BOOK TWO




Chapter 1



It came vividly to Selden on the Casino steps that Monte Carlo
had, more than any other place he knew, the gift of accommodating
itself to each man’s humour. His own, at the moment, lent it a
festive readiness of welcome that might well, in a disenchanted
eye, have turned to paint and facility. So frank an appeal for
participation—so outspoken a recognition of the holiday vein in
human nature—struck refreshingly on a mind jaded by prolonged
hard work in surroundings made for the discipline of the senses.
As he surveyed the white square set in an exotic coquetry of
architecture, the studied tropicality of the gardens, the groups
loitering in the foreground against mauve mountains which
suggested a sublime stage-setting forgotten in a hurried shifting
of scenes—as he took in the whole outspread effect of light and
leisure, he felt a movement of revulsion from the last few months
of his life.

The New York winter had presented an interminable perspective of
snow-burdened days, reaching toward a spring of raw sunshine and
furious air, when the ugliness of things rasped the eye as the
gritty wind ground into the skin. Selden, immersed in his work,
had told himself that external conditions did not matter to a man
in his state, and that cold and ugliness were a good tonic for
relaxed sensibilities. When an urgent case summoned him abroad
to confer with a client in Paris, he broke reluctantly with the
routine of the office; and it was only now that, having despatched
his business, and slipped away for a week in the south, he began to
feel the renewed zest of spectatorship that is the solace of those
who take an objective interest in life.

The multiplicity of its appeals—the perpetual surprise of its
contrasts and resemblances! All these tricks and turns of the
show were upon him with a spring as he descended the Casino steps
and paused on the pavement at its doors. He had not been abroad
for seven years—and what changes the renewed contact produced!
If the central depths were untouched, hardly a pin-point of surface
remained the same. And this was the very place to bring out the
completeness of the renewal. The sublimities, the perpetuities,
might have left him as he was: but this tent pitched for a day’s
revelry spread a roof of oblivion between himself and his fixed sky.

It was mid-April, and one felt that the revelry had reached its
climax and that the desultory groups in the square and gardens
would soon dissolve and reform in other scenes. Meanwhile the last
moments of the performance seemed to gain an added brightness
from the hovering threat of the curtain. The quality of the air,
the exuberance of the flowers, the blue intensity of sea and sky,
produced the effect of a closing TABLEAU, when all the lights are
turned on at once. This impression was presently heightened by the
way in which a consciously conspicuous group of people advanced
to the middle front, and stood before Selden with the air of the
chief performers gathered together by the exigencies of the final
effect. Their appearance confirmed the impression that the show had
been staged regardless of expense, and emphasized its resemblance
to one of those “costume-plays” in which the protagonists walk
through the passions without displacing a drapery. The ladies stood
in unrelated attitudes calculated to isolate their effects, and the
men hung about them as irrelevantly as stage heroes whose tailors
are named in the programme. It was Selden himself who unwittingly
fused the group by arresting the attention of one of its members.

“Why, Mr. Selden!” Mrs. Fisher exclaimed in surprise; and with a
gesture toward Mrs. Jack Stepney and Mrs. Wellington Bry, she added
plaintively: “We’re starving to death because we can’t decide where
to lunch.”

Welcomed into their group, and made the confidant of their
difficulty, Selden learned with amusement that there were several
places where one might miss something by not lunching, or forfeit
something by lunching; so that eating actually became a minor
consideration on the very spot consecrated to its rites.

“Of course one gets the best things at the TERRASSE—but that looks
as if one hadn’t any other reason for being there: the Americans
who don’t know any one always rush for the best food. And the
Duchess of Beltshire has taken up Becassin’s lately,” Mrs. Bry
earnestly summed up.

Mrs. Bry, to Mrs. Fisher’s despair, had not progressed beyond the
point of weighing her social alternatives in public. She could not
acquire the air of doing things because she wanted to, and making
her choice the final seal of their fitness.

Mr. Bry, a short pale man, with a business face and leisure
clothes, met the dilemma hilariously.

“I guess the Duchess goes where it’s cheapest, unless she can get
her meal paid for. If you offered to blow her off at the TERRASSE
she’d turn up fast enough.”

But Mrs. Jack Stepney interposed. “The Grand Dukes go to that
little place at the Condamine. Lord Hubert says it’s the only
restaurant in Europe where they can cook peas.”

Lord Hubert Dacey, a slender shabby-looking man, with a charming
worn smile, and the air of having spent his best years in piloting
the wealthy to the right restaurant, assented with gentle emphasis:
“It’s quite that.”

“PEAS?” said Mr. Bry contemptuously. “Can they cook terrapin? It
just shows,” he continued, “what these European markets are, when a
fellow can make a reputation cooking peas!”

Jack Stepney intervened with authority. “I don’t know that I quite
agree with Dacey: there’s a little hole in Paris, off the Quai
Voltaire—but in any case, I can’t advise the Condamine GARGOTE; at
least not with ladies.”

Stepney, since his marriage, had thickened and grown prudish, as
the Van Osburgh husbands were apt to do; but his wife, to his
surprise and discomfiture, had developed an earth-shaking fastness
of gait which left him trailing breathlessly in her wake.

“That’s where we’ll go then!” she declared, with a heavy toss of
her plumage. “I’m so tired of the TERRASSE: it’s as dull as one
of mother’s dinners. And Lord Hubert has promised to tell us who
all the awful people are at the other place—hasn’t he, Carry? Now,
Jack, don’t look so solemn!”

“Well,” said Mrs. Bry, “all I want to know is who their
dress-makers are.”

“No doubt Dacey can tell you that too,” remarked Stepney, with an
ironic intention which the other received with the light murmur,
“I can at least FIND OUT, my dear fellow”; and Mrs. Bry having
declared that she couldn’t walk another step, the party hailed
two or three of the light phaetons which hover attentively on the
confines of the gardens, and rattled off in procession toward the
Condamine.

Their destination was one of the little restaurants overhanging
the boulevard which dips steeply down from Monte Carlo to the low
intermediate quarter along the quay. From the window in which
they presently found themselves installed, they overlooked the
intense blue curve of the harbour, set between the verdure of twin
promontories: to the right, the cliff of Monaco, topped by the
mediaeval silhouette of its church and castle, to the left the
terraces and pinnacles of the gambling-house. Between the two,
the waters of the bay were furrowed by a light coming and going
of pleasure-craft, through which, just at the culminating moment
of luncheon, the majestic advance of a great steam-yacht drew the
company’s attention from the peas.

“By Jove, I believe that’s the Dorsets back!” Stepney exclaimed;
and Lord Hubert, dropping his single eye-glass, corroborated: “It’s
the Sabrina—yes.”

“So soon? They were to spend a month in Sicily,” Mrs. Fisher
observed.

“I guess they feel as if they had: there’s only one up-to-date
hotel in the whole place,” said Mr. Bry disparagingly.

“It was Ned Silverton’s idea—but poor Dorset and Lily Bart must
have been horribly bored.” Mrs. Fisher added in an undertone to
Selden: “I do hope there hasn’t been a row.”

“It’s most awfully jolly having Miss Bart back,” said Lord Hubert,
in his mild deliberate voice; and Mrs. Bry added ingenuously: “I
daresay the Duchess will dine with us, now that Lily’s here.”

“The Duchess admires her immensely: I’m sure she’d be charmed
to have it arranged,” Lord Hubert agreed, with the professional
promptness of the man accustomed to draw his profit from
facilitating social contacts: Selden was struck by the businesslike
change in his manner.

“Lily has been a tremendous success here,” Mrs. Fisher continued,
still addressing herself confidentially to Selden. “She looks ten
years younger—I never saw her so handsome. Lady Skiddaw took her
everywhere in Cannes, and the Crown Princess of Macedonia had her
to stop for a week at Cimiez. People say that was one reason why
Bertha whisked the yacht off to Sicily: the Crown Princess didn’t
take much notice of her, and she couldn’t bear to look on at Lily’s
triumph.”

Selden made no reply. He was vaguely aware that Miss Bart was
cruising in the Mediterranean with the Dorsets, but it had not
occurred to him that there was any chance of running across her on
the Riviera, where the season was virtually at an end. As he leaned
back, silently contemplating his filigree cup of Turkish coffee,
he was trying to put some order in his thoughts, to tell himself
how the news of her nearness was really affecting him. He had a
personal detachment enabling him, even in moments of emo-
tional high-pressure, to get a fairly clear view of his feelings, and
he was sincerely surprised by the disturbance which the sight
of the Sabrina had produced in him. He had reason to think that
his three months of engrossing professional work, following on
the sharp shock of his disillusionment, had cleared his mind of
its sentimental vapours. The feeling he had nourished and given
prominence to was one of thankfulness for his escape: he was like a
traveller so grateful for rescue from a dangerous accident that at
first he is hardly conscious of his bruises. Now he suddenly felt
the latent ache, and realized that after all he had not come off
unhurt.

An hour later, at Mrs. Fisher’s side in the Casino gardens, he was
trying to find fresh reasons for forgetting the injury received in
the contemplation of the peril avoided. The party had dispersed
with the loitering indecision characteristic of social movements
at Monte Carlo, where the whole place, and the long gilded hours
of the day, seem to offer an infinity of ways of being idle. Lord
Hubert Dacey had finally gone off in quest of the Duchess of
Beltshire, charged by Mrs. Bry with the delicate negotiation of
securing that lady’s presence at dinner, the Stepneys had left for
Nice in their motor-car, and Mr. Bry had departed to take his place
in the pigeon shooting match which was at the moment engaging his
highest faculties.

Mrs. Bry, who had a tendency to grow red and stertorous after
luncheon, had been judiciously prevailed upon by Carry Fisher to
withdraw to her hotel for an hour’s repose; and Selden and his
companion were thus left to a stroll propitious to confidences.
The stroll soon resolved itself into a tranquil session on a bench
overhung with laurel and Banksian roses, from which they caught a
dazzle of blue sea between marble balusters, and the fiery shafts
of cactus-blossoms shooting meteor-like from the rock. The soft
shade of their niche, and the adjacent glitter of the air, were
conducive to an easy lounging mood, and to the smoking of many
cigarettes; and Selden, yielding to these influences, suffered Mrs.
Fisher to unfold to him the history of her recent experiences. She
had come abroad with the Welly Brys at the moment when fashion
flees the inclemency of the New York spring. The Brys, intoxicated
by their first success, already thirsted for new kingdoms, and
Mrs. Fisher, viewing the Riviera as an easy introduction to London
society, had guided their course thither. She had affiliations
of her own in every capital, and a facility for picking them up
again after long absences; and the carefully disseminated rumour
of the Brys’ wealth had at once gathered about them a group of
cosmopolitan pleasure-seekers.

“But things are not going as well as I expected,” Mrs. Fisher
frankly admitted. “It’s all very well to say that every body with
money can get into society; but it would be truer to say that
NEARLY everybody can. And the London market is so glutted with
new Americans that, to succeed there now, they must be either very
clever or awfully queer. The Brys are neither. HE would get on well
enough if she’d let him alone; they like his slang and his brag and
his blunders. But Louisa spoils it all by trying to repress him and
put herself forward. If she’d be natural herself—fat and vulgar and
bouncing—it would be all right; but as soon as she meets anybody
smart she tries to be slender and queenly. She tried it with the
Duchess of Beltshire and Lady Skiddaw, and they fled. I’ve done my
best to make her see her mistake—I’ve said to her again and again:
‘Just let yourself go, Louisa’; but she keeps up the humbug even
with me—I believe she keeps on being queenly in her own room, with
the door shut.

“The worst of it is,” Mrs. Fisher went on, “that she thinks it’s
all MY fault. When the Dorsets turned up here six weeks ago, and
everybody began to make a fuss about Lily Bart, I could see Louisa
thought that if she’d had Lily in tow instead of me she would have
been hob-nobbing with all the royalties by this time. She doesn’t
realize that it’s Lily’s beauty that does it: Lord Hubert tells me
Lily is thought even handsomer than when he knew her at Aix ten
years ago. It seems she was tremendously admired there. An Italian
Prince, rich and the real thing, wanted to marry her; but just at
the critical moment a good-looking step-son turned up, and Lily
was silly enough to flirt with him while her marriage-settlements
with the step-father were being drawn up. Some people said the
young man did it on purpose. You can fancy the scandal: there was
an awful row between the men, and people began to look at Lily
so queerly that Mrs. Peniston had to pack up and finish her cure
elsewhere. Not that SHE ever understood: to this day she thinks
that Aix didn’t suit her, and mentions her having been sent there
as proof of the incompetence of French doctors. That’s Lily all
over, you know: she works like a slave preparing the ground and
sowing her seed; but the day she ought to be reaping the harvest
she over-sleeps herself or goes off on a picnic.”

Mrs. Fisher paused and looked reflectively at the deep shimmer of
sea between the cactus-flowers. “Sometimes,” she added, “I think
it’s just flightiness—and sometimes I think it’s because, at heart,
she despises the things she’s trying for. And it’s the difficulty
of deciding that makes her such an interesting study.” She glanced
tentatively at Selden’s motionless profile, and resumed with a
slight sigh: “Well, all I can say is, I wish she’d give ME some of
her discarded opportunities. I wish we could change places now,
for instance. She could make a very good thing out of the Brys
if she managed them properly, and I should know just how to look
after George Dorset while Bertha is reading Verlaine with Neddy
Silverton.”

She met Selden’s sound of protest with a sharp derisive glance.
“Well, what’s the use of mincing matters? We all know that’s what
Bertha brought her abroad for. When Bertha wants to have a good
time she has to provide occupation for George. At first I thought
Lily was going to play her cards well THIS time, but there are
rumours that Bertha is jealous of her success here and at Cannes,
and I shouldn’t be surprised if there were a break any day. Lily’s
only safeguard is that Bertha needs her badly—oh, very badly.
The Silverton affair is in the acute stage: it’s necessary that
George’s attention should be pretty continuously distracted. And
I’m bound to say Lily DOES distract it: I believe he’d marry her
tomorrow if he found out there was anything wrong with Bertha. But
you know him—he’s as blind as he’s jealous; and of course Lily’s
present business is to keep him blind. A clever woman might know
just the right moment to tear off the bandage: but Lily isn’t
clever in that way, and when George does open his eyes she’ll
probably contrive not to be in his line of vision.”

Selden tossed away his cigarette. “By Jove—it’s time for my train,”
he exclaimed, with a glance at his watch; adding, in reply to Mrs.
Fisher’s surprised comment—“Why, I thought of course you were at
Monte!”—a murmured word to the effect that he was making Nice his
head-quarters.

“The worst of it is, she snubs the Brys now,” he heard irrelevantly
flung after him.

Ten minutes later, in the high-perched bedroom of an hotel
overlooking the Casino, he was tossing his effects into a couple of
gaping portmanteaux, while the porter waited outside to transport
them to the cab at the door. It took but a brief plunge down the
steep white road to the station to land him safely in the afternoon
express for Nice; and not till he was installed in the corner of
an empty carriage, did he exclaim to himself, with a reaction of
self-contempt: “What the deuce am I running away from?”

The pertinence of the question checked Selden’s fugitive impulse
before the train had started. It was ridiculous to be flying like
an emotional coward from an infatuation his reason had conquered.
He had instructed his bankers to forward some important business
letters to Nice, and at Nice he would quietly await them. He was
already annoyed with himself for having left Monte Carlo, where he
had intended to pass the week which remained to him before sailing;
but it would now be difficult to return on his steps without an
appearance of inconsistency from which his pride recoiled. In his
inmost heart he was not sorry to put himself beyond the probability
of meeting Miss Bart. Completely as he had detached himself from
her, he could not yet regard her merely as a social instance;
and viewed in a more personal ways she was not likely to be a
reassuring object of study. Chance encounters, or even the repeated
mention of her name, would send his thoughts back into grooves
from which he had resolutely detached them; whereas, if she could
be entirely excluded from his life, the pressure of new and varied
impressions, with which no thought of her was connected, would soon
complete the work of separation. Mrs. Fisher’s conversation had,
indeed, operated to that end; but the treatment was too painful
to be voluntarily chosen while milder remedies were untried; and
Selden thought he could trust himself to return gradually to a
reasonable view of Miss Bart, if only he did not see her.

Having reached the station early, he had arrived at this point in
his reflections before the increasing throng on the platform warned
him that he could not hope to preserve his privacy; the next moment
there was a hand on the door, and he turned to confront the very
face he was fleeing.

Miss Bart, glowing with the haste of a precipitate descent upon the
train, headed a group composed of the Dorsets, young Silverton and
Lord Hubert Dacey, who had barely time to spring into the carriage,
and envelop Selden in ejaculations of surprise and welcome, before
the whistle of departure sounded. The party, it appeared, were
hastening to Nice in response to a sudden summons to dine with the
Duchess of Beltshire and to see the water-fete in the bay; a plan
evidently improvised—in spite of Lord Hubert’s protesting “Oh, I
say, you know,”—for the express purpose of defeating Mrs. Bry’s
endeavour to capture the Duchess.

During the laughing relation of this manoeuvre, Selden had time for
a rapid impression of Miss Bart, who had seated herself opposite
to him in the golden afternoon light.Scarcely three months had
elapsed since he had parted from her on the threshold of the Brys’
conservatory; but a subtle change had passed over the quality
of her beauty. Then it had had a transparency through which the
fluctuations of the spirit were sometimes tragically visible; now
its impenetrable surface suggested a process of crystallization
which had fused her whole being into one hard brilliant substance.
The change had struck Mrs. Fisher as a rejuvenation: to Selden it
seemed like that moment of pause and arrest when the warm fluidity
of youth is chilled into its final shape.

He felt it in the way she smiled on him, and in the readiness and
competence with which, flung unexpectedly into his presence, she
took up the thread of their intercourse as though that thread had
not been snapped with a violence from which he still reeled. Such
facility sickened him—but he told himself that it was with the
pang which precedes recovery. Now he would really get well—would
eject the last drop of poison from his blood. Already he felt
himself calmer in her presence than he had learned to be in the
thought of her. Her assumptions and elisions, her short-cuts and
long DETOURS, the skill with which she contrived to meet him at a
point from which no inconvenient glimpses of the past were visible,
suggested what opportunities she had had for practising such arts
since their last meeting. He felt that she had at last arrived at
an understanding with herself: had made a pact with her rebellious
impulses, and achieved a uniform system of self-government, under
which all vagrant tendencies were either held captive or forced
into the service of the state.

And he saw other things too in her manner: saw how it had adjusted
itself to the hidden intricacies of a situation in which, even
after Mrs. Fisher’s elucidating flashes, he still felt himself
agrope. Surely Mrs. Fisher could no longer charge Miss Bart with
neglecting her opportunities! To Selden’s exasperated observation
she was only too completely alive to them. She was “perfect”
to every one: subservient to Bertha’s anxious predominance,
good-naturedly watchful of Dorset’s moods, brightly companionable
to Silverton and Dacey, the latter of whom met her on an evident
footing of old admiration, while young Silverton, portentously
self-absorbed, seemed conscious of her only as of something vaguely
obstructive. And suddenly, as Selden noted the fine shades of
manner by which she harmonized herself with her surroundings, it
flashed on him that, to need such adroit handling, the situation
must indeed be desperate. She was on the edge of something—that was
the impression left with him. He seemed to see her poised on the
brink of a chasm, with one graceful foot advanced to assert her
unconsciousness that the ground was failing her.

On the Promenade des Anglais, where Ned Silverton hung on him for
the half hour before dinner, he received a deeper impression of the
general insecurity. Silverton was in a mood of Titanic pessimism.
How any one could come to such a damned hole as the Riviera—any
one with a grain of imagination—with the whole Mediterranean to
choose from: but then, if one’s estimate of a place depended on
the way they broiled a spring chicken! Gad! what a study might be
made of the tyranny of the stomach—the way a sluggish liver or
insufficient gastric juices might affect the whole course of the
universe, overshadow everything in reach—chronic dyspepsia ought
to be among the “statutory causes”; a woman’s life might be ruined
by a man’s inability to digest fresh bread. Grotesque? Yes—and
tragic—like most absurdities. There’s nothing grimmer than the
tragedy that wears a comic mask.... Where was he? Oh—the reason
they chucked Sicily and rushed back? Well—partly, no doubt, Miss
Bart’s desire to get back to bridge and smartness. Dead as a stone
to art and poetry—the light never WAS on sea or land for her! And
of course she persuaded Dorset that the Italian food was bad for
him. Oh, she could make him believe anything—ANYTHING! Mrs. Dorset
was aware of it—oh, perfectly: nothing SHE didn’t see! But she
could hold her tongue—she’d had to, often enough. Miss Bart was an
intimate friend—she wouldn’t hear a word against her. Only it hurts
a woman’s pride—there are some things one doesn’t get used to....
All this in confidence, of course? Ah—and there were the ladies
signalling from the balcony of the hotel.... He plunged across the
Promenade, leaving Selden to a meditative cigar.

The conclusions it led him to were fortified, later in the evening,
by some of those faint corroborative hints that generate a light
of their own in the dusk of a doubting mind. Selden, stumbling on
a chance acquaintance, had dined with him, and adjourned, still
in his company, to the brightly lit Promenade, where a line of
crowded stands commanded the glittering darkness of the waters.
The night was soft and persuasive. Overhead hung a summer sky
furrowed with the rush of rockets; and from the east a late moon,
pushing up beyond the lofty bend of the coast, sent across the bay
a shaft of brightness which paled to ashes in the red glitter of
the illuminated boats. Down the lantern-hung Promenade, snatches
of band-music floated above the hum of the crowd and the soft
tossing of boughs in dusky gardens; and between these gardens and
the backs of the stands there flowed a stream of people in whom the
vociferous carnival mood seemed tempered by the growing languor of
the season.

Selden and his companion, unable to get seats on one of the stands
facing the bay, had wandered for a while with the throng, and
then found a point of vantage on a high garden-parapet above the
Promenade. Thence they caught but a triangular glimpse of the
water, and of the flashing play of boats across its surface; but
the crowd in the street was under their immediate view, and seemed
to Selden, on the whole, of more interest than the show itself.
After a while, however, he wearied of his perch and, dropping
alone to the pavement, pushed his way to the first corner and
turned into the moonlit silence of a side street. Long garden-walls
overhung by trees made a dark boundary to the pavement; an empty
cab trailed along the deserted thoroughfare, and presently Selden
saw two persons emerge from the opposite shadows, signal to the
cab, and drive off in it toward the centre of the town. The moon-
light touched them as they paused to enter the carriage, and he
recognized Mrs. Dorset and young Silverton.

Beneath the nearest lamp-post he glanced at his watch and saw
that the time was close on eleven. He took another cross street,
and without breasting the throng on the Promenade, made his way
to the fashionable club which overlooks that thoroughfare. Here,
amid the blaze of crowded baccarat tables, he caught sight of Lord
Hubert Dacey, seated with his habitual worn smile behind a rapidly
dwindling heap of gold. The heap being in due course wiped out,
Lord Hubert rose with a shrug, and joining Selden, adjourned with
him to the deserted terrace of the club. It was now past midnight,
and the throng on the stands was dispersing, while the long trails
of red-lit boats scattered and faded beneath a sky repossessed by
the tranquil splendour of the moon.

Lord Hubert looked at his watch. “By Jove, I promised to join the
Duchess for supper at the LONDON HOUSE; but it’s past twelve,
and I suppose they’ve all scattered. The fact is, I lost them in the
crowd soon after dinner, and took refuge here, for my sins. They
had seats on one of the stands, but of course they couldn’t stop
quiet: the Duchess never can. She and Miss Bart went off in quest
of what they call adventures—gad, it ain’t their fault if they
don’t have some queer ones!” He added tentatively, after pausing
to grope for a cigarette: “Miss Bart’s an old friend of yours,
I believe? So she told me.—Ah, thanks—I don’t seem to have one
left.” He lit Selden’s proffered cigarette, and continued, in his
high-pitched drawling tone: “None of my business, of course, but I
didn’t introduce her to the Duchess. Charming woman, the Duchess,
you understand; and a very good friend of mine; but RATHER a
liberal education.”

Selden received this in silence, and after a few puffs Lord Hubert
broke out again: “Sort of thing one can’t communicate to the young
lady—though young ladies nowadays are so competent to judge for
themselves; but in this case—I’m an old friend too, you know . . .
and there seemed no one else to speak to. The whole situation’s a
little mixed, as I see it—but there used to be an aunt somewhere, a
diffuse and innocent person, who was great at bridging over chasms
she didn’t see.... Ah, in New York, is she? Pity New York’s such a
long way off!”



Chapter 2



Miss Bart, emerging late the next morning from her cabin, found
herself alone on the deck of the Sabrina.

The cushioned chairs, disposed expectantly under the wide awning,
showed no signs of recent occupancy, and she presently learned
from a steward that Mrs. Dorset had not yet appeared, and that
the gentlemen—separately—had gone ashore as soon as they had
breakfasted. Supplied with these facts, Lily leaned awhile over the
side, giving herself up to a leisurely enjoyment of the spectacle
before her. Unclouded sunlight enveloped sea and shore in a bath
of purest radiancy. The purpling waters drew a sharp white line of
foam at the base of the shore; against its irregular eminences,
hotels and villas flashed from the greyish verdure of olive and
eucalyptus; and the background of bare and finely-pencilled
mountains quivered in a pale intensity of light.

How beautiful it was—and how she loved beauty! She had always
felt that her sensibility in this direction made up for certain
obtusenesses of feeling of which she was less proud; and during the
last three months she had indulged it passionately. The Dorsets’
invitation to go abroad with them had come as an almost miraculous
release from crushing difficulties; and her faculty for renewing
herself in new scenes, and casting off problems of conduct as
easily as the surroundings in which they had arisen, made the mere
change from one place to another seem, not merely a postponement,
but a solution of her troubles. Moral complications existed for her
only in the environment that had produced them; she did not mean
to slight or ignore them, but they lost their reality when they
changed their background. She could not have remained in New York
without repaying the money she owed to Trenor; to acquit herself
of that odious debt she might even have faced a marriage with
Rosedale; but the accident of placing the Atlantic between herself
and her obligations made them dwindle out of sight as if they had
been milestones and she had travelled past them.

Her two months on the Sabrina had been especially calculated to
aid this illusion of distance. She had been plunged into new
scenes, and had found in them a renewal of old hopes and ambitions.
The cruise itself charmed her as a romantic adventure. She was
vaguely touched by the names and scenes amid which she moved,
and had listened to Ned Silverton reading Theocritus by moonlight,
as the yacht rounded the Sicilian promontories, with a thrill
of the nerves that confirmed her belief in her intellectual
superiority. But the weeks at Cannes and Nice had really given
her more pleasure. The gratification of being welcomed in high
company, and of making her own ascendency felt there, so that she
found herself figuring once more as the “beautiful Miss Bart” in
the interesting journal devoted to recording the least movements
of her cosmopolitan companions—all these experiences tended to
throw into the extreme background of memory the prosaic and sordid
difficulties from which she had escaped.

If she was faintly aware of fresh difficulties ahead, she was
sure of her ability to meet them: it was characteristic of her to
feel that the only problems she could not solve were those with
which she was familiar. Meanwhile she could honestly be proud of
the skill with which she had adapted herself to somewhat delicate
conditions. She had reason to think that she had made herself
equally necessary to her host and hostess; and if only she had seen
any perfectly irreproachable means of drawing a financial profit
from the situation, there would have been no cloud on her horizon.
The truth was that her funds, as usual, were inconveniently low;
and to neither Dorset nor his wife could this vulgar embarrassment
be safely hinted. Still, the need was not a pressing one; she could
worry along, as she had so often done before, with the hope of some
happy change of fortune to sustain her; and meanwhile life was
gay and beautiful and easy, and she was conscious of figuring not
unworthily in such a setting.

She was engaged to breakfast that morning with the Duchess of
Beltshire, and at twelve o’clock she asked to be set ashore in the
gig. Before this she had sent her maid to enquire if she might see
Mrs. Dorset; but the reply came back that the latter was tired,
and trying to sleep. Lily thought she understood the reason of
the rebuff. Her hostess had not been included in the Duchess’s
invitation, though she herself had made the most loyal efforts in
that direction. But her grace was impervious to hints, and invited
or omitted as she chose. It was not Lily’s fault if Mrs. Dorset’s
complicated attitudes did not fall in with the Duchess’s easy gait.
The Duchess, who seldom explained herself, had not formulated her
objection beyond saying: “She’s rather a bore, you know. The only
one of your friends I like is that little Mr. Bry—HE’S funny—” but
Lily knew enough not to press the point, and was not altogether
sorry to be thus distinguished at her friend’s expense. Bertha
certainly HAD grown tiresome since she had taken to poetry and
Ned Silverton.

On the whole, it was a relief to break away now and then from
the Sabrina; and the Duchess’s little breakfast, organized by
Lord Hubert with all his usual virtuosity, was the pleasanter
to Lily for not including her travelling-companions. Dorset, of
late, had grown more than usually morose and incalculable, and
Ned Silverton went about with an air that seemed to challenge the
universe. The freedom and lightness of the ducal intercourse made
an agreeable change from these complications, and Lily was tempted,
after luncheon, to adjourn in the wake of her companions to the
hectic atmosphere of the Casino. She did not mean to play; her
diminished pocket-money offered small scope for the adventure; but
it amused her to sit on a divan, under the doubtful protection of
the Duchess’s back, while the latter hung above her stakes at a
neighbouring table.

The rooms were packed with the gazing throng which, in the
afternoon hours, trickles heavily between the tables, like the
Sunday crowd in a lion-house. In the stagnant flow of the mass,
identities were hardly distinguishable; but Lily presently saw
Mrs. Bry cleaving her determined way through the doors, and, in
the broad wake she left, the light figure of Mrs. Fisher bobbing
after her like a row-boat at the stern of a tug. Mrs. Bry pressed
on, evidently animated by the resolve to reach a certain point in
the rooms; but Mrs. Fisher, as she passed Lily, broke from her
towing-line, and let herself float to the girl’s side.

“Lose her?” she echoed the latter’s query, with an indifferent
glance at Mrs. Bry’s retreating back. “I daresay—it doesn’t matter:
I HAVE lost her already.” And, as Lily exclaimed, she added: “We
had an awful row this morning. You know, of course, that the
Duchess chucked her at dinner last night, and she thinks it was my
fault—my want of management. The worst of it is, the message—just a
mere word by telephone—came so late that the dinner HAD to be paid
for; and Becassin HAD run it up—it had been so drummed into him
that the Duchess was coming!” Mrs. Fisher indulged in a faint laugh
at the remembrance. “Paying for what she doesn’t get rankles so
dreadfully with Louisa: I can’t make her see that it’s one of the
preliminary steps to getting what you haven’t paid for—and as I was
the nearest thing to smash, she smashed me to atoms, poor dear!”

Lily murmured her commiseration. Impulses of sympathy came
naturally to her, and it was instinctive to proffer her help to
Mrs. Fisher.

“If there’s anything I can do—if it’s only a question of meeting
the Duchess! I heard her say she thought Mr. Bry amusing——”

But Mrs. Fisher interposed with a decisive gesture. “My dear,
I have my pride: the pride of my trade. I couldn’t manage the
Duchess, and I can’t palm off your arts on Louisa Bry as mine. I’ve
taken the final step: I go to Paris tonight with the Sam Gormers.
THEY’RE still in the elementary stage; an Italian Prince is a great
deal more than a Prince to them, and they’re always on the brink
of taking a courier for one. To save them from that is my present
mission.” She laughed again at the picture. “But before I go I want
to make my last will and testament—I want to leave you the Brys.”

“Me?” Miss Bart joined in her amusement. “It’s charming of you to
remember me, dear; but really——”

“You’re already so well provided for?” Mrs. Fisher flashed a sharp
glance at her. “ARE you, though, Lily—to the point of rejecting my
offer?”

Miss Bart coloured slowly. “What I really meant was, that the Brys
wouldn’t in the least care to be so disposed of.”

Mrs. Fisher continued to probe her embarrassment with an unflinch-
ing eye. “What you really meant was that you’ve snubbed the Brys
horribly; and you know that they know——”

“Carry!”

“Oh, on certain sides Louisa bristles with perceptions. If you’d
even managed to have them asked once on the Sabrina—especially when
royalties were coming! But it’s not too late,” she ended earnestly,
“it’s not too late for either of you.”

Lily smiled. “Stay over, and I’ll get the Duchess to dine with
them.”

“I shan’t stay over—the Gormers have paid for my SALON-LIT,” said
Mrs. Fisher with simplicity. “But get the Duchess to dine with them
all the same.”

Lily’s smile again flowed into a slight laugh: her friend’s importun-
ity was beginning to strike her as irrelevant. “I’m sorry I have
been negligent about the Brys——” she began.

“Oh, as to the Brys—it’s you I’m thinking of,” said Mrs. Fisher
abruptly. She paused, and then, bending forward, with a lowered
voice: “You know we all went on to Nice last night when the Duchess
chucked us. It was Louisa’s idea—I told her what I thought of it.”

Miss Bart assented. “Yes—I caught sight of you on the way back, at
the station.”

“Well, the man who was in the carriage with you and George
Dorset—that horrid little Dabham who does ‘Society Notes from
the Riviera’—had been dining with us at Nice. And he’s telling
everybody that you and Dorset came back alone after midnight.”

“Alone—? When he was with us?” Lily laughed, but her laugh faded
into gravity under the prolonged implication of Mrs. Fisher’s look.
“We DID come back alone—if that’s so very dreadful! But whose fault
was it? The Duchess was spending the night at Cimiez with the Crown
Princess; Bertha got bored with the show, and went off early,
promising to meet us at the station. We turned up on time, but she
didn’t—she didn’t turn up at all!”

Miss Bart made this announcement in the tone of one who presents,
with careless assurance, a complete vindication; but Mrs. Fisher
received it in a manner almost inconsequent. She seemed to have
lost sight of her friend’s part in the incident: her inward vision
had taken another slant.

“Bertha never turned up at all? Then how on earth did she get back?”

“Oh, by the next train, I suppose; there were two extra ones for
the FETE. At any rate, I know she’s safe on the yacht, though I
haven’t yet seen her; but you see it was not my fault,” Lily summed
up.

“Not your fault that Bertha didn’t turn up? My poor child, if only
you don’t have to pay for it!” Mrs. Fisher rose—she had seen Mrs.
Bry surging back in her direction. “There’s Louisa, and I must
be off—oh, we’re on the best of terms externally; we’re lunching
together; but at heart it’s ME she’s lunching on,” she explained;
and with a last hand-clasp and a last look, she added: “Remember, I
leave her to you; she’s hovering now, ready to take you in.”

