obligations obscured
her sense of the greater one it represented, and having never
before known what it was to command so large a sum, she lingered
delectably over the amusement of spending it.

It was on one of these occasions that, leaving a shop where she
had spent an hour of deliberation over a dressing-case of the most
complicated elegance, she ran across Miss Farish, who had entered
the same establishment with the modest object of having her watch
repaired. Lily was feeling unusually virtuous. She had decided to
defer the purchase of the dressing-case till she should receive
the bill for her new opera cloak, and the resolve made her feel
much richer than when she had entered the shop. In this mood of
self-approval she had a sympathetic eye for others, and she was
struck by her friend’s air of dejection.

Miss Farish, it appeared, had just left the committee-meeting
of a struggling charity in which she was interested. The object
of the association was to provide comfortable lodgings, with a
reading-room and other modest distractions, where young women of
the class employed in downtown offices might find a home when
out of work, or in need of rest, and the first year’s financial
report showed so deplorably small a balance that Miss Farish, who
was convinced of the urgency of the work, felt proportionately
discouraged by the small amount of interest it aroused. The
other-regarding sentiments had not been cultivated in Lily, and
she was often bored by the relation of her friend’s philanthropic
efforts, but today her quick dramatizing fancy seized on the
contrast between her own situation and that represented by some of
Gerty’s “cases.” These were young girls, like herself; some perhaps
pretty, some not without a trace of her finer sensibilities. She
pictured herself leading such a life as theirs—a life in which
achievement seemed as squalid as failure—and the vision made her
shudder sympathetically. The price of the dressing-case was still
in her pocket; and drawing out her little gold purse she slipped a
liberal fraction of the amount into Miss Farish’s hand.

The satisfaction derived from this act was all that the most ardent
moralist could have desired. Lily felt a new interest in herself as
a person of charitable instincts: she had never before thought of
doing good with the wealth she had so often dreamed of possessing,
but now her horizon was enlarged by the vision of a prodigal
philanthropy. Moreover, by some obscure process of logic, she felt
that her momentary burst of generosity had justified all previous
extravagances, and excused any in which she might subsequently
indulge. Miss Farish’s surprise and gratitude confirmed this
feeling, and Lily parted from her with a sense of self-esteem which
she naturally mistook for the fruits of altruism.

About this time she was farther cheered by an invitation to spend
the Thanksgiving week at a camp in the Adirondacks. The invitation
was one which, a year earlier, would have provoked a less ready
response, for the party, though organized by Mrs. Fisher, was
ostensibly given by a lady of obscure origin and indomitable social
ambitions, whose acquaintance Lily had hitherto avoided. Now,
however, she was disposed to coincide with Mrs. Fisher’s view, that
it didn’t matter who gave the party, as long as things were well
done; and doing things well (under competent direction) was Mrs.
Wellington Bry’s strong point. The lady (whose consort was known
as “Welly” Bry on the Stock Exchange and in sporting circles) had
already sacrificed one husband, and sundry minor considerations, to
her determination to get on; and, having obtained a hold on Carry
Fisher, she was astute enough to perceive the wisdom of committing
herself entirely to that lady’s guidance. Everything, accordingly,
was well done, for there was no limit to Mrs. Fisher’s prodigality
when she was not spending her own money, and as she remarked to
her pupil, a good cook was the best introduction to society. If the
company was not as select as the CUISINE, the Welly Brys at least
had the satisfaction of figuring for the first time in the society
columns in company with one or two noticeable names; and foremost
among these was of course Miss Bart’s. The young lady was treated
by her hosts with corresponding deference; and she was in the mood
when such attentions are acceptable, whatever their source. Mrs.
Bry’s admiration was a mirror in which Lily’s self-complacency
recovered its lost outline. No insect hangs its nest on threads
as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity;
and the sense of being of importance among the insignificant was
enough to restore to Miss Bart the gratifying consciousness of
power. If these people paid court to her it proved that she was
still conspicuous in the world to which they aspired; and she was
not above a certain enjoyment in dazzling them by her fineness, in
developing their puzzled perception of her superiorities.

Perhaps, however, her enjoyment proceeded more than she was aware
from the physical stimulus of the excursion, the challenge of crisp
cold and hard exercise, the responsive thrill of her body to the
influences of the winter woods. She returned to town in a glow
of rejuvenation, conscious of a clearer colour in her cheeks, a
fresh elasticity in her muscles. The future seemed full of a vague
promise, and all her apprehensions were swept out of sight on the
buoyant current of her mood.

A few days after her return to town she had the unpleasant surprise
of a visit from Mr. Rosedale. He came late, at the confidential
hour when the tea-table still lingers by the fire in friendly
expectancy; and his manner showed a readiness to adapt itself to
the intimacy of the occasion.

Lily, who had a vague sense of his being somehow connected with her
lucky speculations, tried to give him the welcome he expected; but
there was something in the quality of his geniality which chilled
her own, and she was conscious of marking each step in their
acquaintance by a fresh blunder.

Mr. Rosedale—making himself promptly at home in an adjoining
easy-chair, and sipping his tea critically, with the comment: “You
ought to go to my man for something really good”—appeared totally
unconscious of the repugnance which kept her in frozen erectness
behind the urn. It was perhaps her very manner of holding herself
aloof that appealed to his collector’s passion for the rare and
unattainable. He gave, at any rate, no sign of resenting it and
seemed prepared to supply in his own manner all the ease that was
lacking in hers.

His object in calling was to ask her to go to the opera in his box
on the opening night, and seeing her hesitate he said persuasively:
“Mrs. Fisher is coming, and I’ve secured a tremendous admirer of
yours, who’ll never forgive me if you don’t accept.”

As Lily’s silence left him with this allusion on his hands, he
added with a confidential smile: “Gus Trenor has promised to come
to town on purpose. I fancy he’d go a good deal farther for the
pleasure of seeing you.”

Miss Bart felt an inward motion of annoyance: it was distasteful
enough to hear her name coupled with Trenor’s, and on Rosedale’s
lips the allusion was peculiarly unpleasant.

“The Trenors are my best friends—I think we should all go a
long way to see each other,” she said, absorbing herself in the
preparation of fresh tea.

Her visitor’s smile grew increasingly intimate. “Well, I wasn’t
thinking of Mrs. Trenor at the moment—they say Gus doesn’t always,
you know.” Then, dimly conscious that he had not struck the right
note, he added, with a well-meant effort at diversion: “How’s your
luck been going in Wall Street, by the way? I hear Gus pulled off a
nice little pile for you last month.”

Lily put down the tea-caddy with an abrupt gesture. She felt that
her hands were trembling, and clasped them on her knee to steady
them; but her lip trembled too, and for a moment she was afraid
the tremor might communicate itself to her voice. When she spoke,
however, it was in a tone of perfect lightness.

“Ah, yes—I had a little bit of money to invest, and Mr. Trenor,
who helps me about such matters, advised my putting it in stocks
instead of a mortgage, as my aunt’s agent wanted me to do; and as
it happened, I made a lucky ‘turn’—is that what you call it? For
you make a great many yourself, I believe.”

She was smiling back at him now, relaxing the tension of her
attitude, and admitting him, by imperceptible gradations of glance
and manner, a step farther toward intimacy. The protective instinct
always nerved her to successful dissimulation, and it was not the
first time she had used her beauty to divert attention from an
inconvenient topic.

When Mr. Rosedale took leave, he carried with him, not only her
acceptance of his invitation, but a general sense of having
comported himself in a way calculated to advance his cause. He
had always believed he had a light touch and a knowing way with
women, and the prompt manner in which Miss Bart (as he would have
phrased it) had “come into line,” confirmed his confidence in his
powers of handling this skittish sex. Her way of glossing over the
transaction with Trenor he regarded at once as a tribute to his
own acuteness, and a confirmation of his suspicions. The girl was
evidently nervous, and Mr. Rosedale, if he saw no other means of
advancing his acquaintance with her, was not above taking advantage
of her nervousness.

He left Lily to a passion of disgust and fear. It seemed incredible
that Gus Trenor should have spoken of her to Rosedale. With
all his faults, Trenor had the safeguard of his traditions,
and was the less likely to overstep them because they were so
purely instinctive. But Lily recalled with a pang that there
were convivial moments when, as Judy had confided to her, Gus
“talked foolishly”: in one of these, no doubt, the fatal word had
slipped from him. As for Rosedale, she did not, after the first
shock, greatly care what conclusions he had drawn. Though usually
adroit enough where her own interests were concerned, she made
the mistake, not uncommon to persons in whom the social habits
are instinctive, of supposing that the inability to acquire them
quickly implies a general dulness. Because a blue-bottle bangs
irrationally against a window-pane, the drawing-room naturalist
may forget that under less artificial conditions it is capable
of measuring distances and drawing conclusions with all the
accuracy needful to its welfare; and the fact that Mr. Rosedale’s
drawing-room manner lacked perspective made Lily class him with
Trenor and the other dull men she knew, and assume that a little
flattery, and the occasional acceptance of his hospitality, would
suffice to render him innocuous. However, there could be no doubt
of the expediency of showing herself in his box on the opening
night of the opera; and after all, since Judy Trenor had promised
to take him up that winter, it was as well to reap the advantage of
being first in the field.

For a day or two after Rosedale’s visit, Lily’s thoughts were
dogged by the consciousness of Trenor’s shadowy claim, and she
wished she had a clearer notion of the exact nature of the
transaction which seemed to have put her in his power; but her mind
shrank from any unusual application, and she was always helplessly
puzzled by figures. Moreover she had not seen Trenor since the day
of the Van Osburgh wedding, and in his continued absence the trace
of Rosedale’s words was soon effaced by other impressions.

When the opening night of the opera came, her apprehensions had so
completely vanished that the sight of Trenor’s ruddy countenance in
the back of Mr. Rosedale’s box filled her with a sense of pleasant
reassurance. Lily had not quite reconciled herself to the necessity
of appearing as Rosedale’s guest on so conspicuous an occasion, and
it was a relief to find herself supported by any one of her own
set—for Mrs. Fisher’s social habits were too promiscuous for her
presence to justify Miss Bart’s.

To Lily, always inspirited by the prospect of showing her beauty
in public, and conscious tonight of all the added enhancements of
dress, the insistency of Trenor’s gaze merged itself in the general
stream of admiring looks of which she felt herself the centre. Ah,
it was good to be young, to be radiant, to glow with the sense of
slenderness, strength and elasticity, of well-poised lines and
happy tints, to feel one’s self lifted to a height apart by that
incommunicable grace which is the bodily counterpart of genius!

All means seemed justifiable to attain such an end, or rather, by a
happy shifting of lights with which practice had familiarized Miss
Bart, the cause shrank to a pin-point in the general brightness
of the effect. But brilliant young ladies, a little blinded by
their own effulgence, are apt to forget that the modest satellite
drowned in their light is still performing its own revolutions
and generating heat at its own rate. If Lily’s poetic enjoyment
of the moment was undisturbed by the base thought that her gown
and opera cloak had been indirectly paid for by Gus Trenor, the
latter had not sufficient poetry in his composition to lose sight
of these prosaic facts. He knew only that he had never seen Lily
look smarter in her life, that there wasn’t a woman in the house
who showed off good clothes as she did, and that hitherto he, to
whom she owed the opportunity of making this display, had reaped no
return beyond that of gazing at her in company with several hundred
other pairs of eyes.

It came to Lily therefore as a disagreeable surprise when, in
the back of the box, where they found themselves alone between
two acts, Trenor said, without preamble, and in a tone of sulky
authority: “Look here, Lily, how is a fellow ever to see anything
of you? I’m in town three or four days in the week, and you know
a line to the club will always find me, but you don’t seem to re-
member my existence nowadays unless you want to get a tip out
of me.”

The fact that the remark was in distinctly bad taste did not make
it any easier to answer, for Lily was vividly aware that it was not
the moment for that drawing up of her slim figure and surprised
lifting of the brows by which she usually quelled incipient signs
of familiarity.

“I’m very much flattered by your wanting to see me,” she return-
ed, essaying lightness instead, “but, unless you have mislaid my
address, it would have been easy to find me any afternoon at my
aunt’s—in fact, I rather expected you to look me up there.”

If she hoped to mollify him by this last concession the attempt
was a failure, for he only replied, with the familiar lowering of
the brows that made him look his dullest when he was angry: “Hang
going to your aunt’s, and wasting the afternoon listening to a lot
of other chaps talking to you! You know I’m not the kind to sit
in a crowd and jaw—I’d always rather clear out when that sort of
circus is going on. But why can’t we go off somewhere on a little
lark together—a nice quiet little expedition like that drive at
Bellomont, the day you met me at the station?”

He leaned unpleasantly close in order to convey this suggestion,
and she fancied she caught a significant aroma which explained the
dark flush on his face and the glistening dampness of his forehead.

The idea that any rash answer might provoke an unpleasant outburst
tempered her disgust with caution, and she answered with a laugh:
“I don’t see how one can very well take country drives in town, but
I am not always surrounded by an admiring throng, and if you will
let me know what afternoon you are coming I will arrange things so
that we can have a nice quiet talk.”

“Hang talking! That’s what you always say,” returned Trenor, whose
expletives lacked variety. “You put me off with that at the Van
Osburgh wedding—but the plain English of it is that, now you’ve
got what you wanted out of me, you’d rather have any other fellow
about.”

His voice had risen sharply with the last words, and Lily flushed
with annoyance, but she kept command of the situation and laid a
persuasive hand on his arm.

“Don’t be foolish, Gus; I can’t let you talk to me in that
ridiculous way. If you really want to see me, why shouldn’t we
take a walk in the Park some afternoon? I agree with you that it’s
amusing to be rustic in town, and if you like I’ll meet you there,
and we’ll go and feed the squirrels, and you shall take me out on
the lake in the steam-gondola.”

She smiled as she spoke, letting her eyes rest on his in a way that
took the edge from her banter and made him suddenly malleable to
her will.

“All right, then: that’s a go. Will you come tomorrow? Tomorrow
at three o’clock, at the end of the Mall. I’ll be there sharp,
remember; you won’t go back on me, Lily?”

But to Miss Bart’s relief the repetition of her promise was cut
short by the opening of the box door to admit George Dorset.

Trenor sulkily yielded his place, and Lily turned a brilliant smile
on the newcomer. She had not talked with Dorset since their visit
at Bellomont, but something in his look and manner told her that
he recalled the friendly footing on which they had last met. He
was not a man to whom the expression of admiration came easily:
his long sallow face and distrustful eyes seemed always barricaded
against the expansive emotions. But, where her own influence was
concerned, Lily’s intuitions sent out thread-like feelers, and as
she made room for him on the narrow sofa she was sure he found a
dumb pleasure in being near her. Few women took the trouble to
make themselves agreeable to Dorset, and Lily had been kind to him
at Bellomont, and was now smiling on him with a divine renewal of
kindness.

“Well, here we are, in for another six months of caterwauling,”
he began complainingly. “Not a shade of difference between this
year and last, except that the women have got new clothes and the
singers haven’t got new voices. My wife’s musical, you know—puts
me through a course of this every winter. It isn’t so bad on Italian
nights—then she comes late, and there’s time to digest. But when
they give Wagner we have to rush dinner, and I pay up for it. And
the draughts are damnable—asphyxia in front and pleurisy in the
back. There’s Trenor leaving the box without drawing the curtain!
With a hide like that draughts don’t make any difference. Did you
ever watch Trenor eat? If you did, you’d wonder why he’s alive; I
suppose he’s leather inside too.—But I came to say that my wife
wants you to come down to our place next Sunday. Do for heaven’s
sake say yes. She’s got a lot of bores coming—intellectual ones,
I mean; that’s her new line, you know, and I’m not sure it ain’t
worse than the music. Some of ’em have long hair, and they start
an argument with the soup, and don’t notice when things are handed
to them. The consequence is the dinner gets cold, and I have
dyspepsia. That silly ass Silverton brings them to the house—he
writes poetry, you know, and Bertha and he are getting tremendously
thick. She could write better than any of ’em if she chose, and I
don’t blame her for wanting clever fellows about; all I say is:
‘Don’t let me see ’em eat!’”

The gist of this strange communication gave Lily a distinct thrill
of pleasure. Under ordinary circumstances, there would have been
nothing surprising in an invitation from Bertha Dorset; but since
the Bellomont episode an unavowed hostility had kept the two women
apart. Now, with a start of inner wonder, Lily felt that her thirst
for retaliation had died out. IF YOU WOULD FORGIVE YOUR ENEMY,
says the Malay proverb, FIRST INFLICT A HURT ON HIM; and Lily was
experiencing the truth of the apothegm. If she had destroyed Mrs.
Dorset’s letters, she might have continued to hate her; but the
fact that they remained in her possession had fed her resentment to
satiety.

