House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (page 4)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lily woke from happy dreams to find two notes at her bedside.

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

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

Lily sprang out of bed, and went straight to her desk. She wanted to write at once, while she could trust to the strength of her resolve. She was still languid from her brief sleep and the exhilaration of the evening, and the sight of Selden’s writing brought back the culminating moment of her triumph: the moment when she had read in his eyes that no philosophy was proof against her power. It would be pleasant to have that sensation again . . . no one else could give it to her in its fulness; and she could not bear to mar her mood of luxu

rious
retrospection by an act of definite refusal. She took up her pen and wrote hastily: “TOMORROW AT FOUR;” murmuring to herself, as she slipped the sheet into its envelope: “I can easily put him off when tomorrow comes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He paused, flushed by his diatribe, and fixing on her a look in which resentment was the ingredient she least disliked. But she had regained her presence of mind, and stood composedly in the middle of the room, while her slight smile seemed to put an ever increasing distance between herself and Trenor.

Across it she said: “Don’t be absurd, Gus. It’s past eleven, and I must really ask you to ring for a cab.”

He remained immovable, with the lowering forehead she had grown to detest.

“And supposing I won’t ring for one–what’ll you do then?”

“I shall go upstairs to Judy if you force me to disturb her.”

Trenor drew a step nearer and laid his hand on her arm. “Look here, Lily: won’t you give me five minutes of your own accord?”

“Not tonight, Gus: you—”

“Very good, then: I’ll take ’em. And as many more as I want.” He had squared himself on the threshold, his hands thrust deep in his pockets. He nodded toward the chair on the hearth.

“Go and sit down there, please: I’ve got a word to say to you.”

Lily’s quick temper was getting the better of her fears. She drew herself up and moved toward the door.

“If you have anything to say to me, you must say it another time. I shall go up to Judy unless you call a cab for me at once.”

He burst into a laugh. “Go upstairs and welcome, my dear; but you won’t find Judy. She ain’t there.”

Lily cast a startled look upon him. “Do you mean that Judy is not in the house–not in town?” she exclaimed.

“That’s just what I do mean,” returned Trenor, his bluster sinking to sullenness under her look.

“Nonsense–I don’t believe you. I am going upstairs,” she said impatiently.

He drew unexpectedly aside, letting her reach the threshold unimpeded.

“Go up and welcome; but my wife is at Bellomont.”

But Lily had a flash of reassurance. “If she hadn’t come she would have sent me word—”

“She did; she telephoned me this afternoon to let you know.”

“I received no message.”

“I didn’t send any.”

The two measured each other for a moment, but Lily still saw her opponent through a blur of scorn that made all other considerations indistinct.

“I can’t imagine your object in playing such a stupid trick on me; but if you have fully gratified your peculiar sense of humour I must again ask you to send for a cab.”

It was the wrong note, and she knew it as she spoke. To be stung by irony it is not necessary to understand it, and the angry streaks on Trenor’s face might have been raised by an actual lash.

“Look here, Lily, don’t take that high and mighty tone with me.” He had again moved toward the door, and in her instinctive shrinking from him she let him regain command of the threshold. “I DID play a trick on you; I own up to it; but if you think I’m ashamed you’re mistaken. Lord knows I’ve been patient enough–I’ve hung round and looked like an ass. And all the while you were letting a lot of other fellows make up to you . . . letting ’em make fun of me, I daresay . . . I’m not sharp, and can’t dress my friends up to look funny, as you do . . . but I can tell when it’s being done to me . . . I can tell fast enough when I’m made a fool of . . .”

“Ah, I shouldn’t have thought that!” flashed from Lily; but her laugh dropped to silence under his look.

“No; you wouldn’t have thought it; but you’ll know better now. That’s what you’re here for tonight. I’ve been waiting for a quiet time to talk things over, and now I’ve got it I mean to make you hear me out.”

His first rush of inarticulate resentment had been followed by a steadiness and concentration of tone more disconcerting to Lily than the excitement preceding it. For a moment her presence of mind forsook her. She had more than once been in situations where a quick sword-play of wit had been needful to cover her retreat; but her frightened heart-throbs told her that here such skill would not avail.

To gain time she repeated: “I don’t understand what you want.”

Trenor had pushed a chair between herself and the door. He threw himself in it, and leaned back, looking up at her.

“I’ll tell you what I want: I want to know just where you and I stand. Hang it, the man who pays for the dinner is generally allowed to have a seat at table.”

She flamed with anger and abasement, and the sickening need of having to conciliate where she longed to humble.

“I don’t know what you mean–but you must see, Gus, that I can’t stay here talking to you at this hour—”

“Gad, you go to men’s houses fast enough in broad day light–strikes me you’re not always so deuced careful of appearances.”

The brutality of the thrust gave her the sense of dizziness that follows on a physical blow. Rosedale had spoken then–this was the way men talked of her–She felt suddenly weak and defenceless: there was a throb of self-pity in her throat. But all the while another self was sharpening her to vigilance, whispering the terrified warning that every word and gesture must be measured.

“If you have brought me here to say insulting things—” she began.

Trenor laughed. “Don’t talk stage-rot. I don’t want to insult you. But a man’s got his feelings–and you’ve played with mine too long. I didn’t begin this business–kept out of the way, and left the track clear for the other chaps, till you rummaged me out and set to work to make an ass of me–and an easy job you had of it, too. That’s the trouble–it was too easy for you–you got reckless–thought you could turn me inside out, and chuck me in the gutter like an empty purse. But, by gad, that ain’t playing fair: that’s dodging the rules of the game. Of course I know now what you wanted–it wasn’t my beautiful eyes you were after–but I tell you what, Miss Lily, you’ve got to pay up for making me think so—”

He rose, squaring his shoulders aggressively, and stepped toward her with a reddening brow; but she held her footing, though every nerve tore at her to retreat as he advanced.

“Pay up?” she faltered. “Do you mean that I owe you money?”

He laughed again. “Oh, I’m not asking for payment in kind. But there’s such a thing as fair play–and interest on one’s money–and hang me if I’ve had as much as a look from you—”

“Your money? What have I to do with your money? You advised me how to invest mine . . . you must have seen I knew nothing of business . . . you told me it was all right—”

“It WAS all right–it is, Lily: you’re welcome to all of it, and ten times more. I’m only asking for a word of thanks from you.” He was closer still, with a hand that grew formidable; and the frightened self in her was dragging the other down.

“I HAVE thanked you; I’ve shown I was grateful. What more have you done than any friend might do, or any one accept from a friend?”

Trenor caught her up with a sneer. “I don’t doubt you’ve accepted as much before–and chucked the other chaps as you’d like to chuck me. I don’t care how you settled your score with them–if you fooled ’em I’m that much to the good. Don’t stare at me like that–I know I’m not talking the way a man is supposed to talk to a girl–but, hang it, if you don’t like it you can stop me quick enough–you know I’m mad about you–damn the money, there’s plenty more of it–if THAT bothers you . . . I was a brute, Lily–Lily!–just look at me—”

Over and over her the sea of humiliation broke–wave crashing on wave so close that the moral shame was one with the physical dread. It seemed to her that self-esteem would have made her invulnerable–that it was her own dishonour which put a fearful solitude about her.

His touch was a shock to her drowning consciousness. She drew back from him with a desperate assumption of scorn.

“I’ve told you I don’t understand–but if I owe you money you shall be paid—”

Trenor’s face darkened to rage: her recoil of abhorrence had called out the primitive man.

“Ah–you’ll borrow from Selden or Rosedale–and take your chances of fooling them as you’ve fooled me! Unless–unless you’ve settled your other scores already–and I’m the only one left out in the cold!”

She stood silent, frozen to her place. The words–the words were worse than the touch! Her heart was beating all over her body–in her throat, her limbs, her helpless useless hands. Her eyes travelled despairingly about the room–they lit on the bell, and she remembered that help was in call. Yes, but scandal with it–a hideous mustering of tongues. No, she must fight her way out alone. It was enough that the servants knew her to be in the house with Trenor–there must be nothing to excite conjecture in her way of leaving it.

She raised her head, and achieved a last clear look at him.

“I am here alone with you,” she said. “What more have you to say?”

To her surprise, Trenor answered the look with a speechless stare. With his last gust of words the flame had died out, leaving him chill and humbled. It was as though a cold air had dispersed the fumes of his libations, and the situation loomed before him black and naked as the ruins of a fire. Old habits, old restraints, the hand of inherited order, plucked back the bewildered mind which passion had jolted from its ruts. Trenor’s eye had the haggard look of the sleep-walker waked on a deathly ledge.

“Go home! Go away from here”—he stammered, and turning his back on her walked toward the hearth.