* * * * *

Lily carried the impression of Mrs. Fisher’s leave-taking away with
her from the Casino doors. She had accomplished, before leaving,
the first step toward her reinstatement in Mrs. Bry’s good graces.
An affable advance—a vague murmur that they must see more of each
other—an allusive glance to a near future that was felt to include
the Duchess as well as the Sabrina—how easily it was all done, if
one possessed the knack of doing it! She wondered at herself, as
she had so often wondered, that, possessing the knack, she did not
more consistently exercise it. But sometimes she was forgetful—and
sometimes, could it be that she was proud? Today, at any rate, she
had been vaguely conscious of a reason for sinking her pride, had
in fact even sunk it to the point of suggesting to Lord Hubert
Dacey, whom she ran across on the Casino steps, that he might
really get the Duchess to dine with the Brys, if SHE undertook to
have them asked on the Sabrina. Lord Hubert had promised his help,
with the readiness on which she could always count: it was his only
way of ever reminding her that he had once been ready to do so much
more for her. Her path, in short, seemed to smooth itself before
her as she advanced; yet the faint stir of uneasiness persisted.
Had it been produced, she wondered, by her chance meeting with
Selden? She thought not—time and change seemed so completely to
have relegated him to his proper distance. The sudden and exquisite
reaction from her anxieties had had the effect of throwing the
recent past so far back that even Selden, as part of it, retained
a certain air of unreality. And he had made it so clear that they
were not to meet again; that he had merely dropped down to Nice
for a day or two, and had almost his foot on the next steamer.
No—that part of the past had merely surged up for a moment on the
fleeing surface of events; and now that it was submerged again, the
uncertainty, the apprehension persisted.

They grew to sudden acuteness as she caught sight of George Dor-
set descending the steps of the Hotel de Paris and making for her
across the square. She had meant to drive down to the quay and
regain the yacht; but she now had the immediate impression that
something more was to happen first.

“Which way are you going? Shall we walk a bit?” he began, putting
the second question before the first was answered, and not waiting
for a reply to either before he directed her silently toward the
comparative seclusion of the lower gardens.

She detected in him at once all the signs of extreme nervous
tension. The skin was puffed out under his sunken eyes, and its
sallowness had paled to a leaden white against which his irregular
eyebrows and long reddish moustache were relieved with a saturnine
effect. His appearance, in short, presented an odd mixture of the
bedraggled and the ferocious.

He walked beside her in silence, with quick precipitate steps, till
they reached the embowered slopes to the east of the Casino; then,
pulling up abruptly, he said: “Have you seen Bertha?”

“No—when I left the yacht she was not yet up.”

He received this with a laugh like the whirring sound in a disabled
clock. “Not yet up? Had she gone to bed? Do you know at what time
she came on board? This morning at seven!” he exclaimed.

“At seven?” Lily started. “What happened—an accident to the train?”

He laughed again. “They missed the train—all the trains—they had to
drive back.”

“Well——?” She hesitated, feeling at once how little even this
necessity accounted for the fatal lapse of hours.

“Well, they couldn’t get a carriage at once—at that time of night,
you know—” the explanatory note made it almost seem as though he
were putting the case for his wife—“and when they finally did, it
was only a one-horse cab, and the horse was lame!”

“How tiresome! I see,” she affirmed, with the more earnestness
because she was so nervously conscious that she did not; and after
a pause she added: “I’m so sorry—but ought we to have waited?”

“Waited for the one-horse cab? It would scarcely have carried the
four of us, do you think?”

She took this in what seemed the only possible way, with a laugh
intended to sink the question itself in his humorous treatment of
it. “Well, it would have been difficult; we should have had to walk
by turns. But it would have been jolly to see the sunrise.”

“Yes: the sunrise WAS jolly,” he agreed.

“Was it? You saw it, then?”

“I saw it, yes; from the deck. I waited up for them.”

“Naturally—I suppose you were worried. Why didn’t you call on me to
share your vigil?”

He stood still, dragging at his moustache with a lean weak hand. “I
don’t think you would have cared for its DENOUEMENT,” he said with
sudden grimness.

Again she was disconcerted by the abrupt change in his tone, and
as in one flash she saw the peril of the moment, and the need of
keeping her sense of it out of her eyes.

“DENOUEMENT—isn’t that too big a word for such a small incident?
The worst of it, after all, is the fatigue which Bertha has
probably slept off by this time.”

She clung to the note bravely, though its futility was now plain to
her in the glare of his miserable eyes.

“Don’t—don’t——!” he broke out, with the hurt cry of a child; and
while she tried to merge her sympathy, and her resolve to ignore
any cause for it, in one ambiguous murmur of deprecation, he
dropped down on the bench near which they had paused, and poured
out the wretchedness of his soul.

It was a dreadful hour—an hour from which she emerged shrinking
and seared, as though her lids had been scorched by its actual
glare. It was not that she had never had premonitory glimpses of
such an outbreak; but rather because, here and there throughout
the three months, the surface of life had shown such ominous
cracks and vapours that her fears had always been on the alert
for an upheaval. There had been moments when the situation had
presented itself under a homelier yet more vivid image—that of a
shaky vehicle, dashed by unbroken steeds over a bumping road, while
she cowered within, aware that the harness wanted mending, and
wondering what would give way first. Well—everything had given way
now; and the wonder was that the crazy outfit had held together so
long. Her sense of being involved in the crash, instead of merely
witnessing it from the road, was intensified by the way in which
Dorset, through his furies of denunciation and wild reactions of
self-contempt, made her feel the need he had of her, the place she
had taken in his life. But for her, what ear would have been open
to his cries? And what hand but hers could drag him up again to a
footing of sanity and self-respect? All through the stress of the
struggle with him, she had been conscious of something faintly
maternal in her efforts to guide and uplift him. But for the
present, if he clung to her, it was not in order to be dragged up,
but to feel some one floundering in the depths with him: he wanted
her to suffer with him, not to help him to suffer less.

Happily for both, there was little physical strength to sustain his
frenzy. It left him, collapsed and breathing heavily, to an apathy
so deep and prolonged that Lily almost feared the passers-by would
think it the result of a seizure, and stop to offer their aid. But
Monte Carlo is, of all places, the one where the human bond is
least close, and odd sights are the least arresting. If a glance
or two lingered on the couple, no intrusive sympathy disturbed
them; and it was Lily herself who broke the silence by rising from
her seat. With the clearing of her vision the sweep of peril had
extended, and she saw that the post of danger was no longer at
Dorset’s side.

“If you won’t go back, I must—don’t make me leave you!” she urged.

But he remained mutely resistant, and she added: “What are you
going to do? You really can’t sit here all night.”

“I can go to an hotel. I can telegraph my lawyers.” He sat up,
roused by a new thought. “By Jove, Selden’s at Nice—I’ll send for
Selden!”

Lily, at this, reseated herself with a cry of alarm. “No, no, NO!”
she protested.

He swung round on her distrustfully. “Why not Selden? He’s a lawyer
isn’t he? One will do as well as another in a case like this.”

“As badly as another, you mean. I thought you relied on ME to help
you.”

“You do—by being so sweet and patient with me. If it hadn’t been
for you I’d have ended the thing long ago. But now it’s got to
end.” He rose suddenly, straightening himself with an effort. “You
can’t want to see me ridiculous.”

She looked at him kindly. “That’s just it.” Then, after a moment’s
pondering, almost to her own surprise she broke out with a flash of
inspiration: “Well, go over and see Mr. Selden. You’ll have time to
do it before dinner.”

“Oh, DINNER——” he mocked her; but she left him with the smiling
rejoinder: “Dinner on board, remember; we’ll put it off till nine
if you like.”

It was past four already; and when a cab had dropped her at the
quay, and she stood waiting for the gig to put off for her, she
began to wonder what had been happening on the yacht. Of Sil-
verton’s whereabouts there had been no mention. Had he returned
to the Sabrina? Or could Bertha—the dread alternative sprang on
her suddenly—could Bertha, left to herself, have gone ashore to
rejoin him? Lily’s heart stood still at the thought. All her
concern had hitherto been for young Silverton, not only because,
in such affairs, the woman’s instinct is to side with the man, but
because his case made a peculiar appeal to her sympathies. He was
so desperately in earnest, poor youth, and his earnestness was of
so different a quality from Bertha’s, though hers too was desperate
enough. The difference was that Bertha was in earnest only about
herself, while he was in earnest about her. But now, at the actual
crisis, this difference seemed to throw the weight of destitution
on Bertha’s side, since at least he had her to suffer for, and
she had only herself. At any rate, viewed less ideally, all the
disadvantages of such a situation were for the woman; and it was
to Bertha that Lily’s sympathies now went out. She was not fond of
Bertha Dorset, but neither was she without a sense of obligation,
the heavier for having so little personal liking to sustain it.
Bertha had been kind to her, they had lived together, during the
last months, on terms of easy friendship, and the sense of friction
of which Lily had recently become aware seemed to make it the more
urgent that she should work undividedly in her friend’s interest.

It was in Bertha’s interest, certainly, that she had despatched
Dorset to consult with Lawrence Selden. Once the grotesqueness
of the situation accepted, she had seen at a glance that it was
the safest in which Dorset could find himself. Who but Selden
could thus miraculously combine the skill to save Bertha with the
obligation of doing so? The consciousness that much skill would
be required made Lily rest thankfully in the greatness of the
obligation. Since he would HAVE to pull Bertha through she could
trust him to find a way; and she put the fulness of her trust in
the telegram she managed to send him on her way to the quay.

Thus far, then, Lily felt that she had done well; and the
conviction strengthened her for the task that remained. She and
Bertha had never been on confidential terms, but at such a crisis
the barriers of reserve must surely fall: Dorset’s wild allusions
to the scene of the morning made Lily feel that they were down
already, and that any attempt to rebuild them would be beyond
Bertha’s strength. She pictured the poor creature shivering behind
her fallen defences and awaiting with suspense the moment when
she could take refuge in the first shelter that offered. If only
that shelter had not already offered itself elsewhere! As the gig
traversed the short distance between the quay and the yacht, Lily
grew more than ever alarmed at the possible consequences of her
long absence. What if the wretched Bertha, finding in all the long
hours no soul to turn to—but by this time Lily’s eager foot was on
the side-ladder, and her first step on the Sabrina showed the worst
of her apprehensions to be unfounded; for there, in the luxurious
shade of the after-deck, the wretched Bertha, in full command of
her usual attenuated elegance, sat dispensing tea to the Duchess of
Beltshire and Lord Hubert.

The sight filled Lily with such surprise that she felt that
Bertha, at least, must read its meaning in her look, and she was
proportionately disconcerted by the blankness of the look returned.
But in an instant she saw that Mrs. Dorset had, of necessity, to
look blank before the others, and that, to mitigate the effect
of her own surprise, she must at once produce some simple reason
for it. The long habit of rapid transitions made it easy for her
to exclaim to the Duchess: “Why, I thought you’d gone back to the
Princess!” and this sufficed for the lady she addressed, if it was
hardly enough for Lord Hubert.

At least it opened the way to a lively explanation of how the
Duchess was, in fact, going back the next moment, but had first
rushed out to the yacht for a word with Mrs. Dorset on the subject
of tomorrow’s dinner—the dinner with the Brys, to which Lord Hubert
had finally insisted on dragging them.

“To save my neck, you know!” he explained, with a glance that
appealed to Lily for some recognition of his promptness; and the
Duchess added, with her noble candour: “Mr. Bry has promised him
a tip, and he says if we go he’ll pass it onto us.”

This led to some final pleasantries, in which, as it seemed to
Lily, Mrs. Dorset bore her part with astounding bravery, and at the
close of which Lord Hubert, from half way down the side-ladder,
called back, with an air of numbering heads: “And of course we may
count on Dorset too?”

“Oh, count on him,” his wife assented gaily. She was keeping up
well to the last—but as she turned back from waving her adieux over
the side, Lily said to herself that the mask must drop and the soul
of fear look out.

Mrs. Dorset turned back slowly; perhaps she wanted time to steady
her muscles; at any rate, they were still under perfect control
when, dropping once more into her seat behind the tea-table, she
remarked to Miss Bart with a faint touch of irony: “I suppose I
ought to say good morning.”

If it was a cue, Lily was ready to take it, though with only
the vaguest sense of what was expected of her in return. There
was something unnerving in the contemplation of Mrs. Dorset’s
composure, and she had to force the light tone in which she
answered: “I tried to see you this morning, but you were not yet
up.”

“No—I got to bed late. After we missed you at the station I thought
we ought to wait for you till the last train.” She spoke very
gently, but with just the least tinge of reproach.

“You missed us? You waited for us at the station?” Now indeed Lily
was too far adrift in bewilderment to measure the other’s words or
keep watch on her own. “But I thought you didn’t get to the station
till after the last train had left!”

Mrs. Dorset, examining her between lowered lids, met this with the
immediate query: “Who told you that?”

“George—I saw him just now in the gardens.”

“Ah, is that George’s version? Poor George—he was in no state to
remember what I told him. He had one of his worst attacks this
morning, and I packed him off to see the doctor. Do you know if he
found him?”

Lily, still lost in conjecture, made no reply, and Mrs. Dorset
settled herself indolently in her seat. “He’ll wait to see him; he
was horribly frightened about himself. It’s very bad for him to be
worried, and whenever anything upsetting happens, it always brings
on an attack.”

This time Lily felt sure that a cue was being pressed on her;
but it was put forth with such startling suddenness, and with so
incredible an air of ignoring what it led up to, that she could
only falter out doubtfully: “Anything upsetting?”

“Yes—such as having you so conspicuously on his hands in the small
hours. You know, my dear, you’re rather a big responsibility in
such a scandalous place after midnight.”

At that—at the complete unexpectedness and the inconceivable
audacity of it—Lily could not restrain the tribute of an astonished
laugh.

“Well, really—considering it was you who burdened him with the
responsibility!”

Mrs. Dorset took this with an exquisite mildness. “By not having
the superhuman cleverness to discover you in that frightful rush
for the train? Or the imagination to believe that you’d take it
without us—you and he all alone—instead of waiting quietly in the
station till we DID manage to meet you?”

Lily’s colour rose: it was growing clear to her that Bertha was
pursuing an object, following a line she had marked out for
herself. Only, with such a doom impending, why waste time in these
childish efforts to avert it? The puerility of the attempt disarmed
Lily’s indignation: did it not prove how horribly the poor creature
was frightened?

“No; by our simply all keeping together at Nice,” she returned.

“Keeping together? When it was you who seized the first opportunity
to rush off with the Duchess and her friends? My dear Lily, you are
not a child to be led by the hand!”

“No—nor to be lectured, Bertha, really; if that’s what you are
doing to me now.”

Mrs. Dorset smiled on her reproachfully. “Lecture you—I? Heaven
forbid! I was merely trying to give you a friendly hint. But it’s
usually the other way round, isn’t it? I’m expected to take hints,
not to give them: I’ve positively lived on them all these last
months.”

“Hints—from me to you?” Lily repeated.

“Oh, negative ones merely—what not to be and to do and to see. And
I think I’ve taken them to admiration. Only, my dear, if you’ll let
me say so, I didn’t understand that one of my negative duties was
NOT to warn you when you carried your imprudence too far.”

A chill of fear passed over Miss Bart: a sense of remembered
treachery that was like the gleam of a knife in the dusk. But
compassion, in a moment, got the better of her instinctive
recoil. What was this outpouring of senseless bitterness but the
tracked creature’s attempt to cloud the medium through which it
was fleeing? It was on Lily’s lips to exclaim: “You poor soul,
don’t double and turn—come straight back to me, and we’ll find a
way out!” But the words died under the impenetrable insolence of
Bertha’s smile. Lily sat silent, taking the brunt of it quietly,
letting it spend itself on her to the last drop of its accumulated
falseness; then, without a word, she rose and went down to her
cabin.



Chapter 3



Miss Bart’s telegram caught Lawrence Selden at the door of his
hotel; and having read it, he turned back to wait for Dorset. The
message necessarily left large gaps for conjecture; but all that he
had recently heard and seen made these but too easy to fill in. On
the whole he was surprised; for though he had perceived that the
situation contained all the elements of an explosion, he had often
enough, in the range of his personal experience, seen just such
combinations subside into harmlessness. Still, Dorset’s spasmodic
temper, and his wife’s reckless disregard of appearances, gave the
situation a peculiar insecurity; and it was less from the sense of
any special relation to the case than from a purely professional
zeal, that Selden resolved to guide the pair to safety. Whether, in
the present instance, safety for either lay in repairing so damaged
a tie, it was no business of his to consider: he had only, on
general principles, to think of averting a scandal, and his desire
to avert it was increased by his fear of its involving Miss Bart.
There was nothing specific in this apprehension; he merely wished
to spare her the embarrassment of being ever so remotely connected
with the public washing of the Dorset linen.

How exhaustive and unpleasant such a process would be, he saw
even more vividly after his two hours’ talk with poor Dorset. If
anything came out at all, it would be such a vast unpacking of
accumulated moral rags as left him, after his visitor had gone,
with the feeling that he must fling open the windows and have his
room swept out. But nothing should come out; and happily for his
side of the case, the dirty rags, however pieced together, could
not, without considerable difficulty, be turned into a homogeneous
grievance. The torn edges did not always fit—there were missing
bits, there were disparities of size and colour, all of which it
was naturally Selden’s business to make the most of in putting
them under his client’s eye. But to a man in Dorset’s mood the
completest demonstration could not carry conviction, and Selden saw
that for the moment all he could do was to soothe and temporize,
to offer sympathy and to counsel prudence. He let Dorset depart
charged to the brim with the sense that, till their next meeting,
he must maintain a strictly noncommittal attitude; that, in short,
his share in the game consisted for the present in looking on.
Selden knew, however, that he could not long keep such violences
in equilibrium; and he promised to meet Dorset, the next morning,
at an hotel in Monte Carlo. Meanwhile he counted not a little on
the reaction of weakness and self-distrust that, in such natures,
follows on every unwonted expenditure of moral force; and his
telegraphic reply to Miss Bart consisted simply in the injunction:
“Assume that everything is as usual.”

On this assumption, in fact, the early part of the following day
was lived through. Dorset, as if in obedience to Lily’s imperative
bidding, had actually returned in time for a late dinner on the
yacht. The repast had been the most difficult moment of the day.
Dorset was sunk in one of the abysmal silences which so commonly
followed on what his wife called his “attacks” that it was easy,
before the servants, to refer it to this cause; but Bertha herself
seemed, perversely enough, little disposed to make use of this
obvious means of protection. She simply left the brunt of the
situation on her husband’s hands, as if too absorbed in a grievance
of her own to suspect that she might be the object of one herself.
To Lily this attitude was the most ominous, because the most
perplexing, element in the situation. As she tried to fan the
weak flicker of talk, to build up, again and again, the crumbling
structure of “appearances,” her own attention was perpetually
distracted by the question: “What on earth can she be driving at?”
There was something positively exasperating in Bertha’s attitude
of isolated defiance. If only she would have given her friend a
hint they might still have worked together successfully; but how
could Lily be of use, while she was thus obstinately shut out from
participation? To be of use was what she honestly wanted; and not
for her own sake but for the Dorsets’. She had not thought of her
own situation at all: she was simply engrossed in trying to put a
little order in theirs. But the close of the short dreary evening
left her with a sense of effort hopelessly wasted. She had not
tried to see Dorset alone: she had positively shrunk from a renewal
of his confidences. It was Bertha whose confidence she sought, and
who should as eagerly have invited her own; and Bertha, as if in
the infatuation of self-destruction, was actually pushing away her
rescuing hand.

Lily, going to bed early, had left the couple to themselves; and
it seemed part of the general mystery in which she moved that
more than an hour should elapse before she heard Bertha walk down
the silent passage and regain her room. The morrow, rising on an
apparent continuance of the same conditions, revealed nothing of
what had occurred between the confronted pair. One fact alone
outwardly proclaimed the change they were all conspiring to
ignore; and that was the non-appearance of Ned Silverton. No one
referred to it, and this tacit avoidance of the subject kept
it in the immediate foreground of consciousness. But there was
another change, perceptible only to Lily; and that was that Dorset
now avoided her almost as pointedly as his wife. Perhaps he was
repenting his rash outpourings of the previous day; perhaps only
trying, in his clumsy way, to conform to Selden’s counsel to behave
“as usual.” Such instructions no more make for easiness of attitude
than the photographer’s behest to “look natural”; and in a creature
as unconscious as poor Dorset of the appearance he habitually
presented, the struggle to maintain a pose was sure to result in
queer contortions.

It resulted, at any rate, in throwing Lily strangely on her own
resources. She had learned, on leaving her room, that Mrs. Dorset
was still invisible, and that Dorset had left the yacht early; and
feeling too restless to remain alone, she too had herself ferried
ashore. Straying toward the Casino, she attached herself to a
group of acquaintances from Nice, with whom she lunched, and in
whose company she was returning to the rooms when she encountered
Selden crossing the square. She could not, at the moment, separate
herself definitely from her party, who had hospitably assumed that
she would remain with them till they took their departure; but she
found time for a momentary pause of enquiry, to which he promptly
returned: “I’ve seen him again—he’s just left me.”

She waited before him anxiously. “Well? what has happened? What
WILL happen?”

“Nothing as yet—and nothing in the future, I think.”

“It’s over, then? It’s settled? You’re sure?”

He smiled. “Give me time. I’m not sure—but I’m a good deal surer.”
And with that she had to content herself, and hasten on to the
expectant group on the steps.

Selden had in fact given her the utmost measure of his sureness,
had even stretched it a shade to meet the anxiety in her eyes. And
now, as he turned away, strolling down the hill toward the station,
that anxiety remained with him as the visible justification of
his own. It was not, indeed, anything specific that he feared:
there had been a literal truth in his declaration that he did not
think anything would happen. What troubled him was that, though
Dorset’s attitude had perceptibly changed, the change was not
clearly to be accounted for. It had certainly not been produced by
Selden’s arguments, or by the action of his own soberer reason.
Five minutes’ talk sufficed to show that some alien influence had
been at work, and that it had not so much subdued his resentment
as weakened his will, so that he moved under it in a state of
apathy, like a dangerous lunatic who has been drugged. Temporarily,
no doubt, however exerted, it worked for the general safety: the
question was how long it would last, and by what kind of reaction
it was likely to be followed. On these points Selden could gain no
light; for he saw that one effect of the transformation had been to
shut him off from free communion with Dorset. The latter, indeed,
was still moved by the irresistible desire to discuss his wrong;
but, though he revolved about it with the same forlorn tenacity,
Selden was aware that something always restrained him from full
expression. His state was one to produce first weariness and then
impatience in his hearer; and when their talk was over, Selden
began to feel that he had done his utmost, and might justifiably
wash his hands of the sequel.

It was in this mind that he had been making his way back to the
station when Miss Bart crossed his path; but though, after his
brief word with her, he kept mechanically on his course, he was
conscious of a gradual change in his purpose. The change had been
produced by the look in her eyes; and in his eagerness to define
the nature of that look, he dropped into a seat in the gardens,
and sat brooding upon the question. It was natural enough, in
all conscience, that she should appear anxious: a young woman
placed, in the close intimacy of a yachting-cruise, between a
couple on the verge of disaster, could hardly, aside from her
concern for her friends, be insensible to the awkwardness of her
own position. The worst of it was that, in interpreting Miss
Bart’s state of mind, so many alternative readings were possible;
and one of these, in Selden’s troubled mind, took the ugly form
suggested by Mrs. Fisher. If the girl was afraid, was she afraid
for herself or for her friends? And to what degree was her dread of
a catastrophe intensified by the sense of being fatally involved
in it? The burden of offence lying manifestly with Mrs. Dorset,
this conjecture seemed on the face of it gratuitously unkind; but
Selden knew that in the most one-sided matrimonial quarrel there
are generally counter-charges to be brought, and that they are
brought with the greater audacity where the original grievance
is so emphatic. Mrs. Fisher had not hesitated to suggest the
likelihood of Dorset’s marrying Miss Bart if “anything happened”;
and though Mrs. Fisher’s conclusions were notoriously rash, she
was shrewd enough in reading the signs from which they were drawn.
Dorset had apparently shown marked interest in the girl, and this
interest might be used to cruel advantage in his wife’s struggle
for rehabilitation. Selden knew that Bertha would fight to the
last round of powder: the rashness of her conduct was illogically
combined with a cold determination to escape its consequences.
She could be as unscrupulous in fighting for herself as she was
reckless in courting danger, and whatever came to her hand at such
moments was likely to be used as a defensive missile. He did not,
as yet, see clearly just what course she was likely to take, but
his perplexity increased his apprehension, and with it the sense
that, before leaving, he must speak again with Miss Bart. Whatever
her share in the situation—and he had always honestly tried to
resist judging her by her surroundings—however free she might be
from any personal connection with it, she would be better out of
the way of a possible crash; and since she had appealed to him for
help, it was clearly his business to tell her so.

This decision at last brought him to his feet, and carried him
back to the gambling rooms, within whose doors he had seen her
disappearing; but a prolonged exploration of the crowd failed
to put him on her traces. He saw instead, to his surprise, Ned
Silverton loitering somewhat ostentatiously about the tables; and
the discovery that this actor in the drama was not only hovering in
the wings, but actually inviting the exposure of the footlights,
though it might have seemed to imply that all peril was over,
served rather to deepen Selden’s sense of foreboding. Charged with
this impression he returned to the square, hoping to see Miss Bart
move across it, as every one in Monte Carlo seemed inevitably to do
at least a dozen times a day; but here again he waited vainly for
a glimpse of her, and the conclusion was slowly forced on him that
she had gone back to the Sabrina. It would be difficult to follow
her there, and still more difficult, should he do so, to contrive
the opportunity for a private word; and he had almost decided on
the unsatisfactory alternative of writing, when the ceaseless
diorama of the square suddenly unrolled before him the figures of
Lord Hubert and Mrs. Bry.

Hailing them at once with his question, he learned from Lord
Hubert that Miss Bart had just returned to the Sabrina in Dorset’s
company; an announcement so evidently disconcerting to him that
Mrs. Bry, after a glance from her companion, which seemed to act
like the pressure on a spring, brought forth the prompt proposal
that he should come and meet his friends at dinner that evening—“At
Becassin’s—a little dinner to the Duchess,” she flashed out before
Lord Hubert had time to remove the pressure.

Selden’s sense of the privilege of being included in such company
brought him early in the evening to the door of the restaurant,
where he paused to scan the ranks of diners approaching down the
brightly lit terrace. There, while the Brys hovered within over
the last agitating alternatives of the MENU, he kept watch for
the guests from the Sabrina, who at length rose on the horizon in
company with the Duchess, Lord and Lady Skiddaw and the Stepneys.
From this group it was easy for him to detach Miss Bart on the
pretext of a moment’s glance into one of the brilliant shops along
the terrace, and to say to her, while they lingered together in the
white dazzle of a jeweller’s window: “I stopped over to see you—to
beg of you to leave the yacht.”

The eyes she turned on him showed a quick gleam of her former fear.
“To leave—? What do you mean? What has happened?”

“Nothing. But if anything should, why be in the way of it?”

The glare from the jeweller’s window, deepening the pallor of her
face, gave to its delicate lines the sharpness of a tragic mask.
“Nothing will, I am sure; but while there’s even a doubt left, how
can you think I would leave Bertha?”

The words rang out on a note of contempt—was it possibly of
contempt for himself? Well, he was willing to risk its renewal
to the extent of insisting, with an undeniable throb of added
interest: “You have yourself to think of, you know—” to which, with
a strange fall of sadness in her voice, she answered, meeting his
eyes: “If you knew how little difference that makes!”

“Oh, well, nothing WILL happen,” he said, more for his own
reassurance than for hers; and “Nothing, nothing, of course!” she
valiantly assented, as they turned to overtake their companions.

In the thronged restaurant, taking their places about Mrs. Bry’s
illuminated board, their confidence seemed to gain support from
the familiarity of their surroundings. Here were Dorset and his
wife once more presenting their customary faces to the world, she
engrossed in establishing her relation with an intensely new gown,
he shrinking with dyspeptic dread from the multiplied solicitations
of the MENU. The mere fact that they thus showed themselves
together, with the utmost openness the place afforded, seemed
to declare beyond a doubt that their differences were composed.
How this end had been attained was still matter for wonder, but
it was clear that for the moment Miss Bart rested confidently in
the result; and Selden tried to achieve the same view by telling
himself that her opportunities for observation had been ampler than
his own.

Meanwhile, as the dinner advanced through a labyrinth of courses,
in which it became clear that Mrs. Bry had occasionally broken away
from Lord Hubert’s restraining hand, Selden’s general watchfulness
began to lose itself in a particular study of Miss Bart. It was one
of the days when she was so handsome that to be handsome was
enough, and all the rest—her grace, her quickness, her social
felicities—seemed the overflow of a bounteous nature. But what
especially struck him was the way in which she detached herself, by
a hundred undefinable shades, from the persons who most abounded
in her own style. It was in just such company, the fine flower
and complete expression of the state she aspired to, that the
differences came out with special poignancy, her grace cheapening
the other women’s smartness as her finely-discriminated silences
made their chatter dull. The strain of the last hours had restored
to her face the deeper eloquence which Selden had lately missed
in it, and the bravery of her words to him still fluttered in her
voice and eyes. Yes, she was matchless—it was the one word for
her; and he could give his admiration the freer play because so
little personal feeling remained in it. His real detachment from
her had taken place, not at the lurid moment of disenchantment,
but now, in the sober after-light of discrimination, where he saw
her definitely divided from him by the crudeness of a choice which
seemed to deny the very differences he felt in her. It was before
him again in its completeness—the choice in which she was content
to rest: in the stupid costliness of the food and the showy dulness
of the talk, in the freedom of speech which never arrived at wit
and the freedom of act which never made for romance. The strident
setting of the restaurant, in which their table seemed set apart
in a special glare of publicity, and the presence at it of little
Dabham of the “Riviera Notes,” emphasized the ideals of a world
where conspicuousness passed for distinction, and the society
column had become the roll of fame.

It was as the immortalizer of such occasions that little Dabham,
wedged in modest watchfulness between two brilliant neighbours,
suddenly became the centre of Selden’s scrutiny. How much did he
know of what was going on, and how much, for his purpose, was still
worth finding out? His little eyes were like tentacles thrown
out to catch the floating intimations with which, to Selden, the
air at moments seemed thick; then again it cleared to its normal
emptiness, and he could see nothing in it for the journalist
but leisure to note the elegance of the ladies’ gowns. Mrs.
Dorset’s, in particular, challenged all the wealth of Mr. Dabham’s
vocabulary: it had surprises and subtleties worthy of what he
would have called “the literary style.” At first, as Selden had
noticed, it had been almost too preoccupying to its wearer; but now
she was in full command of it, and was even producing her effects
with unwonted freedom. Was she not, indeed, too free, too fluent,
for perfect naturalness? And was not Dorset, to whom his glance
had passed by a natural transition, too jerkily wavering between
the same extremes? Dorset indeed was always jerky; but it seemed
to Selden that tonight each vibration swung him farther from his
centre.

The dinner, meanwhile, was moving to its triumphant close, to
the evident satisfaction of Mrs. Bry, who, throned in apoplectic
majesty between Lord Skiddaw and Lord Hubert, seemed in spirit to
be calling on Mrs. Fisher to witness her achievement. Short of
Mrs. Fisher her audience might have been called complete; for the
restaurant was crowded with persons mainly gathered there for the
purpose of spectatorship, and accurately posted as to the names and
faces of the celebrities they had come to see. Mrs. Bry, conscious
that all her feminine guests came under that heading, and that
each one looked her part to admiration, shone on Lily with all the
pent-up gratitude that Mrs. Fisher had failed to deserve. Selden,
catching the glance, wondered what part Miss Bart had played in
organizing the entertainment. She did, at least, a great deal to
adorn it; and as he watched the bright security with which she bore
herself, he smiled to think that he should have fancied her in
need of help. Never had she appeared more serenely mistress of the
situation than when, at the moment of dispersal, detaching herself
a little from the group about the table, she turned with a smile
and a graceful slant of the shoulders to receive her cloak from
Dorset.

The dinner had been protracted over Mr. Bry’s exceptional cigars
and a bewildering array of liqueurs, and many of the other tables
were empty; but a sufficient number of diners still lingered to
give relief to the leave-taking of Mrs. Bry’s distinguished guests.
This ceremony was drawn out and complicated by the fact that it
involved, on the part of the Duchess and Lady Skiddaw, definite
farewells, and pledges of speedy reunion in Paris, where they
Hubert, and Stepney, on whom Mr. Bry was pressing a final, and
still more expensive, cigar, called out: “Come on, Lily, if you’re
going back to the yacht.”

Lily turned to obey; but as she did so, Mrs. Dorset, who had paused
on her way out, moved a few steps back toward the table.

“Miss Bart is not going back to the yacht,” she said in a voice of
singular distinctness.

A startled look ran from eye to eye; Mrs. Bry crimsoned to the
verge of congestion, Mrs. Stepney slipped nervously behind her
husband, and Selden, in the general turmoil of his sensations, was
mainly conscious of a longing to grip Dabham by the collar and
fling him out into the street.

Dorset, meanwhile, had stepped back to his wife’s side. His
face was white, and he looked about him with cowed angry eyes.
“Bertha!—Miss Bart . . . this is some misunderstanding . . . some
mistake....”

“Miss Bart remains here,” his wife rejoined incisively. “And, I
think, George, we had better not detain Mrs. Stepney any longer.”

Miss Bart, during this brief exchange of words, remained in
admirable erectness, slightly isolated from the embarrassed group
about her. She had paled a little under the shock of the insult,
but the discomposure of the surrounding faces was not reflected in
her own. The faint disdain of her smile seemed to lift her high
above her antagonist’s reach, and it was not till she had given
Mrs. Dorset the full measure of the distance between them that she
turned and extended her hand to her hostess.

“I am joining the Duchess tomorrow,” she explained, “and it seemed
easier for me to remain on shore for the night.”

She held firmly to Mrs. Bry’s wavering eye while she gave this
explanation, but when it was over Selden saw her send a tentative
glance from one to another of the women’s faces. She read their
incredulity in their averted looks, and in the mute wretchedness
of the men behind them, and for a miserable half-second he thought
she quivered on the brink of failure. Then, turning to him with an
easy gesture, and the pale bravery of her recovered smile—“Dear Mr.
Selden,” she said, “you promised to see me to my cab.”