She uttered a smiling acceptance, hailing in the renewal of the tie
an escape from Trenor’s importunities.



Chapter 11



Meanwhile the holidays had gone by and the season was beginning.
Fifth Avenue had become a nightly torrent of carriages surging
upward to the fashionable quarters about the Park, where
illuminated windows and outspread awnings betokened the usual
routine of hospitality. Other tributary currents crossed the
mainstream, bearing their freight to the theatres, restaurants or
opera; and Mrs. Peniston, from the secluded watch-tower of her
upper window, could tell to a nicety just when the chronic volume
of sound was increased by the sudden influx setting toward a Van
Osburgh ball, or when the multiplication of wheels meant merely
that the opera was over, or that there was a big supper at Sherry’s.

Mrs. Peniston followed the rise and culmination of the season
as keenly as the most active sharer in its gaieties; and,
as a looker-on, she enjoyed opportunities of comparison and
generalization such as those who take part must proverbially
forego. No one could have kept a more accurate record of
social fluctuations, or have put a more unerring finger on
the distinguishing features of each season: its dulness, its
extravagance, its lack of balls or excess of divorces. She had a
special memory for the vicissitudes of the “new people” who rose
to the surface with each recurring tide, and were either submerged
beneath its rush or landed triumphantly beyond the reach of envious
breakers; and she was apt to display a remarkable retrospective
insight into their ultimate fate, so that, when they had fulfilled
their destiny, she was almost always able to say to Grace Step-
ney—the recipient of her prophecies—that she had known exactly
what would happen.

This particular season Mrs. Peniston would have characterized as
that in which everybody “felt poor” except the Welly Brys and Mr.
Simon Rosedale. It had been a bad autumn in Wall Street, where
prices fell in accordance with that peculiar law which proves
railway stocks and bales of cotton to be more sensitive to the
allotment of executive power than many estimable citizens trained
to all the advantages of self-government. Even fortunes supposed to
be independent of the market either betrayed a secret dependence on
it, or suffered from a sympathetic affection: fashion sulked in its
country houses, or came to town incognito, general entertainments
were discountenanced, and informality and short dinners became the
fashion.

But society, amused for a while at playing Cinderella, soon
wearied of the hearthside role, and welcomed the Fairy Godmother
in the shape of any magician powerful enough to turn the shrunken
pumpkin back again into the golden coach. The mere fact of growing
richer at a time when most people’s investments are shrinking, is
calculated to attract envious attention; and according to Wall
Street rumours, Welly Bry and Rosedale had found the secret of
performing this miracle.

Rosedale, in particular, was said to have doubled his fortune, and
there was talk of his buying the newly-finished house of one of the
victims of the crash, who, in the space of twelve short months, had
made the same number of millions, built a house in Fifth Avenue,
filled a picture gallery with old masters, entertained all New
York in it, and been smuggled out of the country between a trained
nurse and a doctor, while his creditors mounted guard over the old
masters, and his guests explained to each other that they had dined
with him only because they wanted to see the pictures. Mr. Rosedale
meant to have a less meteoric career. He knew he should have to
go slowly, and the instincts of his race fitted him to suffer
rebuffs and put up with delays. But he was prompt to perceive
that the general dulness of the season afforded him an unusual
opportunity to shine, and he set about with patient industry to
form a background for his growing glory. Mrs. Fisher was of immense
service to him at this period. She had set off so many newcomers
on the social stage that she was like one of those pieces of stock
scenery which tell the experienced spectator exactly what is going
to take place. But Mr. Rosedale wanted, in the long run, a more
individual environment. He was sensitive to shades of difference
which Miss Bart would never have credited him with perceiving,
because he had no corresponding variations of manner; and it
was becoming more and more clear to him that Miss Bart herself
possessed precisely the complementary qualities needed to round off
his social personality.

Such details did not fall within the range of Mrs. Peniston’s
vision. Like many minds of panoramic sweep, hers was apt to
overlook the MINUTIAE of the foreground, and she was much more
likely to know where Carry Fisher had found the Welly Brys’ CHEF
for them, than what was happening to her own niece. She was not,
however, without purveyors of information ready to supplement
her deficiencies. Grace Stepney’s mind was like a kind of moral
fly-paper, to which the buzzing items of gossip were drawn by a
fatal attraction, and where they hung fast in the toils of an inex-
orable memory. Lily would have been surprised to know how many
trivial facts concerning herself were lodged in Miss Stepney’s
head. She was quite aware that she was of interest to dingy people,
but she assumed that there is only one form of dinginess, and
that admiration for brilliancy is the natural expression of its
inferior state. She knew that Gerty Farish admired her blindly, and
therefore supposed that she inspired the same sentiments in Grace
Stepney, whom she classified as a Gerty Farish without the saving
traits of youth and enthusiasm.

In reality, the two differed from each other as much as they
differed from the object of their mutual contemplation. Miss
Farish’s heart was a fountain of tender illusions, Miss Stepney’s
a precise register of facts as manifested in their relation to
herself. She had sensibilities which, to Lily, would have seemed
comic in a person with a freckled nose and red eyelids, who lived
in a boarding-house and admired Mrs. Peniston’s drawing-room; but
poor Grace’s limitations gave them a more concentrated inner life,
as poor soil starves certain plants into intenser efflorescence.
She had in truth no abstract propensity to malice: she did not
dislike Lily because the latter was brilliant and predominant,
but because she thought that Lily disliked her. It is less mor-
tifying to believe one’s self unpopular than insignificant, and
vanity prefers to assume that indifference is a latent form of
unfriendliness. Even such scant civilities as Lily accorded to Mr.
Rosedale would have made Miss Stepney her friend for life; but how
could she foresee that such a friend was worth cultivating? How,
moreover, can a young woman who has never been ignored measure
the pang which this injury inflicts? And, lastly, how could Lily,
accustomed to choose between a pressure of engagements, guess
that she had mortally offended Miss Stepney by causing her to be
excluded from one of Mrs. Peniston’s infrequent dinner-parties?

Mrs. Peniston disliked giving dinners, but she had a high sense
of family obligation, and on the Jack Stepneys’ return from their
honeymoon she felt it incumbent upon her to light the drawing-room
lamps and extract her best silver from the Safe Deposit vaults.
Mrs. Peniston’s rare entertainments were preceded by days of
heart-rending vacillation as to every detail of the feast, from
the seating of the guests to the pattern of the table-cloth, and
in the course of one of these preliminary discussions she had
imprudently suggested to her cousin Grace that, as the dinner was a
family affair, she might be included in it. For a week the prospect
had lighted up Miss Stepney’s colourless existence; then she had
been given to understand that it would be more convenient to have
her another day. Miss Stepney knew exactly what had happened.
Lily, to whom family reunions were occasions of unalloyed dulness,
had persuaded her aunt that a dinner of “smart” people would be
much more to the taste of the young couple, and Mrs. Peniston,
who leaned helplessly on her niece in social matters, had been
prevailed upon to pronounce Grace’s exile. After all, Grace could
come any other day; why should she mind being put off?

It was precisely because Miss Stepney could come any other day—and
because she knew her relations were in the secret of her unoccupied
evenings—that this incident loomed gigantically on her horizon. She
was aware that she had Lily to thank for it; and dull resentment
was turned to active animosity.

Mrs. Peniston, on whom she had looked in a day or two after the
dinner, laid down her crochet-work and turned abruptly from her
oblique survey of Fifth Avenue.

“Gus Trenor?—Lily and Gus Trenor?” she said, growing so suddenly
pale that her visitor was almost alarmed.

“Oh, cousin Julia . . . of course I don’t mean....”

“I don’t know what you DO mean,” said Mrs. Peniston, with a
frightened quiver in her small fretful voice. “Such things were
never heard of in my day. And my own niece! I’m not sure I
understand you. Do people say he’s in love with her?”

Mrs. Peniston’s horror was genuine. Though she boasted an
unequalled familiarity with the secret chronicles of society, she
had the innocence of the school-girl who regards wickedness as a
part of “history,” and to whom it never occurs that the scandals
she reads of in lesson-hours may be repeating themselves in the
next street. Mrs. Peniston had kept her imagination shrouded, like
the drawing-room furniture. She knew, of course, that society was
“very much changed,” and that many women her mother would have
thought “peculiar” were now in a position to be critical about
their visiting-lists; she had discussed the perils of divorce with
her rector, and had felt thankful at times that Lily was still
unmarried; but the idea that any scandal could attach to a young
girl’s name, above all that it could be lightly coupled with that
of a married man, was so new to her that she was as much aghast as
if she had been accused of leaving her carpets down all summer, or
of violating any of the other cardinal laws of house-keeping.

Miss Stepney, when her first fright had subsided, began to feel
the superiority that greater breadth of mind confers. It was
really pitiable to be as ignorant of the world as Mrs. Peniston!
She smiled at the latter’s question. “People always say unpleasant
things—and certainly they’re a great deal together. A friend of
mine met them the other afternoon in the Park—quite late, after the
lamps were lit. It’s a pity Lily makes herself so conspicuous.”

“CONSPICUOUS!” gasped Mrs. Peniston. She bent forward, lowering
her voice to mitigate the horror. “What sort of things do they say?
That he means to get a divorce and marry her?”

Grace Stepney laughed outright. “Dear me, no! He would hardly do
that. It—it’s a flirtation—nothing more.”

“A flirtation? Between my niece and a married man? Do you mean to
tell me that, with Lily’s looks and advantages, she could find no
better use for her time than to waste it on a fat stupid man almost
old enough to be her father?” This argument had such a convincing
ring that it gave Mrs. Peniston sufficient reassurance to pick up
her work, while she waited for Grace Stepney to rally her scattered
forces.

But Miss Stepney was on the spot in an instant. “That’s the worst
of it—people say she isn’t wasting her time! Every one knows, as
you say, that Lily is too handsome and—and charming—to devote
herself to a man like Gus Trenor unless—”

“Unless?” echoed Mrs. Peniston. Her visitor drew breath nervously.
It was agreeable to shock Mrs. Peniston, but not to shock her to
the verge of anger. Miss Stepney was not sufficiently familiar
with the classic drama to have recalled in advance how bearers
of bad tidings are proverbially received, but she now had a
rapid vision of forfeited dinners and a reduced wardrobe as the
possible consequence of her disinterestedness. To the honour of
her sex, however, hatred of Lily prevailed over more personal con-
siderations. Mrs. Peniston had chosen the wrong moment to boast
of her niece’s charms.

“Unless,” said Grace, leaning forward to speak with low-toned
emphasis, “unless there are material advantages to be gained by
making herself agreeable to him.”

She felt that the moment was tremendous, and remembered suddenly
that Mrs. Peniston’s black brocade, with the cut jet fringe, would
have been hers at the end of the season.

Mrs. Peniston put down her work again. Another aspect of the same
idea had presented itself to her, and she felt that it was beneath
her dignity to have her nerves racked by a dependent relative who
wore her old clothes.

“If you take pleasure in annoying me by mysterious insinuations,”
she said coldly, “you might at least have chosen a more suitable
time than just as I am recovering from the strain of giving a large
dinner.”

The mention of the dinner dispelled Miss Stepney’s last scruples.
“I don’t know why I should be accused of taking pleasure in telling
you about Lily. I was sure I shouldn’t get any thanks for it,” she
returned with a flare of temper. “But I have some family feeling
left, and as you are the only person who has any authority over
Lily, I thought you ought to know what is being said of her.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Peniston, “what I complain of is that you haven’t
told me yet what IS being said.”

“I didn’t suppose I should have to put it so plainly. People say
that Gus Trenor pays her bills.”

“Pays her bills—her bills?” Mrs. Peniston broke into a laugh. “I
can’t imagine where you can have picked up such rubbish. Lily has
her own income—and I provide for her very handsomely—”

“Oh, we all know that,” interposed Miss Stepney drily. “But Lily
wears a great many smart gowns—”

“I like her to be well-dressed—it’s only suitable!”

“Certainly; but then there are her gambling debts besides.”

Miss Stepney, in the beginning, had not meant to bring up this
point; but Mrs. Peniston had only her own incredulity to blame. She
was like the stiff-necked unbelievers of Scripture, who must be
annihilated to be convinced.

“Gambling debts? Lily?” Mrs. Peniston’s voice shook with anger and
bewilderment. She wondered whether Grace Stepney had gone out of
her mind. “What do you mean by her gambling debts?”

“Simply that if one plays bridge for money in Lily’s set one is
liable to lose a great deal—and I don’t suppose Lily always wins.”

“Who told you that my niece played cards for money?”

“Mercy, cousin Julia, don’t look at me as if I were trying to turn
you against Lily! Everybody knows she is crazy about bridge. Mrs.
Gryce told me herself that it was her gambling that frightened
Percy Gryce—it seems he was really taken with her at first. But,
of course, among Lily’s friends it’s quite the custom for girls to
play for money. In fact, people are inclined to excuse her on that
account——”

“To excuse her for what?”

“For being hard up—and accepting attentions from men like Gus
Trenor—and George Dorset——”

Mrs. Peniston gave another cry. “George Dorset? Is there any one
else? I should like to know the worst, if you please.”

“Don’t put it in that way, cousin Julia. Lately Lily has been a
good deal with the Dorsets, and he seems to admire her—but of
course that’s only natural. And I’m sure there is no truth in the
horrid things people say; but she HAS been spending a great deal
of money this winter. Evie Van Osburgh was at Celeste’s ordering
her trousseau the other day—yes, the marriage takes place next
month—and she told me that Celeste showed her the most exquisite
things she was just sending home to Lily. And people say that Judy
Trenor has quarrelled with her on account of Gus; but I’m sure I’m
sorry I spoke, though I only meant it as a kindness.”

Mrs. Peniston’s genuine incredulity enabled her to dismiss Miss
Stepney with a disdain which boded ill for that lady’s prospect of
succeeding to the black brocade; but minds impenetrable to reason
have generally some crack through which suspicion filters, and
her visitor’s insinuations did not glide off as easily as she had
expected. Mrs. Peniston disliked scenes, and her determination
to avoid them had always led her to hold herself aloof from the
details of Lily’s life. In her youth, girls had not been supposed
to require close supervision. They were generally assumed to be
taken up with the legitimate business of courtship and marriage,
and interference in such affairs on the part of their natural
guardians was considered as unwarrantable as a spectator’s suddenly
joining in a game. There had of course been “fast” girls even in
Mrs. Peniston’s early experience; but their fastness, at worst, was
understood to be a mere excess of animal spirits, against which
there could be no graver charge than that of being “unladylike.”
The modern fastness appeared synonymous with immorality, and the
mere idea of immorality was as offensive to Mrs. Peniston as a
smell of cooking in the drawing-room: it was one of the conceptions
her mind refused to admit.

She had no immediate intention of repeating to Lily what she
had heard, or even of trying to ascertain its truth by means of
discreet interrogation. To do so might be to provoke a scene; and
a scene, in the shaken state of Mrs. Peniston’s nerves, with the
effects of her dinner not worn off, and her mind still tremulous
with new impressions, was a risk she deemed it her duty to avoid.
But there remained in her thoughts a settled deposit of resentment
against her niece, all the denser because it was not to be cleared
by explanation or discussion. It was horrible of a young girl to
let herself be talked about; however unfounded the charges against
her, she must be to blame for their having been made. Mrs. Peniston
felt as if there had been a contagious illness in the house, and
she was doomed to sit shivering among her contaminated furniture.



Chapter 12



Miss Bart had in fact been treading a devious way, and none of her
critics could have been more alive to the fact than herself; but
she had a fatalistic sense of being drawn from one wrong turning
to another, without ever perceiving the right road till it was too
late to take it.

Lily, who considered herself above narrow prejudices, had not
imagined that the fact of letting Gus Trenor make a little money
for her would ever disturb her self-complacency. And the fact
in itself still seemed harmless enough; only it was a fertile
source of harmful complications. As she exhausted the amusement
of spending the money these complications became more pressing,
and Lily, whose mind could be severely logical in tracing the
causes of her ill-luck to others, justified herself by the thought
that she owed all her troubles to the enmity of Bertha Dorset.
This enmity, however, had apparently expired in a renewal of
friendliness between the two women. Lily’s visit to the Dorsets had
resulted, for both, in the discovery that they could be of use to
each other; and the civilized instinct finds a subtler pleasure in
making use of its antagonist than in confounding him. Mrs. Dorset
was, in fact, engaged in a new sentimental experiment, of which
Mrs. Fisher’s late property, Ned Silverton, was the rosy victim;
and at such moments, as Judy Trenor had once remarked, she felt a
peculiar need of distracting her husband’s attention. Dorset was
as difficult to amuse as a savage; but even his self-engrossment
was not proof against Lily’s arts, or rather these were especially
adapted to soothe an uneasy egoism. Her experience with Percy Gryce
stood her in good stead in ministering to Dorset’s humours, and if
the incentive to please was less urgent, the difficulties of her
situation were teaching her to make much of minor opportunities.