The sharp release from her fears restored Lily to immediate lucidity. The collapse of Trenor’s will left her in control, and she heard herself, in a voice that was her own yet outside herself, bidding him ring for the servant, bidding him give the order for a hansom, directing him to put her in it when it came. Whence the strength came to her she knew not; but an insistent voice warned her that she must leave the house openly, and nerved her, in the hall before the hovering care taker, to exchange light words with Trenor, and charge him with the usual messages for Judy, while all the while she shook with inward loathing. On the doorstep, with the street before her, she felt a mad throb of liberation, intoxicating as the prisoner’s first draught of free air; but the clearness of brain continued, and she noted the mute aspect of Fifth Avenue, guessed at the lateness of the hour, and even observed a man’s figure–was there something half-familiar in its outline?–which, as she entered the hansom, turned from the opposite corner and vanished in the obscurity of the side street.

But with the turn of the wheels reaction came, and shuddering darkness closed on her. “I can’t think–I can’t think,” she moaned, and leaned her head against the rattling side of the cab. She seemed a stranger to herself, or rather there were two selves in her, the one she had always known, and a new abhorrent being to which it found itself chained. She had once picked up, in a house where she was staying, a translation of the EUMENIDES, and her imagination had been seized by the high terror of the scene where Orestes, in the cave of the oracle, finds his implacable huntresses asleep, and snatches an hour’s repose. Yes, the Furies might sometimes sleep, but they were there, always there in the dark corners, and now they were awake and the iron clang of their wings was in her brain . . . She opened her eyes and saw the streets passing–the familiar alien streets. All she looked on was the same and yet changed. There was a great gulf fixed between today and yesterday. Everything in the past seemed simple, natural, full of daylight–and she was alone in a place of darkness and pollution.–Alone! It was the loneliness that frightened her. Her eyes fell on an illuminated clock at a street corner, and she saw that the hands marked the half hour after eleven. Only half-past eleven–there were hours and hours left of the night! And she must spend them alone, shuddering sleepless on her bed. Her soft nature recoiled from this ordeal, which had none of the stimulus of conflict to goad her through it. Oh, the slow cold drip of the minutes on her head! She had a vision of herself lying on the black walnut bed–and the darkness would frighten her, and if she left the light burning the dreary details of the room would brand themselves forever on her brain. She had always hated her room at Mrs. Peniston’s–its ugliness, its impersonality, the fact that nothing in it was really hers. To a torn heart uncomforted by human nearness a room may open almost human arms, and the being to whom no four walls mean more than any others, is, at such hours, expatriate everywhere.

Lily had no heart to lean on. Her relation with her aunt was as superficial as that of chance lodgers who pass on the stairs. But even had the two been in closer contact, it was impossible to think of Mrs. Peniston’s mind as offering shelter or comprehension to such misery as Lily’s. As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little healing in its touch. What Lily craved was the darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion holding its breath.

She started up and looked forth on the passing streets. Gerty!–they were nearing Gerty’s corner. If only she could reach there before this labouring anguish burst from her breast to her lips–if only she could feel the hold of Gerty’s arms while she shook in the ague-fit of fear that was coming upon her! She pushed up the door in the roof and called the address to the driver. It was not so late–Gerty might still be waking. And even if she were not, the sound of the bell would penetrate every recess of her tiny apartment, and rouse her to answer her friend’s call.

Gerty Farish, the morning after the Wellington Brys’ entertainment, woke from dreams as happy as Lily’s. If they were less vivid in hue, more subdued to the half-tints of her personality and her experience, they were for that very reason better suited to her mental vision. Such flashes of joy as Lily moved in would have blinded Miss Farish, who was accustomed, in the way of happiness, to such scant light as shone through the cracks of other people’s lives.

Now she was the centre of a little illumination of her own: a mild but unmistakable beam, compounded of Lawrence Selden’s growing kindness to herself and the discovery that he extended his liking to Lily Bart. If these two factors seem incompatible to the student of feminine psychology, it must be remembered that Gerty had always been a parasite in the moral order, living on the crumbs of other tables, and content to look through the window at the banquet spread for her friends. Now that she was enjoying a little private feast of her own, it would have seemed incredibly selfish not to lay a plate for a friend; and there was no one with whom she would rather have shared her enjoyment than Miss Bart.

As to the nature of Selden’s growing kindness, Gerty would no more have dared to define it than she would have tried to learn a butterfly’s colours by knocking the dust from its wings. To seize on the wonder would be to brush off its bloom, and perhaps see it fade and stiffen in her hand: better the sense of beauty palpitating out of reach, while she held her breath and watched where it would alight. Yet Selden’s manner at the Brys’ had brought the flutter of wings so close that they seemed to be beating in her own heart. She had never seen him so alert, so responsive, so attentive to what she had to say. His habitual manner had an absent-minded kindliness which she accepted, and was grateful for, as the liveliest sentiment her presence was likely to inspire; but she was quick to feel in him a change implying that for once she could give pleasure as well as receive it.

And it was so delightful that this higher degree of sympathy should be reached through their interest in Lily Bart!

Gerty’s affection for her friend–a sentiment that had learned to keep itself alive on the scantiest diet–had grown to active adoration since Lily’s restless curiosity had drawn her into the circle of Miss Farish’s work. Lily’s taste of beneficence had wakened in her a momentary appetite for well-doing. Her visit to the Girls’ Club had first brought her in contact with the dramatic contrasts of life. She had always accepted with philosophic calm the fact that such existences as hers were pedestalled on foundations of obscure humanity. The dreary limbo of dinginess lay all around and beneath that little illuminated circle in which life reached its finest efflorescence, as the mud and sleet of a winter night enclose a hot-house filled with tropical flowers. All this was in the natural order of things, and the orchid basking in its artificially created atmosphere could round the delicate curves of its petals undisturbed by the ice on the panes.

But it is one thing to live comfortably with the abstract conception of poverty, another to be brought in contact with its human embodiments. Lily had never conceived of these victims of fate otherwise than in the mass. That the mass was composed of individual lives, innumerable separate centres of sensation, with her own eager reachings for pleasure, her own fierce revulsions from pain–that some of these bundles of feeling were clothed in shapes not so unlike her own, with eyes meant to look on gladness, and young lips shaped for love–this discovery gave Lily one of those sudden shocks of pity that sometimes decentralize a life. Lily’s nature was incapable of such renewal: she could feel other demands only through her own, and no pain was long vivid which did not press on an answering nerve. But for the moment she was drawn out of herself by the interest of her direct relation with a world so unlike her own. She had supplemented her first gift by personal assistance to one or two of Miss Farish’s most appealing subjects, and the admiration and interest her presence excited among the tired workers at the club ministered in a new form to her insatiable desire to please.

Gerty Farish was not a close enough reader of character to disentangle the mixed threads of which Lily’s philanthropy was woven. She supposed her beautiful friend to be actuated by the same motive as herself–that sharpening of the moral vision which makes all human suffering so near and insistent that the other aspects of life fade into remoteness. Gerty lived by such simple formulas that she did not hesitate to class her friend’s state with the emotional “change of heart” to which her dealings with the poor had accustomed her; and she rejoiced in the thought that she had been the humble instrument of this renewal. Now she had an answer to all criticisms of Lily’s conduct: as she had said, she knew “the real Lily,” and the discovery that Selden shared her knowledge raised her placid acceptance of life to a dazzled sense of its possibilities–a sense farther enlarged, in the course of the afternoon, by the receipt of a telegram from Selden asking if he might dine with her that evening.

While Gerty was lost in the happy bustle which this announcement produced in her small household, Selden was at one with her in thinking with intensity of Lily Bart. The case which had called him to Albany was not complicated enough to absorb all his attention, and he had the professional faculty of keeping a part of his mind free when its services were not needed. This part–which at the moment seemed dangerously like the whole–was filled to the brim with the sensations of the previous evening. Selden understood the symptoms: he recognized the fact that he was paying up, as there had always been a chance of his having to pay up, for the voluntary exclusions of his past. He had meant to keep free from permanent ties, not from any poverty of feeling, but because, in a different way, he was, as much as Lily, the victim of his environment. There had been a germ of truth in his declaration to Gerty Farish that he had never wanted to marry a “nice” girl: the adjective connoting, in his cousin’s vocabulary, certain utilitarian qualities which are apt to preclude the luxury of charm. Now it had been Selden’s fate to have a charming mother: her graceful portrait, all smiles and Cashmere, still emitted a faded scent of the undefinable quality. His father was the kind of man who delights in a charming woman: who quotes her, stimulates her, and keeps her perennially charming. Neither one of the couple cared for money, but their disdain of it took the form of always spending a little more than was prudent. If their house was shabby, it was exquisitely kept; if there were good books on the shelves there were also good dishes on the table. Selden senior had an eye for a picture, his wife an understanding of old lace; and both were so conscious of restraint and discrimination in buying that they never quite knew how it was that the bills mounted up.