* * * * *

Outside, the sky was gusty and overcast, and as Lily and Selden
moved toward the deserted gardens below the restaurant, spurts of
warm rain blew fitfully against their faces. The fiction of the cab
had been tacitly abandoned; they walked on in silence, her hand on
his arm, till the deeper shade of the gardens received them, and
pausing beside a bench, he said: “Sit down a moment.”

She dropped to the seat without answering, but the electric lamp at
the bend of the path shed a gleam on the struggling misery of her
face. Selden sat down beside her, waiting for her to speak, fearful
lest any word he chose should touch too roughly on her wound, and
kept also from free utterance by the wretched doubt which had
slowly renewed itself within him. What had brought her to this
pass? What weakness had placed her so abominably at her enemy’s
mercy? And why should Bertha Dorset have turned into an enemy at
the very moment when she so obviously needed the support of her
sex? Even while his nerves raged at the subjection of husbands to
their wives, and at the cruelty of women to their kind, reason
obstinately harped on the proverbial relation between smoke and
fire. The memory of Mrs. Fisher’s hints, and the corroboration of
his own impressions, while they deepened his pity also increased
his constraint, since, whichever way he sought a free outlet for
sympathy, it was blocked by the fear of committing a blunder.

Suddenly it struck him that his silence must seem almost as
accusatory as that of the men he had despised for turning from her;
but before he could find the fitting word she had cut him short
with a question.

“Do you know of a quiet hotel? I can send for my maid in the
morning.”

“An hotel—HERE—that you can go to alone? It’s not possible.”

She met this with a pale gleam of her old playfulness. “What IS,
then? It’s too wet to sleep in the gardens.”

“But there must be some one——”

“Some one to whom I can go? Of course—any number—but at THIS hour?
You see my change of plan was rather sudden——”

“Good God—if you’d listened to me!” he cried, venting his
helplessness in a burst of anger.

She still held him off with the gentle mockery of her smile. “But
haven’t I?” she rejoined. “You advised me to leave the yacht, and
I’m leaving it.”

He saw then, with a pang of self-reproach, that she meant neither
to explain nor to defend herself; that by his miserable silence he
had forfeited all chance of helping her, and that the decisive hour
was past.

She had risen, and stood before him in a kind of clouded majesty,
like some deposed princess moving tranquilly to exile.

“Lily!” he exclaimed, with a note of despairing appeal; but—“Oh,
not now,” she gently admonished him; and then, in all the sweetness
of her recovered composure: “Since I must find shelter somewhere,
and since you’re so kindly here to help me——”

He gathered himself up at the challenge. “You will do as I tell
you? There’s but one thing, then; you must go straight to your
cousins, the Stepneys.”

“Oh—” broke from her with a movement of instinctive resistance;
but he insisted: “Come—it’s late, and you must appear to have gone
there directly.”

He had drawn her hand into his arm, but she held him back with a
last gesture of protest. “I can’t—I can’t—not that—you don’t know
Gwen: you mustn’t ask me!”

“I MUST ask you—you must obey me,” he persisted, though infected at
heart by her own fear.

Her voice sank to a whisper: “And if she refuses?”—but, “Oh, trust
me—trust me!” he could only insist in return; and yielding to his
touch, she let him lead her back in silence to the edge of the
square.

In the cab they continued to remain silent through the brief drive
which carried them to the illuminated portals of the Stepneys’
hotel. Here he left her outside, in the darkness of the raised
hood, while his name was sent up to Stepney, and he paced the showy
hall, awaiting the latter’s descent. Ten minutes later the two
men passed out together between the gold-laced custodians of the
threshold; but in the vestibule Stepney drew up with a last flare
of reluctance.

“It’s understood, then?” he stipulated nervously, with his hand on
Selden’s arm. “She leaves tomorrow by the early train—and my wife’s
asleep, and can’t be disturbed.”



Chapter 4



The blinds of Mrs. Peniston’s drawing-room were drawn down against
the oppressive June sun, and in the sultry twilight the faces of
her assembled relatives took on a fitting shadow of bereavement.
They were all there: Van Alstynes, Stepneys and Melsons—even a
stray Peniston or two, indicating, by a greater latitude in dress
and manner, the fact of remoter relationship and more settled
hopes. The Peniston side was, in fact, secure in the knowledge that
the bulk of Mr. Peniston’s property “went back”; while the direct
connection hung suspended on the disposal of his widow’s private
fortune and on the uncertainty of its extent. Jack Stepney, in
his new character as the richest nephew, tacitly took the lead,
emphasizing his importance by the deeper gloss of his mourning
and the subdued authority of his manner; while his wife’s bored
attitude and frivolous gown proclaimed the heiress’s disregard of
the insignificant interests at stake. Old Ned Van Alstyne, seated
next to her in a coat that made affliction dapper, twirled his
white moustache to conceal the eager twitch of his lips; and Grace
Stepney, red-nosed and smelling of crape, whispered emotionally to
Mrs. Herbert Melson: “I couldn’t BEAR to see the Niagara anywhere
else!”

A rustle of weeds and quick turning of heads hailed the opening
of the door, and Lily Bart appeared, tall and noble in her black
dress, with Gerty Farish at her side. The women’s faces, as
she paused interrogatively on the threshold, were a study in
hesitation. One or two made faint motions of recognition, which
might have been subdued either by the solemnity of the scene, or by
the doubt as to how far the others meant to go; Mrs. Jack Stepney
gave a careless nod, and Grace Stepney, with a sepulchral gesture,
indicated a seat at her side. But Lily, ignoring the invitation, as
well as Jack Stepney’s official attempt to direct her, moved across
the room with her smooth free gait, and seated herself in a chair
which seemed to have been purposely placed apart from the others.

It was the first time that she had faced her family since her
return from Europe, two weeks earlier; but if she perceived any
uncertainty in their welcome, it served only to add a tinge of
irony to the usual composure of her bearing. The shock of dismay
with which, on the dock, she had heard from Gerty Farish of Mrs.
Peniston’s sudden death, had been mitigated, almost at once, by
the irrepressible thought that now, at last, she would be able to
pay her debts. She had looked forward with considerable uneasiness
to her first encounter with her aunt. Mrs. Peniston had vehemently
opposed her niece’s departure with the Dorsets, and had marked
her continued disapproval by not writing during Lily’s absence.
The certainty that she had heard of the rupture with the Dorsets
made the prospect of the meeting more formidable; and how should
Lily have repressed a quick sense of relief at the thought that,
instead of undergoing the anticipated ordeal, she had only to
enter gracefully on a long-assured inheritance? It had been, in
the consecrated phrase, “always understood” that Mrs. Peniston was
to provide handsomely for her niece; and in the latter’s mind the
understanding had long since crystallized into fact.

“She gets everything, of course—I don’t see what we’re here for,”
Mrs. Jack Stepney remarked with careless loudness to Ned Van
Alstyne; and the latter’s deprecating murmur—“Julia was always
a just woman”—might have been interpreted as signifying either
acquiescence or doubt.

“Well, it’s only about four hundred thousand,” Mrs. Stepney
rejoined with a yawn; and Grace Stepney, in the silence produced by
the lawyer’s preliminary cough, was heard to sob out: “They won’t
find a towel missing—I went over them with her the very day——”

Lily, oppressed by the close atmosphere, and the stifling odour
of fresh mourning, felt her attention straying as Mrs. Peniston’s
lawyer, solemnly erect behind the Buhl table at the end of the
room, began to rattle through the preamble of the will.

“It’s like being in church,” she reflected, wondering vaguely where
Gwen Stepney had got such an awful hat. Then she noticed how stout
Jack had grown—he would soon be almost as plethoric as Herbert
Melson, who sat a few feet off, breathing puffily as he leaned his
black-gloved hands on his stick.

“I wonder why rich people always grow fat—I suppose it’s because
there’s nothing to worry them. If I inherit, I shall have to be
careful of my figure,” she mused, while the lawyer droned on
through a labyrinth of legacies. The servants came first, then
a few charitable institutions, then several remoter Melsons and
Stepneys, who stirred consciously as their names rang out, and then
subsided into a state of impassiveness befitting the solemnity of
the occasion. Ned Van Alstyne, Jack Stepney, and a cousin or two
followed, each coupled with the mention of a few thousands: Lily
wondered that Grace Stepney was not among them. Then she heard her
own name—“to my niece Lily Bart ten thousand dollars—” and after
that the lawyer again lost himself in a coil of unintelligible
periods, from which the concluding phrase flashed out with
startling distinctness: “and the residue of my estate to my dear
cousin and name-sake, Grace Julia Stepney.”

There was a subdued gasp of surprise, a rapid turning of heads, and
a surging of sable figures toward the corner in which Miss Stepney
wailed out her sense of unworthiness through the crumpled ball of a
black-edged handkerchief.

Lily stood apart from the general movement, feeling herself for the
first time utterly alone. No one looked at her, no one seemed aware
of her presence; she was probing the very depths of insignificance.
And under her sense of the collective indifference came the acuter
pang of hopes deceived. Disinherited—she had been disinherited—and
for Grace Stepney! She met Gerty’s lamentable eyes, fixed on her
in a despairing effort at consolation, and the look brought her to
herself. There was something to be done before she left the house:
to be done with all the nobility she knew how to put into such
gestures. She advanced to the group about Miss Stepney, and holding
out her hand said simply: “Dear Grace, I am so glad.”

The other ladies had fallen back at her approach, and a space
created itself about her. It widened as she turned to go, and no
one advanced to fill it up. She paused a moment, glancing about
her, calmly taking the measure of her situation. She heard some one
ask a question about the date of the will; she caught a fragment
of the lawyer’s answer—something about a sudden summons, and an
“earlier instrument.” Then the tide of dispersal began to drift
past her; Mrs. Jack Stepney and Mrs. Herbert Melson stood on the
doorstep awaiting their motor; a sympathizing group escorted Grace
Stepney to the cab it was felt to be fitting she should take,
though she lived but a street or two away; and Miss Bart and Gerty
found themselves almost alone in the purple drawing-room, which
more than ever, in its stuffy dimness, resembled a well-kept family
vault, in which the last corpse had just been decently deposited.

* * * * *

In Gerty Farish’s sitting-room, whither a hansom had carried the
two friends, Lily dropped into a chair with a faint sound of
laughter: it struck her as a humorous coincidence that her aunt’s
legacy should so nearly represent the amount of her debt to Trenor.
The need of discharging that debt had reasserted itself with
increased urgency since her return to America, and she spoke her
first thought in saying to the anxiously hovering Gerty: “I wonder
when the legacies will be paid.”

But Miss Farish could not pause over the legacies; she broke into
a larger indignation. “Oh, Lily, it’s unjust; it’s cruel—Grace
Stepney must FEEL she has no right to all that money!”

“Any one who knew how to please Aunt Julia has a right to her
money,” Miss Bart rejoined philosophically.

“But she was devoted to you—she led every one to think—” Gerty
checked herself in evident embarrassment, and Miss Bart turned to
her with a direct look. “Gerty, be honest: this will was made only
six weeks ago. She had heard of my break with the Dorsets?”

“Every one heard, of course, that there had been some
disagreement—some misunderstanding——”

“Did she hear that Bertha turned me off the yacht?”

“Lily!”

“That was what happened, you know. She said I was trying to marry
George Dorset. She did it to make him think she was jealous. Isn’t
that what she told Gwen Stepney?”

“I don’t know—I don’t listen to such horrors.”

“I MUST listen to them—I must know where I stand.” She paused, and
again sounded a faint note of derision. “Did you notice the women?
They were afraid to snub me while they thought I was going to get
the money—afterward they scuttled off as if I had the plague.”
Gerty remained silent, and she continued: “I stayed on to see
what would happen. They took their cue from Gwen Stepney and Lulu
Melson—I saw them watching to see what Gwen would do.—Gerty, I must
know just what is being said of me.”

“I tell you I don’t listen——”

“One hears such things without listening.” She rose and laid her
resolute hands on Miss Farish’s shoulders. “Gerty, are people going
to cut me?”

“Your FRIENDS, Lily—how can you think it?”

“Who are one’s friends at such a time? Who, but you, you poor
trustful darling? And heaven knows what YOU suspect me of!” She
kissed Gerty with a whimsical murmur. “You’d never let it make any
difference—but then you’re fond of criminals, Gerty! How about the
irreclaimable ones, though? For I’m absolutely impenitent, you
know.”

She drew herself up to the full height of her slender majesty,
towering like some dark angel of defiance above the troubled Gerty,
who could only falter out: “Lily, Lily—how can you laugh about such
things?”

“So as not to weep, perhaps. But no—I’m not of the tearful order. I
discovered early that crying makes my nose red, and the knowledge
has helped me through several painful episodes.” She took a
restless turn about the room, and then, reseating herself, lifted
the bright mockery of her eyes to Gerty’s anxious countenance.

“I shouldn’t have minded, you know, if I’d got the money—” and at
Miss Farish’s protesting “Oh!” she repeated calmly: “Not a straw,
my dear; for, in the first place, they wouldn’t have quite dared
to ignore me; and if they had, it wouldn’t have mattered, because
I should have been independent of them. But now—!” The irony faded
from her eyes, and she bent a clouded face upon her friend.

“How can you talk so, Lily? Of course the money ought to have
been yours, but after all that makes no difference. The important
thing——” Gerty paused, and then continued firmly: “The important
thing is that you should clear yourself—should tell your friends
the whole truth.”

“The whole truth?” Miss Bart laughed. “What is truth? Where a wo-
man is concerned, it’s the story that’s easiest to believe. In this
case it’s a great deal easier to believe Bertha Dorset’s story
than mine, because she has a big house and an opera box, and it’s
convenient to be on good terms with her.”

Miss Farish still fixed her with an anxious gaze. “But what IS your
story, Lily? I don’t believe any one knows it yet.”

“My story?—I don’t believe I know it myself. You see I never
thought of preparing a version in advance as Bertha did—and if I
had, I don’t think I should take the trouble to use it now.”

But Gerty continued with her quiet reasonableness: “I don’t want a
version prepared in advance—but I want you to tell me exactly what
happened from the beginning.”

“From the beginning?” Miss Bart gently mimicked her. “Dear Gerty,
how little imagination you good people have! Why, the beginning
was in my cradle, I suppose—in the way I was brought up, and the
things I was taught to care for. Or no—I won’t blame anybody for
my faults: I’ll say it was in my blood, that I got it from some
wicked pleasure-loving ancestress, who reacted against the homely
virtues of New Amsterdam, and wanted to be back at the court of
the Charleses!” And as Miss Farish continued to press her with
troubled eyes, she went on impatiently: “You asked me just now for
the truth—well, the truth about any girl is that once she’s talked
about she’s done for; and the more she explains her case the worse
it looks.—My good Gerty, you don’t happen to have a cigarette about
you?”

* * * * *

In her stuffy room at the hotel to which she had gone on landing,
Lily Bart that evening reviewed her situation. It was the last week
in June, and none of her friends were in town. The few relatives
who had stayed on, or returned, for the reading of Mrs. Peniston’s
will, had taken flight again that afternoon to Newport or Long
Island; and not one of them had made any proffer of hospitality
to Lily. For the first time in her life she found herself utterly
alone except for Gerty Farish. Even at the actual moment of
her break with the Dorsets she had not had so keen a sense of
its consequences, for the Duchess of Beltshire, hearing of the
catastrophe from Lord Hubert, had instantly offered her protection,
and under her sheltering wing Lily had made an almost triumphant
progress to London. There she had been sorely tempted to linger on
in a society which asked of her only to amuse and charm it, without
enquiring too curiously how she had acquired her gift for doing
so; but Selden, before they parted, had pressed on her the urgent
need of returning at once to her aunt, and Lord Hubert, when he
presently reappeared in London, abounded in the same counsel. Lily
did not need to be told that the Duchess’s championship was not the
best road to social rehabilitation, and as she was besides aware
that her noble defender might at any moment drop her in favour of a
new PROTEGEE, she reluctantly decided to return to America. But she
had not been ten minutes on her native shore before she realized
that she had delayed too long to regain it. The Dorsets, the
Stepneys, the Brys—all the actors and witnesses in the miserable
drama—had preceded her with their version of the case; and, even
had she seen the least chance of gaining a hearing for her own,
some obscure disdain and reluctance would have restrained her.
She knew it was not by explanations and counter-charges that she
could ever hope to recover her lost standing; but even had she felt
the least trust in their efficacy, she would still have been held
back by the feeling which had kept her from defending herself to
Gerty Farish—a feeling that was half pride and half humiliation.
For though she knew she had been ruthlessly sacrificed to Bertha
Dorset’s determination to win back her husband, and though her own
relation to Dorset had been that of the merest good-fellowship, yet
she had been perfectly aware from the outset that her part in the
affair was, as Carry Fisher brutally put it, to distract Dorset’s
attention from his wife. That was what she was “there for”: it was
the price she had chosen to pay for three months of luxury and
freedom from care. Her habit of resolutely facing the facts, in
her rare moments of introspection, did not now allow her to put
any false gloss on the situation. She had suffered for the very
faithfulness with which she had carried out her part of the tacit
compact, but the part was not a handsome one at best, and she saw
it now in all the ugliness of failure.

She saw, too, in the same uncompromising light, the train of
consequences resulting from that failure; and these became clearer
to her with every day of her weary lingering in town. She stayed
on partly for the comfort of Gerty Farish’s nearness, and partly
for lack of knowing where to go. She understood well enough the
nature of the task before her. She must set out to regain, little
by little, the position she had lost; and the first step in the
tedious task was to find out, as soon as possible, on how many
of her friends she could count. Her hopes were mainly centred on
Mrs. Trenor, who had treasures of easy-going tolerance for those
who were amusing or useful to her, and in the noisy rush of whose
existence the still small voice of detraction was slow to make
itself heard. But Judy, though she must have been apprised of Miss
Bart’s return, had not even recognized it by the formal note of
condolence which her friend’s bereavement demanded. Any advance
on　Lily’s side might have been perilous: there was nothing to do but
to trust to the happy chance of an accidental meeting, and Lily
knew that, even so late in the season, there was always a hope of
running across her friends in their frequent passages through town.

To this end she assiduously showed herself at the restaurants they
frequented, where, attended by the troubled Gerty, she lunched
luxuriously, as she said, on her expectations.

“My dear Gerty, you wouldn’t have me let the head-waiter see that
I’ve nothing to live on but Aunt Julia’s legacy? Think of Grace
Stepney’s satisfaction if she came in and found us lunching on cold
mutton and tea! What sweet shall we have today, dear—COUPE JACQUES
or PECHES A LA MELBA?”

She dropped the MENU abruptly, with a quick heightening of colour,
and Gerty, following her glance, was aware of the advance, from an
inner room, of a party headed by Mrs. Trenor and Carry Fisher. It
was impossible for these ladies and their companions—among whom
Lily had at once distinguished both Trenor and Rosedale—not to
pass, in going out, the table at which the two girls were seated;
and Gerty’s sense of the fact betrayed itself in the helpless
trepidation of her manner. Miss Bart, on the contrary, borne
forward on the wave of her buoyant grace, and neither shrinking
from her friends nor appearing to lie in wait for them, gave to
the encounter the touch of naturalness which she could impart to
the most strained situations. Such embarrassment as was shown
was　on Mrs. Trenor’s side, and manifested itself in the mingling of
exaggerated warmth with imperceptible reservations. Her loudly
affirmed pleasure at seeing Miss Bart took the form of a nebulous
generalization, which included neither enquiries as to her future
nor the expression of a definite wish to see her again. Lily,
well-versed in the language of these omissions, knew that they
were equally intelligible to the other members of the party: even
Rosedale, flushed as he was with the importance of keeping such
company, at once took the temperature of Mrs. Trenor’s cordiality,
and reflected it in his off-hand greeting of Miss Bart. Trenor, red
and uncomfortable, had cut short his salutations on the pretext of
a word to say to the head-waiter; and the rest of the group soon
melted away in Mrs. Trenor’s wake.

It was over in a moment—the waiter, MENU in hand, still hung on
the result of the choice between COUPE JACQUES and PECHES A LA
MELBA—but Miss Bart, in the interval, had taken the measure of her
fate. Where Judy Trenor led, all the world would follow; and Lily
had the doomed sense of the castaway who has signalled in vain to
fleeing sails.

In a flash she remembered Mrs. Trenor’s complaints of Carry
Fisher’s rapacity, and saw that they denoted an unexpected
acquaintance with her husband’s private affairs. In the large
tumultuous disorder of the life at Bellomont, where no one seemed
to have time to observe any one else, and private aims and personal
interests were swept along unheeded in the rush of collective
activities, Lily had fancied herself sheltered from inconvenient
scrutiny; but if Judy knew when Mrs. Fisher borrowed money of
her husband, was she likely to ignore the same transaction on
Lily’s part? If she was careless of his affections she was plainly
jealous of his pocket; and in that fact Lily read the explanation
of her rebuff. The immediate result of these conclusions was the
passionate resolve to pay back her debt to Trenor. That obligation
discharged, she would have but a thousand dollars of Mrs.
Peniston’s legacy left, and nothing to live on but her own small
income, which was considerably less than Gerty Farish’s wretched
pittance; but this consideration gave way to the imperative claim
of her wounded pride. She must be quits with the Trenors first;
after that she would take thought for the future.

In her ignorance of legal procrastinations she had supposed that
her legacy would be paid over within a few days of the reading
of her aunt’s will; and after an interval of anxious suspense,
she wrote to enquire the cause of the delay. There was another
interval before Mrs. Peniston’s lawyer, who was also one of the
executors, replied to the effect that, some questions having arisen
relative to the interpretation of the will, he and his associates
might not be in a position to pay the legacies till the close of
the twelvemonth legally allotted for their settlement. Bewildered
and indignant, Lily resolved to try the effect of a personal
appeal; but she returned from her expedition with a sense of the
powerlessness of beauty and charm against the unfeeling processes
of the law. It seemed intolerable to live on for another year
under the weight of her debt; and in her extremity she decided to
turn to Miss Stepney, who still lingered in town, immersed in the
delectable duty of “going over” her benefactress’s effects. It
was bitter enough for Lily to ask a favour of Grace Stepney, but
the alternative was bitterer still; and one morning she presented
herself at Mrs. Peniston’s, where Grace, for the facilitation of
her pious task, had taken up a provisional abode.

The strangeness of entering as a suppliant the house where she had
so long commanded, increased Lily’s desire to shorten the ordeal;
and when Miss Stepney entered the darkened drawing-room, rustling
with the best quality of crape, her visitor went straight to the
point: would she be willing to advance the amount of the expected
legacy?

Grace, in reply, wept and wondered at the request, bemoaned the
inexorableness of the law, and was astonished that Lily had not
realized the exact similarity of their positions. Did she think
that only the payment of the legacies had been delayed? Why, Miss
Stepney herself had not received a penny of her inheritance, and
was paying rent—yes, actually!—for the privilege of living in a
house that belonged to her. She was sure it was not what poor dear
cousin Julia would have wished—she had told the executors so to
their faces; but they were inaccessible to reason, and there was
nothing to do but to wait. Let Lily take example by her, and be
patient—let them both remember how beautifully patient cousin Julia
had always been.

Lily made a movement which showed her imperfect assimilation of
this example. “But you will have everything, Grace—it would be easy
for you to borrow ten times the amount I am asking for.”

“Borrow—easy for me to borrow?” Grace Stepney rose up before her
in sable wrath. “Do you imagine for a moment that I would raise
money on my expectations from cousin Julia, when I know so well her
unspeakable horror of every transaction of the sort? Why, Lily, if
you must know the truth, it was the idea of your being in debt that
brought on her illness—you remember she had a slight attack before
you sailed. Oh, I don’t know the particulars, of course—I don’t
WANT to know them—but there were rumours about your affairs that
made her most unhappy—no one could be with her without seeing that.
I can’t help it if you are offended by my telling you this now—if I
can do anything to make you realize the folly of your course, and
how deeply SHE disapproved of it, I shall feel it is the truest way
of making up to you for her loss.”



Chapter 5



It seemed to Lily, as Mrs. Peniston’s door closed on her, that she
was taking a final leave of her old life. The future stretched
before her dull and bare as the deserted length of Fifth Avenue,
and opportunities showed as meagrely as the few cabs trailing in
quest of fares that did not come. The completeness of the analogy
was, however, disturbed as she reached the sidewalk by the rapid
approach of a hansom which pulled up at sight of her.

From beneath its luggage-laden top, she caught the wave of a
signalling hand; and the next moment Mrs. Fisher, springing to the
street, had folded her in a demonstrative embrace.

“My dear, you don’t mean to say you’re still in town? When I saw
you the other day at Sherry’s I didn’t have time to ask——” She
broke off, and added with a burst of frankness: “The truth is I was
HORRID, Lily, and I’ve wanted to tell you so ever since.”

“Oh——” Miss Bart protested, drawing back from her penitent clasp;
but Mrs. Fisher went on with her usual directness: “Look here,
Lily, don’t let’s beat about the bush: half the trouble in life is
caused by pretending there isn’t any. That’s not my way, and I can
only say I’m thoroughly ashamed of myself for following the other
women’s lead. But we’ll talk of that by and bye—tell me now where
you’re staying and what your plans are. I don’t suppose you’re
keeping house in there with Grace Stepney, eh?—and it struck me you
might be rather at loose ends.”

In Lily’s present mood there was no resisting the honest
friendliness of this appeal, and she said with a smile: “I am at
loose ends for the moment, but Gerty Farish is still in town, and
she’s good enough to let me be with her whenever she can spare the
time.”

Mrs. Fisher made a slight grimace. “H’m—that’s a temperate joy. Oh,
I know—Gerty’s a trump, and worth all the rest of us put together;
but A LA LONGUE you’re used to a little higher seasoning, aren’t
you, dear? And besides, I suppose she’ll be off herself before
long—the first of August, you say? Well, look here, you can’t spend
your summer in town; we’ll talk of that later too. But meanwhile,
what do you say to putting a few things in a trunk and coming down
with me to the Sam Gormers’ tonight?”

And as Lily stared at the breathless suddenness of the suggestion,
she continued with her easy laugh: “You don’t know them and they
don’t know you; but that don’t make a rap of difference. They’ve
taken the Van Alstyne place at Roslyn, and I’ve got CARTE BLANCHE
to bring my friends down there—the more the merrier. They do
things awfully well, and there’s to be rather a jolly party there
this week——” she broke off, checked by an undefinable change in
Miss Bart’s expression. “Oh, I don’t mean YOUR particular set,
you know: rather a different crowd, but very good fun. The fact
is, the Gormers have struck out on a line of their own: what they
want is to have a good time, and to have it in their own way. They
gave the other thing a few months’ trial, under my distinguished
auspices, and they were really doing extremely well—getting on a
good deal faster than the Brys, just because they didn’t care as
much—but suddenly they decided that the whole business bored them,
and that what they wanted was a crowd they could really feel at
home with. Rather original of them, don’t you think so? Mattie
Gormer HAS got aspirations still; women always have; but she’s
awfully easy-going, and Sam won’t be bothered, and they both like
to be the most important people in sight, so they’ve started a sort
of continuous performance of their own, a kind of social Coney
Island, where everybody is welcome who can make noise enough
and doesn’t put on airs. I think it’s awfully good fun myself—some
of the artistic set, you know, any pretty actress that’s going,
and so on. This week, for instance, they have Audrey Anstell,
who made such a hit last spring in ‘The Winning of Winny’; and
Paul Morpeth—he’s painting Mattie Gormer—and the Dick Bellingers,
and Kate Corby—well, every one you can think of who’s jolly and
makes a row. Now don’t stand there with your nose in the air, my
dear—it will be a good deal better than a broiling Sunday in town,
and you’ll find clever people as well as noisy ones—Morpeth, who
admires Mattie enormously, always brings one or two of his set.”

Mrs. Fisher drew Lily toward the hansom with friendly authority.
“Jump in now, there’s a dear, and we’ll drive round to your hotel
and have your things packed, and then we’ll have tea, and the two
maids can meet us at the train.”

* * * * *

It was a good deal better than a broiling Sunday in town—of that
no doubt remained to Lily as, reclining in the shade of a leafy
verandah, she looked seaward across a stretch of greensward
picturesquely dotted with groups of ladies in lace raiment and men
in tennis flannels. The huge Van Alstyne house and its rambling
dependencies were packed to their fullest capacity with the
Gormers’ week-end guests, who now, in the radiance of the Sunday
forenoon, were dispersing themselves over the grounds in quest of
the various distractions the place afforded: distractions ranging
from tennis-courts to shooting-galleries, from bridge and whiskey
within doors to motors and steam-launches without. Lily had the
odd sense of having been caught up into the crowd as carelessly
as a passenger is gathered in by an express train. The blonde and
genial Mrs. Gormer might, indeed, have figured the conductor,
calmly assigning seats to the rush of travellers, while Carry
Fisher represented the porter pushing their bags into place, giving
them their numbers for the dining-car, and warning them when their
station was at hand. The train, meanwhile, had scarcely slackened
speed—life whizzed on with a deafening’ rattle and roar, in which
one traveller at least found a welcome refuge from the sound of
her own thoughts. The Gormer MILIEU represented a social out-skirt
which Lily had always fastidiously avoided; but it struck her, now
that she was in it, as only a flamboyant copy of her own world,
a caricature approximating the real thing as the “society play”
approaches the manners of the drawing-room. The people about her
were doing the same things as the Trenors, the Van Osburghs and
the Dorsets: the difference lay in a hundred shades of aspect and
manner, from the pattern of the men’s waistcoats to the inflexion
of the women’s voices. Everything was pitched in a higher key,
and there was more of each thing: more noise, more colour, more
champagne, more familiarity—but also greater good-nature, less
rivalry, and a fresher capacity for enjoyment.

Miss Bart’s arrival had been welcomed with an uncritical
friendliness that first irritated her pride and then brought her
to a sharp sense of her own situation—of the place in life which,
for the moment, she must accept and make the best of. These people
knew her story—of that her first long talk with Carry Fisher had
left no doubt: she was publicly branded as the heroine of a “queer”
episode—but instead of shrinking from her as her own friends had
done, they received her without question into the easy promiscuity
of their lives. They swallowed her past as easily as they did Miss
Anstell’s, and with no apparent sense of any difference in the size
of the mouthful: all they asked was that she should—in her own way,
for they recognized a diversity of gifts—contribute as much to the
general amusement as that graceful actress, whose talents, when
off the stage, were of the most varied order. Lily felt at once
that any tendency to be “stuck-up,” to mark a sense of differences
and distinctions, would be fatal to her continuance in the Gormer
set. To be taken in on such terms—and into such a world!—was hard
enough to the lingering pride in her; but she realized, with a
pang of self-contempt, that to be excluded from it would, after
all, be harder still. For, almost at once, she had felt the
insidious charm of slipping back into a life where every material
difficulty was smoothed away. The sudden escape from a stifling
hotel in a dusty deserted city to the space and luxury of a great
country-house fanned by sea breezes, had produced a state of moral
lassitude agreeable enough after the nervous tension and physical
discomfort of the past weeks. For the moment she must yield to the
refreshment her senses craved—after that she would reconsider her
situation, and take counsel with her dignity. Her enjoyment of her
surroundings was, indeed, tinged by the unpleasant consideration
that she was accepting the hospitality and courting the approval
of people she had disdained under other conditions. But she was
growing less sensitive on such points: a hard glaze of indifference
was fast forming over her delicacies and susceptibilities, and each
concession to expediency hardened the surface a little more.

On the Monday, when the party disbanded with uproarious adieux,
the return to town threw into stronger relief the charms of the
life she was leaving. The other guests were dispersing to take
up the same existence in a different setting: some at Newport,
some at Bar Harbour, some in the elaborate rusticity of an
Adirondack camp. Even Gerty Farish, who welcomed Lily’s return
with tender solicitude, would soon be preparing to join the aunt
with whom she spent her summers on Lake George: only Lily herself
remained without plan or purpose, stranded in a backwater of the
great current of pleasure. But Carry Fisher, who had insisted on
transporting her to her own house, where she herself was to perch
for a day or two on the way to the Brys’ camp, came to the rescue
with a new suggestion.

“Look here, Lily—I’ll tell you what it is: I want you to take my
place with Mattie Gormer this summer. They’re taking a party out
to Alaska next month in their private car, and Mattie, who is the
laziest woman alive, wants me to go with them, and relieve her
of the bother of arranging things; but the Brys want me too—oh,
yes, we’ve made it up: didn’t I tell you?—and, to put it frankly,
though I like the Gormers best, there’s more profit for me in
the Brys. The fact is, they want to try Newport this summer, and
if I can make it a success for them they—well, they’ll make it a
success for me.” Mrs. Fisher clasped her hands enthusiastically.
“Do you know, Lily, the more I think of my idea the better I like
it—quite as much for you as for myself. The Gormers have both taken
a tremendous fancy to you, and the trip to Alaska is—well—the very
thing I should want for you just at present.”

Miss Bart lifted her eyes with a keen glance. “To take me out of
my friends’ way, you mean?” she said quietly; and Mrs. Fisher
responded with a deprecating kiss: “To keep you out of their sight
till they realize how much they miss you.”

* * * * *

Miss Bart went with the Gormers to Alaska; and the expedition, if
it did not produce the effect anticipated by her friend, had at
least the negative advantage of removing her from the fiery centre
of criticism and discussion. Gerty Farish had opposed the plan with
all the energy of her somewhat inarticulate nature. She had even
offered to give up her visit to Lake George, and remain in town
with Miss Bart, if the latter would renounce her journey; but Lily
could disguise her real distaste for this plan under a sufficiently
valid reason.

“You dear innocent, don’t you see,” she protested, “that Carry is
quite right, and that I must take up my usual life, and go about
among people as much as possible? If my old friends choose to
believe lies about me I shall have to make new ones, that’s all;
and you know beggars mustn’t be choosers. Not that I don’t like
Mattie Gormer—I DO like her: she’s kind and honest and unaffected;
and don’t you suppose I feel grateful to her for making me welcome
at a time when, as you’ve yourself seen, my own family have
unanimously washed their hands of me?”