Intimacy with the Dorsets was not likely to lessen such
difficulties on the material side. Mrs. Dorset had none of Judy
Trenor’s lavish impulses, and Dorset’s admiration was not likely to
express itself in financial “tips,” even had Lily cared to renew
her experiences in that line. What she required, for the moment,
of the Dorsets’ friendship, was simply its social sanction. She
knew that people were beginning to talk of her; but this fact did
not alarm her as it had alarmed Mrs. Peniston. In her set such
gossip was not unusual, and a handsome girl who flirted with a
married man was merely assumed to be pressing to the limit of her
opportunities. It was Trenor himself who frightened her. Their walk
in the Park had not been a success. Trenor had married young, and
since his marriage his intercourse with women had not taken the
form of the sentimental small-talk which doubles upon itself like
the paths in a maze. He was first puzzled and then irritated to
find himself always led back to the same starting-point, and Lily
felt that she was gradually losing control of the situation. Trenor
was in truth in an unmanageable mood. In spite of his understanding
with Rosedale he had been somewhat heavily “touched” by the fall in
stocks; his household expenses weighed on him, and he seemed to be
meeting, on all sides, a sullen opposition to his wishes, instead
of the easy good luck he had hitherto encountered.

Mrs. Trenor was still at Bellomont, keeping the town-house open,
and descending on it now and then for a taste of the world, but
preferring the recurrent excitement of week-end parties to the
restrictions of a dull season. Since the holidays she had not urged
Lily to return to Bellomont, and the first time they met in town
Lily fancied there was a shade of coldness in her manner. Was it
merely the expression of her displeasure at Miss Bart’s neglect,
or had disquieting rumours reached her? The latter contingency
seemed improbable, yet Lily was not without a sense of uneasiness.
If her roaming sympathies had struck root anywhere, it was in
her friendship with Judy Trenor. She believed in the sincerity
of her friend’s affection, though it sometimes showed itself in
self-interested ways, and she shrank with peculiar reluctance from
any risk of estranging it. But, aside from this, she was keenly con-
scious of the way in which such an estrangement would react on
herself. The fact that Gus Trenor was Judy’s husband was at times
Lily’s strongest reason for disliking him, and for resenting the
obligation under which he had placed her. To set her doubts at
rest, Miss Bart, soon after the New Year, “proposed” herself for a
week-end at Bellomont. She had learned in advance that the pre-
sence of a large party would protect her from too great assiduity
on Trenor’s part, and his wife’s telegraphic “come by all means”
seemed to assure her of her usual welcome.

Judy received her amicably. The cares of a large party always
prevailed over personal feelings, and Lily saw no change in
her hostess’s manner. Nevertheless, she was soon aware that
the experiment of coming to Bellomont was destined not to be
successful. The party was made up of what Mrs. Trenor called
“poky people”—her generic name for persons who did not play
bridge—and, it being her habit to group all such obstructionists in
one class, she usually invited them together, regardless of their
other characteristics. The result was apt to be an irreducible com-
bination of persons having no other quality in common than their
abstinence from bridge, and the antagonisms developed in a group
lacking the one taste which might have amalgamated them, were in
this case aggravated by bad weather, and by the ill-concealed
boredom of their host and hostess. In such emergencies, Judy
would usually have turned to Lily to fuse the discordant elements;
and Miss Bart, assuming that such a service was expected of
her, threw herself into it with her accustomed zeal. But at the
outset she perceived a subtle resistance to her efforts. If Mrs.
Trenor’s manner toward her was unchanged, there was certainly a
faint coldness in that of the other ladies. An occasional caustic
allusion to “your friends the Wellington Brys,” or to “the little Jew
who has bought the Greiner house—some one told us you knew him,
Miss Bart,”—showed Lily that she was in disfavour with that portion
of society which, while contributing least to its amusement, has
assumed the right to decide what forms that amusement shall take.
The indication was a slight one, and a year ago Lily would have
smiled at it, trusting to the charm of her personality to dispel
any prejudice against her. But now she had grown more sensitive
to criticism and less confident in her power of disarming it.
She knew, moreover, that if the ladies at Bellomont permitted
themselves to criticize her friends openly, it was a proof that
they were not afraid of subjecting her to the same treatment behind
her back. The nervous dread lest anything in Trenor’s manner should
seem to justify their disapproval made her seek every pretext for
avoiding him, and she left Bellomont conscious of having failed in
every purpose which had taken her there.

In town she returned to preoccupations which, for the moment, had
the happy effect of banishing troublesome thoughts. The Welly Brys,
after much debate, and anxious counsel with their newly-acquired
friends, had decided on the bold move of giving a general
entertainment. To attack society collectively, when one’s means of
approach are limited to a few acquaintances, is like advancing into
a strange country with an insufficient number of scouts; but such
rash tactics have sometimes led to brilliant victories, and the
Brys had determined to put their fate to the touch. Mrs. Fisher, to
whom they had entrusted the conduct of the affair, had decided that
TABLEAUX VIVANTS and expensive music were the two baits most
likely to attract the desired prey, and after prolonged negotiations,
and the kind of wire-pulling in which she was known to excel, she
had induced a dozen fashionable women to exhibit themselves in a
series of pictures which, by a farther miracle of persuasion, the
distinguished portrait painter, Paul Morpeth, had been prevailed
upon to organize.

Lily was in her element on such occasions. Under Morpeth’s guid-
ance her vivid plastic sense, hitherto nurtured on no higher food
than dress-making and upholstery, found eager expression in the
disposal of draperies, the study of attitudes, the shifting of lights
and shadows. Her dramatic instinct was roused by the choice of
subjects, and the gorgeous reproductions of historic dress stirred
an imagination which only visual impressions could reach. But
keenest of all was the exhilaration of displaying her own beauty
under a new aspect: of showing that her loveliness was no mere
fixed quality, but an element shaping all emotions to fresh forms
of grace.

Mrs. Fisher’s measures had been well-taken, and society, surprised
in a dull moment, succumbed to the temptation of Mrs. Bry’s
hospitality. The protesting minority were forgotten in the throng
which abjured and came; and the audience was almost as brilliant as
the show.

Lawrence Selden was among those who had yielded to the proffered
inducements. If he did not often act on the accepted social axiom
that a man may go where he pleases, it was because he had long
since learned that his pleasures were mainly to be found in a small
group of the like-minded. But he enjoyed spectacular effects, and
was not insensible to the part money plays in their production: all
he asked was that the very rich should live up to their calling
as stage-managers, and not spend their money in a dull way. This
the Brys could certainly not be charged with doing. Their recently
built house, whatever it might lack as a frame for domesticity,
was almost as well-designed for the display of a festal assemblage
as one of those airy pleasure-halls which the Italian architects
improvised to set off the hospitality of princes. The air of impro-
visation was in fact strikingly present: so recent, so rapidly-
evoked was the whole MISE-EN-SCENE 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.

Selden, who had put one of these seats to the test, found himself,
from an angle of the ball-room, surveying the scene with frank
enjoyment. The company, in obedience to the decorative instinct
which calls for fine clothes in fine surroundings, had dressed
rather with an eye to Mrs. Bry’s background than to herself. The
seated throng, filling the immense room without undue crowding,
presented a surface of rich tissues and jewelled shoulders in
harmony with the festooned and gilded walls, and the flushed
splendours of the Venetian ceiling. At the farther end of the room
a stage had been constructed behind a proscenium arch curtained
with folds of old damask; but in the pause before the parting of
the folds there was little thought of what they might reveal, for
every woman who had accepted Mrs. Bry’s invitation was engaged in
trying to find out how many of her friends had done the same.

Gerty Farish, seated next to Selden, was lost in that
indiscriminate and uncritical enjoyment so irritating to Miss
Bart’s finer perceptions. It may be that Selden’s nearness had
something to do with the quality of his cousin’s pleasure; but Miss
Farish was so little accustomed to refer her enjoyment of such
scenes to her own share in them, that she was merely conscious
of a deeper sense of contentment.

“Wasn’t it dear of Lily to get me an invitation? Of course it would
never have occurred to Carry Fisher to put me on the list, and I
should have been so sorry to miss seeing it all—and especially
Lily herself. Some one told me the ceiling was by Veronese—you
would know, of course, Lawrence. I suppose it’s very beautiful,
but his women are so dreadfully fat. Goddesses? Well, I can only
say that if they’d been mortals and had to wear corsets, it would
have been better for them. I think our women are much handsomer.
And this room is wonderfully becoming—every one looks so well! Did
you ever see such jewels? Do look at Mrs. George Dorset’s pearls—I
suppose the smallest of them would pay the rent of our Girls’ Club
for a year. Not that I ought to complain about the club; every
one has been so wonderfully kind. Did I tell you that Lily had
given us three hundred dollars? Wasn’t it splendid of her? And
then she collected a lot of money from her friends—Mrs. Bry gave
us five hundred, and Mr. Rosedale a thousand. I wish Lily were not
so nice to Mr. Rosedale, but she says it’s no use being rude to
him, because he doesn’t see the difference. She really can’t bear
to hurt people’s feelings—it makes me so angry when I hear her
called cold and conceited! The girls at the club don’t call her
that. Do you know she has been there with me twice?—yes, Lily! And
you should have seen their eyes! One of them said it was as good
as a day in the country just to look at her. And she sat there,
and laughed and talked with them—not a bit as if she were being
CHARITABLE, you know, but as if she liked it as much as they did.
They’ve been asking ever since when she’s coming back; and she’s
promised me——oh!”

Miss Farish’s confidences were cut short by the parting of the
curtain on the first TABLEAU—a group of nymphs dancing across
flower-strewn sward in the rhythmic postures of Botticelli’s
Spring. TABLEAUX VIVANTS depend for their effect not only on
the happy disposal of lights and the delusive interposition of layers
of gauze, but on a corresponding adjustment of the mental vision.
To unfurnished minds they remain, in spite of every enhancement
of art, only a superior kind of wax-works; but to the responsive
fancy they may give magic glimpses of the boundary world between
fact and imagination. Selden’s mind was of this order: he could
yield to vision-making influences as completely as a child to the
spell of a fairy-tale. Mrs. Bry’s TABLEAUX wanted none of the
qualities which go to the producing of such illusions, and under
Morpeth’s organizing hand the pictures succeeded each other with
the rhythmic march of some splendid frieze, in which the fugitive
curves of living flesh and the wandering light of young eyes have
been subdued to plastic harmony without losing the charm of life.

The scenes were taken from old pictures, and the participators
had been cleverly fitted with characters suited to their types. No
one, for instance, could have made a more typical Goya than Carry
Fisher, with her short dark-skinned face, the exaggerated glow of
her eyes, the provocation of her frankly-painted smile. A brilliant
Miss Smedden from Brooklyn showed to perfection the sumptuous
curves of Titian’s Daughter, lifting her gold salver laden with
grapes above the harmonizing gold of rippled hair and rich brocade,
and a young Mrs. Van Alstyne, who showed the frailer Dutch type,
with high blue-veined forehead and pale eyes and lashes, made
a characteristic Vandyck, in black satin, against a curtained arch-
way. Then there were Kauffmann nymphs garlanding the altar of
Love; a Veronese supper, all sheeny textures, pearl-woven heads
and marble architecture; and a Watteau group of lute-playing com-
edians, lounging by a fountain in a sunlit glade.

Each evanescent picture touched the vision-building faculty in
Selden, leading him so far down the vistas of fancy that even Gerty
Farish’s running commentary—“Oh, how lovely Lulu Melson looks!”
or: “That must be Kate Corby, to the right there, in purple”—did
not break the spell of the illusion. Indeed, so skilfully had the
personality of the actors been subdued to the scenes they figured
in that even the least imaginative of the audience must have felt
a thrill of contrast when the curtain suddenly parted on a picture
which was simply and undisguisedly the portrait of Miss Bart.

Here there could be no mistaking the predominance of per-
sonality—the unanimous “Oh!” of the spectators was a tribute,
not to the brush-work of Reynolds’s “Mrs. Lloyd” but to the flesh
and blood loveliness of Lily Bart. She had shown her artistic
intelligence in selecting a type so like her own that she could
embody the person represented without ceasing to be herself. It
was as though she had stepped, not out of, but into, Reynolds’s
canvas, banishing the phantom of his dead beauty by the beams
of her living grace. The impulse to show herself in a splendid
setting—she had thought for a moment of representing Tiepolo’s
Cleopatra—had yielded to the truer instinct of trusting to her
unassisted beauty, and she had purposely chosen a picture without
distracting accessories of dress or surroundings. 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, yet
lost the sense of when he was not with her. Its expression was now
so vivid that for the first time he seemed to see before him the
real Lily Bart, divested of the trivialities of her little world, and
catching for a moment a note of that eternal harmony of which
her beauty was a part.

“Deuced bold thing to show herself in that get-up; but, gad, there
isn’t a break in the lines anywhere, and I suppose she wanted us to
know it!”

These words, uttered by that experienced connoisseur, Mr. Ned
Van Alstyne, whose scented white moustache had brushed Selden’s
shoulder whenever the parting of the curtains presented any
exceptional opportunity for the study of the female outline,
affected their hearer in an unexpected way. It was not the first
time that Selden had heard Lily’s beauty lightly remarked on, and
hitherto the tone of the comments had imperceptibly coloured his
view of her. But now it woke only a motion of indignant contempt.
This was the world she lived in, these were the standards by which
she was fated to be measured! Does one go to Caliban for a judgment
on Miranda?

In the long moment before the curtain fell, he had time to feel
the whole tragedy of her life. It was as though her beauty, thus
detached from all that cheapened and vulgarized it, had held out
suppliant hands to him from the world in which he and she had once
met for a moment, and where he felt an overmastering longing to be
with her again.

He was roused by the pressure of ecstatic fingers. “Wasn’t she too
beautiful, Lawrence? Don’t you like her best in that simple dress?
It makes her look like the real Lily—the Lily I know.”

He met Gerty Farish’s brimming gaze. “The Lily we know,” he
corrected; and his cousin, beaming at the implied understanding,
exclaimed joyfully: “I’ll tell her that! She always says you
dislike her.”

* * * * *

The performance over, Selden’s first impulse was to seek
Miss Bart. During the interlude of music which succeeded the
TABLEAUX, the actors had seated themselves here and there in the
audience, diversifying its conventional appearance by the varied
picturesqueness of their dress. Lily, however, was not among them,
and her absence served to protract the effect she had produced
on Selden: it would have broken the spell to see her too soon in
the surroundings from which accident had so happily detached her.
They had not met since the day of the Van Osburgh wedding, and
on his side the avoidance had been intentional. Tonight, however,
he knew that, sooner or later, he should find himself at her
side; and though he let the dispersing crowd drift him whither
it would, without making an immediate effort to reach her, his
procrastination was not due to any lingering resistance, but to the
desire to luxuriate a moment in the sense of complete surrender.

Lily had not an instant’s doubt as to the meaning of the murmur
greeting her appearance. No other tableau had been received with
that precise note of approval: it had obviously been called forth
by herself, and not by the picture she impersonated. She had feared
at the last moment that she was risking too much in dispensing with
the advantages of a more sumptuous setting, and the completeness
of her triumph gave her an intoxicating sense of recovered power.
Not caring to diminish the impression she had produced, she held
herself aloof from the audience till the movement of dispersal
before supper, and thus had a second opportunity of showing
herself to advantage, as the throng poured slowly into the empty
drawing-room where she was standing.

She was soon the centre of a group which increased and renewed
itself as the circulation became general, and the individual
comments on her success were a delightful prolongation of the
collective applause. At such moments she lost something of
her natural fastidiousness, and cared less for the quality of
the admiration received than for its quantity. Differences of
personality were merged in a warm atmosphere of praise, in which
her beauty expanded like a flower in sunlight; and if Selden had
approached a moment or two sooner he would have seen her turning
on Ned Van Alstyne and George Dorset the look he had dreamed of
capturing for himself.