Though many of Selden’s friends would have called his parents poor, he had grown up in an atmosphere where restricted means were felt only as a check on aimless profusion: where the few possessions were so good that their rarity gave them a merited relief, and abstinence was combined with elegance in a way exemplified by Mrs. Selden’s knack of wearing her old velvet as if it were new. A man has the advantage of being delivered early from the home point of view, and before Selden left college he had learned that there are as many different ways of going without money as of spending it. Unfortunately, he found no way as agreeable as that practised at home; and his views of womankind in especial were tinged by the remembrance of the one woman who had given him his sense of “values.” It was from her that he inherited his detachment from the sumptuary side of life: the stoic’s carelessness of material things, combined with the Epicurean’s pleasure in them. Life shorn of either feeling appeared to him a diminished thing; and nowhere was the blending of the two ingredients so essential as in the character of a pretty woman.

It had always seemed to Selden that experience offered a great deal besides the sentimental adventure, yet he could vividly conceive of a love which should broaden and deepen till it became the central fact of life. What he could not accept, in his own case, was the makeshift alternative of a relation that should be less than this: that should leave some portions of his nature unsatisfied, while it put an undue strain on others. He would not, in other words, yield to the growth of an affection which might appeal to pity yet leave the understanding untouched: sympathy should no more delude him than a trick of the eyes, the grace of helplessness than a curve of the cheek.

But now–that little BUT passed like a sponge over all his vows. His reasoned-out resistances seemed for the moment so much less important than the question as to when Lily would receive his note! He yielded himself to the charm of trivial preoccupations, wondering at what hour her reply would be sent, with what words it would begin. As to its import he had no doubt–he was as sure of her surrender as of his own. And so he had leisure to muse on all its exquisite details, as a hard worker, on a holiday morning, might lie still and watch the beam of light travel gradually across his room. But if the new light dazzled, it did not blind him. He could still discern the outline of facts, though his own relation to them had changed. He was no less conscious than before of what was said of Lily Bart, but he could separate the woman he knew from the vulgar estimate of her. His mind turned to Gerty Farish’s words, and the wisdom of the world seemed a groping thing beside the insight of innocence. BLESSED ARE THE PURE IN HEART, FOR THEY SHALL SEE GOD–even the hidden god in their neighbour’s breast! Selden was in the state of impassioned self-absorption that the first surrender to love produces. His craving was for the companionship of one whose point of view should justify his own, who should confirm, by deliberate observation, the truth to which his intuitions had leaped. He could not wait for the midday recess, but seized a moment’s leisure in court to scribble his telegram to Gerty Farish.

Reaching town, he was driven direct to his club, where he hoped a note from Miss Bart might await him. But his box contained only a line of rapturous assent from Gerty, and he was turning away disappointed when he was hailed by a voice from the smoking room.

“Hallo, Lawrence! Dining here? Take a bite with me-I’ve ordered a canvas-back.”

He discovered Trenor, in his day clothes, sitting, with a tall glass at his elbow, behind the folds of a sporting journal.

Selden thanked him, but pleaded an engagement.

“Hang it, I believe every man in town has an engagement tonight. I shall have the dub to myself. You know how I’m living this winter, rattling round in that empty house. My wife meant to come to town today, but she’s put it off again, and how is a fellow to dine alone in a room with the looking-glasses covered, and nothing but a bottle of Harvey sauce on the side-board? I say, Lawrence, chuck your engagement and take pity on me–it gives me the blue devils to dine alone, and there’s nobody but that canting ass Wetherall in the club.”

“Sorry, Gus–I can’t do it.”

As Selden turned away, he noticed the dark flush on Trenor’s face, the unpleasant moisture of his intensely white forehead, the way his jewelled rings were wedged in the creases of his fat red fingers. Certainly the beast was predominating–the beast at the bottom of the glass. And he had heard this man’s name coupled with Lily’s! Bah–the thought sickened him; all the way back to his rooms he was haunted by the sight of Trenor’s fat creased hands—

On his table lay the note: Lily had sent it to his rooms. He knew what was in it before he broke the seal–a grey seal with BEYOND! beneath a flying ship. Ah, he would take her beyond–beyond the ugliness, the pettiness, the attrition and corrosion of the soul—

Gerty’s little sitting-room sparkled with welcome when Selden entered it. Its modest “effects,” compact of enamel paint and ingenuity, spoke to him in the language just then sweetest to his ear. It is surprising how little narrow walls and a low ceiling matter, when the roof of the soul has suddenly been raised. Gerty sparkled too; or at least shone with a tempered radiance. He had never before noticed that she had “points”–really, some good fellow might do worse . . . Over the little dinner (and here, again, the effects were wonderful) he told her she ought to marry–he was in a mood to pair off the whole world. She had made the caramel custard with her own hands? It was sinful to keep such gifts to herself. He reflected with a throb of pride that Lily could trim her own hats–she had told him so the day of their walk at Bellomont.

He did not speak of Lily till after dinner. During the little repast he kept the talk on his hostess, who, fluttered at being the centre of observation, shone as rosy as the candle-shades she had manufactured for the occasion. Selden evinced an extraordinary interest in her household arrangements: complimented her on the ingenuity with which she had utilized every inch of her small quarters, asked how her servant managed about afternoons out, learned that one may improvise delicious dinners in a chafing-dish, and uttered thoughtful generalizations on the burden of a large establishment.

When they were in the sitting-room again, where they fitted as snugly as bits in a puzzle, and she had brewed the coffee, and poured it into her grandmother’s egg-shell cups, his eye, as he leaned back, basking in the warm fragrance, lighted on a recent photograph of Miss Bart, and the desired transition was effected without an effort. The photograph was well enough–but to catch her as she had looked last night! Gerty agreed with him–never had she been so radiant. But could photography capture that light? There had been a new look in her face–something different; yes, Selden agreed there had been something different. The coffee was so exquisite that he asked for a second cup: such a contrast to the watery stuff at the club! Ah, your poor bachelor with his impersonal club fare, alternating with the equally impersonal CUISINE of the dinner-party! A man who lived in lodgings missed the best part of life–he pictured the flavourless solitude of Trenor’s repast, and felt a moment’s compassion for the man . . . But to return to Lily–and again and again he returned, questioning, conjecturing, leading Gerty on, draining her inmost thoughts of their stored tenderness for her friend.

At first she poured herself out unstintingly, happy in this perfect communion of their sympathies. His understanding of Lily helped to confirm her own belief in her friend. They dwelt together on the fact that Lily had had no chance. Gerty instanced her generous impulses–her restlessness and discontent. The fact that her life had never satisfied her proved that she was made for better things. She might have married more than once–the conventional rich marriage which she had been taught to consider the sole end of existence–but when the opportunity came she had always shrunk from it. Percy Gryce, for instance, had been in love with her–every one at Bellomont had supposed them to be engaged, and her dismissal of him was thought inexplicable. This view of the Gryce incident chimed too well with Selden’s mood not to be instantly adopted by him, with a flash of retrospective contempt for what had once seemed the obvious solution. If rejection there had been–and he wondered now that he had ever doubted it!–then he held the key to the secret, and the hillsides of Bellomont were lit up, not with sunset, but with dawn. It was he who had wavered and disowned the face of opportunity–and the joy now warming his breast might have been a familiar inmate if he had captured it in its first flight.

It was at this point, perhaps, that a joy just trying its wings in Gerty’s heart dropped to earth and lay still. She sat facing Selden, repeating mechanically: “No, she has never been understood—” and all the while she herself seemed to be sitting in the centre of a great glare of comprehension. The little confidential room, where a moment ago their thoughts had touched elbows like their chairs, grew to unfriendly vastness, separating her from Selden by all the length of her new vision of the future–and that future stretched out interminably, with her lonely figure toiling down it, a mere speck on the solitude.

“She is herself with a few people only; and you are one of them,” she heard Selden saying. And again: “Be good to her, Gerty, won’t you?” and: “She has it in her to become whatever she is believed to be–you’ll help her by believing the best of her?”

The words beat on Gerty’s brain like the sound of a language which has seemed familiar at a distance, but on approaching is found to be unintelligible. He had come to talk to her of Lily–that was all! There had been a third at the feast she had spread for him, and that third had taken her own place. She tried to follow what he was saying, to cling to her own part in the talk–but it was all as meaningless as the boom of waves in a drowning head, and she felt, as the drowning may feel, that to sink would be nothing beside the pain of struggling to keep up.

Selden rose, and she drew a deep breath, feeling that soon she could yield to the blessed waves.