Gerty shook her head, mutely unconvinced. She felt not only that
Lily was cheapening herself by making use of an intimacy she would
never have cultivated from choice, but that, in drifting back now
to her former manner of life, she was forfeiting her last chance
of ever escaping from it. Gerty had but an obscure conception
of what Lily’s actual experience had been: but its consequences
had established a lasting hold on her pity since the memorable
night when she had offered up her own secret hope to her friend’s
extremity. To characters like Gerty’s such a sacrifice constitutes
a moral claim on the part of the person in whose behalf it has been
made. Having once helped Lily, she must continue to help her; and
helping her, must believe in her, because faith is the main-spring
of such natures. But even if Miss Bart, after her renewed taste
of the amenities of life, could have returned to the barrenness
of a New York August, mitigated only by poor Gerty’s presence,
her worldly wisdom would have counselled her against such an act
of abnegation. She knew that Carry Fisher was right: that an
opportune absence might be the first step toward rehabilitation,
and that, at any rate, to linger on in town out of season was a
fatal admission of defeat. From the Gormers’ tumultuous progress
across their native continent, she returned with an altered
view of her situation. The renewed habit of luxury—the daily
waking to an assured absence of care and presence of material
ease—gradually blunted her appreciation of these values, and left
her more conscious of the void they could not fill. Mattie Gormer’s
undiscriminating good-nature, and the slap-dash sociability of her
friends, who treated Lily precisely as they treated each other—all
these characteristic notes of difference began to wear upon her
endurance; and the more she saw to criticize in her companions, the
less justification she found for making use of them. The longing
to get back to her former surroundings hardened to a fixed idea;
but with the strengthening of her purpose came the inevitable
perception that, to attain it, she must exact fresh concessions
from her pride. These, for the moment, took the unpleasant form of
continuing to cling to her hosts after their return from Alaska.
Little as she was in the key of their MILIEU, her immense social
facility, her long habit of adapting herself to others without
suffering her own outline to be blurred, the skilled manipulation
of all the polished implements of her craft, had won for her an
important place in the Gormer group. If their resonant hilarity
could never be hers, she contributed a note of easy elegance more
valuable to Mattie Gormer than the louder passages of the band.
Sam Gormer and his special cronies stood indeed a little in awe of
her; but Mattie’s following, headed by Paul Morpeth, made her feel
that they prized her for the very qualities they most conspicuously
lacked. If Morpeth, whose social indolence was as great as his
artistic activity, had abandoned himself to the easy current of
the Gormer existence, where the minor exactions of politeness were
unknown or ignored, and a man could either break his engagements,
or keep them in a painting-jacket and slippers, he still preserved
his sense of differences, and his appreciation of graces he had no
time to cultivate. During the preparations for the Brys’ TABLEAUX
he had been immensely struck by Lily’s plastic possibilities—“not
the face: too self-controlled for expression; but the rest of her—
gad, what a model she’d make!”—and though his abhorrence of the
world in which he had seen her was too great for him to think of
seeking her there, he was fully alive to the privilege of having
her to look at and listen to while he lounged in Mattie Gormer’s
dishevelled drawing-room.

Lily had thus formed, in the tumult of her surroundings, a little
nucleus of friendly relations which mitigated the crudeness of
her course in lingering with the Gormers after their return. Nor
was she without pale glimpses of her own world, especially since
the breaking up of the Newport season had set the social current
once more toward Long Island. Kate Corby, whose tastes made her
as promiscuous as Carry Fisher was rendered by her necessities,
occasionally descended on the Gormers, where, after a first
stare of surprise, she took Lily’s presence almost too much as a
matter of course. Mrs. Fisher, too, appearing frequently in the
neighbourhood, drove over to impart her experiences and give Lily
what she called the latest report from the weather-bureau; and the
latter, who had never directly invited her confidence, could yet
talk with her more freely than with Gerty Farish, in whose presence
it was impossible even to admit the existence of much that Mrs.
Fisher conveniently took for granted.

Mrs. Fisher, moreover, had no embarrassing curiosity. She did not
wish to probe the inwardness of Lily’s situation, but simply to
view it from the outside, and draw her conclusions accordingly; and
these conclusions, at the end of a confidential talk, she summed up
to her friend in the succinct remark: “You must marry as soon as
you can.”

Lily uttered a faint laugh—for once Mrs. Fisher lacked originality.
“Do you mean, like Gerty Farish, to recommend the unfailing panacea
of ‘a good man’s love’?”

“No—I don’t think either of my candidates would answer to that
description,” said Mrs. Fisher after a pause of reflection.

“Either? Are there actually two?”

“Well, perhaps I ought to say one and a half—for the moment.”

Miss Bart received this with increasing amusement. “Other things
being equal, I think I should prefer a half-husband: who is he?”

“Don’t fly out at me till you hear my reasons—George Dorset.”

“Oh——” Lily murmured reproachfully; but Mrs. Fisher pressed on
unrebuffed. “Well, why not? They had a few weeks’ honeymoon when
they first got back from Europe, but now things are going badly
with them again. Bertha has been behaving more than ever like
a madwoman, and George’s powers of credulity are very nearly
exhausted. They’re at their place here, you know, and I spent last
Sunday with them. It was a ghastly party—no one else but poor Neddy
Silverton, who looks like a galley-slave (they used to talk of my
making that poor boy unhappy!)—and after luncheon George carried me
off on a long walk, and told me the end would have to come soon.”

Miss Bart made an incredulous gesture. “As far as that goes, the
end will never come—Bertha will always know how to get him back
when she wants him.”

Mrs. Fisher continued to observe her tentatively. “Not if he has
any one else to turn to! Yes—that’s just what it comes to: the poor
creature can’t stand alone. And I remember him such a good fellow,
full of life and enthusiasm.” She paused, and went on, dropping her
glance from Lily’s: “He wouldn’t stay with her ten minutes if he
KNEW——”

“Knew——?” Miss Bart repeated.

“What YOU must, for instance—with the opportunities you’ve had! If
he had positive proof, I mean——”

Lily interrupted her with a deep blush of displeasure. “Please let
us drop the subject, Carry: it’s too odious to me.” And to divert
her companion’s attention she added, with an attempt at lightness:
“And your second candidate? We must not forget him.”

Mrs. Fisher echoed her laugh. “I wonder if you’ll cry out just as
loud if I say—Sim Rosedale?”

Miss Bart did not cry out: she sat silent, gazing thoughtfully
at her friend. The suggestion, in truth, gave expression to a
possibility which, in the last weeks, had more than once recurred
to her; but after a moment she said carelessly: “Mr. Rosedale wants
a wife who can establish him in the bosom of the Van Osburghs and
Trenors.”

Mrs. Fisher caught her up eagerly. “And so YOU could—with his
money! Don’t you see how beautifully it would work out for you
both?”

“I don’t see any way of making him see it,” Lily returned, with a
laugh intended to dismiss the subject.

But in reality it lingered with her long after Mrs. Fisher had
taken leave. She had seen very little of Rosedale since her
annexation by the Gormers, for he was still steadily bent on
penetrating to the inner Paradise from which she was now excluded;
but once or twice, when nothing better offered, he had turned up
for a Sunday, and on these occasions he had left her in no doubt
as to his view of her situation. That he still admired her was,
more than ever, offensively evident; for in the Gormer circle,
where he expanded as in his native element, there were no puzzling
conventions to check the full expression of his approval. But it
was in the quality of his admiration that she read his shrewd
estimate of her case. He enjoyed letting the Gormers see that he
had known “Miss Lily”—she was “Miss Lily” to him now—before they
had had the faintest social existence: enjoyed more especially
impressing Paul Morpeth with the distance to which their intimacy
dated back. But he let it be felt that that intimacy was a
mere ripple on the surface of a rushing social current, the
kind of relaxation which a man of large interests and manifold
preoccupations permits himself in his hours of ease.

The necessity of accepting this view of their past relation, and
of meeting it in the key of pleasantry prevalent among her new
friends, was deeply humiliating to Lily. But she dared less than
ever to quarrel with Rosedale. She suspected that her rejection
rankled among the most unforgettable of his rebuffs, and the fact
that he knew something of her wretched transaction with Trenor,
and was sure to put the basest construction on it, seemed to place
her hopelessly in his power. Yet at Carry Fisher’s suggestion a
new hope had stirred in her. Much as she disliked Rosedale, she
no longer absolutely despised him. For he was gradually attaining
his object in life, and that, to Lily, was always less despicable
than to miss it. With the slow unalterable persistency which she
had always felt in him, he was making his way through the dense
mass of social antagonisms. Already his wealth, and the masterly
use he had made of it, were giving him an enviable prominence in
the world of affairs, and placing Wall Street under obligations
which only Fifth Avenue could repay. In response to these claims,
his name began to figure on municipal committees and charitable
boards; he appeared at banquets to distinguished strangers, and
his candidacy at one of the fashionable clubs was discussed with
diminishing opposition. He had figured once or twice at the Trenor
dinners, and had learned to speak with just the right note of
disdain of the big Van Osburgh crushes; and all he now needed was a
wife whose affiliations would shorten the last tedious steps of his
ascent. It was with that object that, a year earlier, he had fixed
his affections on Miss Bart; but in the interval he had mounted
nearer to the goal, while she had lost the power to abbreviate the
remaining steps of the way. All this she saw with the clearness of
vision that came to her in moments of despondency. It was success
that dazzled her—she could distinguish facts plainly enough in the
twilight of failure. And the twilight, as she now sought to pierce
it, was gradually lighted by a faint spark of reassurance. Under
the utilitarian motive of Rosedale’s wooing she had felt, clearly
enough, the heat of personal inclination. She would not have
detested him so heartily had she not known that he dared to admire
her. What, then, if the passion persisted, though the other motive
had ceased to sustain it? She had never even tried to please him—he
had been drawn to her in spite of her manifest disdain. What if she
now chose to exert the power which, even in its passive state, he
had felt so strongly? What if she made him marry her for love, now
that he had no other reason for marrying her?



Chapter 6



As became persons of their rising consequence, the Gormers were
engaged in building a country-house on Long Island; and it was a
part of Miss Bart’s duty to attend her hostess on frequent visits
of inspection to the new estate. There, while Mrs. Gormer plunged
into problems of lighting and sanitation, Lily had leisure to
wander, in the bright autumn air, along the tree-fringed bay to
which the land declined. Little as she was addicted to solitude,
there had come to be moments when it seemed a welcome escape
from the empty noises of her life. She was weary of being swept
passively along a current of pleasure and business in which she
had no share; weary of seeing other people pursue amusement and
squander money, while she felt herself of no more account among
them than an expensive toy in the hands of a spoiled child.

It was in this frame of mind that, striking back from the shore
one morning into the windings of an unfamiliar lane, she came
suddenly upon the figure of George Dorset. The Dorset place was in
the immediate neighbourhood of the Gormers’ newly-acquired estate,
and in her motor-flights thither with Mrs. Gormer, Lily had caught
one or two passing glimpses of the couple; but they moved in so
different an orbit that she had not considered the possibility of a
direct encounter.

Dorset, swinging along with bent head, in moody abstraction, did
not see Miss Bart till he was close upon her; but the sight,
instead of bringing him to a halt, as she had half-expected, sent
him toward her with an eagerness which found expression in his
opening words.

“Miss Bart!—You’ll shake hands, won’t you? I’ve been hoping to meet
you—I should have written to you if I’d dared.” His face, with its
tossed red hair and straggling moustache, had a driven uneasy look,
as though life had become an unceasing race between himself and the
thoughts at his heels.

The look drew a word of compassionate greeting from Lily, and he
pressed on, as if encouraged by her tone: “I wanted to apologize—to
ask you to forgive me for the miserable part I played——”

She checked him with a quick gesture. “Don’t let us speak of it: I
was very sorry for you,” she said, with a tinge of disdain which,
as she instantly perceived, was not lost on him.

He flushed to his haggard eyes, flushed so cruelly that she
repented the thrust. “You might well be; you don’t know—you must
let me explain. I was deceived: abominably deceived——”

“I am still more sorry for you, then,” she interposed, without
irony; “but you must see that I am not exactly the person with whom
the subject can be discussed.”

He met this with a look of genuine wonder. “Why not? Isn’t it to
you, of all people, that I owe an explanation——”

“No explanation is necessary: the situation was perfectly clear to
me.”

“Ah——” he murmured, his head drooping again, and his irresolute
hand switching at the underbrush along the lane. But as Lily made a
movement to pass on, he broke out with fresh vehemence: “Miss Bart,
for God’s sake don’t turn from me! We used to be good friends—you
were always kind to me—and you don’t know how I need a friend now.”

The lamentable weakness of the words roused a motion of pity in
Lily’s breast. She too needed friends—she had tasted the pang of
loneliness; and her resentment of Bertha Dorset’s cruelty softened
her heart to the poor wretch who was after all the chief of
Bertha’s victims.

“I still wish to be kind; I feel no ill-will toward you,” she said.
“But you must understand that after what has happened we can’t be
friends again—we can’t see each other.”

“Ah, you ARE kind—you’re merciful—you always were!” He fixed his
miserable gaze on her. “But why can’t we be friends—why not, when
I’ve repented in dust and ashes? Isn’t it hard that you should
condemn me to suffer for the falseness, the treachery of others? I
was punished enough at the time—is there to be no respite for me?”

“I should have thought you had found complete respite in the
reconciliation which was effected at my expense,” Lily began, with
renewed impatience; but he broke in imploringly: “Don’t put it in
that way—when that’s been the worst of my punishment. My God! what
could I do—wasn’t I powerless? You were singled out as a sacrifice:
any word I might have said would have been turned against you——”

“I have told you I don’t blame you; all I ask you to understand is
that, after the use Bertha chose to make of me—after all that her
behaviour has since implied—it’s impossible that you and I should
meet.”

He continued to stand before her, in his dogged weakness. “Is
it—need it be? Mightn’t there be circumstances——?” he checked
himself, slashing at the wayside weeds in a wider radius. Then he
began again: “Miss Bart, listen—give me a minute. If we’re not to
meet again, at least let me have a hearing now. You say we can’t be
friends after—after what has happened. But can’t I at least appeal
to your pity? Can’t I move you if I ask you to think of me as a
prisoner—a prisoner you alone can set free?”

Lily’s inward start betrayed itself in a quick blush: was it
possible that this was really the sense of Carry Fisher’s
adumbrations?

“I can’t see how I can possibly be of any help to you,” she
murmured, drawing back a little from the mounting excitement of his
look.

Her tone seemed to sober him, as it had so often done in his
stormiest moments. The stubborn lines of his face relaxed, and he
said, with an abrupt drop to docility: “You WOULD see, if you’d be
as merciful as you used to be: and heaven knows I’ve never needed
it more!”

She paused a moment, moved in spite of herself by this reminder of
her influence over him. Her fibres had been softened by suffering,
and the sudden glimpse into his mocked and broken life disarmed her
contempt for his weakness.

“I am very sorry for you—I would help you willingly; but you must
have other friends, other advisers.”

“I never had a friend like you,” he answered simply. “And besides—
can’t you see?—you’re the only person”—his voice dropped to
a whisper—“the only person who knows.”

Again she felt her colour change; again her heart rose in
precipitate throbs to meet what she felt was coming. He lifted his
eyes to her entreatingly. “You do see, don’t you? You understand?
I’m desperate—I’m at the end of my tether. I want to be free, and
you can free me. I know you can. You don’t want to keep me bound
fast in hell, do you? You can’t want to take such a vengeance as
that. You were always kind—your eyes are kind now. You say you’re
sorry for me. Well, it rests with you to show it; and heaven knows
there’s nothing to keep you back. You understand, of course—there
wouldn’t be a hint of publicity—not a sound or a syllable to
connect you with the thing. It would never come to that, you know:
all I need is to be able to say definitely: ‘I know this—and
this—and this’—and the fight would drop, and the way be cleared,
and the whole abominable business swept out of sight in a second.”

He spoke pantingly, like a tired runner, with breaks of exhaustion
between his words; and through the breaks she caught, as through
the shifting rents of a fog, great golden vistas of peace and
safety. For there was no mistaking the definite intention behind
his vague appeal; she could have filled up the blanks without the
help of Mrs. Fisher’s insinuations. Here was a man who turned to
her in the extremity of his loneliness and his humiliation: if she
came to him at such a moment he would be hers with all the force of
his deluded faith. And the power to make him so lay in her hand—lay
there in a completeness he could not even remotely conjecture.
Revenge and rehabilitation might be hers at a stroke—there was
something dazzling in the completeness of the opportunity.

She stood silent, gazing away from him down the autumnal stretch
of the deserted lane. And suddenly fear possessed her—fear of
herself, and of the terrible force of the temptation. All her past
weaknesses were like so many eager accomplices drawing her toward
the path their feet had already smoothed. She turned quickly, and
held out her hand to Dorset.

“Goodbye—I’m sorry; there’s nothing in the world that I can do.”

“Nothing? Ah, don’t say that,” he cried; “say what’s true: that you
abandon me like the others. You, the only creature who could have
saved me!”

“Goodbye—goodbye,” she repeated hurriedly; and as she moved away
she heard him cry out on a last note of entreaty: “At least you’ll
let me see you once more?”

* * * * *

Lily, on regaining the Gormer grounds, struck rapidly across the
lawn toward the unfinished house, where she fancied that her
hostess might be speculating, not too resignedly, on the cause of
her delay; for, like many unpunctual persons, Mrs. Gormer disliked
to be kept waiting.

As Miss Bart reached the avenue, however, she saw a smart phaeton
with a high-stepping pair disappear behind the shrubbery in the
direction of the gate; and on the doorstep stood Mrs. Gormer, with
a glow of retrospective pleasure on her open countenance. At sight
of Lily the glow deepened to an embarrassed red, and she said
with a slight laugh: “Did you see my visitor? Oh, I thought you
came back by the avenue. It was Mrs. George Dorset—she said she’d
dropped in to make a neighbourly call.”

Lily met the announcement with her usual composure, though her
experience of Bertha’s idiosyncrasies would not have led her to
include the neighbourly instinct among them; and Mrs. Gormer,
relieved to see that she gave no sign of surprise, went on with
a deprecating laugh: “Of course what really brought her was cur-
iosity—she made me take her all over the house. But no one could
have been nicer—no airs, you know, and so good-natured: I can
quite see why people think her so fascinating.”

This surprising event, coinciding too completely with her
meeting with Dorset to be regarded as contingent upon it, had
yet immediately struck Lily with a vague sense of foreboding.
It was not in Bertha’s habits to be neighbourly, much less to
make advances to any one outside the immediate circle of her
affinities. She had always consistently ignored the world of outer
aspirants, or had recognized its individual members only when
prompted by motives of self-interest; and the very capriciousness
of her condescensions had, as Lily was aware, given them special
value in the eyes of the persons she distinguished. Lily saw
this now in Mrs. Gormer’s unconcealable complacency, and in the
happy irrelevance with which, for the next day or two, she quoted
Bertha’s opinions and speculated on the origin of her gown. All
the secret ambitions which Mrs. Gormer’s native indolence, and the
attitude of her companions, kept in habitual abeyance, were now
germinating afresh in the glow of Bertha’s advances; and whatever
the cause of the latter, Lily saw that, if they were followed up,
they were likely to have a disturbing effect upon her own future.

She had arranged to break the length of her stay with her new
friends by one or two visits to other acquaintances as recent;
and on her return from this somewhat depressing excursion she was
immediately conscious that Mrs. Dorset’s influence was still in
the air. There had been another exchange of visits, a tea at a
country-club, an encounter at a hunt ball; there was even a rumour
of an approaching dinner, which Mattie Gormer, with an unnatural
effort at discretion, tried to smuggle out of the conversation
whenever Miss Bart took part in it.

The latter had already planned to return to town after a farewell
Sunday with her friends; and, with Gerty Farish’s aid, had
discovered a small private hotel where she might establish herself
for the winter. The hotel being on the edge of a fashionable
neighbourhood, the price of the few square feet she was to
occupy was considerably in excess of her means; but she found a
justification for her dislike of poorer quarters in the argument
that, at this particular juncture, it was of the utmost importance
to keep up a show of prosperity. In reality, it was impossible for
her, while she had the means to pay her way for a week ahead, to
lapse into a form of existence like Gerty Farish’s. She had never
been so near the brink of insolvency; but she could at least manage
to meet her weekly hotel bill, and having settled the heaviest of
her previous debts out of the money she had received from Trenor,
she had a still fair margin of credit to go upon. The situation,
however, was not agreeable enough to lull her to complete
unconsciousness of its insecurity. Her rooms, with their cramped
outlook down a sallow vista of brick walls and fire-escapes, her
lonely meals in the dark restaurant with its surcharged ceiling and
haunting smell of coffee—all these material discomforts, which were
yet to be accounted as so many privileges soon to be withdrawn,
kept constantly before her the disadvantages of her state; and her
mind reverted the more insistently to Mrs. Fisher’s counsels. Beat
about the question as she would, she knew the outcome of it was
that she must try to marry Rosedale; and in this conviction she was
fortified by an unexpected visit from George Dorset.

She found him, on the first Sunday after her return to town,
pacing her narrow sitting-room to the imminent peril of the few
knick-knacks with which she had tried to disguise its plush
exuberances; but the sight of her seemed to quiet him, and he said
meekly that he hadn’t come to bother her—that he asked only to be
allowed to sit for half an hour and talk of anything she liked.
In reality, as she knew, he had but one subject: himself and his
wretchedness; and it was the need of her sympathy that had drawn
him back. But he began with a pretence of questioning her about
herself, and as she replied, she saw that, for the first time,
a faint realization of her plight penetrated the dense surface
of his self-absorption. Was it possible that her old beast of an
aunt had actually cut her off? That she was living alone like this
because there was no one else for her to go to, and that she really
hadn’t more than enough to keep alive on till the wretched little
legacy was paid? The fibres of sympathy were nearly atrophied in
him, but he was suffering so intensely that he had a faint glimpse
of what other sufferings might mean—and, as she perceived, an
almost simultaneous perception of the way in which her particular
misfortunes might serve him.

When at length she dismissed him, on the pretext that she must
dress for dinner, he lingered entreatingly on the threshold to
blurt out: “It’s been such a comfort—do say you’ll let me see you
again—” But to this direct appeal it was impossible to give an
assent; and she said with friendly decisiveness: “I’m sorry—but you
know why I can’t.”

He coloured to the eyes, pushed the door shut, and stood before her
embarrassed but insistent. “I know how you might, if you would—if
things were different—and it lies with you to make them so. It’s
just a word to say, and you put me out of my misery!”

Their eyes met, and for a second she trembled again with the
nearness of the temptation. “You’re mistaken; I know nothing; I saw
nothing,” she exclaimed, striving, by sheer force of reiteration,
to build a barrier between herself and her peril; and as he turned
away, groaning out “You sacrifice us both,” she continued to
repeat, as if it were a charm: “I know nothing—absolutely nothing.”

* * * * *

Lily had seen little of Rosedale since her illuminating talk with
Mrs. Fisher, but on the two or three occasions when they had met
she was conscious of having distinctly advanced in his favour.
There could be no doubt that he admired her as much as ever, and
she believed it rested with herself to raise his admiration to
the point where it should bear down the lingering counsels of
expediency. The task was not an easy one; but neither was it easy,
in her long sleepless nights, to face the thought of what George
Dorset was so clearly ready to offer. Baseness for baseness, she
hated the other least: there were even moments when a marriage with
Rosedale seemed the only honourable solution of her difficulties.
She did not indeed let her imagination range beyond the day of
plighting: after that everything faded into a haze of material
well-being, in which the personality of her benefactor remained
mercifully vague. She had learned, in her long vigils, that there
were certain things not good to think of, certain midnight images
that must at any cost be exorcised—and one of these was the image
of herself as Rosedale’s wife.

Carry Fisher, on the strength, as she frankly owned, of the
Brys’ Newport success, had taken for the autumn months a small
house at Tuxedo; and thither Lily was bound on the Sunday after
Dorset’s visit. Though it was nearly dinner-time when she arrived,
her hostess was still out, and the firelit quiet of the small
silent house descended on her spirit with a sense of peace and
familiarity. It may be doubted if such an emotion had ever before
been evoked by Carry Fisher’s surroundings; but, contrasted to
the world in which Lily had lately lived, there was an air of
repose and stability in the very placing of the furniture, and in
the quiet competence of the parlour-maid who led her up to her
room. Mrs. Fisher’s unconventionality was, after all, a merely
superficial divergence from an inherited social creed, while the
manners of the Gormer circle represented their first attempt to
formulate such a creed for themselves.

It was the first time since her return from Europe that Lily had
found herself in a congenial atmosphere, and the stirring of
familiar associations had almost prepared her, as she descended
the stairs before dinner, to enter upon a group of her old
acquaintances. But this expectation was instantly checked by the
reflection that the friends who remained loyal were precisely those
who would be least willing to expose her to such encounters; and
it was hardly with surprise that she found, instead, Mr. Rosedale
kneeling domestically on the drawing-room hearth before his
hostess’s little girl.

Rosedale in the paternal role was hardly a figure to soften Lily;
yet she could not but notice a quality of homely goodness in his
advances to the child. They were not, at any rate, the premeditated
and perfunctory endearments of the guest under his hostess’s
eye, for he and the little girl had the room to themselves; and
something in his attitude made him seem a simple and kindly being
compared to the small critical creature who endured his homage.
Yes, he would be kind—Lily, from the threshold, had time to
feel—kind in his gross, unscrupulous, rapacious way, the way of the
predatory creature with his mate. She had but a moment in which
to consider whether this glimpse of the fireside man mitigated
her repugnance, or gave it, rather, a more concrete and intimate
form; for at sight of her he was immediately on his feet again, the
florid and dominant Rosedale of Mattie Gormer’s drawing-room.

It was no surprise to Lily to find that he had been selected as her
only fellow-guest. Though she and her hostess had not met since
the latter’s tentative discussion of her future, Lily knew that
the acuteness which enabled Mrs. Fisher to lay a safe and pleasant
course through a world of antagonistic forces was not infrequently
exercised for the benefit of her friends. It was, in fact,
characteristic of Carry that, while she actively gleaned her own
stores from the fields of affluence, her real sympathies were on
the other side—with the unlucky, the unpopular, the unsuccessful,
with all her hungry fellow-toilers in the shorn stubble of success.

Mrs. Fisher’s experience guarded her against the mistake of
exposing Lily, for the first evening, to the unmitigated impression
of Rosedale’s personality. Kate Corby and two or three men drop-
ped in to dinner, and Lily, alive to every detail of her friend’s
method, saw that such opportunities as had been contrived for her
were to be deferred till she had, as it were, gained courage to
make effectual use of them. She had a sense of acquiescing in this
plan with the passiveness of a sufferer resigned to the surgeon’s
touch; and this feeling of almost lethargic helplessness continued
when, after the departure of the guests, Mrs. Fisher followed her
upstairs.

“May I come in and smoke a cigarette over your fire? If we talk in
my room we shall disturb the child.” Mrs. Fisher looked about her
with the eye of the solicitous hostess. “I hope you’ve managed
to make yourself comfortable, dear? Isn’t it a jolly little house?
It’s such a blessing to have a few quiet weeks with the baby.”

Carry, in her rare moments of prosperity, became so expansively
maternal that Miss Bart sometimes wondered whether, if she could
ever get time and money enough, she would not end by devoting them
both to her daughter.

“It’s a well-earned rest: I’ll say that for myself,” she continued,
sinking down with a sigh of content on the pillowed lounge near
the fire. “Louisa Bry is a stern task-master: I often used to
wish myself back with the Gormers. Talk of love making people
jealous and suspicious—it’s nothing to social ambition! Louisa
used to lie awake at night wondering whether the women who called
on us called on ME because I was with her, or on HER because she
was with me; and she was always laying traps to find out what
I thought. Of course I had to disown my oldest friends, rather
than let her suspect she owed me the chance of making a single
acquaintance—when, all the while, that was what she had me there
for, and what she wrote me a handsome cheque for when the season
was over!”

Mrs. Fisher was not a woman who talked of herself without cause,
and the practice of direct speech, far from precluding in her an
occasional resort to circuitous methods, served rather, at crucial
moments, the purpose of the juggler’s chatter while he shifts the
contents of his sleeves. Through the haze of her cigarette-smoke
she continued to gaze meditatively at Miss Bart, who, having
dismissed her maid, sat before the toilet table shaking out over
her shoulders the loosened undulations of her hair.

“Your hair’s wonderful, Lily. Thinner—? What does that matter,
when it’s so light and alive? So many women’s worries seem to go
straight to their hair—but yours looks as if there had never been
an anxious thought under it. I never saw you look better than you
did this evening. Mattie Gormer told me that Morpeth wanted to
paint you—why don’t you let him?”

Miss Bart’s immediate answer was to address a critical glance
to the reflection of the countenance under discussion. Then she
said, with a slight touch of irritation: “I don’t care to accept a
portrait from Paul Morpeth.”

Mrs. Fisher mused. “N—no. And just now, especially—well, he can do
you after you’re married.” She waited a moment, and then went on:
“By the way, I had a visit from Mattie the other day. She turned
up here last Sunday—and with Bertha Dorset, of all people in the
world!”

She paused again to measure the effect of this announcement on
her hearer, but the brush in Miss Bart’s lifted hand maintained its
unwavering stroke from brow to nape.

“I never was more astonished,” Mrs. Fisher pursued. “I don’t know
two women less predestined to intimacy—from Bertha’s standpoint,
that is; for of course poor Mattie thinks it natural enough that
she should be singled out—I’ve no doubt the rabbit always thinks
it is fascinating the anaconda. Well, you know I’ve always told
you that Mattie secretly longed to bore herself with the really
fashionable; and now that the chance has come, I see that she’s
capable of sacrificing all her old friends to it.”

Lily laid aside her brush and turned a penetrating glance upon her
friend. “Including ME?” she suggested.

“Ah, my dear,” murmured Mrs. Fisher, rising to push back a log from
the hearth.

“That’s what Bertha means, isn’t it?” Miss Bart went on steadily.
“For of course she always means something; and before I left Long
Island I saw that she was beginning to lay her toils for Mattie.”

Mrs. Fisher sighed evasively. “She has her fast now, at any rate.
To think of that loud independence of Mattie’s being only a
subtler form of snobbishness! Bertha can already make her believe
anything she pleases—and I’m afraid she’s begun, my poor child, by
insinuating horrors about you.”

Lily flushed under the shadow of her drooping hair. “The world
is too vile,” she murmured, averting herself from Mrs. Fisher’s
anxious scrutiny.

“It’s not a pretty place; and the only way to keep a footing in it
is to fight it on its own terms—and above all, my dear, not alone!”
Mrs. Fisher gathered up her floating implications in a resolute
grasp. “You’ve told me so little that I can only guess what has
been happening; but in the rush we all live in there’s no time to
keep on hating any one without a cause, and if Bertha is still
nasty enough to want to injure you with other people it must be
because she’s still afraid of you. From her standpoint there’s only
one reason for being afraid of you; and my own idea is that, if you
want to punish her, you hold the means in your hand. I believe you
can marry George Dorset tomorrow; but if you don’t care for that
particular form of retaliation, the only thing to save you from
Bertha is to marry somebody else.”



Chapter 7



The light projected on the situation by Mrs. Fisher had the
cheerless distinctness of a winter dawn. It outlined the facts with
a cold precision unmodified by shade or colour, and refracted, as
it were, from the blank walls of the surrounding limitations: she
had opened windows from which no sky was ever visible. But the
idealist subdued to vulgar necessities must employ vulgar minds to
draw the inferences to which he cannot stoop; and it was easier for
Lily to let Mrs. Fisher formulate her case than to put it plainly
to herself. Once confronted with it, however, she went the full
length of its consequences; and these had never been more clearly
present to her than when, the next afternoon, she set out for a
walk with Rosedale.

It was one of those still November days when the air is haunted
with the light of summer, and something in the lines of the
landscape, and in the golden haze which bathed them, recalled to
Miss Bart the September afternoon when she had climbed the slopes
of Bellomont with Selden. The importunate memory was kept before
her by its ironic contrast to her present situation, since her walk
with Selden had represented an irresistible flight from just such
a climax as the present excursion was designed to bring about. But
other memories importuned her also; the recollection of similar
situations, as skillfully led up to, but through some malice of
fortune, or her own unsteadiness of purpose, always failing of
the intended result. Well, her purpose was steady enough now. She
saw that the whole weary work of rehabilitation must begin again,
and against far greater odds, if Bertha Dorset should succeed in
breaking up her friendship with the Gormers; and her longing for
shelter and security was intensified by the passionate desire to
triumph over Bertha, as only wealth and predominance could triumph
over her. As the wife of Rosedale—the Rosedale she felt it in her
power to create—she would at least present an invulnerable front to
her enemy.

She had to draw upon this thought, as upon some fiery stimulant, to
keep up her part in the scene toward which Rosedale was too frankly
tending. As she walked beside him, shrinking in every nerve from
the way in which his look and tone made free of her, yet telling
herself that this momentary endurance of his mood was the price she
must pay for her ultimate power over him, she tried to calculate
the exact point at which concession must turn to resistance, and
the price HE would have to pay be made equally clear to him. But
his dapper self-confidence seemed impenetrable to such hints, and
she had a sense of something hard and self-contained behind the
superficial warmth of his manner.

They had been seated for some time in the seclusion of a rocky glen
above the lake, when she suddenly cut short the culmination of an
impassioned period by turning upon him the grave loveliness of her
gaze.

“I DO believe what you say, Mr. Rosedale,” she said quietly; “and I
am ready to marry you whenever you wish.”

Rosedale, reddening to the roots of his glossy hair, received this
announcement with a recoil which carried him to his feet, where he
halted before her in an attitude of almost comic discomfiture.

“For I suppose that is what you do wish,” she continued, in the
same quiet tone. “And, though I was unable to consent when you
spoke to me in this way before, I am ready, now that I know you so
much better, to trust my happiness to your hands.”

She spoke with the noble directness which she could command on
such occasions, and which was like a large steady light thrown
across the tortuous darkness of the situation. In its inconvenient
brightness Rosedale seemed to waver a moment, as though conscious
that every avenue of escape was unpleasantly illuminated.

Then he gave a short laugh, and drew out a gold cigarette-case, in
which, with plump jewelled fingers, he groped for a gold-tipped
cigarette. Selecting one, he paused to contemplate it a moment
before saying: “My dear Miss Lily, I’m sorry if there’s been any
little misapprehension between us—but you made me feel my suit was
so hopeless that I had really no intention of renewing it.”

Lily’s blood tingled with the grossness of the rebuff; but she
checked the first leap of her anger, and said in a tone of gentle
dignity: “I have no one but myself to blame if I gave you the
impression that my decision was final.”

Her word-play was always too quick for him, and this reply held him
in puzzled silence while she extended her hand and added, with the
faintest inflection of sadness in her voice: “Before we bid each
other goodbye, I want at least to thank you for having once thought
of me as you did.”

The touch of her hand, the moving softness of her look,
thrilled a vulnerable fibre in Rosedale. It was her exquisite
inaccessibleness, the sense of distance she could convey without a
hint of disdain, that made it most difficult for him to give her up.

“Why do you talk of saying goodbye? Ain’t we going to be good
friends all the same?” he urged, without releasing her hand.