Fortune willed, however, that the hurried approach of Mrs. Fisher,
as whose aide-de-camp Van Alstyne was acting, should break up the
group before Selden reached the threshold of the room. One or two
of the men wandered off in search of their partners for supper,
and the others, noticing Selden’s approach, gave way to him in
accordance with the tacit freemasonry of the ball-room. Lily was
therefore standing alone when he reached her; and finding the
expected look in her eye, he had the satisfaction of supposing he
had kindled it. The look did indeed deepen as it rested on him, for
even in that moment of self-intoxication Lily felt the quicker beat
of life that his nearness always produced. She read, too, in his
answering gaze the delicious confirmation of her triumph, and for
the moment it seemed to her that it was for him only she cared to
be beautiful.

Selden had given her his arm without speaking. She took it in
silence, and they moved away, not toward the supper-room, but
against the tide which was setting thither. The faces about her
flowed by like the streaming images of sleep: she hardly noticed
where Selden was leading her, till they passed through a glass
doorway at the end of the long suite of rooms and stood suddenly in
the fragrant hush of a garden. Gravel grated beneath their feet,
and about them was the transparent dimness of a midsummer night.
Hanging lights made emerald caverns in the depths of foliage, and
whitened the spray of a fountain falling among lilies. The magic
place was deserted: there was no sound but the splash of the water
on the lily-pads, and a distant drift of music that might have been
blown across a sleeping lake.

Selden and Lily stood still, accepting the unreality of the scene
as a part of their own dream-like sensations. It would not have
surprised them to feel a summer breeze on their faces, or to see
the lights among the boughs reduplicated in the arch of a starry
sky. The strange solitude about them was no stranger than the
sweetness of being alone in it together. At length Lily withdrew
her hand, and moved away a step, so that her white-robed slimness
was outlined against the dusk of the branches. Selden followed her,
and still without speaking they seated themselves on a bench beside
the fountain.

Suddenly she raised her eyes with the beseeching earnestness of a
child. “You never speak to me—you think hard things of me,” she
murmured.

“I think of you at any rate, God knows!” he said.

“Then why do we never see each other? Why can’t we be friends?
You promised once to help me,” she continued in the same tone, as
though the words were drawn from her unwillingly.

“The only way I can help you is by loving you,” Selden said in a
low voice.

She made no reply, but her face turned to him with the soft motion
of a flower. His own met it slowly, and their lips touched. She
drew back and rose from her seat. Selden rose too, and they stood
facing each other. Suddenly she caught his hand and pressed it a
moment against her cheek.

“Ah, love me, love me—but don’t tell me so!” she sighed with her
eyes in his; and before he could speak she had turned and slipped
through the arch of boughs, disappearing in the brightness of the
room beyond.

Selden stood where she had left him. He knew too well the
transiency of exquisite moments to attempt to follow her; but
presently he reentered the house and made his way through the
deserted rooms to the door. A few sumptuously-cloaked ladies were
already gathered in the marble vestibule, and in the coat-room he
found Van Alstyne and Gus Trenor.

The former, at Selden’s approach, paused in the careful selection
of a cigar from one of the silver boxes invitingly set out near the
door.

“Hallo, Selden, going too? You’re an Epicurean like myself, I see:
you don’t want to see all those goddesses gobbling terrapin. Gad,
what a show of good-looking women; but not one of ’em could touch
that little cousin of mine. Talk of jewels—what’s a woman want with
jewels when she’s got herself to show? The trouble is that all
these fal-bals they wear cover up their figures when they’ve got
’em. I never knew till tonight what an outline Lily has.”

“It’s not her fault if everybody don’t know it now,” growled
Trenor, flushed with the struggle of getting into his fur-lined
coat. “Damned bad taste, I call it—no, no cigar for me. You can’t
tell what you’re smoking in one of these new houses—likely as not
the CHEF buys the cigars. Stay for supper? Not if I know it! When
people crowd their rooms so that you can’t get near any one you
want to speak to, I’d as soon sup in the elevated at the rush hour.
My wife was dead right to stay away: she says life’s too short to
spend it in breaking in new people.”



Chapter 13



Lily woke from happy dreams to find two notes at her bed-side.

One was from Mrs. Trenor, who announced that she was coming to
town that afternoon for a flying visit, and hoped Miss Bart would be
able to dine with her. The other was from Selden. He wrote briefly
that an important case called him to Albany, whence he would be
unable to return till the evening, and asked Lily to let him know
at what hour on the following day she would see him.

Lily, leaning back among her pillows, gazed musingly at his
letter. The scene in the Brys’ conservatory had been like a part
of her dreams; she had not expected to wake to such evidence
of its reality. Her first movement was one of annoyance: this
unforeseen act of Selden’s added another complication to life. It
was so unlike him to yield to such an irrational impulse! Did he
really mean to ask her to marry him? She had once shown him the
impossibility of such a hope, and his subsequent behaviour seemed
to prove that he had accepted the situation with a reasonableness
somewhat mortifying to her vanity. It was all the more agreeable
to find that this reasonableness was maintained only at the cost
of not seeing her; but, though nothing in life was as sweet as the
sense of her power over him, she saw the danger of allowing the
episode of the previous night to have a sequel. Since she could
not marry him, it would be kinder to him, as well as easier for
herself, to write a line amicably evading his request to see her:
he was not the man to mistake such a hint, and when next they
met it would be on their usual friendly footing.

Lily sprang out of bed, and went straight to her desk. She wanted
to write at once, while she could trust to the strength of her
resolve. She was still languid from her brief sleep and the
exhilaration of the evening, and the sight of Selden’s writing
brought back the culminating moment of her triumph: the moment
when she had read in his eyes that no philosophy was proof against
her power. It would be pleasant to have that sensation again . . .
no one else could give it to her in its fulness; and she could
not bear to mar her mood of luxurious retrospection by an act of
definite refusal. She took up her pen and wrote hastily: “TOMORROW
AT FOUR;” murmuring to herself, as she slipped the sheet into its
envelope: “I can easily put him off when tomorrow comes.”

* * * * *

Judy Trenor’s summons was very welcome to Lily. It was the
first time she had received a direct communication from Bello-
mont since the close of her last visit there, and she was still
visited by the dread of having incurred Judy’s displeasure.
But this characteristic command seemed to reestablish their
former relations; and Lily smiled at the thought that her friend
had probably summoned her in order to hear about the Brys’
entertainment. Mrs. Trenor had absented herself from the feast,
perhaps for the reason so frankly enunciated by her husband,
perhaps because, as Mrs. Fisher somewhat differently put it, she
“couldn’t bear new people when she hadn’t discovered them her-
self.” At any rate, though she remained haughtily at Bellomont, Lily
suspected in her a devouring eagerness to hear of what she had
missed, and to learn exactly in what measure Mrs. Wellington Bry
had surpassed all previous competitors for social recognition. Lily
was quite ready to gratify this curiosity, but it happened that she
was dining out. She determined, however, to see Mrs. Trenor for a
few moments, and ringing for her maid she despatched a telegram to
say that she would be with her friend that evening at ten.

She was dining with Mrs. Fisher, who had gathered at an informal
feast a few of the performers of the previous evening. There was
to be plantation music in the studio after dinner—for Mrs. Fisher,
despairing of the republic, had taken up modelling, and annexed to
her small crowded house a spacious apartment, which, whatever its
uses in her hours of plastic inspiration, served at other times for
the exercise of an indefatigable hospitality. Lily was reluctant
to leave, for the dinner was amusing, and she would have liked to
lounge over a cigarette and hear a few songs; but she could not
break her engagement with Judy, and shortly after ten she asked
her hostess to ring for a hansom, and drove up Fifth Avenue to the
Trenors’.

She waited long enough on the doorstep to wonder that Judy’s
presence in town was not signalized by a greater promptness in
admitting her; and her surprise was increased when, instead of
the expected footman, pushing his shoulders into a tardy coat,
a shabby care-taking person in calico let her into the shrouded
hall. Trenor, however, appeared at once on the threshold of the
drawing-room, welcoming her with unusual volubility while he
relieved her of her cloak and drew her into the room.

“Come along to the den; it’s the only comfortable place in the
house. Doesn’t this room look as if it was waiting for the body
to be brought down? Can’t see why Judy keeps the house wrapped
up in this awful slippery white stuff—it’s enough to give a fellow
pneumonia to walk through these rooms on a cold day. You look a
little pinched yourself, by the way: it’s rather a sharp night
out. I noticed it walking up from the club. Come along, and I’ll
give you a nip of brandy, and you can toast yourself over the fire
and try some of my new Egyptians—that little Turkish chap at the
Embassy put me on to a brand that I want you to try, and if you
like ’em I’ll get out a lot for you: they don’t have ’em here yet,
but I’ll cable.”

He led her through the house to the large room at the back, where
Mrs. Trenor usually sat, and where, even in her absence, there was
an air of occupancy. Here, as usual, were flowers, newspapers,
a littered writing-table, and a general aspect of lamp-lit familiar-
ity, so that it was a surprise not to see Judy’s energetic figure
start up from the arm-chair near the fire.

It was apparently Trenor himself who had been occupying the seat
in question, for it was overhung by a cloud of cigar smoke, and
near it stood one of those intricate folding tables which British
ingenuity has devised to facilitate the circulation of tobacco and
spirits. The sight of such appliances in a drawing-room was not
unusual in Lily’s set, where smoking and drinking were unrestricted
by considerations of time and place, and her first movement was
to help herself to one of the cigarettes recommended by Trenor,
while she checked his loquacity by asking, with a surprised glance:
“Where’s Judy?”

Trenor, a little heated by his unusual flow of words, and perhaps
by prolonged propinquity with the decanters, was bending over the
latter to decipher their silver labels.

“Here, now, Lily, just a drop of cognac in a little fizzy water—you
do look pinched, you know: I swear the end of your nose is red.
I’ll take another glass to keep you company—Judy?—Why, you see,
Judy’s got a devil of a head ache—quite knocked out with it, poor
thing—she asked me to explain—make it all right, you know—Do come
up to the fire, though; you look dead-beat, really. Now do let me
make you comfortable, there’s a good girl.”

He had taken her hand, half-banteringly, and was drawing her toward
a low seat by the hearth; but she stopped and freed herself quietly.

“Do you mean to say that Judy’s not well enough to see me? Doesn’t
she want me to go upstairs?”

Trenor drained the glass he had filled for himself, and paused to
set it down before he answered.

“Why, no—the fact is, she’s not up to seeing anybody. It came on
suddenly, you know, and she asked me to tell you how awfully sorry
she was—if she’d known where you were dining she’d have sent you
word.”

“She did know where I was dining; I mentioned it in my telegram.
But it doesn’t matter, of course. I suppose if she’s so poorly she
won’t go back to Bellomont in the morning, and I can come and see
her then.”

“Yes: exactly—that’s capital. I’ll tell her you’ll pop in tomorrow
morning. And now do sit down a minute, there’s a dear, and let’s
have a nice quiet jaw together. You won’t take a drop, just for
sociability? Tell me what you think of that cigarette. Why, don’t
you like it? What are you chucking it away for?”

“I am chucking it away because I must go, if you’ll have the
goodness to call a cab for me,” Lily returned with a smile.

She did not like Trenor’s unusual excitability, with its too
evident explanation, and the thought of being alone with him,
with her friend out of reach upstairs, at the other end of the
great empty house, did not conduce to a desire to prolong their
TETE-A-TETE.

But Trenor, with a promptness which did not escape her, had moved
between herself and the door.

“Why must you go, I should like to know? If Judy’d been here you’d
have sat gossiping till all hours—and you can’t even give me five
minutes! It’s always the same story. Last night I couldn’t get near
you—I went to that damned vulgar party just to see you, and there
was everybody talking about you, and asking me if I’d ever seen
anything so stunning, and when I tried to come up and say a word,
you never took any notice, but just went on laughing and joking
with a lot of asses who only wanted to be able to swagger about
afterward, and look knowing when you were mentioned.”

He paused, flushed by his diatribe, and fixing on her a look in
which resentment was the ingredient she least disliked. But she
had regained her presence of mind, and stood composedly in the
middle of the room, while her slight smile seemed to put an ever
increasing distance between herself and Trenor.

Across it she said: “Don’t be absurd, Gus. It’s past eleven, and I
must really ask you to ring for a cab.”

He remained immovable, with the lowering forehead she had grown to
detest.

“And supposing I won’t ring for one—what’ll you do then?”

“I shall go upstairs to Judy if you force me to disturb her.”

Trenor drew a step nearer and laid his hand on her arm. “Look here,
Lily: won’t you give me five minutes of your own accord?”

“Not tonight, Gus: you——”

“Very good, then: I’ll take ’em. And as many more as I want.” He
had squared himself on the threshold, his hands thrust deep in his
pockets. He nodded toward the chair on the hearth.

“Go and sit down there, please: I’ve got a word to say to you.”

Lily’s quick temper was getting the better of her fears. She drew
herself up and moved toward the door.

“If you have anything to say to me, you must say it another time. I
shall go up to Judy unless you call a cab for me at once.”

He burst into a laugh. “Go upstairs and welcome, my dear; but you
won’t find Judy. She ain’t there.”

Lily cast a startled look upon him. “Do you mean that Judy is not
in the house—not in town?” she exclaimed.

“That’s just what I do mean,” returned Trenor, his bluster sinking
to sullenness under her look.

“Nonsense—I don’t believe you. I am going upstairs,” she said
impatiently.

He drew unexpectedly aside, letting her reach the threshold
unimpeded.

“Go up and welcome; but my wife is at Bellomont.”

But Lily had a flash of reassurance. “If she hadn’t come she would
have sent me word——”

“She did; she telephoned me this afternoon to let you know.”

“I received no message.”

“I didn’t send any.”

The two measured each other for a moment, but Lily still saw her
opponent through a blur of scorn that made all other considerations
indistinct.

“I can’t imagine your object in playing such a stupid trick on me;
but if you have fully gratified your peculiar sense of humour I
must again ask you to send for a cab.”

It was the wrong note, and she knew it as she spoke. To be stung by
irony it is not necessary to understand it, and the angry streaks
on Trenor’s face might have been raised by an actual lash.

“Look here, Lily, don’t take that high and mighty tone with me.” He
had again moved toward the door, and in her instinctive shrinking
from him she let him regain command of the threshold. “I DID play a
trick on you; I own up to it; but if you think I’m ashamed you’re
mistaken. Lord knows I’ve been patient enough—I’ve hung round
and looked like an ass. And all the while you were letting a lot of
other fellows make up to you . . . letting ’em make fun of me,
I daresay . . . I’m not sharp, and can’t dress my friends up to
look funny, as you do . . . but I can tell when it’s being done to
me.... I can tell fast enough when I’m made a fool of....”

“Ah, I shouldn’t have thought that!” flashed from Lily; but her
laugh dropped to silence under his look.

“No; you wouldn’t have thought it; but you’ll know better now.
That’s what you’re here for tonight. I’ve been waiting for a quiet
time to talk things over, and now I’ve got it I mean to make you
hear me out.”

His first rush of inarticulate resentment had been followed by a
steadiness and concentration of tone more disconcerting to Lily
than the excitement preceding it. For a moment her presence of mind
forsook her. She had more than once been in situations where a
quick sword-play of wit had been needful to cover her retreat; but
her frightened heart-throbs told her that here such skill would not
avail.

To gain time she repeated: “I don’t understand what you want.”

Trenor had pushed a chair between herself and the door. He threw
himself in it, and leaned back, looking up at her.

“I’ll tell you what I want: I want to know just where you and
I stand. Hang it, the man who pays for the dinner is generally
allowed to have a seat at table.”

She flamed with anger and abasement, and the sickening need of
having to conciliate where she longed to humble.

“I don’t know what you mean—but you must see, Gus, that I can’t
stay here talking to you at this hour——”

“Gad, you go to men’s houses fast enough in broad day light—strikes
me you’re not always so deuced careful of appearances.”

The brutality of the thrust gave her the sense of dizziness that
follows on a physical blow. Rosedale had spoken then—this was the
way men talked of her—She felt suddenly weak and defenceless:
there was a throb of self-pity in her throat. But all the while an-
other self was sharpening her to vigilance, whispering the terrified
warning that every word and gesture must be measured.

