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The House of Mirth

by Edith Wharton · English · Gutenberg #284 · 749,472 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The House of Mirth

Author: Edith Wharton


        
Release date: June 1, 1995 [eBook #284]
                Most recently updated: February 2, 2023

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/284


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HOUSE OF MIRTH ***




                        The House of Mirth

                                BY

                           EDITH WHARTON




BOOK ONE




Chapter 1


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

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

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

“Mr. Selden—what good luck!”

She came forward smiling, eager almost, in her resolve to intercept
him. One or two persons, in brushing past them, lingered to look;
for Miss Bart was a figure to arrest even the suburban traveller
rushing to his last train.

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

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

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

“Oh, almost any—even to sitting on a bench and talking to me. One
sits out a cotillion—why not sit out a train? It isn’t a bit hotter
here than in Mrs. Van Osburgh’s conservatory—and some of the women
are not a bit uglier.” She broke off, laughing, to explain that she
had come up to town from Tuxedo, on her way to the Gus Trenors’ at
Bellomont, and had missed the three-fifteen train to Rhinebeck.
“And there isn’t another till half-past five.” She consulted the
little jewelled watch among her laces. “Just two hours to wait. And
I don’t know what to do with myself. My maid came up this morning
to do some shopping for me, and was to go on to Bellomont at one
o’clock, and my aunt’s house is closed, and I don’t know a soul in
town.” She glanced plaintively about the station. “It IS hotter
than Mrs. Van Osburgh’s, after all. If you can spare the time, do
take me somewhere for a breath of air.”

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

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

She smiled assentingly, and then made a slight grimace.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Your street? Do you live here?”

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

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

“On the top floor—yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Selden was rummaging in a cupboard for the cake.

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

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

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

She sat up in surprise. “You do?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The reason for what?”

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

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

“Well, then——?”

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

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

“What?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The very thing you are marrying for!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And Americana—do you collect Americana?”

Selden stared and laughed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She returned his look interrogatively.

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

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

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

“Ah, so they do me,” she exclaimed.

“Then why go?”

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

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

She glanced at the clock.

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

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

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

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

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

“No; good bye here, please.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lily stiffened under the pleasantry.

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

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




Chapter 2


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She knew the symptoms at once, and was not surprised to be hailed
by the high notes of a pretty woman, who entered the train
accompanied by a maid, a bull-terrier, and a footman staggering
under a load of bags and dressing-cases.

“Oh, Lily—are you going to Bellomont? Then you can’t let me
have your seat, I suppose? But I MUST have a seat in this
carriage—porter, you must find me a place at once. Can’t some one
be put somewhere else? I want to be with my friends. Oh, how do you
do, Mr. Gryce? Do please make him understand that I must have a
seat next to you and Lily.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




Chapter 3


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lily rose and undressed in haste.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mrs. Bart gave him a quick glance.

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

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

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

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

“Are you ill?” she repeated.

“Ill?—— No, I’m ruined,” he said.

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

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

“Shut the pantry door,” she said.

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

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

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

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

It was a relief to Lily when her father died.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




Chapter 4


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Disappointed? Had you known her before?”

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

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

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

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

“When is Lady Cressida going?” Lily enquired.

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

“To stop here? In this house?”

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

“Perhaps Gus only said it to frighten you.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Furious with you? Why?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

She sat up smiling at the thought.

Miss Bart’s countenance did not reflect the smile.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“To fall?” Miss Bart suggested.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Quite sure,” said Lily.

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




Chapter 5


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, I had,” said Lily confidingly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why limited? Limited by luncheon?”

“No; by my other engagement.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




Chapter 6


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She glanced down at him, faintly smiling.

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

“Of course I did.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Freedom? Freedom from worries?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why not? Is it a celibate order?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




Chapter 7


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




Chapter 8


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Do you see him often?” she asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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