 Book II. CHAPTER VI. As became persons of their rising consequence, the Gormers were engaged in building a country house on Long Island, and it was a part of Miss Bart's duty to attend her hostess on frequent visits of inspection to the new estate. There, while Mrs. Gormer plunged into problems of lighting and sanitation, Lily had leisure to wander, in the bright autumn air, along the tree-fringed bay to which the land declined. Little as she was addicted to solitude, there had come to be moments when it seemed a welcome escape from the empty noises of her life. She was weary of being swept passively along a current of pleasure and business in which she had no share, weary of seeing other people pursue amusement and squander money, while she felt herself of no more account among them than an expensive toy in the hands of a spoiled child. It was in this frame of mind that, striking back from the shore one morning into the windings of an unfamiliar lane, she came suddenly upon the figure of George Dorsett. The Dorsett place was in the immediate neighbourhood of the Gormers newly acquired estate, and in her motor-flight's thither with Mrs. Gormer, Lily had caught one or two passing glimpses of the couple, but they moved in so different an orbit that she had not considered the possibility of a direct encounter. Dorsett, swinging along with bent head in moody abstraction, did not see Miss Bart till he was close upon her, but the sight, instead of bringing him to a halt as she had half expected, sent him toward her with an eagerness which found expression in his opening words. Mrs. Bart, you'll shake hands, won't you? I've been hoping to meet you. I should have written to you if I'd dared. His face, with its tossed red hair and straggling moustache, had a driven uneasy look, as though life had become an unceasing race between himself and the thoughts at his heels. The look drew a word of compassionate greeting from Lily, and he pressed on, as if encouraged by her tone. I wanted to apologize—to ask you to forgive me for the miserable part I played. She checked him with a quick gesture. Don't let us speak of it. I was very sorry for you, she said, with a tinge of disdain, which, as she instantly perceived, was not lost on him. He flushed to his haggard eyes, flushed so cruelly that she repented the thrust. You might well be. You don't know. You must let me explain. I was deceived, abominably deceived. I am still more sorry for you, then, she interposed, without irony. But you must see that I am not exactly the person with whom the subject can be discussed. He met this with a look of genuine wonder. Why not? Isn't it to you, of all people, that I owe an explanation? No explanation is necessary. The situation was perfectly clear to me. Ah! he murmured, his head drooping again, and his irresolute hand switching at the underbrush along the lane. But as Lily made a movement to pass on, he broke out with fresh vehemence. Miss Bart, for God's sake, don't turn from me. We used to be good friends. You were always kind to me, and you don't know how I need a friend now. The lamentable weakness of the words roused a motion of pity in Lily's breast. She too needed friends. She had tasted the pang of loneliness, and her resentment of Bertha Dorsett's cruelty softened her heart to the poor wretch who was after all the chief of Bertha's victims. I still wish to be kind. I feel no ill will toward you, she said. But you must understand that after what has happened we can't be friends again. We can't see each other. Ah! you are kind. You're merciful. You always were. He fixed his miserable gaze on her. But why can't we be friends? Why not, when I have repented in dust and ashes? Isn't it hard that you should condemn me to suffer for the falseness, the treachery of others? I was punished enough at the time. Is there to be no respite for me? I should have thought you had found complete respite in the reconciliation which was affected at my expense. Lily began with renewed impatience. But he broke in imploringly. Don't put it that way. When that's been the worst of my punishment—my God! What could I do? Wasn't I powerless? You were singled out as a sacrifice. Any word I might have said would have been turned against you. I have told you, I don't blame you. All I ask you to understand is that, after the use Bertha chose to make of me, after all that her behaviour has since implied, it's impossible that you and I should meet. He continued to stand before her in his dogged weakness. Is it? Need it be? Mightn't there be circumstances? He checked himself, slashing at the wayside weeds in wider radius. Then he began again. Miss Bart, listen, give me a minute. If we're not to meet again, at least let me have a hearing now. You say we can't be friends after—after what has happened. But can't I at least appeal to your pity? Can't I move you if I ask you to think of me as a prisoner? A prisoner you alone can set free. His inward start betrayed itself in a quick blush. Was it possible that this was really the sense of Carrie Fisher's adembrations? I can't see how I can possibly be of any help to you, she murmured, drawing back a little from the mounting excitement of his look. Her tone seemed to sober him, as it had done so often in his stormiest moments. The stubborn lines of his face relaxed, and he said, with an abrupt drop to docileity, you would see, if