“If you have brought me here to say insulting things—

Trenor laughed. “Don’t talk stage-rot. I don’t want to insult you.
But a man’s got his feelings—and you’ve played with mine too long.
I didn’t begin this business—kept out of the way, and left the
track clear for the other chaps, till you rummaged me out and set
to work to make an ass of me—and an easy job you had of it, too.
That’s the trouble—it was too easy for you—you got reckless—thought
you could turn me inside out, and chuck me in the gutter like an
empty purse. But, by gad, that ain’t playing fair: that’s dodging
the rules of the game. Of course I know now what you wanted—it
wasn’t my beautiful eyes you were after—but I tell you what, Miss
Lily, you’ve got to pay up for making me think so——”

He rose, squaring his shoulders aggressively, and stepped toward
her with a reddening brow; but she held her footing, though every
nerve tore at her to retreat as he advanced.

“Pay up?” she faltered. “Do you mean that I owe you money?”

He laughed again. “Oh, I’m not asking for payment in kind. But
there’s such a thing as fair play—and interest on one’s money—and
hang me if I’ve had as much as a look from you——”

“Your money? What have I to do with your money? You advised me
how to invest mine . . . you must have seen I knew nothing of
business . . . you told me it was all right——”

“It WAS all right—it is, Lily: you’re welcome to all of it, and ten
times more. I’m only asking for a word of thanks from you.” He was
closer still, with a hand that grew formidable; and the frightened
self in her was dragging the other down.

“I HAVE thanked you; I’ve shown I was grateful. What more have you
done than any friend might do, or any one accept from a friend?”

Trenor caught her up with a sneer. “I don’t doubt you’ve accepted
as much before—and chucked the other chaps as you’d like to chuck
me. I don’t care how you settled your score with them—if you fooled
’em I’m that much to the good. Don’t stare at me like that—I know
I’m not talking the way a man is supposed to talk to a girl—but,
hang it, if you don’t like it you can stop me quick enough—you know
I’m mad about you—damn the money, there’s plenty more of it—if THAT
bothers you.... I was a brute, Lily—Lily!—just look at me——”

Over and over her the sea of humiliation broke—wave crashing on
wave so close that the moral shame was one with the physical
dread. It seemed to her that self-esteem would have made her
invulnerable—that it was her own dishonour which put a fearful
solitude about her.

His touch was a shock to her drowning consciousness. She drew back
from him with a desperate assumption of scorn.

“I’ve told you I don’t understand—but if I owe you money you shall
be paid——”

Trenor’s face darkened to rage: her recoil of abhorrence had called
out the primitive man.

“Ah—you’ll borrow from Selden or Rosedale—and take your chances of
fooling them as you’ve fooled me! Unless—unless you’ve settled your
other scores already—and I’m the only one left out in the cold!”

She stood silent, frozen to her place. The words—the words were
worse than the touch! Her heart was beating all over her body—in
her throat, her limbs, her helpless useless hands. Her eyes
travelled despairingly about the room—they lit on the bell, and
she remembered that help was in call. Yes, but scandal with it—a
hideous mustering of tongues. No, she must fight her way out alone.
It was enough that the servants knew her to be in the house with
Trenor—there must be nothing to excite conjecture in her way of
leaving it.

She raised her head, and achieved a last clear look at him.

“I am here alone with you,” she said. “What more have you to say?”

To her surprise, Trenor answered the look with a speechless stare.
With his last gust of words the flame had died out, leaving him
chill and humbled. It was as though a cold air had dispersed the
fumes of his libations, and the situation loomed before him black
and naked as the ruins of a fire. Old habits, old restraints, the
hand of inherited order, plucked back the bewildered mind which
passion had jolted from its ruts. Trenor’s eye had the haggard look
of the sleep-walker waked on a deathly ledge.

“Go home! Go away from here”——he stammered, and turning his
back on her walked toward the hearth.

The sharp release from her fears restored Lily to immediate
lucidity. The collapse of Trenor’s will left her in control, and
she heard herself, in a voice that was her own yet outside herself,
bidding him ring for the servant, bidding him give the order for
a hansom, directing him to put her in it when it came. Whence the
strength came to her she knew not; but an insistent voice warned
her that she must leave the house openly, and nerved her, in the
hall before the hovering care taker, to exchange light words with
Trenor, and charge him with the usual messages for Judy, while all
the while she shook with inward loathing. On the doorstep, with the
street before her, she felt a mad throb of liberation, intoxicating
as the prisoner’s first draught of free air; but the clearness of
brain continued, and she noted the mute aspect of Fifth Avenue,
guessed at the lateness of the hour, and even observed a man’s
figure—was there something half-familiar in its outline?—which,
as she entered the hansom, turned from the opposite corner and
vanished in the obscurity of the side street.

But with the turn of the wheels reaction came, and shuddering
darkness closed on her. “I can’t think—I can’t think,” she moaned,
and leaned her head against the rattling side of the cab. She
seemed a stranger to herself, or rather there were two selves
in her, the one she had always known, and a new abhorrent being
to which it found itself chained. She had once picked up, in a
house where she was staying, a translation of the EUMENIDES, and
her imagination had been seized by the high terror of the scene
where Orestes, in the cave of the oracle, finds his implacable
huntresses asleep, and snatches an hour’s repose. Yes, the Furies
might sometimes sleep, but they were there, always there in the
dark corners, and now they were awake and the iron clang of their
wings was in her brain.... She opened her eyes and saw the streets
passing—the familiar alien streets. All she looked on was the
same and yet changed. There was a great gulf fixed between today
and yesterday. Everything in the past seemed simple, natural,
full of daylight—and she was alone in a place of darkness and
pollution.—Alone! It was the loneliness that frightened her. Her
eyes fell on an illuminated clock at a street corner, and she saw
that the hands marked the half hour after eleven. Only half-past
eleven—there were hours and hours left of the night! And she
must spend them alone, shuddering sleepless on her bed. Her soft
nature recoiled from this ordeal, which had none of the stimulus
of conflict to goad her through it. Oh, the slow cold drip of the
minutes on her head! She had a vision of herself lying on the
black walnut bed—and the darkness would frighten her, and if she
left the light burning the dreary details of the room would brand
themselves forever on her brain. She had always hated her room
at Mrs. Peniston’s—its ugliness, its impersonality, the fact that
nothing in it was really hers. To a torn heart uncomforted by hu-
man nearness a room may open almost human arms, and the being to
whom no four walls mean more than any others, is, at such hours,
expatriate everywhere.

Lily had no heart to lean on. Her relation with her aunt was as
superficial as that of chance lodgers who pass on the stairs. But
even had the two been in closer contact, it was impossible to think
of Mrs. Peniston’s mind as offering shelter or comprehension to
such misery as Lily’s. As the pain that can be told is but half a
pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch.
What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the
silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.

She started up and looked forth on the passing streets. Gerty!—they
were nearing Gerty’s corner. If only she could reach there before
this labouring anguish burst from her breast to her lips—if only
she could feel the hold of Gerty’s arms while she shook in the
ague-fit of fear that was coming upon her! She pushed up the door
in the roof and called the address to the driver. It was not
so late—Gerty might still be waking. And even if she were not,
the sound of the bell would penetrate every recess of her tiny
apartment, and rouse her to answer her friend’s call.



Chapter 14



Gerty Farish, the morning after the Wellington Brys’ entertainment,
woke from dreams as happy as Lily’s. If they were less vivid in
hue, more subdued to the half-tints of her personality and her
experience, they were for that very reason better suited to her
mental vision. Such flashes of joy as Lily moved in would have
blinded Miss Farish, who was accustomed, in the way of happiness,
to such scant light as shone through the cracks of other people’s
lives.

Now she was the centre of a little illumination of her own: a mild
but unmistakable beam, compounded of Lawrence Selden’s growing
kindness to herself and the discovery that he extended his liking
to Lily Bart. If these two factors seem incompatible to the student
of feminine psychology, it must be remembered that Gerty had always
been a parasite in the moral order, living on the crumbs of other
tables, and content to look through the window at the banquet
spread for her friends. Now that she was enjoying a little private
feast of her own, it would have seemed incredibly selfish not to
lay a plate for a friend; and there was no one with whom she would
rather have shared her enjoyment than Miss Bart.

As to the nature of Selden’s growing kindness, Gerty would no
more have dared to define it than she would have tried to learn
a butterfly’s colours by knocking the dust from its wings. To
seize on the wonder would be to brush off its bloom, and perhaps
see it fade and stiffen in her hand: better the sense of beauty
palpitating out of reach, while she held her breath and watched
where it would alight. Yet Selden’s manner at the Brys’ had brought
the flutter of wings so close that they seemed to be beating in
her own heart. She had never seen him so alert, so responsive,
so attentive to what she had to say. His habitual manner had an
absent-minded kindliness which she accepted, and was grateful for,
as the liveliest sentiment her presence was likely to inspire; but
she was quick to feel in him a change implying that for once she
could give pleasure as well as receive it.

And it was so delightful that this higher degree of sympathy should
be reached through their interest in Lily Bart!

Gerty’s affection for her friend—a sentiment that had learned
to keep itself alive on the scantiest diet—had grown to active
adoration since Lily’s restless curiosity had drawn her into the
circle of Miss Farish’s work. Lily’s taste of beneficence had
wakened in her a momentary appetite for well-doing. Her visit to
the Girls’ Club had first brought her in contact with the dramatic
contrasts of life. She had always accepted with philosophic
calm the fact that such existences as hers were pedestalled on
foundations of obscure humanity. The dreary limbo of dinginess lay
all around and beneath that little illuminated circle in which life
reached its finest efflorescence, as the mud and sleet of a winter
night enclose a hot-house filled with tropical flowers. All this
was in the natural order of things, and the orchid basking in its
artificially created atmosphere could round the delicate curves of
its petals undisturbed by the ice on the panes.

But it is one thing to live comfortably with the abstract
conception of poverty, another to be brought in contact with its
human embodiments. Lily had never conceived of these victims of
fate otherwise than in the mass. That the mass was composed of
individual lives, innumerable separate centres of sensation, with
her own eager reachings for pleasure, her own fierce revulsions
from pain—that some of these bundles of feeling were clothed in
shapes not so unlike her own, with eyes meant to look on gladness,
and young lips shaped for love—this discovery gave Lily one of
those sudden shocks of pity that sometimes decentralize a life.
Lily’s nature was incapable of such renewal: she could feel other
demands only through her own, and no pain was long vivid which
did not press on an answering nerve. But for the moment she was
drawn out of herself by the interest of her direct relation with
a world so unlike her own. She had supplemented her first gift by
personal assistance to one or two of Miss Farish’s most appealing
subjects, and the admiration and interest her presence excited
among the tired workers at the club ministered in a new form to her
insatiable desire to please.

Gerty Farish was not a close enough reader of character to
disentangle the mixed threads of which Lily’s philanthropy was
woven. She supposed her beautiful friend to be actuated by the
same motive as herself—that sharpening of the moral vision which
makes all human suffering so near and insistent that the other
aspects of life fade into remoteness. Gerty lived by such simple
formulas that she did not hesitate to class her friend’s state
with the emotional “change of heart” to which her dealings with
the poor had accustomed her; and she rejoiced in the thought that
she had been the humble instrument of this renewal. Now she had
an answer to all criticisms of Lily’s conduct: as she had said,
she knew “the real Lily,” and the discovery that Selden shared her
knowledge raised her placid acceptance of life to a dazzled sense
of its possibilities—a sense farther enlarged, in the course of the
afternoon, by the receipt of a telegram from Selden asking if he
might dine with her that evening.

While Gerty was lost in the happy bustle which this announcement
produced in her small household, Selden was at one with her in
thinking with intensity of Lily Bart. The case which had called him
to Albany was not complicated enough to absorb all his attention,
and he had the professional faculty of keeping a part of his mind
free when its services were not needed. This part—which at the
moment seemed dangerously like the whole—was filled to the brim
with the sensations of the previous evening. Selden understood the
symptoms: he recognized the fact that he was paying up, as there
had always been a chance of his having to pay up, for the voluntary
exclusions of his past. He had meant to keep free from permanent
ties, not from any poverty of feeling, but because, in a different
way, he was, as much as Lily, the victim of his environment. There
had been a germ of truth in his declaration to Gerty Farish that he
had never wanted to marry a “nice” girl: the adjective connoting,
in his cousin’s vocabulary, certain utilitarian qualities which
are apt to preclude the luxury of charm. Now it had been Selden’s
fate to have a charming mother: her graceful portrait, all smiles
and Cashmere, still emitted a faded scent of the undefinable
quality. His father was the kind of man who delights in a charming
woman: who quotes her, stimulates her, and keeps her perennially
charming. Neither one of the couple cared for money, but their
disdain of it took the form of always spending a little more than
was prudent. If their house was shabby, it was exquisitely kept; if
there were good books on the shelves there were also good dishes
on the table. Selden senior had an eye for a picture, his wife an
understanding of old lace; and both were so conscious of restraint
and discrimination in buying that they never quite knew how it was
that the bills mounted up.

Though many of Selden’s friends would have called his parents poor,
he had grown up in an atmosphere where restricted means were felt
only as a check on aimless profusion: where the few possessions
were so good that their rarity gave them a merited relief, and
abstinence was combined with elegance in a way exemplified by Mrs.
Selden’s knack of wearing her old velvet as if it were new. A man
has the advantage of being delivered early from the home point of
view, and before Selden left college he had learned that there
are as many different ways of going without money as of spending
it. Unfortunately, he found no way as agreeable as that practised
at home; and his views of womankind in especial were tinged by
the remembrance of the one woman who had given him his sense of
“values.” It was from her that he inherited his detachment from
the sumptuary side of life: the stoic’s carelessness of material
things, combined with the Epicurean’s pleasure in them. Life shorn
of either feeling appeared to him a diminished thing; and nowhere
was the blending of the two ingredients so essential as in the
character of a pretty woman.

It had always seemed to Selden that experience offered a great deal
besides the sentimental adventure, yet he could vividly conceive of
a love which should broaden and deepen till it became the central
fact of life. What he could not accept, in his own case, was the
makeshift alternative of a relation that should be less than this:
that should leave some portions of his nature unsatisfied, while it
put an undue strain on others. He would not, in other words, yield
to the growth of an affection which might appeal to pity yet leave
the understanding untouched: sympathy should no more delude him
than a trick of the eyes, the grace of helplessness than a curve of
the cheek.

But now—that little BUT passed like a sponge over all his vows.
His reasoned-out resistances seemed for the moment so much
less important than the question as to when Lily would receive his
note! He yielded himself to the charm of trivial preoccupations,
wondering at what hour her reply would be sent, with what words
it would begin. As to its import he had no doubt—he was as sure
of her surrender as of his own. And so he had leisure to muse on
all its exquisite details, as a hard worker, on a holiday morning,
might lie still and watch the beam of light travel gradually
across his room. But if the new light dazzled, it did not blind
him. He could still discern the outline of facts, though his own
relation to them had changed. He was no less conscious than before
of what was said of Lily Bart, but he could separate the woman he
knew from the vulgar estimate of her. His mind turned to Gerty
Farish’s words, and the wisdom of the world seemed a groping thing
beside the insight of innocence. BLESSED ARE THE PURE IN HEART,
FOR THEY SHALL SEE GOD—even the hidden god in their neighbour’s
breast! Selden was in the state of impassioned self-absorption
that the first surrender to love produces. His craving was for the
companionship of one whose point of view should justify his own,
who should confirm, by deliberate observation, the truth to which
his intuitions had leaped. He could not wait for the midday recess,
but seized a moment’s leisure in court to scribble his telegram to
Gerty Farish.

Reaching town, he was driven direct to his club, where he hoped a
note from Miss Bart might await him. But his box contained only
a line of rapturous assent from Gerty, and he was turning away
disappointed when he was hailed by a voice from the smoking room.

“Hallo, Lawrence! Dining here? Take a bite with me—I’ve ordered a
canvas-back.”

He discovered Trenor, in his day clothes, sitting, with a tall
glass at his elbow, behind the folds of a sporting journal.

Selden thanked him, but pleaded an engagement.

“Hang it, I believe every man in town has an engagement tonight. I
shall have the club to myself. You know how I’m living this winter,
rattling round in that empty house. My wife meant to come to town
today, but she’s put it off again, and how is a fellow to dine
alone in a room with the looking-glasses covered, and nothing but
a bottle of Harvey sauce on the sideboard? I say, Lawrence, chuck
your engagement and take pity on me—it gives me the blue devils to
dine alone, and there’s nobody but that canting ass Wetherall in
the club.”

“Sorry, Gus—I can’t do it.”