She drew it away quietly. “What is your idea of being good
friends?” she returned with a slight smile. “Making love to me
without asking me to marry you?” Rosedale laughed with a recovered
sense of ease.

“Well, that’s about the size of it, I suppose. I can’t help making
love to you—I don’t see how any man could; but I don’t mean to ask
you to marry me as long as I can keep out of it.”

She continued to smile. “I like your frankness; but I am afraid our
friendship can hardly continue on those terms.” She turned away, as
though to mark that its final term had in fact been reached, and
he followed her for a few steps with a baffled sense of her having
after all kept the game in her own hands.

“Miss Lily——” he began impulsively; but she walked on without
seeming to hear him.

He overtook her in a few quick strides, and laid an entreating hand
on her arm. “Miss Lily—don’t hurry away like that. You’re beastly
hard on a fellow; but if you don’t mind speaking the truth I don’t
see why you shouldn’t allow me to do the same.”

She had paused a moment with raised brows, drawing away
instinctively from his touch, though she made no effort to evade
his words.

“I was under the impression,” she rejoined, “that you had done so
without waiting for my permission.”

“Well—why shouldn’t you hear my reasons for doing it, then? We’re
neither of us such new hands that a little plain speaking is going
to hurt us. I’m all broken up on you: there’s nothing new in that.
I’m more in love with you than I was this time last year; but I’ve
got to face the fact that the situation is changed.”

She continued to confront him with the same air of ironic com-
posure. “You mean to say that I’m not as desirable a match as
you thought me?”

“Yes; that’s what I do mean,” he answered resolutely. “I won’t go
into what’s happened. I don’t believe the stories about you—I don’t
WANT to believe them. But they’re there, and my not believing them
ain’t going to alter the situation.”

She flushed to her temples, but the extremity of her need checked
the retort on her lip and she continued to face him composedly. “If
they are not true,” she said, “doesn’t THAT alter the situation?”

He met this with a steady gaze of his small stock-taking eyes,
which made her feel herself no more than some superfine human
merchandise. “I believe it does in novels; but I’m certain it don’t
in real life. You know that as well as I do: if we’re speaking the
truth, let’s speak the whole truth. Last year I was wild to marry
you, and you wouldn’t look at me: this year—well, you appear to be
willing. Now, what has changed in the interval? Your situation,
that’s all. Then you thought you could do better; now——”

“You think you can?” broke from her ironically.

“Why, yes, I do: in one way, that is.” He stood before her, his
hands in his pockets, his chest sturdily expanded under its vivid
waistcoat. “It’s this way, you see: I’ve had a pretty steady grind
of it these last years, working up my social position. Think it’s
funny I should say that? Why should I mind saying I want to get
into society? A man ain’t ashamed to say he wants to own a
racing stable or a picture gallery. Well, a taste for society’s just
another kind of hobby. Perhaps I want to get even with some of
the people who cold-shouldered me last year—put it that way if it
sounds better. Anyhow, I want to have the run of the best houses;
and I’m getting it too, little by little. But I know the quickest
way to queer yourself with the right people is to be seen with the
wrong ones; and that’s the reason I want to avoid mistakes.”

Miss Bart continued to stand before him in a silence that might
have expressed either mockery or a half-reluctant respect for his
candour, and after a moment’s pause he went on: “There it is, you
see. I’m more in love with you than ever, but if I married you now
I’d queer myself for good and all, and everything I’ve worked for
all these years would be wasted.”

She received this with a look from which all tinge of resentment
had faded. After the tissue of social falsehoods in which she had
so long moved it was refreshing to step into the open daylight of
an avowed expediency.

“I understand you,” she said. “A year ago I should have been of
use to you, and now I should be an encumbrance; and I like you for
telling me so quite honestly.” She extended her hand with a smile.

Again the gesture had a disturbing effect upon Mr. Rosedale’s
self-command. “By George, you’re a dead game sport, you are!” he
exclaimed; and as she began once more to move away, he broke out
suddenly—“Miss Lily—stop. You know I don’t believe those stories—I
believe they were all got up by a woman who didn’t hesitate to
sacrifice you to her own convenience——”

Lily drew away with a movement of quick disdain: it was easier to
endure his insolence than his commiseration.

“You are very kind; but I don’t think we need discuss the matter
farther.”

But Rosedale’s natural imperviousness to hints made it easy for him
to brush such resistance aside. “I don’t want to discuss anything;
I just want to put a plain case before you,” he persisted.

She paused in spite of herself, held by the note of a new purpose
in his look and tone; and he went on, keeping his eyes firmly
upon her: “The wonder to me is that you’ve waited so long to get
square with that woman, when you’ve had the power in your hands.”
She continued silent under the rush of astonishment that his
words produced, and he moved a step closer to ask with low-toned
directness: “Why don’t you use those letters of hers you bought
last year?”

Lily stood speechless under the shock of the interrogation. In the
words preceding it she had conjectured, at most, an allusion to
her supposed influence over George Dorset; nor did the astonishing
indelicacy of the reference diminish the likelihood of Rosedale’s
resorting to it. But now she saw how far short of the mark she had
fallen; and the surprise of learning that he had discovered the
secret of the letters left her, for the moment, unconscious of the
special use to which he was in the act of putting his knowledge.

Her temporary loss of self-possession gave him time to press his
point; and he went on quickly, as though to secure completer
control of the situation: “You see I know where you stand—I know
how completely she’s in your power. That sounds like stage-talk,
don’t it?—but there’s a lot of truth in some of those old gags;
and I don’t suppose you bought those letters simply because you’re
collecting autographs.”

She continued to look at him with a deepening bewilderment: her
only clear impression resolved itself into a scared sense of his
power.

“You’re wondering how I found out about ’em?” he went on, answering
her look with a note of conscious pride. “Perhaps you’ve forgotten
that I’m the owner of the Benedick—but never mind about that now.
Getting on to things is a mighty useful accomplishment in business,
and I’ve simply extended it to my private affairs. For this IS
partly my affair, you see—at least, it depends on you to make it
so. Let’s look the situation straight in the eye. Mrs. Dorset, for
reasons we needn’t go into, did you a beastly bad turn last spring.
Everybody knows what Mrs. Dorset is, and her best friends wouldn’t
believe her on oath where their own interests were concerned; but
as long as they’re out of the row it’s much easier to follow her
lead than to set themselves against it, and you’ve simply been
sacrificed to their laziness and selfishness. Isn’t that a pretty
fair statement of the case?—Well, some people say you’ve got the
neatest kind of an answer in your hands: that George Dorset would
marry you tomorrow, if you’d tell him all you know, and give him
the chance to show the lady the door. I daresay he would; but you
don’t seem to care for that particular form of getting even, and,
taking a purely business view of the question, I think you’re
right. In a deal like that, nobody comes out with perfectly clean
hands, and the only way for you to start fresh is to get Bertha
Dorset to back you up, instead of trying to fight her.”

He paused long enough to draw breath, but not to give her time
for the expression of her gathering resistance; and as he pressed
on, expounding and elucidating his idea with the directness of
the man who has no doubts of his cause, she found the indignation
gradually freezing on her lip, found herself held fast in the grasp
of his argument by the mere cold strength of its presentation.
There was no time now to wonder how he had heard of her obtaining
the letters: all her world was dark outside the monstrous glare
of his scheme for using them. And it was not, after the first
moment, the horror of the idea that held her spell-bound, subdued
to his will; it was rather its subtle affinity to her own inmost
cravings. He would marry her tomorrow if she could regain Bertha
Dorset’s friendship; and to induce the open resumption of that
friendship, and the tacit retractation of all that had caused its
withdrawal, she had only to put to the lady the latent menace
contained in the packet so miraculously delivered into her hands.
Lily saw in a flash the advantage of this course over that which
poor Dorset had pressed upon her. The other plan depended for its
success on the infliction of an open injury, while this reduced
the transaction to a private understanding, of which no third
person need have the remotest hint. Put by Rosedale in terms of
businesslike give-and-take, this understanding took on the harmless
air of a mutual accommodation, like a transfer of property or a
revision of boundary lines. It certainly simplified life to view it
as a perpetual adjustment, a play of party politics, in which every
concession had its recognized equivalent: Lily’s tired mind was
fascinated by this escape from fluctuating ethical estimates into a
region of concrete weights and measures.

Rosedale, as she listened, seemed to read in her silence not only
a gradual acquiescence in his plan, but a dangerously far-reaching
perception of the chances it offered; for as she continued to stand
before him without speaking, he broke out, with a quick return
upon himself: “You see how simple it is, don’t you? Well, don’t be
carried away by the idea that it’s TOO simple. It isn’t exactly
as if you’d started in with a clean bill of health. Now we’re
talking let’s call things by their right names, and clear the whole
business up. You know well enough that Bertha Dorset couldn’t have
touched you if there hadn’t been—well—questions asked before—little
points of interrogation, eh? Bound to happen to a good-looking girl
with stingy relatives, I suppose; anyhow, they DID happen, and she
found the ground prepared for her. Do you see where I’m coming out?
You don’t want these little questions cropping up again. It’s one
thing to get Bertha Dorset into line—but what you want is to keep
her there. You can frighten her fast enough—but how are you going
to keep her frightened? By showing her that you’re as powerful as
she is. All the letters in the world won’t do that for you as you
are now; but with a big backing behind you, you’ll keep her just
where you want her to be. That’s MY share in the business—that’s
what I’m offering you. You can’t put the thing through without
me—don’t run away with any idea that you can. In six months you’d
be back again among your old worries, or worse ones; and here I am,
ready to lift you out of ’em tomorrow if you say so. DO you say so,
Miss Lily?” he added, moving suddenly nearer.

The words, and the movement which accompanied them, combin-
ed to startle Lily out of the state of tranced subservience into which
she had insensibly slipped. Light comes in devious ways to the
groping consciousness, and it came to her now through the disgusted
perception that her would-be accomplice assumed, as a matter of
course, the likelihood of her distrusting him and perhaps trying
to cheat him of his share of the spoils. This glimpse of his inner
mind seemed to present the whole transaction in a new aspect, and
she saw that the essential baseness of the act lay in its freedom
from risk.

She drew back with a quick gesture of rejection, saying, in a
voice that was a surprise to her own ears: “You are mistaken—quite
mistaken—both in the facts and in what you infer from them.”

Rosedale stared a moment, puzzled by her sudden dash in a direction
so different from that toward which she had appeared to be letting
him guide her.

“Now what on earth does that mean? I thought we understood each
other!” he exclaimed; and to her murmur of “Ah, we do NOW,” he
retorted with a sudden burst of violence: “I suppose it’s because
the letters are to HIM, then? Well, I’ll be damned if I see what
thanks you’ve got from him!”



Chapter 8



The autumn days declined to winter. Once more the leisure world was
in transition between country and town, and Fifth Avenue, still de-
serted at the week-end, showed from Monday to Friday a broadening
stream of carriages between house-fronts gradually restored to
consciousness.

The Horse Show, some two weeks earlier, had produced a passing
semblance of reanimation, filling the theatres and restaurants
with a human display of the same costly and high-stepping kind as
circled daily about its ring. In Miss Bart’s world the Horse Show,
and the public it attracted, had ostensibly come to be classed
among the spectacles disdained of the elect; but, as the feudal
lord might sally forth to join in the dance on his village green,
so society, unofficially and incidentally, still condescended
to look in upon the scene. Mrs. Gormer, among the rest, was not
above seizing such an occasion for the display of herself and her
horses; and Lily was given one or two opportunities of appearing at
her friend’s side in the most conspicuous box the house afforded.
But this lingering semblance of intimacy made her only the more
conscious of a change in the relation between Mattie and herself,
of a dawning discrimination, a gradually formed social standard,
emerging from Mrs. Gormer’s chaotic view of life. It was inevitable
that Lily herself should constitute the first sacrifice to this
new ideal, and she knew that, once the Gormers were established in
town, the whole drift of fashionable life would facilitate Mattie’s
detachment from her. She had, in short, failed to make herself
indispensable; or rather, her attempt to do so had been thwarted by
an influence stronger than any she could exert. That influence, in
its last analysis, was simply the power of money: Bertha Dorset’s
social credit was based on an impregnable bank-account.

Lily knew that Rosedale had overstated neither the difficulty
of her own position nor the completeness of the vindication he
offered: once Bertha’s match in material resources, her superior
gifts would make it easy for her to dominate her adversary. An
understanding of what such domination would mean, and of the
disadvantages accruing from her rejection of it, was brought home
to Lily with increasing clearness during the early weeks of the
winter. Hitherto, she had kept up a semblance of movement outside
the main flow of the social current; but with the return to town,
and the concentrating of scattered activities, the mere fact of
not slipping back naturally into her old habits of life marked
her as being unmistakably excluded from them. If one were not a
part of the season’s fixed routine, one swung unsphered in a void
of social non-existence. Lily, for all her dissatisfied dreaming,
had never really conceived the possibility of revolving about a
different centre: it was easy enough to despise the world, but
decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region. Her sense
of irony never quite deserted her, and she could still note, with
self-directed derision, the abnormal value suddenly acquired by the
most tiresome and insignificant details of her former life. Its
very drudgeries had a charm now that she was involuntarily released
from them: card-leaving, note-writing, enforced civilities to the
dull and elderly, and the smiling endurance of tedious dinners—how
pleasantly such obligations would have filled the emptiness of her
days! She did indeed leave cards in plenty; she kept herself, with
a smiling and valiant persistence, well in the eye of her world;
nor did she suffer any of those gross rebuffs which sometimes
produce a wholesome reaction of contempt in their victim. Society
did not turn away from her, it simply drifted by, preoccupied and
inattentive, letting her feel, to the full measure of her humbled
pride, how completely she had been the creature of its favour.

She had rejected Rosedale’s suggestion with a promptness of scorn
almost surprising to herself: she had not lost her capacity for
high flashes of indignation. But she could not breathe long on the
heights; there had been nothing in her training to develop any
continuity of moral strength: what she craved, and really felt
herself entitled to, was a situation in which the noblest attitude
should also be the easiest. Hitherto her intermittent impulses
of resistance had sufficed to maintain her self-respect. If she
slipped she recovered her footing, and it was only afterward that
she was aware of having recovered it each time on a slightly lower
level. She had rejected Rosedale’s offer without conscious effort;
her whole being had risen against it; and she did not yet perceive
that, by the mere act of listening to him, she had learned to live
with ideas which would once have been intolerable to her.

* * * * *

To Gerty Farish, keeping watch over her with a tenderer if less
discerning eye than Mrs. Fisher’s, the results of the struggle were
already distinctly visible. She did not, indeed, know what hostages
Lily had already given to expediency; but she saw her passionately
and irretrievably pledged to the ruinous policy of “keeping up.”
Gerty could smile now at her own early dream of her friend’s
renovation through adversity: she understood clearly enough that
Lily was not of those to whom privation teaches the unimportance of
what they have lost. But this very fact, to Gerty, made her friend
the more piteously in want of aid, the more exposed to the claims
of a tenderness she was so little conscious of needing.

Lily, since her return to town, had not often climbed Miss
Farish’s stairs. There was something irritating to her in the
mute interrogation of Gerty’s sympathy: she felt the real
difficulties of her situation to be incommunicable to any one
whose theory of values was so different from her own, and the
restrictions of Gerty’s life, which had once had the charm of
contrast, now reminded her too painfully of the limits to which
her own existence was shrinking. When at length, one afternoon,
she put into execution the belated resolve to visit her friend,
this sense of shrunken opportunities possessed her with unusual
intensity. The walk up Fifth Avenue, unfolding before her, in the
brilliance of the hard winter sunlight, an interminable procession
of fastidiously-equipped carriages—giving her, through the little
squares of brougham-windows, peeps of familiar profiles bent above
visiting-lists, of hurried hands dispensing notes and cards to
attendant footmen—this glimpse of the ever-revolving wheels of the
great social machine made Lily more than ever conscious of the
steepness and narrowness of Gerty’s stairs, and of the cramped
blind alley of life to which they led. Dull stairs destined to
be mounted by dull people: how many thousands of insignificant
figures were going up and down such stairs all over the world at
that very moment—figures as shabby and uninteresting as that of the
middle-aged lady in limp black who descended Gerty’s flight as Lily
climbed to it!

“That was poor Miss Jane Silverton—she came to talk things over
with me: she and her sister want to do something to support
themselves,” Gerty explained, as Lily followed her into the
sitting-room.

“To support themselves? Are they so hard up?” Miss Bart asked with
a touch of irritation: she had not come to listen to the woes of
other people.

“I’m afraid they have nothing left: Ned’s debts have swallowed
up everything. They had such hopes, you know, when he broke away
from Carry Fisher; they thought Bertha Dorset would be such a good
influence, because she doesn’t care for cards, and—well, she talked
quite beautifully to poor Miss Jane about feeling as if Ned were
her younger brother, and wanting to carry him off on the yacht, so
that he might have a chance to drop cards and racing, and take up
his literary work again.”

Miss Farish paused with a sigh which reflected the perplexity of
her departing visitor. “But that isn’t all; it isn’t even the
worst. It seems that Ned has quarrelled with the Dorsets; or at
least Bertha won’t allow him to see her, and he is so unhappy about
it that he has taken to gambling again, and going about with all
sorts of queer people. And cousin Grace Van Osburgh accuses him
of having had a very bad influence on Freddy, who left Harvard last
spring, and has been a great deal with Ned ever since. She sent
for Miss Jane, and made a dreadful scene; and Jack Stepney and
Herbert Melson, who were there too, told Miss Jane that Freddy was
threatening to marry some dreadful woman to whom Ned had introduced
him, and that they could do nothing with him because now he’s of
age he has his own money. You can fancy how poor Miss Jane felt—she
came to me at once, and seemed to think that if I could get her
something to do she could earn enough to pay Ned’s debts and send
him away—I’m afraid she has no idea how long it would take her to
pay for one of his evenings at bridge. And he was horribly in debt
when he came back from the cruise—I can’t see why he should have
spent so much more money under Bertha’s influence than Carry’s: can
you?”

Lily met this query with an impatient gesture. “My dear Gerty, I
always understand how people can spend much more money—never how
they can spend any less!”

She loosened her furs and settled herself in Gerty’s easy-chair,
while her friend busied herself with the tea-cups.

“But what can they do—the Miss Silvertons? How do they mean
to support themselves?” she asked, conscious that the note of
irritation still persisted in her voice. It was the very last
topic she had meant to discuss—it really did not interest her in
the least—but she was seized by a sudden perverse curiosity to
know how the two colourless shrinking victims of young Silverton’s
sentimental experiments meant to cope with the grim necessity which
lurked so close to her own threshold.

“I don’t know—I am trying to find something for them. Miss Jane
reads aloud very nicely—but it’s so hard to find any one who is
willing to be read to. And Miss Annie paints a little——”

“Oh, I know—apple-blossoms on blotting-paper; just the kind of
thing I shall be doing myself before long!” exclaimed Lily,
starting up with a vehemence of movement that threatened
destruction to Miss Farish’s fragile tea-table.

Lily bent over to steady the cups; then she sank back into her
seat. “I’d forgotten there was no room to dash about in—how
beautifully one does have to behave in a small flat! Oh, Gerty, I
wasn’t meant to be good,” she sighed out incoherently.

Gerty lifted an apprehensive look to her pale face, in which the
eyes shone with a peculiar sleepless lustre.

“You look horribly tired, Lily; take your tea, and let me give you
this cushion to lean against.”

Miss Bart accepted the cup of tea, but put back the cushion with an
impatient hand.

“Don’t give me that! I don’t want to lean back—I shall go to sleep
if I do.”

“Well, why not, dear? I’ll be as quiet as a mouse,” Gerty urged
affectionately.

“No—no; don’t be quiet; talk to me—keep me awake! I don’t sleep at
night, and in the afternoon a dreadful drowsiness creeps over me.”

“You don’t sleep at night? Since when?”

“I don’t know—I can’t remember.” She rose and put the empty cup on
the tea-tray. “Another, and stronger, please; if I don’t keep awake
now I shall see horrors tonight—perfect horrors!”

“But they’ll be worse if you drink too much tea.”

“No, no—give it to me; and don’t preach, please,” Lily returned
imperiously. Her voice had a dangerous edge, and Gerty noticed that
her hand shook as she held it out to receive the second cup.

“But you look so tired: I’m sure you must be ill——”

Miss Bart set down her cup with a start. “Do I look ill? Does my
face show it?” She rose and walked quickly toward the little mirror
above the writing-table. “What a horrid looking-glass—it’s all
blotched and discoloured. Any one would look ghastly in it!” She
turned back, fixing her plaintive eyes on Gerty. “You stupid dear,
why do you say such odious things to me? It’s enough to make one
ill to be told one looks so! And looking ill means looking ugly.”
She caught Gerty’s wrists, and drew her close to the window. “After
all, I’d rather know the truth. Look me straight in the face,
Gerty, and tell me: am I perfectly frightful?”

“You’re perfectly beautiful now, Lily: your eyes are shining, and
your cheeks have grown so pink all of a sudden——”

“Ah, they WERE pale, then—ghastly pale, when I came in? Why don’t
you tell me frankly that I’m a wreck? My eyes are bright now
because I’m so nervous—but in the mornings they look like lead.
And I can see the lines coming in my face—the lines of worry and
disappointment and failure! Every sleepless night leaves a new
one—and how can I sleep, when I have such dreadful things to think
about?”

“Dreadful things—what things?” asked Gerty, gently detaching her
wrists from her friend’s feverish fingers.

“What things? Well, poverty, for one—and I don’t know any that’s
more dreadful.” Lily turned away and sank with sudden weariness
into the easy-chair near the tea-table. “You asked me just now if I
could understand why Ned Silverton spent so much money. Of course
I understand—he spends it on living with the rich. You think we live
ON the rich, rather than with them: and so we do, in a sense—but
it’s a privilege we have to pay for! We eat their dinners, and
drink their wine, and smoke their cigarettes, and use their
carriages and their opera-boxes and their private cars—yes, but
there’s a tax to pay on every one of those luxuries. The man pays
it by big tips to the servants, by playing cards beyond his means,
by flowers and presents—and—and—lots of other things that cost;
the girl pays it by tips and cards too—oh, yes, I’ve had to take
up bridge again—and by going to the best dress-makers, and having
just the right dress for every occasion, and always keeping herself
fresh and exquisite and amusing!”

She leaned back for a moment, closing her eyes, and as she sat
there, her pale lips slightly parted, and the lids dropped above
her fagged brilliant gaze, Gerty had a startled perception of the
change in her face—of the way in which an ashen daylight seemed
suddenly to extinguish its artificial brightness. She looked up,
and the vision vanished.

“It doesn’t sound very amusing, does it? And it isn’t—I’m sick to
death of it! And yet the thought of giving it all up nearly kills
me—it’s what keeps me awake at night, and makes me so crazy for
your strong tea. For I can’t go on in this way much longer, you
know—I’m nearly at the end of my tether. And then what can I do—
how on earth am I to keep myself alive? I see myself reduced to the
fate of that poor Silverton woman—slinking about to employment
agencies, and trying to sell painted blotting-pads to Women’s Ex-
changes! And there are thousands and thousands of women trying to
do the same thing already, and not one of the number who has less
idea how to earn a dollar than I have!”

She rose again with a hurried glance at the clock. “It’s late, and
I must be off—I have an appointment with Carry Fisher. Don’t look
so worried, you dear thing—don’t think too much about the nonsense
I’ve been talking.” She was before the mirror again, adjusting
her hair with a light hand, drawing down her veil, and giving a
dexterous touch to her furs. “Of course, you know, it hasn’t come
to the employment agencies and the painted blotting-pads yet;
but I’m rather hard up just for the moment, and if I could find
something to do—notes to write and visiting-lists to make up, or
that kind of thing—it would tide me over till the legacy is paid.
And Carry has promised to find somebody who wants a kind of social
secretary—you know she makes a specialty of the helpless rich.”

* * * * *

Miss Bart had not revealed to Gerty the full extent of her anxiety.
She was in fact in urgent and immediate need of money: money to
meet the vulgar weekly claims which could neither be deferred nor
evaded. To give up her apartment, and shrink to the obscurity of a
boarding-house, or the provisional hospitality of a bed in Gerty
Farish’s sitting-room, was an expedient which could only postpone
the problem confronting her; and it seemed wiser as well as more
agreeable to remain where she was and find some means of earning
her living. The possibility of having to do this was one which she
had never before seriously considered, and the discovery that, as a
bread-winner, she was likely to prove as helpless and ineffectual
as poor Miss Silverton, was a severe shock to her self-confidence.

Having been accustomed to take herself at the popular valuation,
as a person of energy and resource, naturally fitted to dominate
any situation in which she found herself, she vaguely imagined that
such gifts would be of value to seekers after social guidance;
but there was unfortunately no specific head under which the
art of saying and doing the right thing could be offered in the
market, and even Mrs. Fisher’s resourcefulness failed before the
difficulty of discovering a workable vein in the vague wealth of
Lily’s graces. Mrs. Fisher was full of indirect expedients for
enabling her friends to earn a living, and could conscientiously
assert that she had put several opportunities of this kind before
Lily; but more legitimate methods of bread-winning were as much out
of her line as they were beyond the capacity of the sufferers she
was generally called upon to assist. Lily’s failure to profit by
the chances already afforded her might, moreover, have justified
the abandonment of farther effort on her behalf; but Mrs. Fisher’s
inexhaustible good-nature made her an adept at creating artificial
demands in response to an actual supply. In the pursuance of this
end she at once started on a voyage of discovery in Miss Bart’s
behalf; and as the result of her explorations she now summoned the
latter with the announcement that she had “found something.”

* * * * *

Left to herself, Gerty mused distressfully upon her friend’s
plight, and her own inability to relieve it. It was clear to her
that Lily, for the present, had no wish for the kind of help she
could give. Miss Farish could see no hope for her friend but in a
life completely reorganized and detached from its old associations;
whereas all Lily’s energies were centred in the determined effort
to hold fast to those associations, to keep herself visibly
identified with them, as long as the illusion could be maintained.
Pitiable as such an attitude seemed to Gerty, she could not judge
it as harshly as Selden, for instance, might have done. She had
not forgotten the night of emotion when she and Lily had lain in
each other’s arms, and she had seemed to feel her very heart’s
blood passing into her friend. The sacrifice she had made had
seemed unavailing enough; no trace remained in Lily of the subduing
influences of that hour; but Gerty’s tenderness, disciplined by
long years of contact with obscure and inarticulate suffering,
could wait on its object with a silent forbearance which took no
account of time. She could not, however, deny herself the solace of
taking anxious counsel with Lawrence Selden, with whom, since his
return from Europe, she had renewed her old relation of cousinly
confidence.

Selden himself had never been aware of any change in their
relation. He found Gerty as he had left her, simple, undemanding
and devoted, but with a quickened intelligence of the heart which
he recognized without seeking to explain it. To Gerty herself it
would once have seemed impossible that she should ever again talk
freely with him of Lily Bart; but what had passed in the secrecy
of her own breast seemed to resolve itself, when the mist of the
struggle cleared, into a breaking down of the bounds of self, a
deflecting of the wasted personal emotion into the general current
of human understanding.

It was not till some two weeks after her visit from Lily that
Gerty had the opportunity of communicating her fears to Selden.
The latter, having presented himself on a Sunday afternoon, had
lingered on through the dowdy animation of his cousin’s tea-hour,
conscious of something in her voice and eye which solicited a word
apart; and as soon as the last visitor was gone Gerty opened her
case by asking how lately he had seen Miss Bart.

Selden’s perceptible pause gave her time for a slight stir of
surprise.

“I haven’t seen her at all—I’ve perpetually missed seeing her since
she came back.”

This unexpected admission made Gerty pause too; and she was still
hesitating on the brink of her subject when he relieved her by
adding: “I’ve wanted to see her—but she seems to have been absorbed
by the Gormer set since her return from Europe.”

“That’s all the more reason: she’s been very unhappy.”

“Unhappy at being with the Gormers?”

“Oh, I don’t defend her intimacy with the Gormers; but that too is
at an end now, I think. You know people have been very unkind since
Bertha Dorset quarrelled with her.”

“Ah——” Selden exclaimed, rising abruptly to walk to the window,
where he remained with his eyes on the darkening street while
his cousin continued to explain: “Judy Trenor and her own family
have deserted her too—and all because Bertha Dorset has said such
horrible things. And she is very poor—you know Mrs. Peniston cut
her off with a small legacy, after giving her to understand that
she was to have everything.”

“Yes—I know,” Selden assented curtly, turning back into the room,
but only to stir about with restless steps in the circumscribed
space between door and window. “Yes—she’s been abominably treated;
but it’s unfortunately the precise thing that a man who wants to
show his sympathy can’t say to her.”

His words caused Gerty a slight chill of disappointment. “There
would be other ways of showing your sympathy,” she suggested.

Selden, with a slight laugh, sat down beside her on the little sofa
which projected from the hearth. “What are you thinking of, you
incorrigible missionary?” he asked.

Gerty’s colour rose, and her blush was for a moment her only
answer. Then she made it more explicit by saying: “I am thinking of
the fact that you and she used to be great friends—that she used to
care immensely for what you thought of her—and that, if she takes
your staying away as a sign of what you think now, I can imagine
its adding a great deal to her unhappiness.”

“My dear child, don’t add to it still more—at least to
your conception of it—by attributing to her all sorts of
susceptibilities of your own.” Selden, for his life, could not
keep a note of dryness out of his voice; but he met Gerty’s look
of perplexity by saying more mildly: “But, though you immensely
exaggerate the importance of anything I could do for Miss Bart, you
can’t exaggerate my readiness to do it—if you ask me to.” He laid
his hand for a moment on hers, and there passed between them, on
the current of the rare contact, one of those exchanges of meaning
which fill the hidden reservoirs of affection. Gerty had the
feeling that he measured the cost of her request as plainly as she
read the significance of his reply; and the sense of all that was
suddenly clear between them made her next words easier to find.

“I do ask you, then; I ask you because she once told me that you
had been a help to her, and because she needs help now as she has
never needed it before. You know how dependent she has always been
on ease and luxury—how she has hated what was shabby and ugly and
uncomfortable. She can’t help it—she was brought up with those
ideas, and has never been able to find her way out of them. But
now all the things she cared for have been taken from her, and the
people who taught her to care for them have abandoned her too; and
it seems to me that if some one could reach out a hand and show her
the other side—show her how much is left in life and in herself——”
Gerty broke off, abashed at the sound of her own eloquence, and
impeded by the difficulty of giving precise expression to her vague
yearning for her friend’s retrieval. “I can’t help her myself:
she’s passed out of my reach,” she continued. “I think she’s afraid
of being a burden to me. When she was last here, two weeks ago, she
seemed dreadfully worried about her future: she said Carry Fisher
was trying to find something for her to do. A few days later she
wrote me that she had taken a position as private secretary, and
that I was not to be anxious, for everything was all right, and
she would come in and tell me about it when she had time; but she
has never come, and I don’t like to go to her, because I am afraid
of forcing myself on her when I’m not wanted. Once, when we were
children, and I had rushed up after a long separation, and thrown
my arms about her, she said: ‘Please don’t kiss me unless I ask you
to, Gerty’—and she DID ask me, a minute later; but since then I’ve
always waited to be asked.”

Selden had listened in silence, with the concentrated look which
his thin dark face could assume when he wished to guard it against
any involuntary change of expression. When his cousin ended, he
said with a slight smile: “Since you’ve learned the wisdom of
waiting, I don’t see why you urge me to rush in—” but the troubled
appeal of her eyes made him add, as he rose to take leave: “Still,
I’ll do what you wish, and not hold you responsible for my failure.”

Selden’s avoidance of Miss Bart had not been as unintentional as he
had allowed his cousin to think. At first, indeed, while the memory
of their last hour at Monte Carlo still held the full heat of his
indignation, he had anxiously watched for her return; but she had
disappointed him by lingering in England, and when she finally
reappeared it happened that business had called him to the West,
whence he came back only to learn that she was starting for Alaska
with the Gormers. The revelation of this suddenly-established
intimacy effectually chilled his desire to see her. If, at a moment
when her whole life seemed to be breaking up, she could cheerfully
commit its reconstruction to the Gormers, there was no reason why
such accidents should ever strike her as irreparable. Every step
she took seemed in fact to carry her farther from the region where,
once or twice, he and she had met for an illumined moment; and the
recognition of this fact, when its first pang had been surmounted,
produced in him a sense of negative relief. It was much simpler for
him to judge Miss Bart by her habitual conduct than by the rare
deviations from it which had thrown her so disturbingly in his way;
and every act of hers which made the recurrence of such deviations
more unlikely, confirmed the sense of relief with which he returned
to the conventional view of her.

But Gerty Farish’s words had sufficed to make him see how little
this view was really his, and how impossible it was for him to live
quietly with the thought of Lily Bart. To hear that she was in
need of help—even such vague help as he could offer—was to be at
once repossessed by that thought; and by the time he reached the
street he had sufficiently convinced himself of the urgency of his
cousin’s appeal to turn his steps directly toward Lily’s hotel.

There his zeal met a check in the unforeseen news that Miss Bart
had moved away; but, on his pressing his enquiries, the clerk
remembered that she had left an address, for which he presently
began to search through his books.

It was certainly strange that she should have taken this step
without letting Gerty Farish know of her decision; and Selden
waited with a vague sense of uneasiness while the address was
sought for. The process lasted long enough for uneasiness to turn
to apprehension; but when at length a slip of paper was handed him,
and he read on it: “Care of Mrs. Norma Hatch, Emporium Hotel,” his
apprehension passed into an incredulous stare, and this into the
gesture of disgust with which he tore the paper in two, and turned
to walk quickly homeward.



Chapter 9



When Lily woke on the morning after her translation to the Emporium
Hotel, her first feeling was one of purely physical satisfaction.
The force of contrast gave an added keenness to the luxury of lying
once more in a soft-pillowed bed, and looking across a spacious
sunlit room at a breakfast-table set invitingly near the fire.
Analysis and introspection might come later; but for the moment
she was not even troubled by the excesses of the upholstery or
the restless convolutions of the furniture. The sense of being
once more lapped and folded in ease, as in some dense mild medium
impenetrable to discomfort, effectually stilled the faintest note
of criticism.