you'd be as merciful as you used to be, and heaven knows I've never needed it more. She paused a moment, moved in spite of herself by this reminder of her influence over him. Her fibres had been softened by suffering, and the sudden glimpse into his mocked and broken life disarmed her contempt for his weakness. I am very sorry for you. I would help you willingly, but you must have other friends, other advisers. I never had a friend like you, he answered simply, and besides, can't you see, you're the only person—his voice dropped to a whisper—the only person who knows. Again she felt her colour change, again her heart rose in precipitant throbs to meet what she felt was coming. He lifted his eyes to her intriguingly. You do see, don't you? You understand. I'm desperate. I'm at the end of my tether. I want to be free, and you can free me. I know you can. You don't want to keep me bound fast in hell, do you? You can't want to take such a vengeance as that. You are always kind. Your eyes are kind now. You say you're sorry for me. Well it rests with you, to show it. And heaven knows there's nothing to keep you back. You understand, of course, there wouldn't be a hint of publicity—not a sound or a syllable to connect you with a thing. It would never come to that, you know. All I need is to be able to say definitely, I know this, and this, and this, and the fight would drop, and the way be cleared, and the whole abominable business swept out of sight in a second. He spoke pantingly, like a tired runner, with breaks of exhaustion between his words, and through the breaks she caught, as through the shifting rents of a fog, great golden vistas of peace and safety. For there was no mistaking the definite intention behind his vague appeal. She could have filled up the blanks without the help of Mrs. Fisher's insinuations. Here was a man who turned to her in the extremity of his loneliness and his humiliation. If she came to him at such a moment, he would be hers, with all the force of his deluded faith. And the power to make him so lay in her hand—lay there in a completeness he could not even remotely conjecture—revenge and rehabilitation might be hers at a stroke. There was something dazzling in the completeness of the opportunity. She stood silent, gazing away from him down the autumnal stretch of the deserted lane, and suddenly fear possessed her, fear of herself, and of the terrible force of the temptation. All her past weaknesses were like so many eager accomplices, drawing her toward the path their feet had already smoothed. She turned quickly, and held out her hand to dorset. "'Good-bye. I'm sorry. There's nothing in the world that I can do.' "'Nothing? Ha! Don't say that!' he cried. Say what's true—that you abandon me like the others—you, the only creature who could have saved me.' "'Good-bye. Good-bye,' she repeated hurriedly, and as she moved away she heard him cry out on a last note of entreaty. "'At least you'll let me see you once more.'" Lily, unregaining the Gormer grounds, struck rapidly across the lawn toward the unfinished house, where she fancied that her hostess might be speculating, not too resignedly, on the cause of her delay, for like many unpunctual persons, Mrs. Gormer disliked to be kept waiting. As Miss Bart reached the avenue, however, she saw a smart faton with a high-stepping pair disappear behind the shrubbery in the direction of the gate, and on the doorstep stood Mrs. Gormer, with a glow of retrospective pleasure on her open countenance. At sight of Lily, the glow deepened to an embarrassed red, and she said with a slight laugh, "'Did you see my visitor? Oh, I thought you came back by the avenue.' It was Mrs. George Dorset. She said she dropped in to make a neighborly call. Lily met the announcement with her usual composure, though her experience of Bertha's idiosyncrasies would not have led her to include the neighborly instinct among them, and Mrs. Gormer, relieved to see that she gave no sign of surprise, went on with a deprecating laugh. Of course what really brought her was curiosity. She made me take her all over the house. But no one could have been nicer. No airs, you know, and so good-natured. I can quite see why people think her so fascinating. This surprising event, coinciding too completely with her meeting with Dorset to be regarded as contingent upon it, had yet immediately struck Lily with a vague sense of foreboding. It was not in Bertha's habits to be neighborly, much less to make advances to any one outside the immediate circle of her affinities. She had always consistently ignored the world of outer aspirants, or had recognized its individual members only when prompted by motives of self-interest, and the very capriciousness of her condescensions had, as Lily was aware, given them special value in the eyes of the person she distinguished. Lily saw this now in Mrs. Gormer's unconceivable complacency, and in the happy irrelevance with which, for the next day or two, she quoted Bertha's opinions and speculated on the origin of her gown. All the secret ambitions which Mrs. Gormer's native indolence, and the attitude of her companions, kept in habitual abeyance, were now germinating afresh in the glow of Bertha's advances, and whatever the cause of the latter, Lily saw that, if they were followed up, they were likely to have a disturbing effect upon her own future. She had arranged