As Selden turned away, he noticed the dark flush on Trenor’s face,
the unpleasant moisture of his intensely white forehead, the way
his jewelled rings were wedged in the creases of his fat red
fingers. Certainly the beast was predominating—the beast at the
bottom of the glass. And he had heard this man’s name coupled with
Lily’s! Bah—the thought sickened him; all the way back to his rooms
he was haunted by the sight of Trenor’s fat creased hands——

On his table lay the note: Lily had sent it to his rooms. He knew
what was in it before he broke the seal—a grey seal with BEYOND!
beneath a flying ship. Ah, he would take her beyond—beyond the
ugliness, the pettiness, the attrition and corrosion of the soul——

* * * * *

Gerty’s little sitting-room sparkled with welcome when Selden
entered it. Its modest “effects,” compact of enamel paint and
ingenuity, spoke to him in the language just then sweetest to his
ear. It is surprising how little narrow walls and a low ceiling
matter, when the roof of the soul has suddenly been raised. Gerty
sparkled too; or at least shone with a tempered radiance. He had
never before noticed that she had “points”—really, some good fel-
low might do worse.... Over the little dinner (and here, again, the
effects were wonderful) he told her she ought to marry—he was in a
mood to pair off the whole world. She had made the caramel custard
with her own hands? It was sinful to keep such gifts to herself.
He reflected with a throb of pride that Lily could trim her own
hats—she had told him so the day of their walk at Bellomont.

He did not speak of Lily till after dinner. During the little
repast he kept the talk on his hostess, who, fluttered at being
the centre of observation, shone as rosy as the candle-shades she
had manufactured for the occasion. Selden evinced an extraordinary
interest in her household arrangements: complimented her on the
ingenuity with which she had utilized every inch of her small
quarters, asked how her servant managed about afternoons out,
learned that one may improvise delicious dinners in a chafing-dish,
and uttered thoughtful generalizations on the burden of a large
establishment.

When they were in the sitting-room again, where they fitted as
snugly as bits in a puzzle, and she had brewed the coffee, and
poured it into her grandmother’s egg-shell cups, his eye, as he
leaned back, basking in the warm fragrance, lighted on a recent
photograph of Miss Bart, and the desired transition was effected
without an effort. The photograph was well enough—but to catch
her as she had looked last night! Gerty agreed with him—never had
she been so radiant. But could photography capture that light?
There had been a new look in her face—something different; yes,
Selden agreed there had been something different. The coffee was
so exquisite that he asked for a second cup: such a contrast to
the watery stuff at the club! Ah, your poor bachelor with his
impersonal club fare, alternating with the equally impersonal
CUISINE of the dinner-party! A man who lived in lodgings missed
the best part of life—he pictured the flavourless solitude of Tre-
nor’s repast, and felt a moment’s compassion for the man.... But
to return to Lily—and again and again he returned, questioning,
conjecturing, leading Gerty on, draining her inmost thoughts of
their stored tenderness for her friend.

At first she poured herself out unstintingly, happy in this perfect
communion of their sympathies. His understanding of Lily helped
to confirm her own belief in her friend. They dwelt together on
the fact that Lily had had no chance. Gerty instanced her generous
impulses—her restlessness and discontent. The fact that her life
had never satisfied her proved that she was made for better things.
She might have married more than once—the conventional rich
marriage which she had been taught to consider the sole end of
existence—but when the opportunity came she had always shrunk from
it. Percy Gryce, for instance, had been in love with her—every one
at Bellomont had supposed them to be engaged, and her dismissal
of him was thought inexplicable. This view of the Gryce incident
chimed too well with Selden’s mood not to be instantly adopted
by him, with a flash of retrospective contempt for what had once
seemed the obvious solution. If rejection there had been—and he
wondered now that he had ever doubted it!—then he held the key
to the secret, and the hillsides of Bellomont were lit up, not with
sunset, but with dawn. It was he who had wavered and disowned the
face of opportunity—and the joy now warming his breast might have
been a familiar inmate if he had captured it in its first flight.

It was at this point, perhaps, that a joy just trying its wings
in Gerty’s heart dropped to earth and lay still. She sat fac-
ing Selden, repeating mechanically: “No, she has never been
understood——” and all the while she herself seemed to be sitting
in the centre of a great glare of comprehension. The little con-
fidential room, where a moment ago their thoughts had touched
elbows like their chairs, grew to unfriendly vastness, separating
her from Selden by all the length of her new vision of the fu-
ture—and that future stretched out interminably, with her lonely
figure toiling down it, a mere speck on the solitude.

“She is herself with a few people only; and you are one of them,”
she heard Selden saying. And again: “Be good to her, Gerty, won’t
you?” and: “She has it in her to become whatever she is believed to
be—you’ll help her by believing the best of her?”

The words beat on Gerty’s brain like the sound of a language which
has seemed familiar at a distance, but on approaching is found to
be unintelligible. He had come to talk to her of Lily—that was all!
There had been a third at the feast she had spread for him, and
that third had taken her own place. She tried to follow what he
was saying, to cling to her own part in the talk—but it was all as
meaningless as the boom of waves in a drowning head, and she felt,
as the drowning may feel, that to sink would be nothing beside the
pain of struggling to keep up.

Selden rose, and she drew a deep breath, feeling that soon she
could yield to the blessed waves.

“Mrs. Fisher’s? You say she was dining there? There’s music
afterward; I believe I had a card from her.” He glanced at the
foolish pink-faced clock that was drumming out this hideous hour.
“A quarter past ten? I might look in there now; the Fisher evenings
are amusing. I haven’t kept you up too late, Gerty? You look
tired—I’ve rambled on and bored you.” And in the unwonted overflow
of his feelings, he left a cousinly kiss upon her cheek.

* * * * *

At Mrs. Fisher’s, through the cigar smoke of the studio, a dozen
voices greeted Selden. A song was pending as he entered, and he
dropped into a seat near his hostess, his eyes roaming in search
of Miss Bart. But she was not there, and the discovery gave him a
pang out of all proportion to its seriousness; since the note in
his breast-pocket assured him that at four the next day they would
meet. To his impatience it seemed immeasurably long to wait, and
half-ashamed of the impulse, he leaned to Mrs. Fisher to ask, as
the music ceased, if Miss Bart had not dined with her.

“Lily? She’s just gone. She had to run off, I forget where. Wasn’t
she wonderful last night?”

“Who’s that? Lily?” asked Jack Stepney, from the depths of a
neighbouring arm-chair. “Really, you know, I’m no prude, but when
it comes to a girl standing there as if she was up at auction—I
thought seriously of speaking to cousin Julia.”

“You didn’t know Jack had become our social censor?” Mrs. Fisher
said to Selden with a laugh; and Stepney spluttered, amid the
general derision: “But she’s a cousin, hang it, and when a man’s
married—TOWN TALK was full of her this morning.”

“Yes: lively reading that was,” said Mr. Ned Van Alstyne, stroking
his moustache to hide the smile behind it. “Buy the dirty sheet?
No, of course not; some fellow showed it to me—but I’d heard the
stories before. When a girl’s as good-looking as that she’d better
marry; then no questions are asked. In our imperfectly organized
society there is no provision as yet for the young woman who claims
the privileges of marriage without assuming its obligations.”

“Well, I understand Lily is about to assume them in the shape of
Mr. Rosedale,” Mrs. Fisher said with a laugh.

“Rosedale—good heavens!” exclaimed Van Alstyne, dropping his
eye-glass. “Stepney, that’s your fault for foisting the brute on
us.”

“Oh, confound it, you know, we don’t MARRY Rosedale in our fam-
ily,” Stepney languidly protested; but his wife, who sat in oppressive
bridal finery at the other side of the room, quelled him with the
judicial reflection: “In Lily’s circumstances it’s a mistake to
have too high a standard.”

“I hear even Rosedale has been scared by the talk lately,” Mrs.
Fisher rejoined; “but the sight of her last night sent him off his
head. What do you think he said to me after her TABLEAU? ‘My
God, Mrs. Fisher, if I could get Paul Morpeth to paint her like that,
the picture’d appreciate a hundred per cent in ten years.’”

“By Jove,—but isn’t she about somewhere?” exclaimed Van Alstyne,
restoring his glass with an uneasy glance.

“No; she ran off while you were all mixing the punch down stairs.
Where was she going, by the way? What’s on tonight? I hadn’t heard
of anything.”

“Oh, not a party, I think,” said an inexperienced young Farish who
had arrived late. “I put her in her cab as I was coming in, and she
gave the driver the Trenors’ address.”

“The Trenors’?” exclaimed Mrs. Jack Stepney. “Why, the house is
closed—Judy telephoned me from Bellomont this evening.”

“Did she? That’s queer. I’m sure I’m not mistaken. Well, come now,
Trenor’s there, anyhow—I—oh, well—the fact is, I’ve no head for
numbers,” he broke off, admonished by the nudge of an adjoining
foot, and the smile that circled the room.

In its unpleasant light Selden had risen and was shaking hands with
his hostess. The air of the place stifled him, and he wondered why
he had stayed in it so long.

On the doorstep he stood still, remembering a phrase of Lily’s:
“It seems to me you spend a good deal of time in the element you
disapprove of.”

Well—what had brought him there but the quest of her? It was her
element, not his. But he would lift her out of it, take her beyond!
That BEYOND! on her letter was like a cry for rescue. He knew
that Perseus’s task is not done when he has loosed Andromeda’s
chains, for her limbs are numb with bondage, and she cannot rise
and walk, but clings to him with dragging arms as he beats back to
land with his burden. Well, he had strength for both—it was her
weakness which had put the strength in him. It was not, alas, a
clean rush of waves they had to win through, but a clogging morass
of old associations and habits, and for the moment its vapours
were in his throat. But he would see clearer, breathe freer in her
presence: she was at once the dead weight at his breast and the
spar which should float them to safety. He smiled at the whirl of
metaphor with which he was trying to build up a defence against the
influences of the last hour. It was pitiable that he, who knew the
mixed motives on which social judgments depend, should still feel
himself so swayed by them. How could he lift Lily to a freer vision
of life, if his own view of her was to be coloured by any mind in
which he saw her reflected?

The moral oppression had produced a physical craving for air, and
he strode on, opening his lungs to the reverberating coldness of
the night. At the corner of Fifth Avenue Van Alstyne hailed him
with an offer of company.

“Walking? A good thing to blow the smoke out of one’s head. Now
that women have taken to tobacco we live in a bath of nicotine.
It would be a curious thing to study the effect of cigarettes on
the relation of the sexes. Smoke is almost as great a solvent as
divorce: both tend to obscure the moral issue.”

Nothing could have been less consonant with Selden’s mood than
Van Alstyne’s after-dinner aphorisms, but as long as the latter
confined himself to generalities his listener’s nerves were in
control. Happily Van Alstyne prided himself on his summing-up of
social aspects, and with Selden for audience was eager to show the
sureness of his touch. Mrs. Fisher lived in an East side street
near the Park, and as the two men walked down Fifth Avenue the new
architectural developments of that versatile thoroughfare invited
Van Alstyne’s comment.

“That Greiner house, now—a typical rung in the social ladder! The
man who built it came from a MILIEU where all the dishes are put
on the table at once. His facade is a complete architectural meal;
if he had omitted a style his friends might have thought the money
had given out. Not a bad purchase for Rosedale, though: attracts
attention, and awes the Western sight-seer. By and bye he’ll get
out of that phase, and want something that the crowd will pass and
the few pause before. Especially if he marries my clever cousin——”

Selden dashed in with the query: “And the Wellington Brys’? Rather
clever of its kind, don’t you think?”

They were just beneath the wide white facade, with its rich
restraint of line, which suggested the clever corseting of a
redundant figure.

“That’s the next stage: the desire to imply that one has been to
Europe, and has a standard. I’m sure Mrs. Bry thinks her house
a copy of the TRIANON; in America every marble house with gilt
furniture is thought to be a copy of the TRIANON. What a clever
chap that architect is, though—how he takes his client’s measure!
He has put the whole of Mrs. Bry in his use of the composite
order. Now for the Trenors, you remember, he chose the Corinthian:
exuberant, but based on the best precedent. The Trenor house is
one of his best things—doesn’t look like a banqueting-hall turned
inside out. I hear Mrs. Trenor wants to build out a new ball-room,
and that divergence from Gus on that point keeps her at Bellomont.
The dimensions of the Brys’ ball-room must rankle: you may be sure
she knows ’em as well as if she’d been there last night with a
yard-measure. Who said she was in town, by the way? That Farish
boy? She isn’t, I know; Mrs. Stepney was right; the house is dark,
you see: I suppose Gus lives in the back.”

He had halted opposite the Trenors’ corner, and Selden perforce
stayed his steps also. The house loomed obscure and uninhabited;
only an oblong gleam above the door spoke of provisional occupancy.

“They’ve bought the house at the back: it gives them a hundred and
fifty feet in the side street. There’s where the ball-room’s to
be, with a gallery connecting it: billiard-room and so on above.
I suggested changing the entrance, and carrying the drawing-room
across the whole Fifth Avenue front; you see the front door
corresponds with the windows——”

The walking-stick which Van Alstyne swung in demonstration dropped
to a startled “Hallo!” as the door opened and two figures were seen
silhouetted against the hall-light. At the same moment a hansom
halted at the curb-stone, and one of the figures floated down to it
in a haze of evening draperies; while the other, black and bulky,
remained persistently projected against the light.

For an immeasurable second the two spectators of the incident were
silent; then the house-door closed, the hansom rolled off, and the
whole scene slipped by as if with the turn of a stereopticon.

Van Alstyne dropped his eye-glass with a low whistle.

“A—hem—nothing of this, eh, Selden? As one of the family, I know I
may count on you—appearances are deceptive—and Fifth Avenue is so
imperfectly lighted——”

“Goodnight,” said Selden, turning sharply down the side street
without seeing the other’s extended hand.

* * * * *

Alone with her cousin’s kiss, Gerty stared upon her thoughts. He
had kissed her before—but not with another woman on his lips. If
he had spared her that she could have drowned quietly, welcoming
the dark flood as it submerged her. But now the flood was shot
through with glory, and it was harder to drown at sunrise than in
darkness. Gerty hid her face from the light, but it pierced to the
crannies of her soul. She had been so contented, life had seemed
so simple and sufficient—why had he come to trouble her with new
hopes? And Lily—Lily, her best friend! Woman-like, she accused
the woman. Perhaps, had it not been for Lily, her fond imagining
might have become truth. Selden had always liked her—had understood
and sympathized with the modest independence of her life. He, who
had the reputation of weighing all things in the nice balance of
fastidious perceptions, had been uncritical and simple in his view
of her: his cleverness had never overawed her because she had felt
at home in his heart. And now she was thrust out, and the door
barred against her by Lily’s hand! Lily, for whose admission there
she herself had pleaded! The situation was lighted up by a dreary
flash of irony. She knew Selden—she saw how the force of her faith
in Lily must have helped to dispel his hesitations. She remembered,
too, how Lily had talked of him—she saw herself bringing the two
together, making them known to each other. On Selden’s part, no
doubt, the wound inflicted was inconscient; he had never guessed
her foolish secret; but Lily—Lily must have known! When, in such
matters, are a woman’s perceptions at fault? And if she knew, then
she had deliberately despoiled her friend, and in mere wantonness
of power, since, even to Gerty’s suddenly flaming jealousy, it
seemed incredible that Lily should wish to be Selden’s wife. Lily
might be incapable of marrying for money, but she was equally
incapable of living without it, and Selden’s eager investigations
into the small economies of house-keeping made him appear to Gerty
as tragically duped as herself.

She remained long in her sitting-room, where the embers were
crumbling to cold grey, and the lamp paled under its gay shade.
Just beneath it stood the photograph of Lily Bart, looking out
imperially on the cheap gimcracks, the cramped furniture of the
little room. Could Selden picture her in such an interior? Gerty
felt the poverty, the insignificance of her surroundings: she
beheld her life as it must appear to Lily. And the cruelty of
Lily’s judgments smote upon her memory. She saw that she had
dressed her idol with attributes of her own making. When had Lily
ever really felt, or pitied, or understood? All she wanted was
the taste of new experiences: she seemed like some cruel creature
experimenting in a laboratory.