When, the afternoon before, she had presented herself to the lady
to whom Carry Fisher had directed her, she had been conscious of
entering a new world. Carry’s vague presentment of Mrs. Norma
Hatch (whose reversion to her Christian name was explained as
the result of her latest divorce), left her under the implication
of coming “from the West,” with the not unusual extenuation of
having brought a great deal of money with her. She was, in short,
rich, helpless, unplaced: the very subject for Lily’s hand. Mrs.
Fisher had not specified the line her friend was to take; she
owned herself unacquainted with Mrs. Hatch, whom she “knew about”
through Melville Stancy, a lawyer in his leisure moments, and the
Falstaff of a certain section of festive club life. Socially, Mr.
Stancy might have been said to form a connecting link between the
Gormer world and the more dimly-lit region on which Miss Bart
now found herself entering. It was, however, only figuratively
that the illumination of Mrs. Hatch’s world could be described as
dim: in actual fact, Lily found her seated in a blaze of electric
light, impartially projected from various ornamental excrescences
on a vast concavity of pink damask and gilding, from which she
rose like Venus from her shell. The analogy was justified by the
appearance of the lady, whose large-eyed prettiness had the fixity
of something impaled and shown under glass. This did not preclude
the immediate discovery that she was some years younger than her
visitor, and that under her showiness, her ease, the aggression of
her dress and voice, there persisted that ineradicable innocence
which, in ladies of her nationality, so curiously coexists with
startling extremes of experience.

The environment in which Lily found herself was as strange to her
as its inhabitants. She was unacquainted with the world of the
fashionable New York hotel—a world over-heated, over-upholstered,
and over-fitted with mechanical appliances for the gratification
of fantastic requirements, while the comforts of a civilized life
were as unattainable as in a desert. Through this atmosphere of
torrid splendour moved wan beings as richly upholstered as the
furniture, beings without definite pursuits or permanent relations,
who drifted on a languid tide of curiosity from restaurant to
concert-hall, from palm-garden to music-room, from “art exhibit” to
dress-maker’s opening. High-stepping horses or elaborately equipped
motors waited to carry these ladies into vague metropolitan
distances, whence they returned, still more wan from the weight of
their sables, to be sucked back into the stifling inertia of the
hotel routine. Somewhere behind them, in the background of their
lives, there was doubtless a real past, peopled by real human
activities: they themselves were probably the product of strong
ambitions, persistent energies, diversified contacts with the
wholesome roughness of life; yet they had no more real existence
than the poet’s shades in limbo.

Lily had not been long in this pallid world without discovering
that Mrs. Hatch was its most substantial figure. That lady, though
still floating in the void, showed faint symptoms of developing
an outline; and in this endeavour she was actively seconded by
Mr. Melville Stancy. It was Mr. Stancy, a man of large resounding
presence, suggestive of convivial occasions and of a chivalry
finding expression in “first-night” boxes and thousand dollar
bonbonnieres, who had transplanted Mrs. Hatch from the scene of
her first development to the higher stage of hotel life in the
metropolis. It was he who had selected the horses with which she
had taken the blue ribbon at the Show, had introduced her to the
photographer whose portraits of her formed the recurring ornament
of “Sunday Supplements,” and had got together the group which
constituted her social world. It was a small group still, with het-
erogeneous figures suspended in large unpeopled spaces; but Lily
did not take long to learn that its regulation was no longer in Mr.
Stancy’s hands. As often happens, the pupil had outstripped the
teacher, and Mrs. Hatch was already aware of heights of elegance
as well as depths of luxury beyond the world of the Emporium. This
discovery at once produced in her a craving for higher guidance,
for the adroit feminine hand which should give the right turn
to her correspondence, the right “look” to her hats, the right
succession to the items of her MENUS. It was, in short, as the
regulator of a germinating social life that Miss Bart’s guidance
was required; her ostensible duties as secretary being restricted
by the fact that Mrs. Hatch, as yet, knew hardly any one to write
to.

The daily details of Mrs. Hatch’s existence were as strange to
Lily as its general tenor. The lady’s habits were marked by an
Oriental indolence and disorder peculiarly trying to her companion.
Mrs. Hatch and her friends seemed to float together outside the
bounds of time and space. No definite hours were kept; no fixed
obligations existed: night and day flowed into one another in a
blur of confused and retarded engagements, so that one had the
impression of lunching at the tea-hour, while dinner was often
merged in the noisy after-theatre supper which prolonged Mrs.
Hatch’s vigil till daylight.

Through this jumble of futile activities came and went a strange
throng of hangers-on—manicures, beauty-doctors, hair-dressers,
teachers of bridge, of French, of “physical development”: figures
sometimes indistinguishable, by their appearance, or by Mrs.
Hatch’s relation to them, from the visitors constituting her
recognized society. But strangest of all to Lily was the encounter,
in this latter group, of several of her acquaintances. She had
supposed, and not without relief, that she was passing, for the
moment, completely out of her own circle; but she found that Mr.
Stancy, one side of whose sprawling existence overlapped the
edge of Mrs. Fisher’s world, had drawn several of its brightest
ornaments into the circle of the Emporium. To find Ned Silverton
among the habitual frequenters of Mrs. Hatch’s drawing-room
was one of Lily’s first astonishments; but she soon discovered
that he was not Mr. Stancy’s most important recruit. It was on
little Freddy Van Osburgh, the small slim heir of the Van Osburgh
millions, that the attention of Mrs. Hatch’s group was centred.
Freddy, barely out of college, had risen above the horizon since
Lily’s eclipse, and she now saw with surprise what an effulgence he
shed on the outer twilight of Mrs. Hatch’s existence. This, then,
was one of the things that young men “went in” for when released
from the official social routine; this was the kind of “previous
engagement” that so frequently caused them to disappoint the hopes
of anxious hostesses. Lily had an odd sense of being behind the
social tapestry, on the side where the threads were knotted and
the loose ends hung. For a moment she found a certain amusement
in the show, and in her own share of it: the situation had an ease
and unconventionality distinctly refreshing after her experience
of the irony of conventions. But these flashes of amusement were
but brief reactions from the long disgust of her days. Compared
with the vast gilded void of Mrs. Hatch’s existence, the life of
Lily’s former friends seemed packed with ordered activities. Even
the most irresponsible pretty woman of her acquaintance had her
inherited obligations, her conventional benevolences, her share in
the working of the great civic machine; and all hung together in
the solidarity of these traditional functions. The performance of
specific duties would have simplified Miss Bart’s position; but the
vague attendance on Mrs. Hatch was not without its perplexities.

It was not her employer who created these perplexities. Mrs.
Hatch showed from the first an almost touching desire for Lily’s
approval. Far from asserting the superiority of wealth, her beau-
tiful eyes seemed to urge the plea of inexperience: she wanted
to do what was “nice,” to be taught how to be “lovely.” The
difficulty was to find any point of contact between her ideals and
Lily’s.

Mrs. Hatch swam in a haze of indeterminate enthusiasms, of
aspirations culled from the stage, the newspapers, the fashion
journals, and a gaudy world of sport still more completely beyond
her companion’s ken. To separate from these confused conceptions
those most likely to advance the lady on her way, was Lily’s
obvious duty; but its performance was hampered by rapidly-growing
doubts. Lily was in fact becoming more and more aware of a certain
ambiguity in her situation. It was not that she had, in the
conventional sense, any doubt of Mrs. Hatch’s irreproachableness.
The lady’s offences were always against taste rather than conduct;
her divorce record seemed due to geographical rather than ethical
conditions; and her worst laxities were likely to proceed from
a wandering and extravagant good-nature. But if Lily did not
mind her detaining her manicure for luncheon, or offering the
“Beauty-Doctor” a seat in Freddy Van Osburgh’s box at the play,
she was not equally at ease in regard to some less apparent lapses
from convention. Ned Silverton’s relation to Stancy seemed, for
instance, closer and less clear than any natural affinities would
warrant; and both appeared united in the effort to cultivate Freddy
Van Osburgh’s growing taste for Mrs. Hatch. There was as yet
nothing definable in the situation, which might well resolve itself
into a huge joke on the part of the other two; but Lily had a vague
sense that the subject of their experiment was too young, too rich
and too credulous. Her embarrassment was increased by the fact that
Freddy seemed to regard her as cooperating with himself in the
social development of Mrs. Hatch: a view that suggested, on his
part, a permanent interest in the lady’s future. There were moments
when Lily found an ironic amusement in this aspect of the case. The
thought of launching such a missile as Mrs. Hatch at the perfidious
bosom of society was not without its charm: Miss Bart had even
beguiled her leisure with visions of the fair Norma introduced for
the first time to a family banquet at the Van Osburghs’. But the
thought of being personally connected with the transaction was less
agreeable; and her momentary flashes of amusement were followed by
increasing periods of doubt.

The sense of these doubts was uppermost when, late one afternoon,
she was surprised by a visit from Lawrence Selden. He found her
alone in the wilderness of pink damask, for in Mrs. Hatch’s world
the tea-hour was not dedicated to social rites, and the lady was in
the hands of her masseuse.

Selden’s entrance had caused Lily an inward start of embarrass-
ment; but his air of constraint had the effect of restoring her
self-possession, and she took at once the tone of surprise and
pleasure, wondering frankly that he should have traced her to so
unlikely a place, and asking what had inspired him to make the
search.

Selden met this with an unusual seriousness: she had never seen
him so little master of the situation, so plainly at the mercy of any
obstructions she might put in his way. “I wanted to see you,” he
said; and she could not resist observing in reply that he had kept
his wishes under remarkable control. She had in truth felt his long
absence as one of the chief bitternesses of the last months: his
desertion had wounded sensibilities far below the surface of her
pride.

Selden met the challenge with directness. “Why should I have come,
unless I thought I could be of use to you? It is my only excuse for
imagining you could want me.”

This struck her as a clumsy evasion, and the thought gave a flash
of keenness to her answer. “Then you have come now because you
think you can be of use to me?”

He hesitated again. “Yes: in the modest capacity of a person to
talk things over with.”

For a clever man it was certainly a stupid beginning; and the
idea that his awkwardness was due to the fear of her attaching a
personal significance to his visit, chilled her pleasure in seeing
him. Even under the most adverse conditions, that pleasure always
made itself felt: she might hate him, but she had never been able
to wish him out of the room. She was very near hating him now;
yet the sound of his voice, the way the light fell on his thin
dark hair, the way he sat and moved and wore his clothes—she was
conscious that even these trivial things were inwoven with her
deepest life. In his presence a sudden stillness came upon her, and
the turmoil of her spirit ceased; but an impulse of resistance to
this stealing influence now prompted her to say: “It’s very good of
you to present yourself in that capacity; but what makes you think
I have anything particular to talk about?”

Though she kept the even tone of light intercourse, the question
was framed in a way to remind him that his good offices were
unsought; and for a moment Selden was checked by it. The situation
between them was one which could have been cleared up only by a
sudden explosion of feeling; and their whole training and habit
of mind were against the chances of such an explosion. Selden’s
calmness seemed rather to harden into resistance, and Miss Bart’s
into a surface of glittering irony, as they faced each other from
the opposite corners of one of Mrs. Hatch’s elephantine sofas. The
sofa in question, and the apartment peopled by its monstrous mates,
served at length to suggest the turn of Selden’s reply.

“Gerty told me that you were acting as Mrs. Hatch’s secretary; and
I knew she was anxious to hear how you were getting on.”

Miss Bart received this explanation without perceptible softening.
“Why didn’t she look me up herself, then?” she asked.

“Because, as you didn’t send her your address, she was afraid of
being importunate.” Selden continued with a smile: “You see no such
scruples restrained me; but then I haven’t as much to risk if I
incur your displeasure.”

Lily answered his smile. “You haven’t incurred it as yet; but I
have an idea that you are going to.”

“That rests with you, doesn’t it? You see my initiative doesn’t go
beyond putting myself at your disposal.”

“But in what capacity? What am I to do with you?” she asked in the
same light tone.

Selden again glanced about Mrs. Hatch’s drawing-room; then he said,
with a decision which he seemed to have gathered from this final
inspection: “You are to let me take you away from here.”

Lily flushed at the suddenness of the attack; then she stiffened
under it and said coldly: “And may I ask where you mean me to go?”

“Back to Gerty in the first place, if you will; the essential thing
is that it should be away from here.”

The unusual harshness of his tone might have shown her how much
the words cost him; but she was in no state to measure his feelings
while her own were in a flame of revolt. To neglect her, perhaps
even to avoid her, at a time when she had most need of her friends,
and then suddenly and unwarrantably to break into her life with
this strange assumption of authority, was to rouse in her every
instinct of pride and self-defence.

“I am very much obliged to you,” she said, “for taking such an
interest in my plans; but I am quite contented where I am, and have
no intention of leaving.”

Selden had risen, and was standing before her in an attitude of
uncontrollable expectancy.

“That simply means that you don’t know where you are!” he exclaimed.

Lily rose also, with a quick flash of anger. “If you have come here
to say disagreeable things about Mrs. Hatch——”

“It is only with your relation to Mrs. Hatch that I am concerned.”

“My relation to Mrs. Hatch is one I have no reason to be ashamed
of. She has helped me to earn a living when my old friends were
quite resigned to seeing me starve.”

“Nonsense! Starvation is not the only alternative. You know you can
always find a home with Gerty till you are independent again.”

“You show such an intimate acquaintance with my affairs that I
suppose you mean—till my aunt’s legacy is paid?”

“I do mean that; Gerty told me of it,” Selden acknowledged without
embarrassment. He was too much in earnest now to feel any false
constraint in speaking his mind.

“But Gerty does not happen to know,” Miss Bart rejoined, “that I
owe every penny of that legacy.”

“Good God!” Selden exclaimed, startled out of his composure by the
abruptness of the statement.

“Every penny of it, and more too,” Lily repeated; “and you now
perhaps see why I prefer to remain with Mrs. Hatch rather than take
advantage of Gerty’s kindness. I have no money left, except my
small income, and I must earn something more to keep myself alive.”

Selden hesitated a moment; then he rejoined in a quieter tone:
“But with your income and Gerty’s—since you allow me to go so
far into the details of the situation—you and she could surely
contrive a life together which would put you beyond the need of
having to support yourself. Gerty, I know, is eager to make such an
arrangement, and would be quite happy in it——”

“But I should not,” Miss Bart interposed. “There are many reasons
why it would be neither kind to Gerty nor wise for myself.” She
paused a moment, and as he seemed to await a farther explanation,
added with a quick lift of her head: “You will perhaps excuse me
from giving you these reasons.”

“I have no claim to know them,” Selden answered, ignoring her tone;
“no claim to offer any comment or suggestion beyond the one I have
already made. And my right to make that is simply the universal
right of a man to enlighten a woman when he sees her unconsciously
placed in a false position.”

Lily smiled. “I suppose,” she rejoined, “that by a false position
you mean one outside of what we call society; but you must remember
that I had been excluded from those sacred precincts long before
I met Mrs. Hatch. As far as I can see, there is very little real
difference in being inside or out, and I remember your once telling
me that it was only those inside who took the difference seriously.”

She had not been without intention in making this allusion to their
memorable talk at Bellomont, and she waited with an odd tremor of
the nerves to see what response it would bring; but the result of
the experiment was disappointing. Selden did not allow the allusion
to deflect him from his point; he merely said with completer
fulness of emphasis: “The question of being inside or out is, as
you say, a small one, and it happens to have nothing to do with the
case, except in so far as Mrs. Hatch’s desire to be inside may put
you in the position I call false.”

In spite of the moderation of his tone, each word he spoke had the
effect of confirming Lily’s resistance. The very apprehensions he
aroused hardened her against him: she had been on the alert for the
note of personal sympathy, for any sign of recovered power over
him; and his attitude of sober impartiality, the absence of all
response to her appeal, turned her hurt pride to blind resentment
of his interference. The conviction that he had been sent by Gerty,
and that, whatever straits he conceived her to be in, he would
never voluntarily have come to her aid, strengthened her resolve
not to admit him a hair’s breadth farther into her confidence.
However doubtful she might feel her situation to be, she would
rather persist in darkness than owe her enlightenment to Selden.

“I don’t know,” she said, when he had ceased to speak, “why you
imagine me to be situated as you describe; but as you have always
told me that the sole object of a bringing-up like mine was to
teach a girl to get what she wants, why not assume that that is
precisely what I am doing?”

The smile with which she summed up her case was like a clear
barrier raised against farther confidences: its brightness held
him at such a distance that he had a sense of being almost out of
hearing as he rejoined: “I am not sure that I have ever called you
a successful example of that kind of bringing-up.”

Her colour rose a little at the implication, but she steeled
herself with a light laugh. “Ah, wait a little longer—give me a
little more time before you decide!” And as he wavered before her,
still watching for a break in the impenetrable front she presented:
“Don’t give me up; I may still do credit to my training!” she
affirmed.



Chapter 10



“Look at those spangles, Miss Bart—every one of ’em sewed on
crooked.”

The tall forewoman, a pinched perpendicular figure, dropped the
condemned structure of wire and net on the table at Lily’s side,
and passed on to the next figure in the line.

There were twenty of them in the work-room, their fagged profiles,
under exaggerated hair, bowed in the harsh north light above
the utensils of their art; for it was something more than an
industry, surely, this creation of ever-varied settings for the
face of fortunate womanhood. Their own faces were sallow with the
unwholesomeness of hot air and sedentary toil, rather than with any
actual signs of want: they were employed in a fashionable millinery
establishment, and were fairly well clothed and well paid; but the
youngest among them was as dull and colourless as the middle-aged.
In the whole work-room there was only one skin beneath which the
blood still visibly played; and that now burned with vexation as
Miss Bart, under the lash of the forewoman’s comment, began to
strip the hat-frame of its over-lapping spangles.

To Gerty Farish’s hopeful spirit a solution appeared to have been
reached when she remembered how beautifully Lily could trim hats.
Instances of young lady-milliners establishing themselves under
fashionable patronage, and imparting to their “creations” that
indefinable touch which the professional hand can never give, had
flattered Gerty’s visions of the future, and convinced even Lily
that her separation from Mrs. Norma Hatch need not reduce her to
dependence on her friends.

The parting had occurred a few weeks after Selden’s visit, and
would have taken place sooner had it not been for the resistance
set up in Lily by his ill-starred offer of advice. The sense of
being involved in a transaction she would not have cared to examine
too closely had soon afterward defined itself in the light of a
hint from Mr. Stancy that, if she “saw them through,” she would
have no reason to be sorry. The implication that such loyalty would
meet with a direct reward had hastened her flight, and flung her
back, ashamed and penitent, on the broad bosom of Gerty’s sympathy.
She did not, however, propose to lie there prone, and Gerty’s
inspiration about the hats at once revived her hopes of profitable
activity. Here was, after all, something that her charming listless
hands could really do; she had no doubt of their capacity for
knotting a ribbon or placing a flower to advantage. And of course
only these finishing touches would be expected of her: subordinate
fingers, blunt, grey, needle-pricked fingers, would prepare the
shapes and stitch the linings, while she presided over the charming
little front shop—a shop all white panels, mirrors, and moss-green
hangings—where her finished creations, hats, wreaths, aigrettes
and the rest, perched on their stands like birds just poising for
flight.

But at the very outset of Gerty’s campaign this vision of the
green-and-white shop had been dispelled. Other young ladies of
fashion had been thus “set up,” selling their hats by the mere
attraction of a name and the reputed knack of tying a bow; but
these privileged beings could command a faith in their powers
materially expressed by the readiness to pay their shop-rent and
advance a handsome sum for current expenses. Where was Lily to
find such support? And even could it have been found, how were
the ladies on whose approval she depended to be induced to give
her their patronage? Gerty learned that whatever sympathy her
friend’s case might have excited a few months since had been
imperilled, if not lost, by her association with Mrs. Hatch. Once
again, Lily had withdrawn from an ambiguous situation in time to
save her self-respect, but too late for public vindication. Freddy
Van Osburgh was not to marry Mrs. Hatch; he had been rescued at
the eleventh hour—some said by the efforts of Gus Trenor and
Rosedale—and despatched to Europe with old Ned Van Alstyne; but the
risk he had run would always be ascribed to Miss Bart’s connivance,
and would somehow serve as a summing-up and corroboration of the
vague general distrust of her. It was a relief to those who had
hung back from her to find themselves thus justified, and they were
inclined to insist a little on her connection with the Hatch case
in order to show that they had been right.

Gerty’s quest, at any rate, brought up against a solid wall of
resistance; and even when Carry Fisher, momentarily penitent
for her share in the Hatch affair, joined her efforts to Miss
Farish’s, they met with no better success. Gerty had tried to veil
her failure in tender ambiguities; but Carry, always the soul of
candour, put the case squarely to her friend.

“I went straight to Judy Trenor; she has fewer prejudices than the
others, and besides she’s always hated Bertha Dorset. But what HAVE
you done to her, Lily? At the very first word about giving you a
start she flamed out about some money you’d got from Gus; I never
knew her so hot before. You know she’ll let him do anything but
spend money on his friends: the only reason she’s decent to me now
is that she knows I’m not hard up.—He speculated for you, you say?
Well, what’s the harm? He had no business to lose. He DIDN’T lose?
Then what on earth—but I never COULD understand you, Lily!”

The end of it was that, after anxious enquiry and much
deliberation, Mrs. Fisher and Gerty, for once oddly united in
their effort to help their friend, decided on placing her in the
work-room of Mme. Regina’s renowned millinery establishment.
Even this arrangement was not effected without considerable
negotiation, for Mme. Regina had a strong prejudice against untrain-
ed assistance, and was induced to yield only by the fact that she
owed the patronage of Mrs. Bry and Mrs. Gormer to Carry Fisher’s
influence. She had been willing from the first to employ Lily in
the show-room: as a displayer of hats, a fashionable beauty might
be a valuable asset. But to this suggestion Miss Bart opposed a
negative which Gerty emphatically supported, while Mrs. Fisher,
inwardly unconvinced, but resigned to this latest proof of Lily’s
unreason, agreed that perhaps in the end it would be more useful
that she should learn the trade. To Regina’s work-room Lily was
therefore committed by her friends, and there Mrs. Fisher left her
with a sigh of relief, while Gerty’s watchfulness continued to
hover over her at a distance.

Lily had taken up her work early in January: it was now two months
later, and she was still being rebuked for her inability to sew
spangles on a hat-frame. As she returned to her work she heard
a titter pass down the tables. She knew she was an object of
criticism and amusement to the other work-women. They were, of
course, aware of her history—the exact situation of every girl
in the room was known and freely discussed by all the others—but
the knowledge did not produce in them any awkward sense of class
distinction: it merely explained why her untutored fingers were
still blundering over the rudiments of the trade. Lily had no
desire that they should recognize any social difference in her; but
she had hoped to be received as their equal, and perhaps before
long to show herself their superior by a special deftness of touch,
and it was humiliating to find that, after two months of drudgery,
she still betrayed her lack of early training. Remote was the day
when she might aspire to exercise the talents she felt confident
of possessing; only experienced workers were entrusted with the
delicate art of shaping and trimming the hat, and the forewoman
still held her inexorably to the routine of preparatory work.

She began to rip the spangles from the frame, listening absently to
the buzz of talk which rose and fell with the coming and going of
Miss Haines’s active figure. The air was closer than usual, because
Miss Haines, who had a cold, had not allowed a window to be opened
even during the noon recess; and Lily’s head was so heavy with the
weight of a sleepless night that the chatter of her companions had
the incoherence of a dream.

“I TOLD her he’d never look at her again; and he didn’t. I wouldn’t
have, either—I think she acted real mean to him. He took her to
the Arion Ball, and had a hack for her both ways.... She’s taken
ten bottles, and her headaches don’t seem no better—but she’s
written a testimonial to say the first bottle cured her, and she
got five dollars and her picture in the paper.... Mrs. Trenor’s
hat? The one with the green Paradise? Here, Miss Haines—it’ll be
ready right off.... That was one of the Trenor girls here yesterday
with Mrs. George Dorset. How’d I know? Why, Madam sent for me to
alter the flower in that Virot hat—the blue tulle: she’s tall and
slight, with her hair fuzzed out—a good deal like Mamie Leach, on’y
thinner....”

On and on it flowed, a current of meaningless sound, on which,
startlingly enough, a familiar name now and then floated to the
surface. It was the strangest part of Lily’s strange experience,
the hearing of these names, the seeing the fragmentary and
distorted image of the world she had lived in reflected in the
mirror of the working-girls’ minds. She had never before suspected
the mixture of insatiable curiosity and contemptuous freedom with
which she and her kind were discussed in this underworld of toilers
who lived on their vanity and self-indulgence. Every girl in Mme.
Regina’s work-room knew to whom the headgear in her hands was
destined, and had her opinion of its future wearer, and a definite
knowledge of the latter’s place in the social system. That Lily
was a star fallen from that sky did not, after the first stir of
curiosity had subsided, materially add to their interest in her.
She had fallen, she had “gone under,” and true to the ideal of
their race, they were awed only by success—by the gross tangible
image of material achievement. The consciousness of her different
point of view merely kept them at a little distance from her, as
though she were a foreigner with whom it was an effort to talk.

“Miss Bart, if you can’t sew those spangles on more regular I guess
you’d better give the hat to Miss Kilroy.”

Lily looked down ruefully at her handiwork. The forewoman was
right: the sewing on of the spangles was inexcusably bad. What
made her so much more clumsy than usual? Was it a growing dis-
taste for her task, or actual physical disability? She felt tired and
confused: it was an effort to put her thoughts together. She rose
and handed the hat to Miss Kilroy, who took it with a suppressed
smile.

“I’m sorry; I’m afraid I am not well,” she said to the forewoman.

Miss Haines offered no comment. From the first she had augured ill
of Mme. Regina’s consenting to include a fashionable apprentice
among her workers. In that temple of art no raw beginners were
wanted, and Miss Haines would have been more than human had she
not taken a certain pleasure in seeing her forebodings confirmed.

“You’d better go back to binding edges,” she said drily. Lily
slipped out last among the band of liberated work-women. She
did not care to be mingled in their noisy dispersal: once in
the street, she always felt an irresistible return to her old
standpoint, an instinctive shrinking from all that was unpolished
and promiscuous. In the days—how distant they now seemed!—when
she had visited the Girls’ Club with Gerty Farish, she had felt an
enlightened interest in the working-classes; but that was because
she looked down on them from above, from the happy altitude of her
grace and her beneficence. Now that she was on a level with them,
the point of view was less interesting.

She felt a touch on her arm, and met the penitent eye of Miss
Kilroy. “Miss Bart, I guess you can sew those spangles on as well
as I can when you’re feeling right. Miss Haines didn’t act fair to
you.”

Lily’s colour rose at the unexpected advance: it was a long time
since real kindness had looked at her from any eyes but Gerty’s.

“Oh, thank you: I’m not particularly well, but Miss Haines was
right. I AM clumsy.”

“Well, it’s mean work for anybody with a headache.” Miss Kilroy
paused irresolutely. “You ought to go right home and lay down. Ever
try orangeine?”

“Thank you.” Lily held out her hand. “It’s very kind of you—I mean
to go home.”

She looked gratefully at Miss Kilroy, but neither knew what more
to say. Lily was aware that the other was on the point of offering
to go home with her, but she wanted to be alone and silent—even
kindness, the sort of kindness that Miss Kilroy could give, would
have jarred on her just then.

“Thank you,” she repeated as she turned away.

She struck westward through the dreary March twilight, toward
the street where her boarding-house stood. She had resolutely
refused Gerty’s offer of hospitality. Something of her mother’s
fierce shrinking from observation and sympathy was beginning to
develop in her, and the promiscuity of small quarters and close
intimacy seemed, on the whole, less endurable than the solitude of
a hall bedroom in a house where she could come and go unremarked
among other workers. For a while she had been sustained by this
desire for privacy and independence; but now, perhaps from
increasing physical weariness, the lassitude brought about by
hours of unwonted confinement, she was beginning to feel acutely
the ugliness and discomfort of her surroundings. The day’s task
done, she dreaded to return to her narrow room, with its blotched
wall-paper and shabby paint; and she hated every step of the walk
thither, through the degradation of a New York street in the last
stages of decline from fashion to commerce.

But what she dreaded most of all was having to pass the chemist’s
at the corner of Sixth Avenue. She had meant to take another
street: she had usually done so of late. But today her steps were
irresistibly drawn toward the flaring plate-glass corner; she tried
to take the lower crossing, but a laden dray crowded her back, and
she struck across the street obliquely, reaching the sidewalk just
opposite the chemist’s door.

Over the counter she caught the eye of the clerk who had waited
on her before, and slipped the prescription into his hand. There
could be no question about the prescription: it was a copy of one
of Mrs. Hatch’s, obligingly furnished by that lady’s chemist. Lily
was confident that the clerk would fill it without hesitation;
yet the nervous dread of a refusal, or even of an expression of
doubt, communicated itself to her restless hands as she affected to
examine the bottles of perfume stacked on the glass case before her.

The clerk had read the prescription without comment; but in the act
of handing out the bottle he paused.

“You don’t want to increase the dose, you know,” he remarked.
Lily’s heart contracted.

What did he mean by looking at her in that way?

“Of course not,” she murmured, holding out her hand.

“That’s all right: it’s a queer-acting drug. A drop or two more,
and off you go—the doctors don’t know why.”

The dread lest he should question her, or keep the bottle back,
choked the murmur of acquiescence in her throat; and when at length
she emerged safely from the shop she was almost dizzy with the
intensity of her relief. The mere touch of the packet thrilled her
tired nerves with the delicious promise of a night of sleep, and in
the reaction from her momentary fear she felt as if the first fumes
of drowsiness were already stealing over her.

In her confusion she stumbled against a man who was hurrying down
the last steps of the elevated station. He drew back, and she heard
her name uttered with surprise. It was Rosedale, fur-coated, glossy
and prosperous—but why did she seem to see him so far off, and as
if through a mist of splintered crystals? Before she could account
for the phenomenon she found herself shaking hands with him. They
had parted with scorn on her side and anger upon his; but all trace
of these emotions seemed to vanish as their hands met, and she was
only aware of a confused wish that she might continue to hold fast
to him.

“Why, what’s the matter, Miss Lily? You’re not well!” he exclaimed;
and she forced her lips into a pallid smile of reassurance.

“I’m a little tired—it’s nothing. Stay with me a moment, please,”
she faltered. That she should be asking this service of Rosedale!

He glanced at the dirty and unpropitious corner on which they
stood, with the shriek of the “elevated” and the tumult of trams
and waggons contending hideously in their ears.

“We can’t stay here; but let me take you somewhere for a cup of
tea. The LONGWORTH is only a few yards off, and there’ll be no one
there at this hour.”

A cup of tea in quiet, somewhere out of the noise and ugliness,
seemed for the moment the one solace she could bear. A few steps
brought them to the ladies’ door of the hotel he had named, and
a moment later he was seated opposite to her, and the waiter had
placed the tea-tray between them.

“Not a drop of brandy or whiskey first? You look regularly done up,
Miss Lily. Well, take your tea strong, then; and, waiter, get a
cushion for the lady’s back.”

Lily smiled faintly at the injunction to take her tea strong.
It was the temptation she was always struggling to resist. Her
craving for the keen stimulant was forever conflicting with that
other craving for sleep—the midnight craving which only the little
phial in her hand could still. But today, at any rate, the tea
could hardly be too strong: she counted on it to pour warmth and
resolution into her empty veins.

As she leaned back before him, her lids drooping in utter
lassitude, though the first warm draught already tinged her face
with returning life, Rosedale was seized afresh by the poignant
surprise of her beauty. The dark pencilling of fatigue under her
eyes, the morbid blue-veined pallor of the temples, brought out the
brightness of her hair and lips, as though all her ebbing vitality
were centred there. Against the dull chocolate-coloured background
of the restaurant, the purity of her head stood out as it had
never done in the most brightly lit ball-room. He looked at her
with a startled uncomfortable feeling, as though her beauty were a
forgotten enemy that had lain in ambush and now sprang out on him
unawares.

To clear the air he tried to take an easy tone with her. “Why, Miss
Lily, I haven’t seen you for an age. I didn’t know what had become
of you.”

As he spoke, he was checked by an embarrassing sense of the
complications to which this might lead. Though he had not seen her
he had heard of her; he knew of her connection with Mrs. Hatch, and
of the talk resulting from it. Mrs. Hatch’s MILIEU was one which he
had once assiduously frequented, and now as devoutly shunned.

Lily, to whom the tea had restored her usual clearness of mind, saw
what was in his thoughts and said with a slight smile: “You would
not be likely to know about me. I have joined the working-classes.”

He stared in genuine wonder. “You don’t mean—? Why, what on earth
are you doing?”

“Learning to be a milliner—at least TRYING to learn,” she hastily
qualified the statement.

Rosedale suppressed a low whistle of surprise. “Come off—you ain’t
serious, are you?”

“Perfectly serious. I’m obliged to work for my living.”

“But I understood—I thought you were with Norma Hatch.”

“You heard I had gone to her as her secretary?”

“Something of the kind, I believe.” He leaned forward to refill her
cup.

Lily guessed the possibilities of embarrassment which the topic
held for him, and raising her eyes to his, she said suddenly: “I
left her two months ago.”

Rosedale continued to fumble awkwardly with the tea-pot, and she
felt sure that he had heard what had been said of her. But what was
there that Rosedale did not hear?

“Wasn’t it a soft berth?” he enquired, with an attempt at lightness.

“Too soft—one might have sunk in too deep.” Lily rested one arm on
the edge of the table, and sat looking at him more intently than
she had ever looked before. An uncontrollable impulse was urging
her to put her case to this man, from whose curiosity she had
always so fiercely defended herself.

“You know Mrs. Hatch, I think? Well, perhaps you can understand
that she might make things too easy for one.”

Rosedale looked faintly puzzled, and she remembered that
allusiveness was lost on him.

“It was no place for you, anyhow,” he agreed, so suffused and
immersed in the light of her full gaze that he found himself being
drawn into strange depths of intimacy. He who had had to subsist
on mere fugitive glances, looks winged in flight and swiftly lost
under covert, now found her eyes settling on him with a brooding
intensity that fairly dazzled him.

“I left,” Lily continued, “lest people should say I was helping
Mrs. Hatch to marry Freddy Van Osburgh—who is not in the least too
good for her—and as they still continue to say it, I see that I
might as well have stayed where I was.”

“Oh, Freddy——” Rosedale brushed aside the topic with an air of its
unimportance which gave a sense of the immense perspective he had
acquired. “Freddy don’t count—but I knew YOU weren’t mixed up in
that. It ain’t your style.”

Lily coloured slightly: she could not conceal from herself that
the words gave her pleasure. She would have liked to sit there,
drinking more tea, and continuing to talk of herself to Rosedale.
But the old habit of observing the conventions reminded her that it
was time to bring their colloquy to an end, and she made a faint
motion to push back her chair.