“Mrs. Fisher’s? You say she was dining there? There’s music afterward; I believe I had a card from her.” He glanced at the foolish pink-faced clock that was drumming out this hideous hour. “A quarter past ten? I might look in there now; the Fisher evenings are amusing. I haven’t kept you up too late, Gerty? You look tired–I’ve rambled on and bored you.” And in the unwonted overflow of his feelings, he left a cousinly kiss upon her cheek.

At Mrs. Fisher’s, through the cigar-smoke of the studio, a dozen voices greeted Selden. A song was pending as he entered, and he dropped into a seat near his hostess, his eyes roaming in search of Miss Bart. But she was not there, and the discovery gave him a pang out of all proportion to its seriousness; since the note in his breast-pocket assured him that at four the next day they would meet. To his impatience it seemed immeasurably long to wait, and half-ashamed of the impulse, he leaned to Mrs. Fisher to ask, as the music ceased, if Miss Bart had not dined with her.

“Lily? She’s just gone. She had to run off, I forget where. Wasn’t she wonderful last night?”

“Who’s that? Lily?” asked Jack Stepney, from the depths of a neighbouring arm-chair. “Really, you know, I’m no prude, but when it comes to a girl standing there as if she was up at auction–I thought seriously of speaking to cousin Julia.”

“You didn’t know Jack had become our social censor?” Mrs. Fisher said to Selden with a laugh; and Stepney spluttered, amid the general derision: “But she’s a cousin, hang it, and when a man’s married–TOWN TALK was full of her this morning.”

“Yes: lively reading that was,” said Mr. Ned Van Alstyne, stroking his moustache to hide the smile behind it. “Buy the dirty sheet? No, of course not; some fellow showed it to me–but I’d heard the stories before. When a girl’s as good-looking as that she’d better marry; then no questions are asked. In our imperfectly organized society there is no provision as yet for the young woman who claims the privileges of marriage without assuming its obligations.”

“Well, I understand Lily is about to assume them in the shape of Mr. Rosedale,” Mrs. Fisher said with a laugh.

“Rosedale–good heavens!” exclaimed Van Alstyne, dropping his eye-glass. “Stepney, that’s your fault for foisting the brute on us.”

“Oh, confound it, you know, we don’t MARRY Rosedale in our family,” Stepney languidly protested; but his wife, who sat in oppressive bridal finery at the other side of the room, quelled him with the judicial reflection: “In Lily’s circumstances it’s a mistake to have too high a standard.”

“I hear even Rosedale has been scared by the talk lately,” Mrs. Fisher rejoined; “but the sight of her last night sent him off his head. What do you think he said to me after her TABLEAU? ‘My God, Mrs. Fisher, if I could get Paul Morpeth to paint her like that, the picture’d appreciate a hundred per cent in ten years.'”

“By Jove,–but isn’t she about somewhere?” exclaimed Van Alstyne, restoring his glass with an uneasy glance.

“No; she ran off while you were all mixing the punch down stairs. Where was she going, by the way? What’s on tonight? I hadn’t heard of anything.”

“Oh, not a party, I think,” said an inexperienced young Farish who had arrived late. “I put her in her cab as I was coming in, and she gave the driver the Trenors’ address.”

“The Trenors’?” exclaimed Mrs. Jack Stepney. “Why, the house is closed–Judy telephoned me from Bellomont this evening.”

“Did she? That’s queer. I’m sure I’m not mistaken. Well, come now, Trenor’s there, anyhow–I–oh, well–the fact is, I’ve no head for numbers,” he broke off, admonished by the nudge of an adjoining foot, and the smile that circled the room.

In its unpleasant light Selden had risen and was shaking hands with his hostess. The air of the place stifled him, and he wondered why he had stayed in it so long.

On the doorstep he stood still, remembering a phrase of Lily’s: “It seems to me you spend a good deal of time in the element you disapprove of.”

Well–what had brought him there but the quest of her? It was her element, not his. But he would lift her out of it, take her beyond! That BEYOND! on her letter was like a cry for rescue. He knew that Perseus’s task is not done when he has loosed Andromeda’s chains, for her limbs are numb with bondage, and she cannot rise and walk, but clings to him with dragging arms as he beats back to land with his burden. Well, he had strength for both–it was her weakness which had put the strength in him. It was not, alas, a clean rush of waves they had to win through, but a clogging morass of old associations and habits, and for the moment its vapours were in his throat. But he would see clearer, breathe freer in her presence: she was at once the dead weight at his breast and the spar which should float them to safety. He smiled at the whirl of metaphor with which he was trying to build up a defence against the influences of the last hour. It was pitiable that he, who knew the mixed motives on which social judgments depend, should still feel himself so swayed by them. How could he lift Lily to a freer vision of life, if his own view of her was to be coloured by any mind in which he saw her reflected?

The moral oppression had produced a physical craving for air, and he strode on, opening his lungs to the reverberating coldness of the night. At the corner of Fifth Avenue Van Alstyne hailed him with an offer of company.

“Walking? A good thing to blow the smoke out of one’s head. Now that women have taken to tobacco we live in a bath of nicotine. It would be a curious thing to study the effect of cigarettes on the relation of the sexes. Smoke is almost as great a solvent as divorce: both tend to obscure the moral issue.”

Nothing could have been less consonant with Selden’s mood than Van Alstyne’s after-dinner aphorisms, but as long as the latter confined himself to generalities his listener’s nerves were in control. Happily Van Alstyne prided himself on his summing up of social aspects, and with Selden for audience was eager to show the sureness of his touch. Mrs. Fisher lived in an East side street near the Park, and as the two men walked down Fifth Avenue the new architectural developments of that versatile thoroughfare invited Van Alstyne’s comment.

“That Greiner house, now–a typical rung in the social ladder! The man who built it came from a MILIEU where all the dishes are put on the table at once. His facade is a complete architectural meal; if he had omitted a style his friends might have thought the money had given out. Not a bad purchase for Rosedale, though: attracts attention, and awes the Western sight-seer. By and bye he’ll get out of that phase, and want something that the crowd will pass and the few pause before. Especially if he marries my clever cousin—”

Selden dashed in with the query: “And the Wellington Brys’? Rather clever of its kind, don’t you think?”

They were just beneath the wide white facade, with its rich restraint of line, which suggested the clever corseting of a redundant figure.

“That’s the next stage: the desire to imply that one has been to Europe, and has a standard. I’m sure Mrs. Bry thinks her house a copy of the TRIANON; in America every marble house with gilt furniture is thought to be a copy of the TRIANON. What a clever chap that architect is, though–how he takes his client’s measure! He has put the whole of Mrs. Bry in his use of the composite order. Now for the Trenors, you remember, he chose the Corinthian: exuberant, but based on the best precedent. The Trenor house is one of his best things–doesn’t look like a banqueting-hall turned inside out. I hear Mrs. Trenor wants to build out a new ball-room, and that divergence from Gus on that point keeps her at Bellomont. The dimensions of the Brys’ ball-room must rankle: you may be sure she knows ’em as well as if she’d been there last night with a yard-measure. Who said she was in town, by the way? That Farish boy? She isn’t, I know; Mrs. Stepney was right; the house is dark, you see: I suppose Gus lives in the back.”

He had halted opposite the Trenors’ comer, and Selden perforce stayed his steps also. The house loomed obscure and uninhabited; only an oblong gleam above the door spoke of provisional occupancy.

“They’ve bought the house at the back: it gives them a hundred and fifty feet in the side street. There’s where the ball-room’s to be, with a gallery connecting it: billiard-room and so on above. I suggested changing the entrance, and carrying the drawing-room across the whole Fifth Avenue front; you see the front door corresponds with the windows—”

The walking-stick which Van Alstyne swung in demonstration dropped to a startled “Hallo!” as the door opened and two figures were seen silhouetted against the hall-light. At the same moment a hansom halted at the curb-stone, and one of the figures floated down to it in a haze of evening draperies; while the other, black and bulky, remained persistently projected against the light.

For an immeasurable second the two spectators of the incident were silent; then the house-door closed, the hansom rolled off, and the whole scene slipped by as if with the turn of a stereopticon.

Van Alstyne dropped his eye-glass with a low whistle.

“A–hem–nothing of this, eh, Selden? As one of the family, I know I may count on you–appearances are deceptive–and Fifth Avenue is so imperfectly lighted—”

“Goodnight,” said Selden, turning sharply down the side street without seeing the other’s extended hand.