The pink-faced clock drummed out another hour, and Gerty rose
with a start. She had an appointment early the next morning with
a district visitor on the East side. She put out her lamp, covered
the fire, and went into her bedroom to undress. In the little glass
above her dressing-table she saw her face reflected against the
shadows of the room, and tears blotted the reflection. What right
had she to dream the dreams of loveliness? A dull face invited a
dull fate. She cried quietly as she undressed, laying aside her
clothes with her habitual precision, setting everything in order
for the next day, when the old life must be taken up as though
there had been no break in its routine. Her servant did not come
till eight o’clock, and she prepared her own tea-tray and placed it
beside the bed. Then she locked the door of the flat, extinguished
her light and lay down. But on her bed sleep would not come, and
she lay face to face with the fact that she hated Lily Bart. It
closed with her in the darkness like some formless evil to be
blindly grappled with. Reason, judgment, renunciation, all the
sane daylight forces, were beaten back in the sharp struggle for
self-preservation. She wanted happiness—wanted it as fiercely and
unscrupulously as Lily did, but without Lily’s power of obtaining
it. And in her conscious impotence she lay shivering, and hated her
friend——


A ring at the door-bell caught her to her feet. She struck a
light and stood startled, listening. For a moment her heart beat
incoherently, then she felt the sobering touch of fact, and re-
membered that such calls were not unknown in her charitable
work. She flung on her dressing-gown to answer the summons,
and unlocking her door, confronted the shining vision of Lily Bart.

Gerty’s first movement was one of revulsion. She shrank back as
though Lily’s presence flashed too sudden a light upon her misery.
Then she heard her name in a cry, had a glimpse of her friend’s
face, and felt herself caught and clung to.

“Lily—what is it?” she exclaimed.

Miss Bart released her, and stood breathing brokenly, like one who
has gained shelter after a long flight.

“I was so cold—I couldn’t go home. Have you a fire?”

Gerty’s compassionate instincts, responding to the swift call of
habit, swept aside all her reluctances. Lily was simply some one
who needed help—for what reason, there was no time to pause and
conjecture: disciplined sympathy checked the wonder on Gerty’s
lips, and made her draw her friend silently into the sitting-room
and seat her by the darkened hearth.

“There is kindling wood here: the fire will burn in a minute.”

She knelt down, and the flame leapt under her rapid hands. It
flashed strangely through the tears which still blurred her eyes,
and smote on the white ruin of Lily’s face. The girls looked at
each other in silence; then Lily repeated: “I couldn’t go home.”

“No—no—you came here, dear! You’re cold and tired—sit quiet, and
I’ll make you some tea.”

Gerty had unconsciously adopted the soothing note of her trade:
all personal feeling was merged in the sense of ministry, and
experience had taught her that the bleeding must be stayed before
the wound is probed.

Lily sat quiet, leaning to the fire: the clatter of cups behind her
soothed her as familiar noises hush a child whom silence has kept
wakeful. But when Gerty stood at her side with the tea she pushed
it away, and turned an estranged eye on the familiar room.

“I came here because I couldn’t bear to be alone,” she said.

Gerty set down the cup and knelt beside her.

“Lily! Something has happened—can’t you tell me?”

“I couldn’t bear to lie awake in my room till morning. I hate my
room at Aunt Julia’s—so I came here——”

She stirred suddenly, broke from her apathy, and clung to Gerty in
a fresh burst of fear.

“Oh, Gerty, the furies . . . you know the noise of their wings—
alone, at night, in the dark? But you don’t know—there is
nothing to make the dark dreadful to you——”

The words, flashing back on Gerty’s last hours, struck from her
a faint derisive murmur; but Lily, in the blaze of her own misery,
was blinded to everything outside it.

“You’ll let me stay? I shan’t mind when daylight comes—Is
it late? Is the night nearly over? It must be awful to be
sleepless—everything stands by the bed and stares——”

Miss Farish caught her straying hands. “Lily, look at me! Something
has happened—an accident? You have been frightened—what has
frightened you? Tell me if you can—a word or two—so that I can help
you.”

Lily shook her head.

“I am not frightened: that’s not the word. Can you imagine looking
into your glass some morning and seeing a disfigurement—some
hideous change that has come to you while you slept? Well, I seem
to myself like that—I can’t bear to see myself in my own thoughts—I
hate ugliness, you know—I’ve always turned from it—but I can’t
explain to you—you wouldn’t understand.”

She lifted her head and her eyes fell on the clock.

“How long the night is! And I know I shan’t sleep tomorrow. Some
one told me my father used to lie sleepless and think of horrors.
And he was not wicked, only unfortunate—and I see now how he must
have suffered, lying alone with his thoughts! But I am bad—a bad
girl—all my thoughts are bad—I have always had bad people about
me. Is that any excuse? I thought I could manage my own life—I was
proud—proud! but now I’m on their level——”

Sobs shook her, and she bowed to them like a tree in a dry storm.

Gerty knelt beside her, waiting, with the patience born of
experience, till this gust of misery should loosen fresh speech.
She had first imagined some physical shock, some peril of the
crowded streets, since Lily was presumably on her way home from
Carry Fisher’s; but she now saw that other nerve-centres were
smitten, and her mind trembled back from conjecture.

Lily’s sobs ceased, and she lifted her head.

“There are bad girls in your slums. Tell me—do they ever pick
themselves up? Ever forget, and feel as they did before?”

“Lily! you mustn’t speak so—you’re dreaming.”

“Don’t they always go from bad to worse? There’s no turning
back—your old self rejects you, and shuts you out.”

She rose, stretching her arms as if in utter physical weariness.
“Go to bed, dear! You work hard and get up early. I’ll watch here
by the fire, and you’ll leave the light, and your door open. All
I want is to feel that you are near me.” She laid both hands on
Gerty’s shoulders, with a smile that was like sunrise on a sea
strewn with wreckage.

“I can’t leave you, Lily. Come and lie on my bed. Your hands are
frozen—you must undress and be made warm.” Gerty paused with sudden
compunction. “But Mrs. Peniston—it’s past midnight! What will she
think?”

“She goes to bed. I have a latchkey. It doesn’t matter—I can’t go
back there.”

“There’s no need to: you shall stay here. But you must tell me
where you have been. Listen, Lily—it will help you to speak!” She
regained Miss Bart’s hands, and pressed them against her. “Try to
tell me—it will clear your poor head. Listen—you were dining at
Carry Fisher’s.” Gerty paused and added with a flash of heroism:
“Lawrence Selden went from here to find you.”

At the word, Lily’s face melted from locked anguish to the open
misery of a child. Her lips trembled and her gaze widened with
tears.

“He went to find me? And I missed him! Oh, Gerty, he tried to help
me. He told me—he warned me long ago—he foresaw that I should grow
hateful to myself!”

The name, as Gerty saw with a clutch at the heart, had loosened
the springs of self-pity in her friend’s dry breast, and tear by
tear Lily poured out the measure of her anguish. She had dropped
sideways in Gerty’s big arm-chair, her head buried where lately
Selden’s had leaned, in a beauty of abandonment that drove home to
Gerty’s aching senses the inevitableness of her own defeat. Ah,
it needed no deliberate purpose on Lily’s part to rob her of her
dream! To look on that prone loveliness was to see in it a natural
force, to recognize that love and power belong to such as Lily, as
renunciation and service are the lot of those they despoil. But if
Selden’s infatuation seemed a fatal necessity, the effect that his
name produced shook Gerty’s steadfastness with a last pang. Men
pass through such superhuman loves and outlive them: they are the
probation subduing the heart to human joys. How gladly Gerty would
have welcomed the ministry of healing: how willingly have soothed
the sufferer back to tolerance of life! But Lily’s self-betrayal
took this last hope from her. The mortal maid on the shore is
helpless against the siren who loves her prey: such victims are
floated back dead from their adventure.

Lily sprang up and caught her with strong hands. “Gerty, you
know him—you understand him—tell me; if I went to him, if I told
him everything—if I said: ‘I am bad through and through—I want
admiration, I want excitement, I want money—’ yes, MONEY! That’s my
shame, Gerty—and it’s known, it’s said of me—it’s what men think of
me—If I said it all to him—told him the whole story—said plainly:
‘I’ve sunk lower than the lowest, for I’ve taken what they take,
and not paid as they pay’—oh, Gerty, you know him, you can speak
for him: if I told him everything would he loathe me? Or would he
pity me, and understand me, and save me from loathing myself?”

Gerty stood cold and passive. She knew the hour of her probation
had come, and her poor heart beat wildly against its destiny. As a
dark river sweeps by under a lightning flash, she saw her chance of
happiness surge past under a flash of temptation. What prevented
her from saying: “He is like other men?” She was not so sure of
him, after all! But to do so would have been like blaspheming her
love. She could not put him before herself in any light but the
noblest: she must trust him to the height of her own passion.

“Yes: I know him; he will help you,” she said; and in a moment
Lily’s passion was weeping itself out against her breast.

There was but one bed in the little flat, and the two girls lay
down on it side by side when Gerty had unlaced Lily’s dress
and persuaded her to put her lips to the warm tea. The light
extinguished, they lay still in the darkness, Gerty shrinking
to the outer edge of the narrow couch to avoid contact with her
bed-fellow. Knowing that Lily disliked to be caressed, she had long
ago learned to check her demonstrative impulses toward her friend.
But tonight every fibre in her body shrank from Lily’s nearness:
it was torture to listen to her breathing, and feel the sheet stir
with it. As Lily turned, and settled to completer rest, a strand
of her hair swept Gerty’s cheek with its fragrance. Everything
about her was warm and soft and scented: even the stains of her
grief became her as rain-drops do the beaten rose. But as Gerty lay
with arms drawn down her side, in the motionless narrowness of an
effigy, she felt a stir of sobs from the breathing warmth beside
her, and Lily flung out her hand, groped for her friend’s, and held
it fast.

“Hold me, Gerty, hold me, or I shall think of things,” she moaned;
and Gerty silently slipped an arm under her, pillowing her head in
its hollow as a mother makes a nest for a tossing child. In the
warm hollow Lily lay still and her breathing grew low and regular.
Her hand still clung to Gerty’s as if to ward off evil dreams, but
the hold of her fingers relaxed, her head sank deeper into its
shelter, and Gerty felt that she slept.



Chapter 15



When Lily woke she had the bed to herself, and the winter light
was in the room.

She sat up, bewildered by the strangeness of her surroundings;
then memory returned, and she looked about her with a shiver.
In the cold slant of light reflected from the back wall of a
neighbouring building, she saw her evening dress and opera
cloak lying in a tawdry heap on a chair. Finery laid off is as
unappetizing as the remains of a feast, and it occurred to Lily
that, at home, her maid’s vigilance had always spared her the
sight of such incongruities. Her body ached with fatigue, and with
the constriction of her attitude in Gerty’s bed. All through her
troubled sleep she had been conscious of having no space to toss
in, and the long effort to remain motionless made her feel as if
she had spent her night in a train.

This sense of physical discomfort was the first to assert itself;
then she perceived, beneath it, a corresponding mental prostration,
a languor of horror more insufferable than the first rush of her
disgust. The thought of having to wake every morning with this
weight on her breast roused her tired mind to fresh effort. She
must find some way out of the slough into which she had stumbled:
it was not so much compunction as the dread of her morning thoughts
that pressed on her the need of action. But she was unutterably
tired; it was weariness to think connectedly. She lay back, looking
about the poor slit of a room with a renewal of physical distaste.
The outer air, penned between high buildings, brought no freshness
through the window; steam-heat was beginning to sing in a coil of
dingy pipes, and a smell of cooking penetrated the crack of the
door.

The door opened, and Gerty, dressed and hatted, entered with a cup
of tea. Her face looked sallow and swollen in the dreary light, and
her dull hair shaded imperceptibly into the tones of her skin.

She glanced shyly at Lily, asking in an embarrassed tone how she
felt; Lily answered with the same constraint, and raised herself up
to drink the tea.

“I must have been over-tired last night; I think I had a nervous
attack in the carriage,” she said, as the drink brought clearness
to her sluggish thoughts.

“You were not well; I am so glad you came here,” Gerty returned.

“But how am I to get home? And Aunt Julia—?”

“She knows; I telephoned early, and your maid has brought your
things. But won’t you eat something? I scrambled the eggs myself.”

Lily could not eat; but the tea strengthened her to rise and dress
under her maid’s searching gaze. It was a relief to her that Gerty
was obliged to hasten away: the two kissed silently, but without a
trace of the previous night’s emotion.

Lily found Mrs. Peniston in a state of agitation. She had sent for
Grace Stepney and was taking digitalis. Lily breasted the storm of
enquiries as best she could, explaining that she had had an attack
of faintness on her way back from Carry Fisher’s; that, fearing
she would not have strength to reach home, she had gone to Miss
Farish’s instead; but that a quiet night had restored her, and that
she had no need of a doctor.

This was a relief to Mrs. Peniston, who could give herself up
to her own symptoms, and Lily was advised to go and lie down,
her aunt’s panacea for all physical and moral disorders. In the
solitude of her own room she was brought back to a sharp con-
templation of facts. Her daylight view of them necessarily dif-
fered from the cloudy vision of the night. The winged furies were
now prowling gossips who dropped in on each other for tea. But
her fears seemed the uglier, thus shorn of their vagueness; and
besides, she had to act, not rave. For the first time she forced
herself to reckon up the exact amount of her debt to Trenor; and
the result of this hateful computation was the discovery that she
had, in all, received nine thousand dollars from him. The flimsy
pretext on which it had been given and received shrivelled up
in the blaze of her shame: she knew that not a penny of it was
her own, and that to restore her self-respect she must at once
repay the whole amount. The inability thus to solace her outraged
feelings gave her a paralyzing sense of insignificance. She was
realizing for the first time that a woman’s dignity may cost more
to keep up than her carriage; and that the maintenance of a moral
attribute should be dependent on dollars and cents, made the world
appear a more sordid place than she had conceived it.

After luncheon, when Grace Stepney’s prying eyes had been
removed, Lily asked for a word with her aunt. The two ladies
went upstairs to the sitting-room, where Mrs. Peniston seated
herself in her black satin arm-chair tufted with yellow buttons,
beside a bead-work table bearing a bronze box with a miniature
of Beatrice Cenci in the lid. Lily felt for these objects the
same distaste which the prisoner may entertain for the fittings
of the court-room. It was here that her aunt received her rare
confidences, and the pink-eyed smirk of the turbaned Beatrice was
associated in her mind with the gradual fading of the smile from
Mrs. Peniston’s lips. That lady’s dread of a scene gave her an
inexorableness which the greatest strength of character could not
have produced, since it was independent of all considerations of
right or wrong; and knowing this, Lily seldom ventured to assail
it. She had never felt less like making the attempt than on the
present occasion; but she had sought in vain for any other means
of escape from an intolerable situation.

Mrs. Peniston examined her critically. “You’re a bad colour, Lily:
this incessant rushing about is beginning to tell on you,” she said.

Miss Bart saw an opening. “I don’t think it’s that, Aunt Julia;
I’ve had worries,” she replied.

“Ah,” said Mrs. Peniston, shutting her lips with the snap of a
purse closing against a beggar.

“I’m sorry to bother you with them,” Lily continued, “but I really
believe my faintness last night was brought on partly by anxious
thoughts—”

“I should have said Carry Fisher’s cook was enough to account for
it. She has a woman who was with Maria Melson in 1891—the spring of
the year we went to Aix—and I remember dining there two days before
we sailed, and feeling SURE the coppers hadn’t been scoured.”

“I don’t think I ate much; I can’t eat or sleep.” Lily paused, and
then said abruptly: “The fact is, Aunt Julia, I owe some money.”

Mrs. Peniston’s face clouded perceptibly, but did not express the
astonishment her niece had expected. She was silent, and Lily was
forced to continue: “I have been foolish——”

“No doubt you have: extremely foolish,” Mrs. Peniston interposed.
“I fail to see how any one with your income, and no expenses—not to
mention the handsome presents I’ve always given you——”

“Oh, you’ve been most generous, Aunt Julia; I shall never forget
your kindness. But perhaps you don’t quite realize the expense a
girl is put to nowadays——”

“I don’t realize that YOU are put to any expense except for your
clothes and your railway fares. I expect you to be handsomely
dressed; but I paid Celeste’s bill for you last October.”

Lily hesitated: her aunt’s implacable memory had never been more
inconvenient. “You were as kind as possible; but I have had to get
a few things since——”

“What kind of things? Clothes? How much have you spent? Let me see
the bill—I daresay the woman is swindling you.”

“Oh, no, I think not: clothes have grown so frightfully expensive;
and one needs so many different kinds, with country visits, and
golf and skating, and Aiken and Tuxedo——”

“Let me see the bill,” Mrs. Peniston repeated.

Lily hesitated again. In the first place, Mme. Celeste had not yet
sent in her account, and secondly, the amount it represented was
only a fraction of the sum that Lily needed.