to break the length of her stay with her new friends by one or two visits to other acquaintances as recent, and on her return from this somewhat depressing excursion, she was immediately conscious that Mrs. Dorsett's influence was still in the air. There had been another exchange of visits, a tea at a country-club, an encounter at a hunt-ball. There was even a rumour of an approaching dinner, which Maddie Gormer, with an unnatural effort at discretion, tried to smuggle out of the conversation whenever Miss Bart took part in it. The latter had already planned to return to town after a farewell Sunday with her friends, and with Gertie Farrish's aid had discovered a small private hotel where she might establish herself for the winter. The hotel being on the edge of a fashionable neighbourhood, the price of the few square feet she was to occupy, was considerably in excess of her means, but she found justification for her dislike of poorer quarters, in the argument that, at this particular juncture, it was of the utmost importance to keep up a show of prosperity. In reality, it was impossible for her, while she had the means to pay her way for a week ahead, to lapse into a form of existence like Gertie Farrish's. She had never been so near the brink of insolvency. But she could at least manage to meet her weekly hotel-bill, and having settled the heaviest of her previous debts out of the money she had received from Trenor, she had still a fair margin of credit to go upon. The situation, however, was not agreeable enough to lull her to complete unconsciousness of its insecurity. Her rooms, with their cramped outlook down a shallow vista of brick walls and fire escapes, her lonely meals in the dark restaurant with its surcharged ceiling and haunting smell of coffee—all these material discomforts, which were yet to be accounted as so many privileges soon to be withdrawn, kept constantly before her the disadvantages of her state, and her mind reverted the more insistently to Mrs. Fisher's councils. Needed about the question as she would, she knew the outcome of it was that she must try to marry Rosdale, and in this conviction she was fortified by an unexpected visit from George Dorsett. She found him, on the first Sunday after her return to town, pacing her narrow sitting-room to the imminent peril of the few knick-knacks with which she had tried to disguise its plush exuberances. But the sight of her seemed to quiet him, and he said meekly that he hadn't come to bother her, that he asked only to be allowed to sit for half an hour and talk of anything she liked. In reality, as she knew, he had but one subject—himself and his wretchedness—and it was the need of her sympathy that had drawn him back. But he began with a pretense of questioning her about herself, and as she replied, she saw that, for the first time, a faint realization of her plight penetrated the dense surface of his self-absorption. Was it possible that her old beast of an aunt had actually cut her off? That she was living alone like this because there was no one else for her to go to, and that she really hadn't more than enough to keep alive on, till the wretched little legacy was paid? The fibres of sympathy were nearly atrophied in him, but he was suffering so intensely that he had a faint glimpse of what other sufferings might mean, and, as she perceived, an almost simultaneous perception of the way in which her particular misfortunes might serve him. When at length she dismissed him, on the pretext that she must dress for dinner, he lingered entreatingly on the threshold to blurt out,—it's been such a comfort, do say you'll let me see you again. But to this direct appeal it was impossible to give an ascent, and she said with friendly decisiveness,—I'm sorry, but you know why I can't. He colored to the eyes, pushed the door shut, and stood before her embarrassed but insistent. I know how you might, if you would, if things were different, and it lies with you to make them so. It's just a word to say, and you put me out of my misery. Their eyes met, and for a second she trembled again with the nearness of the temptation. You are mistaken. I know nothing. I saw nothing, she exclaimed, striving by sheer force of reiteration, to build a barrier between herself and her peril. And as he turned away, groaning out, you sacrifice us both. She continued to repeat, as if it were a charm. I know nothing. Absolutely nothing. Lily had seen little of Rosedale since her illuminating talk with Mrs. Fisher, but on the two or three occasions when they had met, she was conscious of having distinctly advanced in his favour. There could be no doubt that he admired her as much as ever, and she believed it rested with herself to raise his admiration to the point where it should bear down the lingering counsels of expediency. The task was not an easy one, but neither was it easy in her long sleepless nights to face the thought of what George Dorsett was so clearly ready to offer. Baseness for baseness. She hated the other least. There were even moments when a marriage with Rosedale seemed the only honourable solution of her difficulties. She did not indeed let her imagination range beyond the day of plighting. After that everything faded into a haze of material well-being, in which the personality of her benefactor remained mercifully vague. She had learned, in her long vigils, that