Alone with her cousin’s kiss, Gerty stared upon her thoughts. He had kissed her before–but not with another woman on his lips. If he had spared her that she could have drowned quietly, welcoming the dark flood as it submerged her. But now the flood was shot through with glory, and it was harder to drown at sunrise than in darkness. Gerty hid her face from the light, but it pierced to the crannies of her soul. She had been so contented, life had seemed so simple and sufficient–why had he come to trouble her with new hopes? And Lily–Lily, her best friend! Woman-like, she accused the woman. Perhaps, had it not been for Lily, her fond imagining might have become truth. Selden had always liked her–had understood and sympathized with the modest independence of her life. He, who had the reputation of weighing all things in the nice balance of fastidious perceptions, had been uncritical and simple in his view of her: his cleverness had never overawed her because she had felt at home in his heart. And now she was thrust out, and the door barred against her by Lily’s hand! Lily, for whose admission there she herself had pleaded! The situation was lighted up by a dreary flash of irony. She knew Selden–she saw how the force of her faith in Lily must have helped to dispel his hesitations. She remembered, too, how Lily had talked of him-she saw herself bringing the two together, making them known to each other. On Selden’s part, no doubt, the wound inflicted was inconscient; he had never guessed her foolish secret; but Lily–Lily must have known! When, in such matters, are a woman’s perceptions at fault? And if she knew, then she had deliberately despoiled her friend, and in mere wantonness of power, since, even to Gerty’s suddenly flaming jealousy, it seemed incredible that Lily should wish to be Selden’s wife. Lily might be incapable of marrying for money, but she was equally incapable of living without it, and Selden’s eager investigations into the small economies of house-keeping made him appear to Gerty as tragically duped as herself.

She remained long in her sitting-room, where the embers were crumbling to cold grey, and the lamp paled under its gay shade. Just beneath it stood the photograph of Lily Bart, looking out imperially on the cheap gim-cracks, the cramped furniture of the little room. Could Selden picture her in such an interior? Gerty felt the poverty, the insignificance of her surroundings: she beheld her life as it must appear to Lily. And the cruelty of Lily’s judgments smote upon her memory. She saw that she had dressed her idol with attributes of her own making. When had Lily ever really felt, or pitied, or understood? All she wanted was the taste of new experiences: she seemed like some cruel creature experimenting in a laboratory.

The pink-faced clock drummed out another hour, and Gerty rose with a start. She had an appointment early the next morning with a district visitor on the East side. She put out her lamp, covered the fire, and went into her bedroom to undress. In the little glass above her dressing-table she saw her face reflected against the shadows of the room, and tears blotted the reflection. What right had she to dream the dreams of loveliness? A dull face invited a dull fate. She cried quietly as she undressed, laying aside her clothes with her habitual precision, setting everything in order for the next day, when the old life must be taken up as though there had been no break in its routine. Her servant did not come till eight o’clock, and she prepared her own tea-tray and placed it beside the bed. Then she locked the door of the flat, extinguished her light and lay down. But on her bed sleep would not come, and she lay face to face with the fact that she hated Lily Bart. It closed with her in the darkness like some formless evil to be blindly grappled with. Reason, judgment, renunciation, all the sane daylight forces, were beaten back in the sharp struggle for self-preservation. She wanted happiness—

wanted it as fiercely and
unscrupulously as Lily did, but without Lily’s power of obtaining it. And in her conscious impotence she lay shivering, and hated her friend—

A ring at the door-bell caught her to her feet. She struck a light and stood startled, listening. For a moment her heart beat incoherently, then she felt the sobering touch of fact, and remembered that such calls were not unknown in her charitable work. She flung on her dressing-gown to answer the summons, and unlocking her door, confronted the shining vision of Lily Bart.

Gerty’s first movement was one of revulsion. She shrank back as though Lily’s presence flashed too sudden a light upon her misery. Then she heard her name in a cry, had a glimpse of her friend’s face, and felt herself caught and clung to.

“Lily–what is it?” she exclaimed.

Miss Bart released her, and stood breathing brokenly, like one who has gained shelter after a long flight.

“I was so cold–I couldn’t go home. Have you a fire?”

Gerty’s compassionate instincts, responding to the swift call of habit, swept aside all her reluctances. Lily was simply some one who needed help–for what reason, there was no time to pause and conjecture: disciplined sympathy checked the wonder on Gerty’s lips, and made her draw her friend silently into the sitting-room and seat her by the darkened hearth.

“There is kindling wood here: the fire will burn in a minute.”

She knelt down, and the flame leapt under her rapid hands. It flashed strangely through the tears which still blurred her eyes, and smote on the white ruin of Lily’s face. The girls looked at each other in silence; then Lily repeated: “I couldn’t go home.”

“No–no–you came here, dear! You’re cold and tired–sit quiet, and I’ll make you some tea.”

Gerty had unconsciously adopted the soothing note of her trade: all personal feeling was merged in the sense of ministry, and experience had taught her that the bleeding must be stayed before the wound is probed.

Lily sat quiet, leaning to the fire: the clatter of cups behind her soothed her as familiar noises hush a child whom silence has kept wakeful. But when Gerty stood at her side with the tea she pushed it away, and turned an estranged eye on the familiar room.

“I came here because I couldn’t bear to be alone,” she said.

Gerty set down the cup and knelt beside her.

“Lily! Something has happened–can’t you tell me?”

“I couldn’t bear to lie awake in my room till morning. I hate my room at Aunt Julia’s–so I came here—”

She stirred suddenly, broke from her apathy, and dung to Gerty in a fresh burst of fear.

“Oh, Gerty, the furies . . . you know the noise of their wings–alone, at night, in the dark? But you don’t know–there is nothing to make the dark dreadful to you—”

The words, flashing back on Gerty’s last hours, struck from her a faint derisive murmur; but Lily, in the blaze of her own misery, was blinded to everything outside it.

“You’ll let me stay? I shan’t mind when daylight comes–Is it late? Is the night nearly over? It must be awful to be sleepless–everything stands by the bed and stares—”

Miss Farish caught her straying hands. “Lily, look at me! Something has happened–an accident? You have been frightened–what has frightened you? Tell me if you can–a word or two–so that I can help you.”

Lily shook her head.

“I am not frightened: that’s not the word. Can you imagine looking into your glass some morning and seeing a disfigurement–some hideous change that has come to you while you slept? Well, I seem to myself like that–I can’t bear to see myself in my own thoughts–I hate ugliness, you know–I’ve always turned from it–but I can’t explain to you–you wouldn’t understand.”

She lifted her head and her eyes fell on the clock.

“How long the night is! And I know I shan’t sleep tomorrow. Some one told me my father used to lie sleepless and think of horrors. And he was not wicked, only unfortunate–and I see now how he must have suffered, lying alone with his thoughts! But I am bad–a bad girl–all my thoughts are bad–I have always had bad people about me. Is that any excuse? I thought I could manage my own life–I was proud–proud! but now I’m on their level—”

Sobs shook her, and she bowed to them like a tree in a dry storm.

Gerty knelt beside her, waiting, with the patience born of experience, till this gust of misery should loosen fresh speech. She had first imagined some physical shock, some peril of the crowded streets, since Lily was presumably on her way home from Carry Fisher’s; but she now saw that other nerve-centres were smitten, and her mind trembled back from conjecture.

Lily’s sobs ceased, and she lifted her head.

“There are bad girls in your slums. Tell me–do they ever pick themselves up? Ever forget, and feel as they did before?”

“Lily! you mustn’t speak so–you’re dreaming.”

“Don’t they always go from bad to worse? There’s no turning back–your old self rejects you, and shuts you out.”

She rose, stretching her arms as if in utter physical weariness. “Go to bed, dear! You work hard and get up early. I’ll watch here by the fire, and you’ll leave the light, and your door open. All I want is to feel that you are near me.” She laid both hands on Gerty’s shoulders, with a smile that was like sunrise on a sea strewn with wreckage.

“I can’t leave you, Lily. Come and lie on my bed. Your hands are frozen–you must undress and be made warm.” Gerty paused with sudden compunction. “But Mrs. Peniston–it’s past midnight! What will she think?”

“She goes to bed. I have a latch-key. It doesn’t matter–I can’t go back there.”

“There’s no need to: you shall stay here. But you must tell me where you have been. Listen, Lily–it will help you to speak!” She regained Miss Bart’s hands, and pressed them against her. “Try to tell me–it will clear your poor head. Listen–you were dining at Carry Fisher’s.” Gerty paused and added with a flash of heroism: “Lawrence Selden went from here to find you.”

At the word, Lily’s face melted from locked anguish to the open misery of a child. Her lips trembled and her gaze widened with tears.

“He went to find me? And I missed him! Oh, Gerty, he tried to help me. He told me–he warned me long ago–he foresaw that I should grow hateful to myself!”