“She hasn’t sent in the bill for my winter things, but I KNOW it’s
large; and there are one or two other things; I’ve been careless
and imprudent—I’m frightened to think of what I owe——”

She raised the troubled loveliness of her face to Mrs. Peniston,
vainly hoping that a sight so moving to the other sex might not be
without effect upon her own. But the effect produced was that of
making Mrs. Peniston shrink back apprehensively.

“Really, Lily, you are old enough to manage your own affairs, and
after frightening me to death by your performance of last night you
might at least choose a better time to worry me with such matters.”
Mrs. Peniston glanced at the clock, and swallowed a tablet of
digitalis. “If you owe Celeste another thousand, she may send me
her account,” she added, as though to end the discussion at any
cost.

“I am very sorry, Aunt Julia; I hate to trouble you at such a time;
but I have really no choice—I ought to have spoken sooner—I owe a
great deal more than a thousand dollars.”

“A great deal more? Do you owe two? She must have robbed you!”

“I told you it was not only Celeste. I—there are other bills—more
pressing—that must be settled.”

“What on earth have you been buying? Jewelry? You must have gone
off your head,” said Mrs. Peniston with asperity. “But if you have
run into debt, you must suffer the consequences, and put aside your
monthly income till your bills are paid. If you stay quietly here
until next spring, instead of racing about all over the country,
you will have no expenses at all, and surely in four or five months
you can settle the rest of your bills if I pay the dress-maker now.”

Lily was again silent. She knew she could not hope to extract
even a thousand dollars from Mrs. Peniston on the mere plea of
paying Celeste’s bill: Mrs. Peniston would expect to go over the
dress-maker’s account, and would make out the cheque to her and not
to Lily. And yet the money must be obtained before the day was over!

“The debts I speak of are—different—not like tradesmen’s bills,”
she began confusedly; but Mrs. Peniston’s look made her almost
afraid to continue. Could it be that her aunt suspected anything?
The idea precipitated Lily’s avowal.

“The fact is, I’ve played cards a good deal—bridge; the women all
do it; girls too—it’s expected. Sometimes I’ve won—won a good
deal—but lately I’ve been unlucky—and of course such debts can’t be
paid off gradually——”

She paused: Mrs. Peniston’s face seemed to be petrifying as she
listened.

“Cards—you’ve played cards for money? It’s true, then: when I was
told so I wouldn’t believe it. I won’t ask if the other horrors
I was told were true too; I’ve heard enough for the state of my
nerves. When I think of the example you’ve had in this house! But I
suppose it’s your foreign bringing-up—no one knew where your mother
picked up her friends. And her Sundays were a scandal—that I know.”

Mrs. Peniston wheeled round suddenly. “You play cards on Sunday?”

Lily flushed with the recollection of certain rainy Sundays at
Bellomont and with the Dorsets.

“You’re hard on me, Aunt Julia: I have never really cared for
cards, but a girl hates to be thought priggish and superior, and
one drifts into doing what the others do. I’ve had a dreadful
lesson, and if you’ll help me out this time I promise you—”

Mrs. Peniston raised her hand warningly. “You needn’t make any
promises: it’s unnecessary. When I offered you a home I didn’t
undertake to pay your gambling debts.”

“Aunt Julia! You don’t mean that you won’t help me?”

“I shall certainly not do anything to give the impression that I
countenance your behaviour. If you really owe your dress-maker,
I will settle with her—beyond that I recognize no obligation to
assume your debts.”

Lily had risen, and stood pale and quivering before her aunt. Pride
stormed in her, but humiliation forced the cry from her lips: “Aunt
Julia, I shall be disgraced—I—” But she could go no farther. If her
aunt turned such a stony ear to the fiction of the gambling debts,
in what spirit would she receive the terrible avowal of the truth?

“I consider that you ARE disgraced, Lily: disgraced by your conduct
far more than by its results. You say your friends have persuaded
you to play cards with them; well, they may as well learn a lesson
too. They can probably afford to lose a little money—and at any
rate, I am not going to waste any of mine in paying them. And now I
must ask you to leave me—this scene has been extremely painful, and
I have my own health to consider. Draw down the blinds, please; and
tell Jennings I will see no one this afternoon but Grace Stepney.”

Lily went up to her own room and bolted the door. She was trembling
with fear and anger—the rush of the furies’ wings was in her ears.
She walked up and down the room with blind irregular steps. The
last door of escape was closed—she felt herself shut in with her
dishonour.

Suddenly her wild pacing brought her before the clock on the
chimney-piece. Its hands stood at half-past three, and she
remembered that Selden was to come to her at four. She had
meant to put him off with a word—but now her heart leaped at the
thought of seeing him. Was there not a promise of rescue in his
love? As she had lain at Gerty’s side the night before, she had
thought of his coming, and of the sweetness of weeping out her
pain upon his breast. Of course she had meant to clear herself of
its consequences before she met him—she had never really doubted
that Mrs. Peniston would come to her aid. And she had felt, even
in the full storm of her misery, that Selden’s love could not be
her ultimate refuge; only it would be so sweet to take a moment’s
shelter there, while she gathered fresh strength to go on.

But now his love was her only hope, and as she sat alone with her
wretchedness the thought of confiding in him became as seductive
as the river’s flow to the suicide. The first plunge would be ter-
rible—but afterward, what blessedness might come! She remembered
Gerty’s words: “I know him—he will help you”; and her mind clung
to them as a sick person might cling to a healing relic. Oh, if
he really understood—if he would help her to gather up her broken
life, and put it together in some new semblance in which no trace
of the past should remain! He had always made her feel that she
was worthy of better things, and she had never been in greater
need of such solace. Once and again she shrank at the thought
of imperilling his love by her confession: for love was what she
needed—it would take the glow of passion to weld together the
shattered fragments of her self-esteem. But she recurred to Gerty’s
words and held fast to them. She was sure that Gerty knew Selden’s
feeling for her, and it had never dawned upon her blindness that
Gerty’s own judgment of him was coloured by emotions far more
ardent than her own.

Four o’clock found her in the drawing-room: she was sure that
Selden would be punctual. But the hour came and passed—it moved
on feverishly, measured by her impatient heart-beats. She had
time to take a fresh survey of her wretchedness, and to fluctuate
anew between the impulse to confide in Selden and the dread of
destroying his illusions. But as the minutes passed the need of
throwing herself on his comprehension became more urgent: she could
not bear the weight of her misery alone. There would be a perilous
moment, perhaps: but could she not trust to her beauty to bridge it
over, to land her safe in the shelter of his devotion?

But the hour sped on and Selden did not come. Doubtless he had
been detained, or had misread her hurriedly scrawled note, taking the
four for a five. The ringing of the door-bell a few minutes after
five confirmed this supposition, and made Lily hastily resolve to
write more legibly in future. The sound of steps in the hall, and
of the butler’s voice preceding them, poured fresh energy into her
veins. She felt herself once more the alert and competent moulder
of emergencies, and the remembrance of her power over Selden
flushed her with sudden confidence. But when the drawing-room
door opened it was Rosedale who came in.

The reaction caused her a sharp pang, but after a passing
movement of irritation at the clumsiness of fate, and at her
own carelessness in not denying the door to all but Selden, she
controlled herself and greeted Rosedale amicably. It was annoying
that Selden, when he came, should find that particular visitor in
possession, but Lily was mistress of the art of ridding herself
of superfluous company, and to her present mood Rosedale seemed
distinctly negligible.

His own view of the situation forced itself upon her after a few
moments’ conversation. She had caught at the Brys’ entertainment
as an easy impersonal subject, likely to tide them over the interval
till Selden appeared, but Mr. Rosedale, tenaciously planted beside
the tea-table, his hands in his pockets, his legs a little too
freely extended, at once gave the topic a personal turn.

“Pretty well done—well, yes, I suppose it was: Welly Bry’s got his
back up and don’t mean to let go till he’s got the hang of the
thing. Of course, there were things here and there—things Mrs.
Fisher couldn’t be expected to see to—the champagne wasn’t cold,
and the coats got mixed in the coat-room. I would have spent more
money on the music. But that’s my character: if I want a thing I’m
willing to pay: I don’t go up to the counter, and then wonder if
the article’s worth the price. I wouldn’t be satisfied to entertain
like the Welly Brys; I’d want something that would look more easy
and natural, more as if I took it in my stride. And it takes just
two things to do that, Miss Bart: money, and the right woman to
spend it.”

He paused, and examined her attentively while she affected to
rearrange the tea-cups.

“I’ve got the money,” he continued, clearing his throat, “and what
I want is the woman—and I mean to have her too.”

He leaned forward a little, resting his hands on the head of his
walking-stick. He had seen men of Ned Van Alstyne’s type bring
their hats and sticks into a drawing-room, and he thought it added
a touch of elegant familiarity to their appearance.

Lily was silent, smiling faintly, with her eyes absently resting on
his face. She was in reality reflecting that a declaration would
take some time to make, and that Selden must surely appear before
the moment of refusal had been reached. Her brooding look, as of
a mind withdrawn yet not averted, seemed to Mr. Rosedale full of
a subtle encouragement. He would not have liked any evidence of
eagerness.

“I mean to have her too,” he repeated, with a laugh intended to
strengthen his self-assurance. “I generally HAVE got what I wanted
in life, Miss Bart. I wanted money, and I’ve got more than I know
how to invest; and now the money doesn’t seem to be of any account
unless I can spend it on the right woman. That’s what I want to do
with it: I want my wife to make all the other women feel small. I’d
never grudge a dollar that was spent on that. But it isn’t every
woman can do it, no matter how much you spend on her. There was
a girl in some history book who wanted gold shields, or something,
and the fellows threw ’em at her, and she was crushed under ’em:
they killed her. Well, that’s true enough: some women looked buried
under their jewelry. What I want is a woman who’ll hold her head
higher the more diamonds I put on it. And when I looked at you the
other night at the Brys’, in that plain white dress, looking as if
you had a crown on, I said to myself: ‘By gad, if she had one she’d
wear it as if it grew on her.’”

Still Lily did not speak, and he continued, warming with his theme:
“Tell you what it is, though, that kind of woman costs more than
all the rest of ’em put together. If a woman’s going to ignore her
pearls, they want to be better than anybody else’s—and so it is
with everything else. You know what I mean—you know it’s only the
showy things that are cheap. Well, I should want my wife to be able
to take the earth for granted if she wanted to. I know there’s one
thing vulgar about money, and that’s the thinking about it; and my
wife would never have to demean herself in that way.” He paused,
and then added, with an unfortunate lapse to an earlier manner: “I
guess you know the lady I’ve got in view, Miss Bart.”

Lily raised her head, brightening a little under the challenge.
Even through the dark tumult of her thoughts, the clink of Mr.
Rosedale’s millions had a faintly seductive note. Oh, for enough of
them to cancel her one miserable debt! But the man behind them grew
increasingly repugnant in the light of Selden’s expected coming.
The contrast was too grotesque: she could scarcely suppress the
smile it provoked. She decided that directness would be best.

“If you mean me, Mr. Rosedale, I am very grateful—very much
flattered; but I don’t know what I have ever done to make you
think—”

“Oh, if you mean you’re not dead in love with me, I’ve got sense
enough left to see that. And I ain’t talking to you as if you were—
I presume I know the kind of talk that’s expected under those
circumstances. I’m confoundedly gone on you—that’s about the size
of it—and I’m just giving you a plain business statement of the
consequences. You’re not very fond of me—YET—but you’re fond of
luxury, and style, and amusement, and of not having to worry about
cash. You like to have a good time, and not have to settle for it;
and what I propose to do is to provide for the good time and do the
settling.”

He paused, and she returned with a chilling smile: “You are
mistaken in one point, Mr. Rosedale: whatever I enjoy I am prepared
to settle for.”

She spoke with the intention of making him see that, if his words
implied a tentative allusion to her private affairs, she was
prepared to meet and repudiate it. But if he recognized her meaning
it failed to abash him, and he went on in the same tone: “I didn’t
mean to give offence; excuse me if I’ve spoken too plainly. But
why ain’t you straight with me—why do you put up that kind of
bluff? You know there’ve been times when you were bothered—damned
bothered—and as a girl gets older, and things keep moving along,
why, before she knows it, the things she wants are liable to move
past her and not come back. I don’t say it’s anywhere near that
with you yet; but you’ve had a taste of bothers that a girl like
yourself ought never to have known about, and what I’m offering you
is the chance to turn your back on them once for all.”

The colour burned in Lily’s face as he ended; there was no
mistaking the point he meant to make, and to permit it to pass
unheeded was a fatal confession of weakness, while to resent it too
openly was to risk offending him at a perilous moment. Indignation
quivered on her lip; but it was quelled by the secret voice which
warned her that she must not quarrel with him. He knew too much
about her, and even at the moment when it was essential that he
should show himself at his best, he did not scruple to let her
see how much he knew. How then would he use his power when her
expression of contempt had dispelled his one motive for restraint?
Her whole future might hinge on her way of answering him: she had
to stop and consider that, in the stress of her other anxieties, as
a breathless fugitive may have to pause at the cross-roads and try
to decide coolly which turn to take.

“You are quite right, Mr. Rosedale. I HAVE had bothers; and I am
grateful to you for wanting to relieve me of them. It is not always
easy to be quite independent and self-respecting when one is poor
and lives among rich people; I have been careless about money, and
have worried about my bills. But I should be selfish and ungrateful
if I made that a reason for accepting all you offer, with no better
return to make than the desire to be free from my anxieties. You
must give me time—time to think of your kindness—and of what I
could give you in return for it——”

She held out her hand with a charming gesture in which dismissal
was shorn of its rigour. Its hint of future leniency made Rosedale
rise in obedience to it, a little flushed with his unhoped-for
success, and disciplined by the tradition of his blood to accept
what was conceded, without undue haste to press for more. Something
in his prompt acquiescence frightened her; she felt behind it the
stored force of a patience that might subdue the strongest will.
But at least they had parted amicably, and he was out of the house
without meeting Selden—Selden, whose continued absence now smote
her with a new alarm. Rosedale had remained over an hour, and she
understood that it was now too late to hope for Selden. He would
write explaining his absence, of course; there would be a note
from him by the late post. But her confession would have to be
postponed; and the chill of the delay settled heavily on her fagged
spirit.

It lay heavier when the postman’s last ring brought no note for
her, and she had to go upstairs to a lonely night—a night as grim
and sleepless as her tortured fancy had pictured it to Gerty.
She had never learned to live with her own thoughts, and to be
confronted with them through such hours of lucid misery made the
confused wretchedness of her previous vigil seem easily bearable.

Daylight disbanded the phantom crew, and made it clear to her
that she would hear from Selden before noon; but the day passed
without his writing or coming. Lily remained at home, lunching and
dining alone with her aunt, who complained of flutterings of the
heart, and talked icily on general topics. Mrs. Peniston went to
bed early, and when she had gone Lily sat down and wrote a note to
Selden. She was about to ring for a messenger to despatch it when
her eye fell on a paragraph in the evening paper which lay at her
elbow: “Mr. Lawrence Selden was among the passengers sailing this
afternoon for Havana and the West Indies on the Windward Liner
Antilles.”

She laid down the paper and sat motionless, staring at her note.
She understood now that he was never coming—that he had gone away
because he was afraid that he might come. She rose, and walking
across the floor stood gazing at herself for a long time in the
brightly lit mirror above the mantelpiece. The lines in her face
came out terribly—she looked old; and when a girl looks old to
herself, how does she look to other people? She moved away, and
began to wander aimlessly about the room, fitting her steps with
mechanical precision between the monstrous roses of Mrs. Peniston’s
Axminster. Suddenly she noticed that the pen with which she had
written to Selden still rested against the uncovered inkstand.
She seated herself again, and taking out an envelope, addressed
it rapidly to Rosedale. Then she laid out a sheet of paper, and
sat over it with suspended pen. It had been easy enough to write
the date, and “Dear Mr. Rosedale”—but after that her inspiration
flagged. She meant to tell him to come to her, but the words
refused to shape themselves. At length she began: “I have been
thinking——” then she laid the pen down, and sat with her elbows on
the table and her face hidden in her hands.

Suddenly she started up at the sound of the door-bell. It was
not late—barely ten o’clock—and there might still be a note from
Selden, or a message—or he might be there himself, on the other
side of the door! The announcement of his sailing might have been
a mistake—it might be another Lawrence Selden who had gone to
Havana—all these possibilities had time to flash through her mind,
and build up the conviction that she was after all to see or hear
from him, before the drawing-room door opened to admit a servant
carrying a telegram.

Lily tore it open with shaking hands, and read Bertha Dorset’s name
below the message: “Sailing unexpectedly tomorrow. Will you join us
on a cruise in Mediterranean?”



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