House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (page 6)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the Monday, when the party disbanded with uproarious adieux, the return to town threw into stronger relief the charms of the life she was leaving. The other guests were dis

persing to
take up the same existence in a different setting: some at Newport, some at Bar Harbour, some in the elaborate rusticity of an Adirondack camp. Even Gerty Farish, who welcomed Lily’s return with tender solicitude, would soon be preparing to join the aunt with whom she spent her summers on Lake George: only Lily herself remained without plan or purpose, stranded in a backwater of the great current of pleasure. But Carry Fisher, who had insisted on transporting her to her own house, where she herself was to perch for a day or two on the way to the Brys’ camp, came to the rescue with a new suggestion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Either? Are there actually two?”

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

Miss Bart received this with increasing amusement. “Other things being equal, I think I should prefer a half-husband: who is he?” “Don’t fly out at me till you hear my reasons–George Dorset.”

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

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

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

“Knew—?” Miss Bart repeated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What things? Well, poverty, for one–and I don’t know any that’s more dreadful.” Lily turned away and sank with sudden weariness into the easy-chair near the tea-table. “You asked me just now if I could understand why Ned Silverton spent so much money. Of course I understand–he spends it on living with the rich. You think we live ON the rich, rather than with them: and so we do, in a sense–but it’s a privi

lege we have to pay for! We
eat their dinners, and drink their wine, and smoke their cigarettes, and use their carriages and their opera-boxes and their private cars–yes, but there’s a tax to pay on every one of those luxuries. The man pays it by big tips to the servants, by playing cards beyond his means, by flowers and presents–and–and–lots of other things that cost; the girl pays it by tips and cards too–oh, yes, I’ve had to take up bridge again–and by going to the best dress-makers, and having just the right dress for every occasion, and always keeping herself fresh and exquisite and amusing!”

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

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

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

And Carry has promised to find somebody who wants a kind of social secretary–you know she makes a specialty of the helpless rich.”

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

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

tions she now summoned the latter with the announcement that she had “found something.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Unhappy at being with the Gormers?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Selden had listened in silence, with the concentrated look which his thin dark face could assume when he wished to guard it against any involuntary change of expression. When his cousin ended, he said with a slight smile: “Since you’ve learned the wisdom of waiting, I don’t see why you urge me to rush in_ n but the troubled appeal of her eyes made him add, as he rose to take leave: “Still, I’ll do what you wish, and not hold you responsible for my failure.” Selden’s avoidance of Miss Bart had not been as unintentional as he had allowed his cousin to think. At first, indeed, while the memory of their last hour at Monte Carlo still held the full heat of his indignation, he had anxiously watched for her return; but she had disappointed him by lingering in England, and when she finally reappeared it happened that business had called him to the West, whence he came back only to learn that she was starting for Alaska with the Gormers. The revelation of this suddenly-established intimacy effectually chilled his desire to see her. If, at a moment when her whole life seemed to be breaking up, she could cheerfully commit its reconstruction to the Gormers, there was no reason why such accidents should ever strike her as irreparable. Every step she took seemed in fact to carry her farther from the region where, once or twice, he and she had met for an illumined moment; and the recognition of this fact, when its first pang had been surmounted, produced in him a sense of negative relief. It was much simpler for him to judge Miss Bart by her habitual conduct than by the rare deviations from it which had thrown her so disturbingly in his way; and every act of hers which made the recurrence of such deviations more unlikely, confirmed the sense of relief with which he returned to the conventional view of her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The sense of these doubts was uppermost when, late one afternoon, she was surprised by a visit from Lawrence Selden. He found her alone in the wilderness of pink damask, for in Mrs. Hatch’s world