The name, as Gerty saw with a clutch at the heart, had loosened the springs of self-pity in her friend’s dry breast, and tear by tear Lily poured out the measure of her anguish. She had dropped sideways in Gerty’s big arm-chair, her head buried where lately Selden’s had leaned, in a beauty of abandonment that drove home to Gerty’s aching senses the inevitableness of her own defeat. Ah, it needed no deliberate purpose on Lily’s part to rob her of her dream! To look on that prone loveliness was to see in it a natural force, to recognize that love and power belong to such as Lily, as renunciation and service are the lot of those they despoil. But if Selden’s infatuation seemed a fatal necessity, the effect that his name produced shook Gerty’s steadfastness with a last pang. Men pass through such superhuman loves and outlive them: they are the probation subduing the heart to human joys. How gladly Gerty would have welcomed the ministry of healing: how willingly have soothed the sufferer back to tolerance of life! But Lily’s self-betrayal took this last hope from her. The mortal maid on the shore is helpless against the siren who loves her prey: such victims are floated back dead from their adventure.

Lily sprang up and caught her with strong hands. “Gerty, you know him–you understand him–tell me; if I went to him, if I told him everything–if I said: ‘I am bad through and through–I want admiration, I want excitement, I want money–‘ yes, MONEY! That’s my shame, Gerty–and it’s known, it’s said of me–it’s what men think of me–If I said it all to him–told him the whole story–said plainly:’I’ve sunk lower than the lowest, for I’ve taken what they take, and not paid as they pay’–oh, Gerty, you know him, you can speak for him: if I told him everything would he loathe me? Or would he pity me, and understand me, and save me from loathing myself?”

Gerty stood cold and passive. She knew the hour of her probation had come, and her poor heart beat wildly against its destiny. As a dark river sweeps by under a lightning flash, she saw her chance of happiness surge past under a flash of temptation. What prevented her from saying: “He is like other men”? She was not so sure of him, after all! But to do so would have been like blaspheming her love. She could not put him before herself in any light but the noblest: she must trust him to the height of her own passion.

“Yes: I know him; he will help you,” she said; and in a moment Lily’s passion was weeping itself out against her breast.

There was but one bed in the little flat, and the two girls lay down on it side by side when Gerty had unlaced Lily’s dress and persuaded her to put her lips to the warm tea. The light extinguished, they lay still in the darkness, Gerty shrinking to the outer edge of the narrow couch to avoid contact with her bed-fellow. Knowing that Lily disliked to be caressed, she had long ago learned to check her demonstrative impulses toward her friend. But tonight every fibre in her body shrank from Lily’s nearness: it was torture to listen to her breathing, and feel the sheet stir with it. As Lily turned, and settled to completer rest, a strand of her hair swept Gerty’s cheek with its fragrance. Everything about her was warm and soft and scented: even the stains of her grief became her as rain-drops do the beaten rose. But as Gerty lay with arms drawn down her side, in the motionless narrowness of an effigy, she felt a stir of sobs from the breathing warmth beside her, and Lily flung out her hand, groped for her friend’s, and held it fast.

“Hold me, Gerty, hold me, or I shall think of things,” she moaned; and Gerty silently slipped an arm under her, pillowing her head in its hollow as a mother makes a nest for a tossing child. In the warm hollow Lily lay still and her breathing grew low and regular. Her hand still dung to Gerty’s as if to ward off evil dreams, but the hold of her fingers relaxed, her head sank deeper into its shelter, and Gerty felt that she slept.

When lily woke she had the bed to herself, and the winter light was in the room.

She sat up, bewildered by the strangeness of her surroundings; then memory returned, and she looked about her with a shiver. In the cold slant of light reflected from the back wall of a neighbouring building, she saw her evening dress and opera cloak lying in a tawdry heap on a chair. Finery laid off is as unappetizing as the remains of a feast, and it occurred to Lily that, at home, her maid’s vigilance had always spared her the sight of such incongruities. Her body ached with fatigue, and with the constriction of her attitude in Gerty’s bed. All through her troubled sleep she had been conscious of having no space to toss in, and the long effort to remain motionless made her feel as if she had spent her night in a train.

This sense of physical discomfort was the first to assert itself; then she perceived, beneath it, a corresponding mental prostration, a languor of horror more insufferable than the first rush of her disgust. The thought of having to wake every morning with this weight on her breast roused her tired mind to fresh effort. She must find some way out of the slough into which she had stumbled: it was not so much compunction as the dread of her morning thoughts that pressed on her the need of action. But she was unutterably tired; it was weariness to think connectedly. She lay back, looking about the poor slit of a room with a renewal of physical distaste. The outer air, penned between high buildings, brought no freshness through the window; steam-heat was beginning to sing in a coil of dingy pipes, and a smell of cooking penetrated the crack of the door.

The door opened, and Gerty, dressed and hatted, entered with a cup of tea. Her face looked sallow and swollen in the dreary light, and her dull hair shaded imperceptibly into the tones of her skin.

She glanced shyly at Lily, asking in an embarrassed tone how she felt; Lily answered with the same constraint, and raised herself up to drink the tea.

“I must have been over-tired last night; I think I had a nervous attack in the carriage,” she said, as the drink brought clearness to her sluggish thoughts.

“You were not well; I am so glad you came here,” Gerty returned.

“But how am I to get home? And Aunt Julia–?”

“She knows; I telephoned early, and your maid has brought your things. But won’t you eat something? I scrambled the eggs myself.”

Lily could not eat; but the tea strengthened her to rise and dress under her maid’s searching gaze. It was a relief to her that Gerty was obliged to hasten away: the two kissed silently, but without a trace of the previous night’s emotion.

Lily found Mrs. Peniston in a state of agitation. She had sent for Grace Stepney and was taking digitalis. Lily breasted the storm of enquiries as best she could, explaining that she had had an attack of faintness on her way back from Carry Fisher’s; that, fearing she would not have strength to reach home, she had gone to Miss Farish’s instead; but that a quiet night had restored her, and that she had no need of a doctor.

This was a relief to Mrs. Peniston, who could give herself up to her own symptoms, and Lily was advised to go and lie down, her aunt’s panacea for all physical and moral disorders. In the solitude of her own room she was brought back to a sharp contemplation of facts. Her daylight view of them necessarily differed from the cloudy vision of the night. The winged furies were now prowling gossips who dropped in on each other for tea. But her fears seemed the uglier, thus shorn of their vagueness; and besides, she had to act, not rave. For the first time she forced herself to reckon up the exact amount of her debt to Trenor; and the result of this hateful computation was the discovery that she had, in all, received nine thousand dollars from him. The flimsy pretext on which it had been given and received shrivelled up in the blaze of her shame: she knew that not a penny of it was her own, and that to restore her self-respect she must at once repay the whole amount. The inability thus to solace her outraged feelings gave her a paralyzing sense of insignificance. She was realizing for the first time that a woman’s dignity may cost more to keep up than her carriage; and that the maintenance of a moral attribute should be dependent on dollars and cents, made the world appear a more sordid place than she had conceived it.

After luncheon, when Grace Stepney’s prying eyes had been removed, Lily asked for a word with her aunt. The two ladies went upstairs to the sitting-room, where Mrs. Peniston seated herself in her black satin arm-chair tufted with yellow buttons, beside a bead-work table bearing a bronze box with a miniature of Beatrice Cenci in the lid. Lily felt for these objects the same distaste which the prisoner may entertain for the fittings of the court-room. It was here that her aunt received her rare confidences, and the pink-eyed smirk of the turbaned Beatrice was associated in her mind with the gradual fading of the smile from Mrs. Peniston’s lips. That lady’s dread of a scene gave her an inexorableness which the greatest strength of character could not have produced, since it was independent of all considerations of right or wrong; and knowing this, Lily seldom ventured to assail it. She had never felt less like making the attempt than on the present occasion; but she had sought in vain for any other means of escape from an intolerable situation.

Mrs. Peniston examined her critically. “You’re a bad colour, Lily: this incessant rushing about is beginning to tell on you,” she said.

Miss Bart saw an opening. “I don’t think it’s that, Aunt Julia; I’ve had worries,” she replied.

“Ah,” said Mrs. Peniston, shutting her lips with the snap of a purse closing against a beggar.

“I’m sorry to bother you with them,” Lily continued, “but I really believe my faintness last night was brought on partly by anxious thoughts–”

“I should have said Carry Fisher’s cook was enough to account for it. She has a woman who was with Maria Melson in 1891–the spring of the year we went to Aix–and I remember dining there two days before we sailed, and feeling SURE the coppers hadn’t been scoured.”

“I don’t think I ate much; I can’t eat or sleep.” Lily paused, and then said abruptly: “The fact is, Aunt Julia, I owe some money.”