Rosedale stopped her with a protesting gesture. “Wait a
minute—don’t go yet; sit quiet and rest a little longer. You look
thoroughly played out. And you haven’t told me——” He broke off,
conscious of going farther than he had meant. She saw the struggle
and understood it; understood also the nature of the spell to which
he yielded as, with his eyes on her face, he began again abruptly:
“What on earth did you mean by saying just now that you were
learning to be a milliner?”

“Just what I said. I am an apprentice at Regina’s.”

“Good Lord—YOU? But what for? I knew your aunt had turned you down:
Mrs. Fisher told me about it. But I understood you got a legacy
from her——”

“I got ten thousand dollars; but the legacy is not to be paid till
next summer.”

“Well, but—look here: you could BORROW on it any time you wanted.”

She shook her head gravely. “No; for I owe it already.”

“Owe it? The whole ten thousand?”

“Every penny.” She paused, and then continued abruptly, with her
eyes on his face: “I think Gus Trenor spoke to you once about
having made some money for me in stocks.”

She waited, and Rosedale, congested with embarrassment, muttered
that he remembered something of the kind.

“He made about nine thousand dollars,” Lily pursued, in the same
tone of eager communicativeness. “At the time, I understood that
he was speculating with my own money: it was incredibly stupid of
me, but I knew nothing of business. Afterward I found out that he
had NOT used my money—that what he said he had made for me he
had　really given me. It was meant in kindness, of course; but it was
not the sort of obligation one could remain under. Unfortunately
I had spent the money before I discovered my mistake; and so my
legacy will have to go to pay it back. That is the reason why I am
trying to learn a trade.”

She made the statement clearly, deliberately, with pauses between
the sentences, so that each should have time to sink deeply into
her hearer’s mind. She had a passionate desire that some one
should know the truth about this transaction, and also that the
rumour of her intention to repay the money should reach Judy
Trenor’s ears. And it had suddenly occurred to her that Rosedale,
who had surprised Trenor’s confidence, was the fitting person to
receive and transmit her version of the facts. She had even felt
a momentary exhilaration at the thought of thus relieving herself
of her detested secret; but the sensation gradually faded in the
telling, and as she ended her pallor was suffused with a deep blush
of misery.

Rosedale continued to stare at her in wonder; but the wonder took
the turn she had least expected.

“But see here—if that’s the case, it cleans you out altogether?”

He put it to her as if she had not grasped the consequences of her
act; as if her incorrigible ignorance of business were about to
precipitate her into a fresh act of folly.

“Altogether—yes,” she calmly agreed.

He sat silent, his thick hands clasped on the table, his little
puzzled eyes exploring the recesses of the deserted restaurant.

“See here—that’s fine,” he exclaimed abruptly.

Lily rose from her seat with a deprecating laugh. “Oh, no—it’s
merely a bore,” she asserted, gathering together the ends of her
feather scarf.

Rosedale remained seated, too intent on his thoughts to notice her
movement. “Miss Lily, if you want any backing—I like pluck——” broke
from him disconnectedly.

“Thank you.” She held out her hand. “Your tea has given me a
tremendous backing. I feel equal to anything now.”

Her gesture seemed to show a definite intention of dismissal, but
her companion had tossed a bill to the waiter, and was slipping his
short arms into his expensive overcoat.

“Wait a minute—you’ve got to let me walk home with you,” he said.

Lily uttered no protest, and when he had paused to make sure of
his change they emerged from the hotel and crossed Sixth Avenue
again. As she led the way westward past a long line of areas which,
through the distortion of their paintless rails, revealed with
increasing candour the DISJECTA MEMBRA of bygone dinners, Lily felt
that Rosedale was taking contemptuous note of the neighbourhood;
and before the doorstep at which she finally paused he looked up
with an air of incredulous disgust.

“This isn’t the place? Some one told me you were living with Miss
Farish.”

“No: I am boarding here. I have lived too long on my friends.”

He continued to scan the blistered brown stone front, the windows
draped with discoloured lace, and the Pompeian decoration of the
muddy vestibule; then he looked back at her face and said with a
visible effort: “You’ll let me come and see you some day?”

She smiled, recognizing the heroism of the offer to the point of
being frankly touched by it. “Thank you—I shall be very glad,” she
made answer, in the first sincere words she had ever spoken to him.

* * * * *

That evening in her own room Miss Bart—who had fled early from
the heavy fumes of the basement dinner-table—sat musing upon the
impulse which had led her to unbosom herself to Rosedale. Beneath
it she discovered an increasing sense of loneliness—a dread of
returning to the solitude of her room, while she could be anywhere
else, or in any company but her own. Circumstances, of late, had
combined to cut her off more and more from her few remaining
friends. On Carry Fisher’s part the withdrawal was perhaps not
quite involuntary. Having made her final effort on Lily’s behalf,
and landed her safely in Mme. Regina’s work-room, Mrs. Fisher
seemed disposed to rest from her labours; and Lily, understanding
the reason, could not condemn her. Carry had in fact come
dangerously near to being involved in the episode of Mrs. Norma
Hatch, and it had taken some verbal ingenuity to extricate herself.
She frankly owned to having brought Lily and Mrs. Hatch together,
but then she did not know Mrs. Hatch—she had expressly warned Lily
that she did not know Mrs. Hatch—and besides, she was not Lily’s
keeper, and really the girl was old enough to take care of herself.
Carry did not put her own case so brutally, but she allowed it to
be thus put for her by her latest bosom friend, Mrs. Jack Stepney:
Mrs. Stepney, trembling over the narrowness of her only brother’s
escape, but eager to vindicate Mrs. Fisher, at whose house she
could count on the “jolly parties” which had become a necessity to
her since marriage had emancipated her from the Van Osburgh point
of view.

Lily understood the situation and could make allowances for it.
Carry had been a good friend to her in difficult days, and perhaps
only a friendship like Gerty’s could be proof against such an
increasing strain. Gerty’s friendship did indeed hold fast; yet
Lily was beginning to avoid her also. For she could not go to
Gerty’s without risk of meeting Selden; and to meet him now would
be pure pain. It was pain enough even to think of him, whether she
considered him in the distinctness of her waking thoughts, or felt
the obsession of his presence through the blur of her tormented
nights. That was one of the reasons why she had turned again to
Mrs. Hatch’s prescription. In the uneasy snatches of her natural
dreams he came to her sometimes in the old guise of fellowship and
tenderness; and she would rise from the sweet delusion mocked and
emptied of her courage. But in the sleep which the phial procured
she sank far below such half-waking visitations, sank into depths
of dreamless annihilation from which she woke each morning with an
obliterated past.

Gradually, to be sure, the stress of the old thoughts would return;
but at least they did not importune her waking hour. The drug
gave her a momentary illusion of complete renewal, from which she
drew strength to take up her daily work. The strength was more
and more needed as the perplexities of her future increased. She
knew that to Gerty and Mrs. Fisher she was only passing through
a temporary period of probation, since they believed that the
apprenticeship she was serving at Mme. Regina’s would enable her,
when Mrs. Peniston’s legacy was paid, to realize the vision of the
green-and-white shop with the fuller competence acquired by her
preliminary training. But to Lily herself, aware that the legacy
could not be put to such a use, the preliminary training seemed
a wasted effort. She understood clearly enough that, even if she
could ever learn to compete with hands formed from childhood
for their special work, the small pay she received would not be
a sufficient addition to her income to compensate her for such
drudgery. And the realization of this fact brought her recurringly
face to face with the temptation to use the legacy in establishing
her business. Once installed, and in command of her own work-
women, she believed she had sufficient tact and ability to attract a
fashionable CLIENTELE; and if the business succeeded she could
gradually lay aside money enough to discharge her debt to Trenor.
But the task might take years to accomplish, even if she continued
to stint herself to the utmost; and meanwhile her pride would be
crushed under the weight of an intolerable obligation.

These were her superficial considerations; but under them lurked
the secret dread that the obligation might not always remain
intolerable. She knew she could not count on her continuity of
purpose, and what really frightened her was the thought that she
might gradually accommodate herself to remaining indefinitely
in Trenor’s debt, as she had accommodated herself to the part
allotted her on the Sabrina, and as she had so nearly drifted
into acquiescing with Stancy’s scheme for the advancement of
Mrs. Hatch. Her danger lay, as she knew, in her old incurable dread
of discomfort and poverty; in the fear of that mounting tide of
dinginess against which her mother had so passionately warned her.
And now a new vista of peril opened before her. She understood
that Rosedale was ready to lend her money; and the longing to take
advantage of his offer began to haunt her insidiously. It was of
course impossible to accept a loan from Rosedale; but proximate
possibilities hovered temptingly before her. She was quite sure
that he would come and see her again, and almost sure that, if he
did, she could bring him to the point of offering to marry her on
the terms she had previously rejected. Would she still reject them
if they were offered? More and more, with every fresh mischance
befalling her, did the pursuing furies seem to take the shape of
Bertha Dorset; and close at hand, safely locked among her papers,
lay the means of ending their pursuit. The temptation, which her
scorn of Rosedale had once enabled her to reject, now insistently
returned upon her; and how much strength was left her to oppose it?

What little there was must at any rate be husbanded to the utmost;
she could not trust herself again to the perils of a sleepless
night. Through the long hours of silence the dark spirit of fatigue
and loneliness crouched upon her breast, leaving her so drained
of bodily strength that her morning thoughts swam in a haze of
weakness. The only hope of renewal lay in the little bottle at her
bed-side; and how much longer that hope would last she dared not
conjecture.



Chapter 11



Lily, lingering for a moment on the corner, looked out on the
afternoon spectacle of Fifth Avenue. It was a day in late April,
and the sweetness of spring was in the air. It mitigated the
ugliness of the long crowded thoroughfare, blurred the gaunt
roof-lines, threw a mauve veil over the discouraging perspective of
the side streets, and gave a touch of poetry to the delicate haze
of green that marked the entrance to the Park.

As Lily stood there, she recognized several familiar faces in the
passing carriages. The season was over, and its ruling forces had
disbanded; but a few still lingered, delaying their departure for
Europe, or passing through town on their return from the South.
Among them was Mrs. Van Osburgh, swaying majestically in her
C-spring barouche, with Mrs. Percy Gryce at her side, and the new
heir to the Gryce millions enthroned before them on his nurse’s
knees. They were succeeded by Mrs. Hatch’s electric victoria, in
which that lady reclined in the lonely splendour of a spring toilet
obviously designed for company; and a moment or two later came Judy
Trenor, accompanied by Lady Skiddaw, who had come over for her
annual tarpon fishing and a dip into “the street.”

This fleeting glimpse of her past served to emphasize the sense
of aimlessness with which Lily at length turned toward home. She
had nothing to do for the rest of the day, nor for the days to
come; for the season was over in millinery as well as in society,
and a week earlier Mme. Regina had notified her that her services
were no longer required. Mme. Regina always reduced her staff on
the first of May, and Miss Bart’s attendance had of late been so
irregular—she had so often been unwell, and had done so little work
when she came—that it was only as a favour that her dismissal had
hitherto been deferred.

Lily did not question the justice of the decision. She was
conscious of having been forgetful, awkward and slow to learn. It
was bitter to acknowledge her inferiority even to herself, but the
fact had been brought home to her that as a bread-winner she could
never compete with professional ability. Since she had been brought
up to be ornamental, she could hardly blame herself for failing to
serve any practical purpose; but the discovery put an end to her
consoling sense of universal efficiency.

As she turned homeward her thoughts shrank in anticipation from
the fact that there would be nothing to get up for the next morning.
The luxury of lying late in bed was a pleasure belonging to the
life of ease; it had no part in the utilitarian existence of the
boarding-house. She liked to leave her room early, and to return to
it as late as possible; and she was walking slowly now in order to
postpone the detested approach to her doorstep.

But the doorstep, as she drew near it, acquired a sudden interest
from the fact that it was occupied—and indeed filled—by the
conspicuous figure of Mr. Rosedale, whose presence seemed to take
on an added amplitude from the meanness of his surroundings.

The sight stirred Lily with an irresistible sense of triumph.
Rosedale, a day or two after their chance meeting, had called to
enquire if she had recovered from her indisposition; but since
then she had not seen or heard from him, and his absence seemed
to betoken a struggle to keep away, to let her pass once more out
of his life. If this were the case, his return showed that the
struggle had been unsuccessful, for Lily knew he was not the man to
waste his time in an ineffectual sentimental dalliance. He was too
busy, too practical, and above all too much preoccupied with his
own advancement, to indulge in such unprofitable asides.

In the peacock-blue parlour, with its bunches of dried pampas
grass, and discoloured steel engravings of sentimental episodes,
he looked about him with unconcealed disgust, laying his hat
distrustfully on the dusty console adorned with a Rogers statuette.

Lily sat down on one of the plush and rosewood sofas, and he
deposited himself in a rocking-chair draped with a starched
antimacassar which scraped unpleasantly against the pink fold of
skin above his collar.

“My goodness—you can’t go on living here!” he exclaimed.

Lily smiled at his tone. “I am not sure that I can; but I have gone
over my expenses very carefully, and I rather think I shall be able
to manage it.”

“Be able to manage it? That’s not what I mean—it’s no place for
you!”

“It’s what I mean; for I have been out of work for the last week.”

“Out of work—out of work! What a way for you to talk! The idea
of your having to work—it’s preposterous.” He brought out his
sentences in short violent jerks, as though they were forced up
from a deep inner crater of indignation. “It’s a farce—a crazy
farce,” he repeated, his eyes fixed on the long vista of the room
reflected in the blotched glass between the windows.

Lily continued to meet his expostulations with a smile. “I don’t
know why I should regard myself as an exception——” she began.

“Because you ARE; that’s why; and your being in a place like this
is a damnable outrage. I can’t talk of it calmly.”

She had in truth never seen him so shaken out of his usual
glibness; and there was something almost moving to her in his
inarticulate struggle with his emotions.

He rose with a start which left the rocking-chair quivering on its
beam ends, and placed himself squarely before her.

“Look here, Miss Lily, I’m going to Europe next week: going over
to Paris and London for a couple of months—and I can’t leave you
like this. I can’t do it. I know it’s none of my business—you’ve
let me understand that often enough; but things are worse with you
now than they have been before, and you must see that you’ve got to
accept help from somebody. You spoke to me the other day about some
debt to Trenor. I know what you mean—and I respect you for feeling
as you do about it.”

A blush of surprise rose to Lily’s pale face, but before she could
interrupt him he had continued eagerly: “Well, I’ll lend you the
money to pay Trenor; and I won’t—I—see here, don’t take me up
till I’ve finished. What I mean is, it’ll be a plain business
arrangement, such as one man would make with another. Now, what
have you got to say against that?”

Lily’s blush deepened to a glow in which humiliation and gratitude
were mingled; and both sentiments revealed themselves in the
unexpected gentleness of her reply.

“Only this: that it is exactly what Gus Trenor proposed; and that
I can never again be sure of understanding the plainest business
arrangement.” Then, realizing that this answer contained a germ
of injustice, she added, even more kindly: “Not that I don’t
appreciate your kindness—that I’m not grateful for it. But a
business arrangement between us would in any case be impossible,
because I shall have no security to give when my debt to Gus Trenor
has been paid.”

Rosedale received this statement in silence: he seemed to feel the
note of finality in her voice, yet to be unable to accept it as
closing the question between them.

In the silence Lily had a clear perception of what was passing
through his mind. Whatever perplexity he felt as to the inexor-
ableness of her course—however little he penetrated its motive—
she saw that it unmistakably tended to strengthen her hold over
him. It was as though the sense in her of unexplained scruples
and resistances had the same attraction as the delicacy of feature,
the fastidiousness of manner, which gave her an external rarity,
an air of being impossible to match. As he advanced in social
experience this uniqueness had acquired a greater value for him,
as though he were a collector who had learned to distinguish minor
differences of design and quality in some long-coveted object.

Lily, perceiving all this, understood that he would marry her
at once, on the sole condition of a reconciliation with Mrs.
Dorset; and the temptation was the less easy to put aside because,
little by little, circumstances were breaking down her dislike
for Rosedale. The dislike, indeed, still subsisted; but it was
penetrated here and there by the perception of mitigating qualities
in him: of a certain gross kindliness, a rather helpless fidelity
of sentiment, which seemed to be struggling through the hard
surface of his material ambitions.

Reading his dismissal in her eyes, he held out his hand with a
gesture which conveyed something of this inarticulate conflict.

“If you’d only let me, I’d set you up over them all—I’d put you
where you could wipe your feet on ’em!” he declared; and it touched
her oddly to see that his new passion had not altered his old
standard of values.

* * * * *

Lily took no sleeping-drops that night. She lay awake viewing her
situation in the crude light which Rosedale’s visit had shed on
it. In fending off the offer he was so plainly ready to renew, had
she not sacrificed to one of those abstract notions of honour that
might be called the conventionalities of the moral life? What debt
did she owe to a social order which had condemned and banished her
without trial? She had never been heard in her own defence; she was
innocent of the charge on which she had been found guilty; and the
irregularity of her conviction might seem to justify the use of
methods as irregular in recovering her lost rights. Bertha Dorset,
to save herself, had not scrupled to ruin her by an open falsehood;
why should she hesitate to make private use of the facts that
chance had put in her way? After all, half the opprobrium of such
an act lies in the name attached to it. Call it blackmail and it
becomes unthinkable; but explain that it injures no one, and that
the rights regained by it were unjustly forfeited, and he must be a
formalist indeed who can find no plea in its defence.

The arguments pleading for it with Lily were the old unanswerable
ones of the personal situation: the sense of injury, the sense
of failure, the passionate craving for a fair chance against the
selfish despotism of society. She had learned by experience that
she had neither the aptitude nor the moral constancy to remake her
life on new lines; to become a worker among workers, and let the
world of luxury and pleasure sweep by her unregarded. She could not
hold herself much to blame for this ineffectiveness, and she was
perhaps less to blame than she believed. Inherited tendencies had
combined with early training to make her the highly specialized
product she was: an organism as helpless out of its narrow range as
the sea-anemone torn from the rock. She had been fashioned to adorn
and delight; to what other end does nature round the rose-leaf and
paint the humming-bird’s breast? And was it her fault that the
purely decorative mission is less easily and harmoniously fulfilled
among social beings than in the world of nature? That it is apt
to be hampered by material necessities or complicated by moral
scruples?

These last were the two antagonistic forces which fought out their
battle in her breast during the long watches of the night; and
when she rose the next morning she hardly knew where the victory
lay. She was exhausted by the reaction of a night without sleep,
coming after many nights of rest artificially obtained; and in the
distorting light of fatigue the future stretched out before her
grey, interminable and desolate.

She lay late in bed, refusing the coffee and fried eggs which the
friendly Irish servant thrust through her door, and hating the
intimate domestic noises of the house and the cries and rumblings
of the street. Her week of idleness had brought home to her with
exaggerated force these small aggravations of the boarding-house
world, and she yearned for that other luxurious world, whose
machinery is so carefully concealed that one scene flows into
another without perceptible agency.

At length she rose and dressed. Since she had left Mme. Regina’s
she had spent her days in the streets, partly to escape from the
uncongenial promiscuities of the boarding-house, and partly in the
hope that physical fatigue would help her to sleep. But once out of
the house, she could not decide where to go; for she had avoided
Gerty since her dismissal from the milliner’s, and she was not sure
of a welcome anywhere else.

The morning was in harsh contrast to the previous day. A cold grey
sky threatened rain, and a high wind drove the dust in wild spirals
up and down the streets. Lily walked up Fifth Avenue toward the
Park, hoping to find a sheltered nook where she might sit; but the
wind chilled her, and after an hour’s wandering under the tossing
boughs she yielded to her increasing weariness, and took refuge in
a little restaurant in Fifty-ninth Street. She was not hungry, and
had meant to go without luncheon; but she was too tired to return
home, and the long perspective of white tables showed alluringly
through the windows.

The room was full of women and girls, all too much engaged in the
rapid absorption of tea and pie to remark her entrance. A hum
of shrill voices reverberated against the low ceiling, leaving
Lily shut out in a little circle of silence. She felt a sudden
pang of profound loneliness. She had lost the sense of time, and
it seemed to her as though she had not spoken to any one for
days. Her eyes sought the faces about her, craving a responsive
glance, some sign of an intuition of her trouble. But the sallow
preoccupied women, with their bags and note-books and rolls of
music, were all engrossed in their own affairs, and even those who
sat by themselves were busy running over proof-sheets or devouring
magazines between their hurried gulps of tea. Lily alone was
stranded in a great waste of disoccupation.

She drank several cups of the tea which was served with her portion
of stewed oysters, and her brain felt clearer and livelier when
she emerged once more into the street. She realized now that, as
she sat in the restaurant, she had unconsciously arrived at a
final decision. The discovery gave her an immediate illusion of
activity: it was exhilarating to think that she had actually a
reason for hurrying home. To prolong her enjoyment of the sensation
she decided to walk; but the distance was so great that she found
herself glancing nervously at the clocks on the way. One of the
surprises of her unoccupied state was the discovery that time, when
it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it, cannot
be trusted to move at any recognized pace. Usually it loiters; but
just when one has come to count upon its slowness, it may suddenly
break into a wild irrational gallop.

She found, however, on reaching home, that the hour was still early
enough for her to sit down and rest a few minutes before putting
her plan into execution. The delay did not perceptibly weaken her
resolve. She was frightened and yet stimulated by the reserved
force of resolution which she felt within herself: she saw it was
going to be easier, a great deal easier, than she had imagined.

At five o’clock she rose, unlocked her trunk, and took out a
sealed packet which she slipped into the bosom of her dress. Even
the contact with the packet did not shake her nerves as she had
half-expected it would. She seemed encased in a strong armour of
indifference, as though the vigorous exertion of her will had
finally benumbed her finer sensibilities.

She dressed herself once more for the street, locked her door and
went out. When she emerged on the pavement, the day was still
high, but a threat of rain darkened the sky and cold gusts shook
the signs projecting from the basement shops along the street. She
reached Fifth Avenue and began to walk slowly northward. She was
sufficiently familiar with Mrs. Dorset’s habits to know that she
could always be found at home after five. She might not, indeed, be
accessible to visitors, especially to a visitor so unwelcome, and
against whom it was quite possible that she had guarded herself by
special orders; but Lily had written a note which she meant to send
up with her name, and which she thought would secure her admission.

She had allowed herself time to walk to Mrs. Dorset’s, thinking
that the quick movement through the cold evening air would help
to steady her nerves; but she really felt no need of being
tranquillized. Her survey of the situation remained calm and
unwavering.

As she reached Fiftieth Street the clouds broke abruptly, and
a rush of cold rain slanted into her face. She had no umbrella
and the moisture quickly penetrated her thin spring dress. She
was still half a mile from her destination, and she decided to
walk across to Madison Avenue and take the electric car. As she
turned into the side street, a vague memory stirred in her. The
row of budding trees, the new brick and limestone house-fronts,
the Georgian flat-house with flower-boxes on its balconies, were
merged together into the setting of a familiar scene. It was
down this street that she had walked with Selden, that September
day two years ago; a few yards ahead was the doorway they had
entered together. The recollection loosened a throng of benumbed
sensations—longings, regrets, imaginings, the throbbing brood of
the only spring her heart had ever known. It was strange to find
herself passing his house on such an errand. She seemed suddenly
to see her action as he would see it—and the fact of his own
connection with it, the fact that, to attain her end, she must
trade on his name, and profit by a secret of his past, chilled her
blood with shame. What a long way she had travelled since the day
of their first talk together! Even then her feet had been set in
the path she was now following—even then she had resisted the hand
he had held out.

All her resentment of his fancied coldness was swept away in this
overwhelming rush of recollection. Twice he had been ready to
help her—to help her by loving her, as he had said—and if, the
third time, he had seemed to fail her, whom but herself could she
accuse?... Well, that part of her life was over; she did not know
why her thoughts still clung to it. But the sudden longing to see
him remained; it grew to hunger as she paused on the pavement
opposite his door. The street was dark and empty, swept by the
rain. She had a vision of his quiet room, of the bookshelves,
and the fire on the hearth. She looked up and saw a light in his
window; then she crossed the street and entered the house.



Chapter 12



The library looked as she had pictured it. The green-shaded lamps
made tranquil circles of light in the gathering dusk, a little fire
flickered on the hearth, and Selden’s easy-chair, which stood near
it, had been pushed aside when he rose to admit her.

He had checked his first movement of surprise, and stood silent,
waiting for her to speak, while she paused a moment on the
threshold, assailed by a rush of memories.

The scene was unchanged. She recognized the row of shelves from
which he had taken down his La Bruyere, and the worn arm of the
chair he had leaned against while she examined the precious volume.
But then the wide September light had filled the room, making it
seem a part of the outer world: now the shaded lamps and the warm
hearth, detaching it from the gathering darkness of the street,
gave it a sweeter touch of intimacy.

Becoming gradually aware of the surprise under Selden’s silence,
Lily turned to him and said simply: “I came to tell you that I was
sorry for the way we parted—for what I said to you that day at Mrs.
Hatch’s.”

The words rose to her lips spontaneously. Even on her way up
the stairs, she had not thought of preparing a pretext for her
visit, but she now felt an intense longing to dispel the cloud of
misunderstanding that hung between them.

Selden returned her look with a smile. “I was sorry too that we
should have parted in that way; but I am not sure I didn’t bring it
on myself. Luckily I had foreseen the risk I was taking——”

“So that you really didn’t care——?” broke from her with a flash of
her old irony.

“So that I was prepared for the consequences,” he corrected
good-humouredly. “But we’ll talk of all this later. Do come and sit-
by the fire. I can recommend that arm-chair, if you’ll let me put a
cushion behind you.”

While he spoke she had moved slowly to the middle of the room, and
paused near his writing-table, where the lamp, striking upward,
cast exaggerated shadows on the pallor of her delicately-hollowed
face.

“You look tired—do sit down,” he repeated gently.

She did not seem to hear the request. “I wanted you to know that I
left Mrs. Hatch immediately after I saw you,” she said, as though
continuing her confession.

“Yes—yes; I know,” he assented, with a rising tinge of embarrassment.

“And that I did so because you told me to. Before you came I had
already begun to see that it would be impossible to remain with
her—for the reasons you gave me; but I wouldn’t admit it—I wouldn’t
let you see that I understood what you meant.”

“Ah, I might have trusted you to find your own way out—don’t
overwhelm me with the sense of my officiousness!”

His light tone, in which, had her nerves been steadier, she would
have recognized the mere effort to bridge over an awkward moment,
jarred on her passionate desire to be understood. In her strange
state of extra-lucidity, which gave her the sense of being already
at the heart of the situation, it seemed incredible that any one
should think it necessary to linger in the conventional outskirts
of word-play and evasion.

“It was not that—I was not ungrateful,” she insisted. But the power
of expression failed her suddenly; she felt a tremor in her throat,
and two tears gathered and fell slowly from her eyes.

Selden moved forward and took her hand. “You are very tired. Why
won’t you sit down and let me make you comfortable?”

He drew her to the arm-chair near the fire, and placed a cushion
behind her shoulders.

“And now you must let me make you some tea: you know I always have
that amount of hospitality at my command.”

She shook her head, and two more tears ran over. But she did not
weep easily, and the long habit of self-control reasserted itself,
though she was still too tremulous to speak.

“You know I can coax the water to boil in five minutes,” Selden
continued, speaking as though she were a troubled child.

His words recalled the vision of that other afternoon when they
had sat together over his tea-table and talked jestingly of her
future. There were moments when that day seemed more remote than
any other event in her life; and yet she could always relive it in
its minutest detail.

She made a gesture of refusal. “No: I drink too much tea. I would
rather sit quiet—I must go in a moment,” she added confusedly.

Selden continued to stand near her, leaning against the
mantelpiece. The tinge of constraint was beginning to be more
distinctly perceptible under the friendly ease of his manner. Her
self-absorption had not allowed her to perceive it at first; but
now that her consciousness was once more putting forth its eager
feelers, she saw that her presence was becoming an embarrassment
to him. Such a situation can be saved only by an immediate outrush
of feeling; and on Selden’s side the determining impulse was still
lacking.

The discovery did not disturb Lily as it might once have done.
She had passed beyond the phase of well-bred reciprocity, in
which every demonstration must be scrupulously proportioned to
the emotion it elicits, and generosity of feeling is the only
ostentation condemned. But the sense of loneliness returned with
redoubled force as she saw herself forever shut out from Selden’s
inmost self. She had come to him with no definite purpose; the mere
longing to see him had directed her; but the secret hope she had
carried with her suddenly revealed itself in its death-pang.

“I must go,” she repeated, making a motion to rise from her chair.
“But I may not see you again for a long time, and I wanted to
tell you that I have never forgotten the things you said to me at
Bellomont, and that sometimes—sometimes when I seemed farthest from
remembering them—they have helped me, and kept me from mistakes;
kept me from really becoming what many people have thought me.”

Strive as she would to put some order in her thoughts, the words
would not come more clearly; yet she felt that she could not leave
him without trying to make him understand that she had saved
herself whole from the seeming ruin of her life.

A change had come over Selden’s face as she spoke. Its guarded look
had yielded to an expression still untinged by personal emotion,
but full of a gentle understanding.

“I am glad to have you tell me that; but nothing I have said has
really made the difference. The difference is in yourself—it will
always be there. And since it IS there, it can’t really matter
to you what people think: you are so sure that your friends will
always understand you.”

“Ah, don’t say that—don’t say that what you have told me has made
no difference. It seems to shut me out—to leave me all alone
with the other people.” She had risen and stood before him, once
more completely mastered by the inner urgency of the moment. The
consciousness of his half-divined reluctance had vanished. Whether
he wished it or not, he must see her wholly for once before they
parted.

Her voice had gathered strength, and she looked him gravely in the
eyes as she continued. “Once—twice—you gave me the chance to es-
cape from my life, and I refused it: refused it because I was a coward.
Afterward I saw my mistake—I saw I could never be happy with what
had contented me before. But it was too late: you had judged me—I
understood. It was too late for happiness—but not too late to be
helped by the thought of what I had missed. That is all I have
lived on—don’t take it from me now! Even in my worst moments it
has been like a little light in the darkness. Some women are strong
enough to be good by themselves, but I needed the help of your
belief in me. Perhaps I might have resisted a great temptation, but
the little ones would have pulled me down. And then I remembered—I
remembered your saying that such a life could never satisfy me;
and I was ashamed to admit to myself that it could. That is what
you did for me—that is what I wanted to thank you for. I wanted to
tell you that I have always remembered; and that I have tried—tried
hard....”

She broke off suddenly. Her tears had risen again, and in drawing
out her handkerchief her fingers touched the packet in the folds
of her dress. A wave of colour suffused her, and the words died on
her lips. Then she lifted her eyes to his and went on in an altered
voice.

“I have tried hard—but life is difficult, and I am a very useless
person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I
was just a screw or a cog in the great machine I called life, and
when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else.
What can one do when one finds that one only fits into one hole?
One must get back to it or be thrown out into the rubbish heap—and
you don’t know what it’s like in the rubbish heap!”

Her lips wavered into a smile—she had been distracted by the
whimsical remembrance of the confidences she had made to him, two
years earlier, in that very room. Then she had been planning to
marry Percy Gryce—what was it she was planning now?

The blood had risen strongly under Selden’s dark skin, but his
emotion showed itself only in an added seriousness of manner.

“You have something to tell me—do you mean to marry?” he said
abruptly.

Lily’s eyes did not falter, but a look of wonder, of puzzled
self-interrogation, formed itself slowly in their depths. In
the light of his question, she had paused to ask herself if her
decision had really been taken when she entered the room.

“You always told me I should have to come to it sooner or later!”
she said with a faint smile.

“And you have come to it now?”

“I shall have to come to it—presently. But there is something else
I must come to first.” She paused again, trying to transmit to her
voice the steadiness of her recovered smile. “There is some one
I must say goodbye to. Oh, not YOU—we are sure to see each other
again—but the Lily Bart you knew. I have kept her with me all this
time, but now we are going to part, and I have brought her back
to you—I am going to leave her here. When I go out presently she
will not go with me. I shall like to think that she has stayed with
you—and she’ll be no trouble, she’ll take up no room.”

She went toward him, and put out her hand, still smiling. “Will you
let her stay with you?” she asked.

He caught her hand, and she felt in his the vibration of feeling
that had not yet risen to his lips. “Lily—can’t I help you?” he
exclaimed.

She looked at him gently. “Do you remember what you said to me
once? That you could help me only by loving me? Well—you did love
me for a moment; and it helped me. It has always helped me. But the
moment is gone—it was I who let it go. And one must go on living.
Goodbye.”

She laid her other hand on his, and they looked at each other with
a kind of solemnity, as though they stood in the presence of death.
Something in truth lay dead between them—the love she had killed in
him and could no longer call to life. But something lived between
them also, and leaped up in her like an imperishable flame: it was
the love his love had kindled, the passion of her soul for his.

In its light everything else dwindled and fell away from her. She
understood now that she could not go forth and leave her old self
with him: that self must indeed live on in his presence, but it
must still continue to be hers.

Selden had retained her hand, and continued to scrutinize her with
a strange sense of foreboding. The external aspect of the situation
had vanished for him as completely as for her: he felt it only as
one of those rare moments which lift the veil from their faces as
they pass.

“Lily,” he said in a low voice, “you mustn’t speak in this way. I
can’t let you go without knowing what you mean to do. Things may
change—but they don’t pass. You can never go out of my life.”

She met his eyes with an illumined look. “No,” she said. “I see
that now. Let us always be friends. Then I shall feel safe,
whatever happens.”

“Whatever happens? What do you mean? What is going to happen?”

She turned away quietly and walked toward the hearth.

“Nothing at present—except that I am very cold, and that before I
go you must make up the fire for me.”

She knelt on the hearth-rug, stretching her hands to the embers.
Puzzled by the sudden change in her tone, he mechanically gathered
a handful of wood from the basket and tossed it on the fire. As he
did so, he noticed how thin her hands looked against the rising
light of the flames. He saw too, under the loose lines of her
dress, how the curves of her figure had shrunk to angularity; he
remembered long afterward how the red play of the flame sharpened
the depression of her nostrils, and intensified the blackness of
the shadows which struck up from her cheekbones to her eyes. She
knelt there for a few moments in silence; a silence which he dared
not break. When she rose he fancied that he saw her draw something
from her dress and drop it into the fire; but he hardly noticed
the gesture at the time. His faculties seemed tranced, and he was
still groping for the word to break the spell. She went up to him
and laid her hands on his shoulders. “Goodbye,” she said, and as he
bent over her she touched his forehead with her lips.