Mrs. Peniston’s face clouded perceptibly, but did not express the astonishment her niece had expected. She was silent, and Lily was forced to continue: “I have been foolish—”

“No doubt you have: extremely foolish,” Mrs. Peniston interposed. “I fail to see how any one with your income, and no expenses–not to mention the handsome presents I’ve always given you—”

“Oh, you’ve been most generous, Aunt Julia; I shall never forget your kindness. But perhaps you don’t quite realize the expense a girl is put to nowadays—”

“I don’t realize that YOU are put to any expense except for your clothes and your railway fares. I expect you to be handsomely dressed; but I paid Celeste’s bill for you last October.”

Lily hesitated: her aunt’s implacable memory had never been more inconvenient. “You were as kind as possible; but I have had to get a few things since—”

“What kind of things? Clothes? How much have you spent? Let me see the bill–I daresay the woman is swindling you.”

“Oh, no, I think not: clothes have grown so frightfully expensive; and one needs so many different kinds, with country visits, and golf and skating, and Aiken and Tuxedo—”

“Let me see the bill,” Mrs. Peniston repeated.

Lily hesitated again. In the first place, Mme. Celeste had not yet sent in her account, and secondly, the amount it represented was only a fraction of the sum that Lily needed.

“She hasn’t sent in the bill for my winter things, but I KNOW it’s large; and there are one or two other things; I’ve been careless and imprudent–I’m frightened to think of what I owe—”

She raised the troubled loveliness of her face to Mrs. Peniston, vainly hoping that a sight so moving to the other sex might not be without effect upon her own. But the effect produced was that of making Mrs. Peniston shrink back apprehensively.

“Really, Lily, you are old enough to manage your own affairs, and after frightening me to death by your performance of last night you might at least choose a better time to worry me with such matters.” Mrs. Peniston glanced at the clock, and swallowed a tablet of digitalis. “If you owe Celeste another thousand, she may send me her account,” she added, as though to end the discussion at any cost.

“I am very sorry, Aunt Julia; I hate to trouble you at such a time; but I have really no choice–I ought to have spoken sooner–I owe a great deal more than a thousand dollars.”

“A great deal more? Do you owe two? She must have robbed you!”

“I told you it was not only Celeste. I–there are other bills–more pressing–that must be settled.”

“What on earth have you been buying? Jewelry? You must have gone off your head,” said Mrs. Peniston with asperity. “But if you have run into debt, you must suffer the consequences, and put aside your monthly income till your bills are paid. If you stay quietly here until next spring, instead of racing about all over the country, you will have no expenses at all, and surely in four or five months you can settle the rest of your bills if I pay the dress-maker now.”

Lily was again silent. She knew she could not hope to extract even a thousand dollars from Mrs. Peniston on the mere plea of paying Celeste’s bill: Mrs. Peniston would expect to go over the dress-maker’s account, and would make out the cheque to her and not to Lily. And yet the money must be obtained before the day was over!

“The debts I speak of are–different–not like tradesmen’s bills,” she began confusedly; but Mrs. Peniston’s look made her almost afraid to continue. Could it be that her aunt suspected anything? The idea precipitated Lily’s avowal.

“The fact is, I’ve played cards a good deal–bridge; the women all do it; girls too–it’s expected. Sometimes I’ve won–won a good deal–but lately I’ve been unlucky–and of course such debts can’t be paid off gradually—”

She paused: Mrs. Peniston’s face seemed to be petrifying as she listened.

“Cards–you’ve played cards for money? It’s true, then: when I was told so I wouldn’t believe it. I won’t ask if the other horrors I was told were true too; I’ve heard enough for the state of my nerves. When I think of the example you’ve had in this house! But I suppose it’s your foreign bringing-up–no one knew where your mother picked up her friends. And her Sundays were a scandal–that I know.”

Mrs. Peniston wheeled round suddenly. “You play cards on Sunday?”

Lily flushed with the recollection of certain rainy Sundays at Bellomont and with the Dorsets.

“You’re hard on me, Aunt Julia: I have never really cared for cards, but a girl hates to be thought priggish and superior, and one drifts into doing what the others do. I’ve had a dreadful lesson, and if you’ll help me out this time I promise you–”

Mrs. Peniston raised her hand warningly. “You needn’t make any promises: it’s unnecessary. When I offered you a home I didn’t undertake to pay your gambling debts.”

“Aunt Julia! You don’t mean that you won’t help me?”

“I shall certainly not do anything to give the impression that I countenance your behaviour. If you really owe your dress-maker, I will settle with her–beyond that I recognize no obligation to assume your debts.”

Lily had risen, and stood pale and quivering before her aunt. Pride stormed in her, but humiliation forced the cry from her lips: “Aunt Julia, I shall be disgraced–I–” But she could go no farther. If her aunt turned such a stony ear to the fiction of the gambling debts, in what spirit would she receive the terrible avowal of the truth?

“I consider that you ARE disgraced, Lily: disgraced by your conduct far more than by its results. You say your friends have persuaded you to play cards with them; well, they may as well learn a lesson too. They can probably afford to lose a little money–and at any rate, I am not going to waste any of mine in paying them. And now I must ask you to leave me–this scene has been extremely painful, and I have my own health to consider. Draw down the blinds, please; and tell Jennings I will see no one this afternoon but Grace Stepney.”

Lily went up to her own room and bolted the door. She was trembling with fear and anger–the rush of the furies’ wings was in her ears. She walked up and down the room with blind irregular steps. The last door of escape was closed–she felt herself shut in with her dishonour

Suddenly her wild pacing brought her before the clock on the chimney-piece. Its hands stood at half-past three, and she remembered that Selden was to come to her at four. She had meant to put him off with a word–but now her heart leaped at the thought of seeing him. Was there not a promise of rescue in his love? As she had lain at Gerty’s side the night before, she had thought of his coming, and of the sweetness of weeping out her pain upon his breast. Of course she had meant to clear herself of its consequences before she met him–she had never really doubted that Mrs. Peniston would come to her aid. And she had felt, even in the full storm of her misery, that Selden’s love could not be her ultimate refuge; only it would be so sweet to take a moment’s shelter there, while she gathered fresh strength to go on.

But now his love was her only hope, and as she sat alone with her wretchedness the thought of confiding in him became as seductive as the river’s flow to the suicide. The first plunge would be terrible–but afterward, what blessedness might come! She remembered Gerty’s words: “I know him–he will help you”; and her mind clung to them as a sick person might cling to a healing relic. Oh, if he really understood–if he would help her to gather up her broken life, and put it together in some new semblance in which no trace of the past should remain! He had always made her feel that she was worthy of better things, and she had never been in greater need of such solace. Once and again she shrank at the thought of imperilling his love by her confession: for love was what she needed–it would take the glow of passion to weld together the shattered fragments of her self-esteem. But she recurred to Gerty’s words and held fast to them. She was sure that Gerty knew Selden’s feeling for her, and it had never dawned upon her blindness that Gerty’s own judgment of him was coloured by emotions far more ardent than her own.

Four o’clock found her in the drawing-room: she was sure that Selden would be punctual. But the hour came and passed–it moved on feverishly, measured by her impatient heart-beats. She had time to take a fresh survey of her wretchedness, and to fluctuate anew between the impulse to confide in Selden and the dread of destroying his illusions. But as the minutes passed the need of throwing herself on his comprehension became more urgent: she could not bear the weight of her misery alone. There would be a perilous moment, perhaps: but could she not trust to her beauty to bridge it over, to land her safe in the shelter of his devotion?

But the hour sped on and Selden did not come. Doubtless he had been detained, or had misread her hurriedly scrawled note, taking the four for a five. The ringing of the door-bell a few minutes after five confirmed this supposition, and made Lily hastily resolve to write more legibly in future. The sound of steps in the hall, and of the butler’s voice preceding them, poured fresh energy into her veins. She felt herself once more the alert and competent moulder of emergencies, and the remembrance of her power over Selden flushed her with sudden confidence. But when the drawing-room door opened it was Rosedale who came in.

The reaction caused her a sharp pang, but after a passing movement of irritation at the clumsiness of fate, and at her own carelessness in not denying the door to all but Selden, she controlled herself and greeted Rosedale amicably. It was annoying that Selden, when he came, should find that particular visitor in possession, but Lily was mistress of the art of ridding herself of superfluous company, and to her present mood Rosedale seemed distinctly negligible.

His own view of the situation forced itself upon her after a few moments’ conversation. She had caught at the Brys’ entertainment as an easy impersonal subject, likely to tide them over the interval till Selden appeared, but Mr. Rosedale, tenaciously planted beside the tea-table, his hands in his pockets, his legs a little too freely extended, at once gave the topic a personal turn.