Chapter 13



The street-lamps were lit, but the rain had ceased, and there was
a momentary revival of light in the upper sky. Lily walked on
unconscious of her surroundings. She was still treading the buoyant
ether which emanates from the high moments of life. But gradually
it shrank away from her and she felt the dull pavement beneath
her feet. The sense of weariness returned with accumulated force,
and for a moment she felt that she could walk no farther. She had
reached the corner of Forty-first Street and Fifth Avenue, and she
remembered that in Bryant Park there were seats where she might
rest.

That melancholy pleasure-ground was almost deserted when she
entered it, and she sank down on an empty bench in the glare of
an electric street-lamp. The warmth of the fire had passed out of
her veins, and she told herself that she must not sit long in the
penetrating dampness which struck up from the wet asphalt. But her
will-power seemed to have spent itself in a last great effort, and
she was lost in the blank reaction which follows on an unwonted
expenditure of energy. And besides, what was there to go home to?
Nothing but the silence of her cheerless room—that silence of the
night which may be more racking to tired nerves than the most
discordant noises: that, and the bottle of chloral by her bed.
The thought of the chloral was the only spot of light in the dark
prospect: she could feel its lulling influence stealing over her
already. But she was troubled by the thought that it was losing
its power—she dared not go back to it too soon. Of late the sleep
it had brought her had been more broken and less profound; there
had been nights when she was perpetually floating up through it
to consciousness. What if the effect of the drug should gradually
fail, as all narcotics were said to fail? She remembered the
chemist’s warning against increasing the dose; and she had heard
before of the capricious and incalculable action of the drug. Her
dread of returning to a sleepless night was so great that she
lingered on, hoping that excessive weariness would reinforce the
waning power of the chloral.

Night had now closed in, and the roar of traffic in Forty-second
Street was dying out. As complete darkness fell on the square the
lingering occupants of the benches rose and dispersed; but now and
then a stray figure, hurrying homeward, struck across the path
where Lily sat, looming black for a moment in the white circle of
electric light. One or two of these passers-by slackened their
pace to glance curiously at her lonely figure; but she was hardly
conscious of their scrutiny.

Suddenly, however, she became aware that one of the passing shadows
remained stationary between her line of vision and the gleaming
asphalt; and raising her eyes she saw a young woman bending over
her.

“Excuse me—are you sick?—Why, it’s Miss Bart!” a half-familiar
voice exclaimed.

Lily looked up. The speaker was a poorly-dressed young woman
with a bundle under her arm. Her face had the air of unwholesome
refinement which ill-health and over-work may produce, but its
common prettiness was redeemed by the strong and generous curve
of the lips.

“You don’t remember me,” she continued, brightening with the
pleasure of recognition, “but I’d know you anywhere, I’ve thought
of you such a lot. I guess my folks all know your name by heart.
I was one of the girls at Miss Farish’s club—you helped me to go
to the country that time I had lung-trouble. My name’s Nettie
Struther. It was Nettie Crane then—but I daresay you don’t remember
that either.”

Yes: Lily was beginning to remember. The episode of Nettie Crane’s
timely rescue from disease had been one of the most satisfying
incidents of her connection with Gerty’s charitable work. She had
furnished the girl with the means to go to a sanatorium in the
mountains: it struck her now with a peculiar irony that the money
she had used had been Gus Trenor’s.

She tried to reply, to assure the speaker that she had not
forgotten; but her voice failed in the effort, and she felt herself
sinking under a great wave of physical weakness. Nettie Struther,
with a startled exclamation, sat down and slipped a shabbily-clad
arm behind her back.

“Why, Miss Bart, you ARE sick. Just lean on me a little till you
feel better.”

A faint glow of returning strength seemed to pass into Lily from
the pressure of the supporting arm.

“I’m only tired—it is nothing,” she found voice to say in a moment;
and then, as she met the timid appeal of her companion’s eyes, she
added involuntarily: “I have been unhappy—in great trouble.”

“YOU in trouble? I’ve always thought of you as being so high up,
where everything was just grand. Sometimes, when I felt real mean,
and got to wondering why things were so queerly fixed in the world,
I used to remember that you were having a lovely time, anyhow, and
that seemed to show there was a kind of justice somewhere. But
you mustn’t sit here too long—it’s fearfully damp. Don’t you feel
strong enough to walk on a little ways now?” she broke off.

“Yes—yes; I must go home,” Lily murmured, rising.

Her eyes rested wonderingly on the thin shabby figure at her side.
She had known Nettie Crane as one of the discouraged victims of
over-work and anaemic parentage: one of the superfluous frag-
ments of life destined to be swept prematurely into that social
refuse-heap of which Lily had so lately expressed her dread. But
Nettie Struther’s frail envelope was now alive with hope and en-
ergy: whatever fate the future reserved for her, she would not be
cast into the refuse-heap without a struggle.

“I am very glad to have seen you,” Lily continued, summoning a
smile to her unsteady lips. “It’ll be my turn to think of you as
happy—and the world will seem a less unjust place to me too.”

“Oh, but I can’t leave you like this—you’re not fit to go home
alone. And I can’t go with you either!” Nettie Struther wailed
with a start of recollection. “You see, it’s my husband’s
night-shift—he’s a motor-man—and the friend I leave the baby with
has to step upstairs to get HER husband’s supper at seven. I didn’t
tell you I had a baby, did I? She’ll be four months old day after
tomorrow, and to look at her you wouldn’t think I’d ever had a sick
day. I’d give anything to show you the baby, Miss Bart, and we live
right down the street here—it’s only three blocks off.” She lifted
her eyes tentatively to Lily’s face, and then added with a burst
of courage: “Why won’t you get right into the cars and come home
with me while I get baby’s supper? It’s real warm in our kitchen,
and you can rest there, and I’ll take YOU home as soon as ever she
drops off to sleep.”

It WAS warm in the kitchen, which, when Nettie Struther’s match had
made a flame leap from the gas-jet above the table, revealed itself
to Lily as extraordinarily small and almost miraculously clean. A
fire shone through the polished flanks of the iron stove, and near
it stood a crib in which a baby was sitting upright, with incipient
anxiety struggling for expression on a countenance still placid
with sleep.

Having passionately celebrated her reunion with her offspring, and
excused herself in cryptic language for the lateness of her return,
Nettie restored the baby to the crib and shyly invited Miss Bart to
the rocking-chair near the stove.

“We’ve got a parlour too,” she explained with pardonable pride;
“but I guess it’s warmer in here, and I don’t want to leave you
alone while I’m getting baby’s supper.”

On receiving Lily’s assurance that she much preferred the friendly
proximity of the kitchen fire, Mrs. Struther proceeded to prepare a
bottle of infantile food, which she tenderly applied to the baby’s
impatient lips; and while the ensuing degustation went on, she
seated herself with a beaming countenance beside her visitor.

“You’re sure you won’t let me warm up a drop of coffee for you,
Miss Bart? There’s some of baby’s fresh milk left over—well,
maybe you’d rather just sit quiet and rest a little while. It’s
too lovely having you here. I’ve thought of it so often that I
can’t believe it’s really come true. I’ve said to George again
and again: ‘I just wish Miss Bart could see me NOW—’ and I used
to watch for your name in the papers, and we’d talk over what you
were doing, and read the descriptions of the dresses you wore. I
haven’t seen your name for a long time, though, and I began to be
afraid you were sick, and it worried me so that George said I’d get
sick myself, fretting about it.” Her lips broke into a reminiscent
smile. “Well, I can’t afford to be sick again, that’s a fact: the
last spell nearly finished me. When you sent me off that time I
never thought I’d come back alive, and I didn’t much care if I did.
You see I didn’t know about George and the baby then.”

She paused to readjust the bottle to the child’s bubbling mouth.

“You precious—don’t you be in too much of a hurry! Was it mad with
mommer for getting its supper so late? Marry Anto’nette—that’s what
we call her: after the French queen in that play at the Garden—I
told George the actress reminded me of you, and that made me fancy
the name.... I never thought I’d get married, you know, and I’d
never have had the heart to go on working just for myself.”

She broke off again, and meeting the encouragement in Lily’s eyes,
went on, with a flush rising under her anaemic skin: “You see I
wasn’t only just SICK that time you sent me off—I was dreadfully
unhappy too. I’d known a gentlemanwhere I was employed—I don’t
know as you remember I did type-writing in a big importing
firm—and—well—I thought we were to be married: he’d gone steady
with me six months and given me his mother’s wedding ring. But I
presume he was too stylish for me—he travelled for the firm, and
had seen a great deal of society. Work girls aren’t looked after
the way you are, and they don’t always know how to look after
themselves. I didn’t . . . and it pretty near killed me when he
went away and left off writing....

“It was then I came down sick—I thought it was the end of
everything. I guess it would have been if you hadn’t sent me off.
But when I found I was getting well I began to take heart in spite
of myself. And then, when I got back home, George came round and
asked me to marry him. At first I thought I couldn’t, because we’d
been brought up together, and I knew he knew about me. But after a
while I began to see that that made it easier. I never could have
told another man, and I’d never have married without telling; but
if George cared for me enough to have me as I was, I didn’t see why
I shouldn’t begin over again—and I did.”

The strength of the victory shone forth from her as she lifted
her irradiated face from the child on her knees. “But, mercy, I
didn’t mean to go on like this about myself, with you sitting there
looking so fagged out. Only it’s so lovely having you here, and
letting you see just how you’ve helped me.” The baby had sunk back
blissfully replete, and Mrs. Struther softly rose to lay the bottle
aside. Then she paused before Miss Bart.

“I only wish I could help YOU—but I suppose there’s nothing on
earth I could do,” she murmured wistfully.

Lily, instead of answering, rose with a smile and held out her
arms; and the mother, understanding the gesture, laid her child in
them.

The baby, feeling herself detached from her habitual anchorage,
made an instinctive motion of resistance; but the soothing
influences of digestion prevailed, and Lily felt the soft weight
sink trustfully against her breast. The child’s confidence in its
safety thrilled her with a sense of warmth and returning life, and
she bent over, wondering at the rosy blur of the little face, the
empty clearness of the eyes, the vague tendrilly motions of the
folding and unfolding fingers. At first the burden in her arms
seemed as light as a pink cloud or a heap of down, but as she
continued to hold it the weight increased, sinking deeper, and
penetrating her with a strange sense of weakness, as though the
child entered into her and became a part of herself.

She looked up, and saw Nettie’s eyes resting on her with tenderness
and exultation.

“Wouldn’t it be too lovely for anything if she could grow up to be
just like you? Of course I know she never COULD—but mothers are
always dreaming the craziest things for their children.”

Lily clasped the child close for a moment and laid her back in her
mother’s arms.

“Oh, she must not do that—I should be afraid to come and see
her too often!” she said with a smile; and then, resisting Mrs.
Struther’s anxious offer of companionship, and reiterating the
promise that of course she would come back soon, and make George’s
acquaintance, and see the baby in her bath, she passed out of the
kitchen and went alone down the tenement stairs.

* * * * *

As she reached the street she realized that she felt stronger
and happier: the little episode had done her good. It was the
first time she had ever come across the results of her spasmodic
benevolence, and the surprised sense of human fellowship took the
mortal chill from her heart.

It was not till she entered her own door that she felt the reaction
of a deeper loneliness. It was long after seven o’clock, and the
light and odours proceeding from the basement made it manifest that
the boarding-house dinner had begun. She hastened up to her room,
lit the gas, and began to dress. She did not mean to pamper herself
any longer, to go without food because her surroundings made it
unpalatable. Since it was her fate to live in a boarding-house, she
must learn to fall in with the conditions of the life. Nevertheless
she was glad that, when she descended to the heat and glare of the
dining-room, the repast was nearly over.

* * * * *

In her own room again, she was seized with a sudden fever of
activity. For weeks past she had been too listless and indifferent
to set her possessions in order, but now she began to examine
systematically the contents of her drawers and cupboard. She had a
few handsome dresses left—survivals of her last phase of splendour,
on the Sabrina and in London—but when she had been obliged to
part with her maid she had given the woman a generous share of
her cast-off apparel. The remaining dresses, though they had lost
their freshness, still kept the long unerring lines, the sweep
and amplitude of the great artist’s stroke, and as she spread
them out on the bed the scenes in which they had been worn rose
vividly before her. An association lurked in every fold: each fall
of lace and gleam of embroidery was like a letter in the record
of her past. She was startled to find how the atmosphere of her
old life enveloped her. But, after all, it was the life she had
been made for: every dawning tendency in her had been carefully
directed toward it, all her interests and activities had been
taught to centre around it. She was like some rare flower grown for
exhibition, a flower from which every bud had been nipped except
the crowning blossom of her beauty.

Last of all, she drew forth from the bottom of her trunk a heap
of white drapery which fell shapelessly across her arm. It was
the Reynolds dress she had worn in the Bry TABLEAUX. It had been
impossible for her to give it away, but she had never seen it since
that night, and the long flexible folds, as she shook them out,
gave forth an odour of violets which came to her like a breath
from the flower-edged fountain where she had stood with Lawrence
Selden and disowned her fate. She put back the dresses one by one,
laying away with each some gleam of light, some note of laughter,
some stray waft from the rosy shores of pleasure. She was still in
a state of highly-wrought impressionability, and every hint of the
past sent a lingering tremor along her nerves.

She had just closed her trunk on the white folds of the Reynolds
dress when she heard a tap at her door, and the red fist of the
Irish maid-servant thrust in a belated letter. Carrying it to the
light, Lily read with surprise the address stamped on the upper
corner of the envelope. It was a business communication from the
office of her aunt’s executors, and she wondered what unexpected
development had caused them to break silence before the appointed
time. She opened the envelope and a cheque fluttered to the floor.
As she stooped to pick it up the blood rushed to her face. The
cheque represented the full amount of Mrs. Peniston’s legacy, and
the letter accompanying it explained that the executors, having
adjusted the business of the estate with less delay than they had
expected, had decided to anticipate the date fixed for the payment
of the bequests.

Lily sat down beside the desk at the foot of her bed, and spreading
out the cheque, read over and over the TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS
written across it in a steely business hand. Ten months earlier the
amount it stood for had represented the depths of penury; but her
standard of values had changed in the interval, and now visions of
wealth lurked in every flourish of the pen. As she continued to
gaze at it, she felt the glitter of the visions mounting to her brain,
and after a while she lifted the lid of the desk and slipped the
magic formula out of sight. It was easier to think without those
five figures dancing before her eyes; and she had a great deal of
thinking to do before she slept.

She opened her cheque-book, and plunged into such anxious
calculations as had prolonged her vigil at Bellomont on the night
when she had decided to marry Percy Gryce. Poverty simplifies
book-keeping, and her financial situation was easier to ascertain
than it had been then; but she had not yet learned the control of
money, and during her transient phase of luxury at the Emporium she
had slipped back into habits of extravagance which still impaired
her slender balance. A careful examination of her cheque-book, and
of the unpaid bills in her desk, showed that, when the latter had
been settled, she would have barely enough to live on for the next
three or four months; and even after that, if she were to continue
her present way of living, without earning any additional money,
all incidental expenses must be reduced to the vanishing point.
She hid her eyes with a shudder, beholding herself at the entrance
of that ever-narrowing perspective down which she had seen Miss
Silverton’s dowdy figure take its despondent way.

It was no longer, however, from the vision of material poverty that
she turned with the greatest shrinking. She had a sense of deeper
impoverishment—of an inner destitution compared to which outward
conditions dwindled into insignificance. It was indeed miserable to
be poor—to look forward to a shabby, anxious middle-age, leading
by dreary degrees of economy and self-denial to gradual absorption
in the dingy communal existence of the boarding-house. But there
was something more miserable still—it was the clutch of solitude at
her heart, the sense of being swept like a stray uprooted growth
down the heedless current of the years. That was the feeling which
possessed her now—the feeling of being something rootless and
ephemeral, mere spin-drift of the whirling surface of existence,
without anything to which the poor little tentacles of self could
cling before the awful flood submerged them. And as she looked
back she saw that there had never been a time when she had had
any real relation to life. Her parents too had been rootless, blown
hither and thither on every wind of fashion, without any personal
existence to shelter them from its shifting gusts. She herself had
grown up without any one spot of earth being dearer to her than
another: there was no centre of early pieties, of grave endearing
traditions, to which her heart could revert and from which it could
draw strength for itself and tenderness for others. In whatever
form a slowly-accumulated past lives in the blood—whether in the
concrete image of the old house stored with visual memories, or
in the conception of the house not built with hands, but made
up of inherited passions and loyalties—it has the same power of
broadening and deepening the individual existence, of attaching
it by mysterious links of kinship to all the mighty sum of human
striving.

Such a vision of the solidarity of life had never before come to
Lily. She had had a premonition of it in the blind motions of her
mating-instinct; but they had been checked by the disintegrating
influences of the life about her. All the men and women she
knew were like atoms whirling away from each other in some wild
centrifugal dance: her first glimpse of the continuity of life had
come to her that evening in Nettie Struther’s kitchen.

The poor little working-girl who had found strength to gather up
the fragments of her life, and build herself a shelter with them,
seemed to Lily to have reached the central truth of existence. It
was a meagre enough life, on the grim edge of poverty, with scant
margin for possibilities of sickness or mischance, but it had the
frail audacious permanence of a bird’s nest built on the edge of a
cliff—a mere wisp of leaves and straw, yet so put together that the
lives entrusted to it may hang safely over the abyss.

Yes—but it had taken two to build the nest; the man’s faith as well
as the woman’s courage. Lily remembered Nettie’s words: I KNEW HE
KNEW ABOUT ME. Her husband’s faith in her had made her renewal
possible—it is so easy for a woman to become what the man she loves
believes her to be! Well—Selden had twice been ready to stake his
faith on Lily Bart; but the third trial had been too severe for
his endurance. The very quality of his love had made it the more
impossible to recall to life. If it had been a simple instinct of
the blood, the power of her beauty might have revived it. But the
fact that it struck deeper, that it was inextricably wound up with
inherited habits of thought and feeling, made it as impossible to
restore to growth as a deep-rooted plant torn from its bed. Selden
had given her of his best; but he was as incapable as herself of an
uncritical return to former states of feeling.

There remained to her, as she had told him, the uplifting memory
of his faith in her; but she had not reached the age when a woman
can live on her memories. As she held Nettie Struther’s child in
her arms the frozen currents of youth had loosed themselves and
run warm in her veins: the old life-hunger possessed her, and all
her being clamoured for its share of personal happiness. Yes—it
was happiness she still wanted, and the glimpse she had caught of
it made everything else of no account. One by one she had detached
herself from the baser possibilities, and she saw that nothing now
remained to her but the emptiness of renunciation.

It was growing late, and an immense weariness once more posses-
sed her. It was not the stealing sense of sleep, but a vivid wakeful
fatigue, a wan lucidity of mind against which all the possibilities
of the future were shadowed forth gigantically. She was appalled
by the intense cleanness of the vision; she seemed to have broken
through the merciful veil which intervenes between intention and
action, and to see exactly what she would do in all the long
days to come. There was the cheque in her desk, for instance—she
meant to use it in paying her debt to Trenor; but she foresaw
that when the morning came she would put off doing so, would slip
into gradual tolerance of the debt. The thought terrified her—she
dreaded to fall from the height of her last moment with Lawrence
Selden. But how could she trust herself to keep her footing?
She knew the strength of the opposing impulses—she could feel
the countless hands of habit dragging her back into some fresh
compromise with fate. She felt an intense longing to prolong,
to perpetuate, the momentary exaltation of her spirit. If only
life could end now—end on this tragic yet sweet vision of lost
possibilities, which gave her a sense of kinship with all the
loving and foregoing in the world!

She reached out suddenly and, drawing the cheque from her
writing-desk, enclosed it in an envelope which she addressed to
her bank. She then wrote out a cheque for Trenor, and placing it,
without an accompanying word, in an envelope inscribed with his
name, laid the two letters side by side on her desk. After that
she continued to sit at the table, sorting her papers and writing,
till the intense silence of the house reminded her of the lateness
of the hour. In the street the noise of wheels had ceased, and
the rumble of the “elevated” came only at long intervals through
the deep unnatural hush. In the mysterious nocturnal separation
from all outward signs of life, she felt herself more strangely
confronted with her fate. The sensation made her brain reel,
and she tried to shut out consciousness by pressing her hands
against her eyes. But the terrible silence and emptiness seemed to
symbolize her future—she felt as though the house, the street, the
world were all empty, and she alone left sentient in a lifeless
universe.

But this was the verge of delirium . . . she had never hung so
near the dizzy brink of the unreal. Sleep was what she wanted—she
remembered that she had not closed her eyes for two nights. The
little bottle was at her bed-side, waiting to lay its spell upon
her. She rose and undressed hastily, hungering now for the touch of
her pillow. She felt so profoundly tired that she thought she must
fall asleep at once; but as soon as she had lain down every nerve
started once more into separate wakefulness. It was as though a
great blaze of electric light had been turned on in her head, and
her poor little anguished self shrank and cowered in it, without
knowing where to take refuge.

She had not imagined that such a multiplication of wakefulness
was possible: her whole past was reenacting itself at a hundred
different points of consciousness. Where was the drug that could
still this legion of insurgent nerves? The sense of exhaustion
would have been sweet compared to this shrill beat of activities;
but weariness had dropped from her as though some cruel stimulant
had been forced into her veins.

She could bear it—yes, she could bear it; but what strength would
be left her the next day? Perspective had disappeared—the next day
pressed close upon her, and on its heels came the days that were to
follow—they swarmed about her like a shrieking mob. She must shut
them out for a few hours; she must take a brief bath of oblivion.
She put out her hand, and measured the soothing drops into a glass;
but as she did so, she knew they would be powerless against the
supernatural lucidity of her brain. She had long since raised the
dose to its highest limit, but tonight she felt she must increase
it. She knew she took a slight risk in doing so—she remembered
the chemist’s warning. If sleep came at all, it might be a sleep
without waking. But after all that was but one chance in a hundred:
the action of the drug was incalculable, and the addition of a few
drops to the regular dose would probably do no more than procure
for her the rest she so desperately needed....

She did not, in truth, consider the question very closely—the
physical craving for sleep was her only sustained sensation. Her
mind shrank from the glare of thought as instinctively as eyes
contract in a blaze of light—darkness, darkness was what she must
have at any cost. She raised herself in bed and swallowed the
contents of the glass; then she blew out her candle and lay down.

She lay very still, waiting with a sensuous pleasure for the first
effects of the soporific. She knew in advance what form they would
take—the gradual cessation of the inner throb, the soft approach
of passiveness, as though an invisible hand made magic passes over
her in the darkness. The very slowness and hesitancy of the effect
increased its fascination: it was delicious to lean over and look
down into the dim abysses of unconsciousness. Tonight the drug
seemed to work more slowly than usual: each passionate pulse had to
be stilled in turn, and it was long before she felt them dropping
into abeyance, like sentinels falling asleep at their posts. But
gradually the sense of complete subjugation came over her, and she
wondered languidly what had made her feel so uneasy and excited.
She saw now that there was nothing to be excited about—she had
returned to her normal view of life. Tomorrow would not be so
difficult after all: she felt sure that she would have the strength
to meet it. She did not quite remember what it was that she had
been afraid to meet, but the uncertainty no longer troubled her.
She had been unhappy, and now she was happy—she had felt herself
alone, and now the sense of loneliness had vanished.

She stirred once, and turned on her side, and as she did so, she
suddenly understood why she did not feel herself alone. It was
odd—but Nettie Struther’s child was lying on her arm: she felt
the pressure of its little head against her shoulder. She did not
know how it had come there, but she felt no great surprise at the
fact, only a gentle penetrating thrill of warmth and pleasure.
She settled herself into an easier position, hollowing her arm to
pillow the round downy head, and holding her breath lest a sound
should disturb the sleeping child.

As she lay there she said to herself that there was something she
must tell Selden, some word she had found that should make life
clear between them. She tried to repeat the word, which lingered
vague and luminous on the far edge of thought—she was afraid of not
remembering it when she woke; and if she could only remember it and
say it to him, she felt that everything would be well.

Slowly the thought of the word faded, and sleep began to enfold
her. She struggled faintly against it, feeling that she ought
to keep awake on account of the baby; but even this feeling was
gradually lost in an indistinct sense of drowsy peace, through
which, of a sudden, a dark flash of loneliness and terror tore its
way.

She started up again, cold and trembling with the shock: for a
moment she seemed to have lost her hold of the child. But no—she
was mistaken—the tender pressure of its body was still close to
hers: the recovered warmth flowed through her once more, she
yielded to it, sank into it, and slept.



Chapter 14



The next morning rose mild and bright, with a promise of summer
in the air. The sunlight slanted joyously down Lily’s street,
mellowed the blistered house-front, gilded the paintless railings
of the doorstep, and struck prismatic glories from the panes of her
darkened window.

When such a day coincides with the inner mood there is intoxication
in its breath; and Selden, hastening along the street through the
squalor of its morning confidences, felt himself thrilling with a
youthful sense of adventure. He had cut loose from the familiar
shores of habit, and launched himself on uncharted seas of emotion;
all the old tests and measures were left behind, and his course was
to be shaped by new stars.

That course, for the moment, led merely to Miss Bart’s
boarding-house; but its shabby doorstep had suddenly become the
threshold of the untried. As he approached he looked up at the
triple row of windows, wondering boyishly which one of them
was hers. It was nine o’clock, and the house, being tenanted
by workers, already showed an awakened front to the street. He
remembered afterward having noticed that only one blind was down.
He noticed too that there was a pot of pansies on one of the window
sills, and at once concluded that the window must be hers: it was
inevitable that he should connect her with the one touch of beauty
in the dingy scene.

Nine o’clock was an early hour for a visit, but Selden had passed
beyond all such conventional observances. He only knew that he must
see Lily Bart at once—he had found the word he meant to say to her,
and it could not wait another moment to be said. It was strange
that it had not come to his lips sooner—that he had let her pass
from him the evening before without being able to speak it. But
what did that matter, now that a new day had come? It was not a
word for twilight, but for the morning.

Selden ran eagerly up the steps and pulled the bell; and even in
his state of self-absorption it came as a sharp surprise to him
that the door should open so promptly. It was still more of a
surprise to see, as he entered, that it had been opened by Gerty
Farish—and that behind her, in an agitated blur, several other
figures ominously loomed.

“Lawrence!” Gerty cried in a strange voice, “how could you get
here so quickly?”—and the trembling hand she laid on him seemed
instantly to close about his heart.

He noticed the other faces, vague with fear and conjecture—he saw
the landlady’s imposing bulk sway professionally toward him; but
he shrank back, putting up his hand, while his eyes mechanically
mounted the steep black walnut stairs, up which he was immediately
aware that his cousin was about to lead him.

A voice in the background said that the doctor might be back at any
minute—and that nothing, upstairs, was to be disturbed. Some one
else exclaimed: “It was the greatest mercy—” then Selden felt that
Gerty had taken him gently by the hand, and that they were to be
suffered to go up alone.

In silence they mounted the three flights, and walked along the
passage to a closed door. Gerty opened the door, and Selden went
in after her. Though the blind was down, the irresistible sunlight
poured a tempered golden flood into the room, and in its light
Selden saw a narrow bed along the wall, and on the bed, with
motionless hands and calm unrecognizing face, the semblance of Lily
Bart.

That it was her real self, every pulse in him ardently denied. Her
real self had lain warm on his heart but a few hours earlier—what
had he to do with this estranged and tranquil face which, for the
first time, neither paled nor brightened at his coming?

Gerty, strangely tranquil too, with the conscious self-control of
one who has ministered to much pain, stood by the bed, speaking
gently, as if transmitting a final message.

“The doctor found a bottle of chloral—she had been sleeping badly
for a long time, and she must have taken an overdose by mistake....
There is no doubt of that—no doubt—there will be no question—he
has been very kind. I told him that you and I would like to be left
alone with her—to go over her things before any one else comes. I
know it is what she would have wished.”

Selden was hardly conscious of what she said. He stood looking down
on the sleeping face which seemed to lie like a delicate impalpable
mask over the living lineaments he had known. He felt that the real
Lily was still there, close to him, yet invisible and inaccessible;
and the tenuity of the barrier between them mocked him with a sense
of helplessness. There had never been more than a little impalpable
barrier between them—and yet he had suffered it to keep them apart!
And now, though it seemed slighter and frailer than ever, it had
suddenly hardened to adamant, and he might beat his life out
against it in vain.

He had dropped on his knees beside the bed, but a touch from Gerty
aroused him. He stood up, and as their eyes met he was struck by
the extraordinary light in his cousin’s face.

“You understand what the doctor has gone for? He has promised that
there shall be no trouble—but of course the formalities must be
gone through. And I asked him to give us time to look through her
things first——”

He nodded, and she glanced about the small bare room. “It won’t
take long,” she concluded.

“No—it won’t take long,” he agreed.

She held his hand in hers a moment longer, and then, with a last
look at the bed, moved silently toward the door. On the threshold
she paused to add: “You will find me downstairs if you want me.”

Selden roused himself to detain her. “But why are you going? She
would have wished——”

Gerty shook her head with a smile. “No: this is what she would have
wished——” and as she spoke a light broke through Selden’s stony
misery, and he saw deep into the hidden things of love.

The door closed on Gerty, and he stood alone with the motionless
sleeper on the bed. His impulse was to return to her side, to fall
on his knees, and rest his throbbing head against the peaceful
cheek on the pillow. They had never been at peace together, they
two; and now he felt himself drawn downward into the strange
mysterious depths of her tranquillity.

But he remembered Gerty’s warning words—he knew that, though
time had ceased in this room, its feet were hastening relentlessly
toward the door. Gerty had given him this supreme half hour, and he
must use it as she willed.

He turned and looked about him, sternly compelling himself to
regain his consciousness of outward things. There was very little
furniture in the room. The shabby chest of drawers was spread
with a lace cover, and set out with a few gold-topped boxes and
bottles, a rose-coloured pin-cushion, a glass tray strewn with
tortoise-shell hair-pins—he shrank from the poignant intimacy of
these trifles, and from the blank surface of the toilet-mirror
above them.

These were the only traces of luxury, of that clinging to the
minute observance of personal seemliness, which showed what her
other renunciations must have cost. There was no other token
of her personality about the room, unless it showed itself in
the scrupulous neatness of the scant articles of furniture: a
washing-stand, two chairs, a small writing-desk, and the little
table near the bed. On this table stood the empty bottle and glass,
and from these also he averted his eyes.

The desk was closed, but on its slanting lid lay two letters which
he took up. One bore the address of a bank, and as it was stamped
and sealed, Selden, after a moment’s hesitation, laid it aside. On
the other letter he read Gus Trenor’s name; and the flap of the
envelope was still ungummed.

Temptation leapt on him like the stab of a knife. He staggered
under it, steadying himself against the desk. Why had she been
writing to Trenor—writing, presumably, just after their parting
of the previous evening? The thought unhallowed the memory of
that last hour, made a mock of the word he had come to speak, and
defiled even the reconciling silence upon which it fell. He felt
himself flung back on all the ugly uncertainties from which he
thought he had cast loose forever. After all, what did he know of
her life? Only as much as she had chosen to show him, and measured
by the world’s estimate, how little that was! By what right—the
letter in his hand seemed to ask—by what right was it he who now
passed into her confidence through the gate which death had left
unbarred? His heart cried out that it was by right of their last
hour together, the hour when she herself had placed the key in
his hand. Yes—but what if the letter to Trenor had been written
afterward?

He put it from him with sudden loathing, and setting his lips,
addressed himself resolutely to what remained of his task. After
all, that task would be easier to perform, now that his personal
stake in it was annulled.

He raised the lid of the desk, and saw within it a cheque-book
and a few packets of bills and letters, arranged with the orderly
precision which characterized all her personal habits. He looked
through the letters first, because it was the most difficult part
of the work. They proved to be few and unimportant, but among them
he found, with a strange commotion of the heart, the note he had
written her the day after the Brys’ entertainment.

“When may I come to you?”—his words overwhelmed him with a
realization of the cowardice which had driven him from her at the
very moment of attainment. Yes—he had always feared his fate, and
he was too honest to disown his cowardice now; for had not all his
old doubts started to life again at the mere sight of Trenor’s name?

He laid the note in his card-case, folding it away carefully, as
something made precious by the fact that she had held it so; then,
growing once more aware of the lapse of time, he continued his
examination of the papers.

To his surprise, he found that all the bills were receipted; there
was not an unpaid account among them. He opened the cheque-
book, and saw that, the very night before, a cheque of ten thou-
sand dollars from Mrs. Peniston’s executors had been entered in it.
The legacy, then, had been paid sooner than Gerty had led him
to expect. But, turning another page or two, he discovered with
astonishment that, in spite of this recent accession of funds, the
balance had already declined to a few dollars. A rapid glance at
the stubs of the last cheques, all of which bore the date of the
previous day, showed that between four or five hundred dollars of
the legacy had been spent in the settlement of bills, while the
remaining thousands were comprehended in one cheque, made
out, at the same time, to Charles Augustus Trenor.

Selden laid the book aside, and sank into the chair beside the
desk. He leaned his elbows on it, and hid his face in his hands.
The bitter waters of life surged high about him, their sterile
taste was on his lips. Did the cheque to Trenor explain the mystery
or deepen it? At first his mind refused to act—he felt only the
taint of such a transaction between a man like Trenor and a girl
like Lily Bart. Then, gradually, his troubled vision cleared,
old hints and rumours came back to him, and out of the very
insinuations he had feared to probe, he constructed an explanation
of the mystery. It was true, then, that she had taken money from
Trenor; but true also, as the contents of the little desk declared,
that the obligation had been intolerable to her, and that at the
first opportunity she had freed herself from it, though the act
left her face to face with bare unmitigated poverty.

That was all he knew—all he could hope to unravel of the story.
The mute lips on the pillow refused him more than this—unless
indeed they had told him the rest in the kiss they had left upon
his forehead. Yes, he could now read into that farewell all that
his heart craved to find there; he could even draw from it courage
not to accuse himself for having failed to reach the height of his
opportunity.

He saw that all the conditions of life had conspired to keep them
apart; since his very detachment from the external influences which
swayed her had increased his spiritual fastidiousness, and made it
more difficult for him to live and love uncritically. But at least
he HAD loved her—had been willing to stake his future on his faith
in her—and if the moment had been fated to pass from them before
they could seize it, he saw now that, for both, it had been saved
whole out of the ruin of their lives.

It was this moment of love, this fleeting victory over themselves,
which had kept them from atrophy and extinction; which, in her, had
reached out to him in every struggle against the influence of her
surroundings, and in him, had kept alive the faith that now drew
him penitent and reconciled to her side.

He knelt by the bed and bent over her, draining their last moment
to its lees; and in the silence there passed between them the word
which made all clear.


THE END