“Pretty well done–well, yes, I suppose it was: Welly Bry’s got his back up and don’t mean to let go till he’s got the hang of the thing. Of course, there were things here and there–things Mrs. Fisher couldn’t be expected to see to–the champagne wasn’t cold, and the coats got mixed in the coat-room. I would have spent more money on the music. But that’s my character: if I want a thing I’m willing to pay: I don’t go up to the counter, and then wonder if the article’s worth the price. I wouldn’t be satisfied to entertain like the Welly Brys; I’d want something that would look more easy and natural, more as if I took it in my stride. And it takes just two things to do that, Miss Bart: money, and the right woman to spend it.”

He paused, and examined her attentively while she affected to rearrange the tea-cups.

“I’ve got the money,” he continued, clearing his throat, “and what I want is the woman–and I mean to have her too.”

He leaned forward a little, resting his hands on the head of his walking-stick. He had seen men of Ned Van Alstyne’s type bring their hats and sticks into a drawing-room, and he thought it added a touch of elegant familiarity to their appearance.

Lily was silent, smiling faintly, with her eyes absently resting on his face. She was in reality reflecting that a declaration would take some time to make, and that Selden must surely appear before the moment of refusal had been reached. Her brooding look, as of a mind withdrawn yet not averted, seemed to Mr. Rosedale full of a subtle encouragement. He would not have liked any evidence of eagerness.

“I mean to have her too,” he repeated, with a laugh intended to strengthen his self-assurance. “I generally HAVE got what I wanted in life, Miss Bart. I wanted money, and I’ve got more than I know how to invest; and now the money doesn’t seem to be of any account unless I can spend it on the right woman. That’s what I want to do with it: I want my wife to make all the other women feel small. I’d never grudge a dollar that was spent on that. But it isn’t every woman can do it, no matter how much you spend on her. There was a girl in some history book who wanted gold shields, or something, and the fellows threw ’em at her, and she was crushed under ’em: they killed her. Well, that’s true enough: some women looked buried under their jewelry. What I want is a woman who’ll hold her head higher the more diamonds I put on it. And when I looked at you the other night at the Brys’, in that plain white dress, looking as if you had a crown on, I said to myself:’By gad, if she had one she’d wear it as if it grew on her.'”

Still Lily did not speak, and he continued, warming with his theme: “Tell you what it is, though, that kind of woman costs more than all the rest of ’em put together. If a woman’s going to ignore her pearls, they want to be better than anybody else’s–and so it is with everything else. You know what I mean–you know it’s only the showy things that are cheap. Well, I should want my wife to be able to take the earth for granted if she wanted to. I know there’s one thing vulgar about money, and that’s the thinking about it; and my wife would never have to demean herself in that way.” He paused, and then added, with an unfortunate lapse to an earlier manner: “I guess you know the lady I’ve got in view, Miss Bart.”

Lily raised her head, brightening a little under the challenge. Even through the dark tumult of her thoughts, the clink of Mr. Rosedale’s millions had a faintly seductive note. Oh, for enough of them to cancel her one miserable debt! But the man behind them grew increasingly repugnant in the light of Selden’s expected coming. The contrast was too grotesque: she could scarcely suppress the smile it provoked. She decided that directness would be best.

“If you mean me, Mr. Rosedale, I am very grateful–very much flattered; but I don’t know what I have ever done to make you think–”

“Oh, if you mean you’re not dead in love with me, I’ve got sense enough left to see that. And I ain’t talking to you as if you were–I presume I know the kind of talk that’s expected under those circumstances. I’m confoundedly gone on you–that’s about the size of it–and I’m just giving you a plain business statement of the consequences. You’re not very fond of me–YET–but you’re fond of luxury, and style, and amusement, and of not having to worry about cash. You like to have a good time, and not have to settle for it; and what I propose to do is to provide for the good time and do the settling.”

He paused, and she returned with a chilling smile: “You are mistaken in one point, Mr. Rosedale: whatever I enjoy I am prepared to settle for.”

She spoke with the intention of making him see that, if his words implied a tentative allusion to her private affairs, she was prepared to meet and repudiate it. But if he recognized her meaning it failed to abash him, and he went on in the same tone: “I didn’t mean to give offence; excuse me if I’ve spoken too plainly. But why ain’t you straight with me–why do you put up that kind of bluff? You know there’ve been times when you were bothered–damned bothered–and as a girl gets older, and things keep moving along, why, before she knows it, the things she wants are liable to move past her and not come back. I don’t say it’s anywhere near that with you yet; but you’ve had a taste of bothers that a girl like yourself ought never to have known about, and what I’m offering you is the chance to turn your back on them once for all.”

The colour burned in Lily’s face as he ended; there was no mistaking the point he meant to make, and to permit it to pass unheeded was a fatal confession of weakness, while to resent it too openly was to risk offending him at a perilous moment. Indignation quivered on her lip; but it was quelled by the secret voice which warned her that she must not quarrel with him. He knew too much about her, and even at the moment when it was essential that he should show himself at his best, he did not scruple to let her see how much he knew. How then would he use his power when her expression of contempt had dispelled his one motive for restraint? Her whole future might hinge on her way of answering him: she had to stop and consider that, in the stress of her other anxieties, as a breathless fugitive may have to pause at the cross-roads and try to decide coolly which turn to take.

“You are quite right, Mr. Rosedale. I HAVE had bothers; and I am grateful to you for wanting to relieve me of them. It is not always easy to be quite independent and self-respecting when one is poor and lives among rich people; I have been careless about money, and have worried about my bills. But I should be selfish and ungrateful if I made that a reason for accepting all you offer, with no better return to make than the desire to be free from my anxieties. You must give me time–time to think of your kindness–and of what I could give you in return for it—”

She held out her hand with a charming gesture in which dismissal was shorn of its rigour. Its hint of future leniency made Rosedale rise in obedience to it, a little flushed with his unhoped-for success, and disciplined by the tradition of his blood to accept what was conceded, without undue haste to press for more. Something in his prompt acquiescence frightened her; she felt behind it the stored force of a patience that might subdue the strongest will. But at least they had parted amicably, and he was out of the house without meeting Selden–Selden, whose continued absence now smote her with a new alarm. Rosedale had remained over an hour, and she understood that it was now too late to hope for Selden. He would write explaining his absence, of course; there would be a note from him by the late post. But her confession would have to be postponed; and the chill of the delay settled heavily on her fagged spirit.

It lay heavier when the postman’s last ring brought no note for her, and she had to go upstairs to a lonely night–a night as grim and sleepless as her tortured fancy had pictured it to Gerty. She had never learned to live with her own thoughts, and to be confronted with them through such hours of lucid misery made the confused wretchedness of her previous vigil seem easily bearable.

Daylight disbanded the phantom crew, and made it clear to her that she would hear from Selden before noon; but the day passed without his writing or coming. Lily remained at home, lunching and dining alone with her aunt, who complained of flutterings of the heart, and talked icily on general topics. Mrs. Peniston went to bed early, and when she had gone Lily sat down and wrote a note to Selden. She was about to ring for a messenger to despatch it when her eye fell on a paragraph in the evening paper which lay at her elbow: “Mr. Lawrence Selden was among the passengers sailing this afternoon for Havana and the West Indies on the Windward Liner Antilles.”

She laid down the paper and sat motionless, staring at her note. She understood now that he was never coming–that he had gone away because he was afraid that he might come. She rose, and walking across the floor stood gazing at herself for a long time in the brightly-lit mirror above the mantel- piece. The lines in her face came out terribly–she looked old; and when a girl looks old to herself, how does she look to other people? She moved away, and began to wander aimlessly about the room, fitting her steps with mechanical precision between the monstrous roses of Mrs. Peniston’s Axminster. Suddenly she noticed that the pen with which she had written to Selden still rested against the uncovered inkstand. She seated herself again, and taking out an envelope, addressed it rapidly to Rosedale. Then she laid out a sheet of paper, and sat over it with suspended pen. It had been easy enough to write the date, and “Dear Mr. Rosedale”–but after that her inspiration flagged. She meant to tell him to come to her, but the words refused to shape themselves. At length she began: “I have been thinking—” then she laid the pen down, and sat with her elbows on the table and her face hidden in her hands.

Suddenly she started up at the sound of the door-bell. It was not late–barely ten o’clock–and there might still be a note from Selden, or a message–or he might be there himself, on the other side of the door! The announcement of his sailing might have been a mistake–it might be another Lawrence Selden who had gone to Havana–all these possibilities had time to flash through her mind, and build up the conviction that she was after all to see or hear from him, before the drawing-room door opened to admit a servant carrying a telegram.

Lily tore it open with shaking hands, and read Bertha Dorset’s name below the message: “Sailing unexpectedly tomorrow. Will you join us on a cruise in Mediterranean?”

BOOK II

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 re-form 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