there were certain things not good to think of, certain midnight images that must at any cost be exercised, and one of these was the image of herself as Rosedale's wife. Carrie Fisher, on the strength, as she frankly owned of the bri's Newport success, had taken for the autumn months a small house at Tuxedo, and thither Lily was bound on the Sunday after Dorsett's visit. Though it was nearly dinner-time when she arrived, her hostess was still out, and the fire-lit quiet of the small, silent house descended on her spirit with a sense of peace and familiarity. It may be doubted if such an emotion had ever before been evoked by Carrie Fisher's surroundings, but contrasted to the world in which Lily had lately lived, there was an air of repose and stability in the very placing of the furniture, and in the quiet competence of the parlor maid, who led her up to her room. Mrs. Fisher's unconventionality was, after all, a merely superficial divergence from an inherited social creed, while the manners of the Gormers' circle represented their first attempt to formulate such a creed for themselves. It was the first time, since her return from Europe, that Lily had found herself in a congenial atmosphere, and the stirring of familiar associations had almost prepared her, as she descended the stairs before dinner, to enter upon a group of her old acquaintances. But this expectation was instantly checked by the reflection that the friends who remained loyal were precisely those who would be least willing to expose her to such encounters, and it was hardly with surprise that she found, instead, Mr. Rosedale kneeling domestically on the drawing-room hearth before his hostess's little girl. Rosedale in the paternal role was hardly a figure to soften Lily, yet she could not but notice a quality of homely goodness in his advances to the child. They were not, at any rate, their premeditated and perfunctory endearments of the guest under his hostess's eye, for he and the little girl had the room to themselves, and something in his attitude made him seem as simple and kindly being, compared to the small, critical creature who endured his homage. Yes, he would be kind. Lily from the threshold had time to feel. Kind in his gross, unscrupulous, rapacious way, the way of the predatory creature with his mate. She had been a moment in which to consider whether this glimpse of the fireside man mitigated her repugnance, or gave it, rather, a more concrete and intimate form. For at sight of her, he was immediately on his feet again. The floored and dominant Rosedale of Maddie Gormer's drawing-room. It was no surprise to Lily to find that he had been selected as her only fellow-guest. Though she and her hostess had not met since the latter's tentative discussion of her future, Lily knew that the acuteness which enabled Mrs. Fisher to lay a safe and pleasant course through a world of antagonistic forces was not infrequently exercised for the benefit of her friends. It was, in fact, characteristic of Carrie, that while she actively gleaned her own stores from the field of affluence, her real sympathies were on the other side, with the unlucky, the unpopular, the unsuccessful, with all her hungry fellow-toilers in the shorn stubble of success. Mrs. Fisher's experience guarded her against the mistake of exposing Lily, for the first evening, to the unmitigated impression of Rosedale's personality. Kate Corby and two or three men dropped into dinner, and Lily, alive to every detail of her friend's method, saw that such opportunities as had been contrived for her were to be deferred till she had, as it were, gained courage to make effectual use of them. She had a sense of acquiescing in this plan with the passiveness of a sufferer resigned to the surgeon's touch, and this feeling of almost lethargic helplessness continued when, after the departure of the guests, Mrs. Fisher followed her upstairs. May I come in and smoke a cigarette over your fire? If we talk in my room we shall disturb the child. Mrs. Fisher looked about her with the eye of the solicitous hostess. I hope you've managed to make yourself comfortable, dear. Isn't it a jolly little house? It's been such a blessing to have a few quiet weeks with the baby. Carrie, in her rare moments of prosperity, became so expansively maternal that Miss Bart sometimes wondered whether, if she could ever get the time and money enough, she would not end by devoting them both to her daughter. It's a well-earned rest. I'll say that for myself, she continued, sinking down with a sigh of content on the pillowed lounge near the fire. Louisa Brie is a stern taskmaster. I often used to wish myself back with the gormers. Talk of love making people jealous and suspicious. It's nothing to social ambition. Louisa used to lie awake at night, wondering whether the women who called on us called on me because I was with her, or on her because she was with me, and she was always laying traps to find out what I thought. Of course I had to disown my oldest friends, rather than let her suspect she owed me the chance of making a single acquaintance, when all the while that was what she had been there for, and what she wrote me a handsome check for when the season was over. Miss Fisher was not a woman who talked of herself without cause, and the practice of direct speech, far from precluding in her an occasional resort to circuitous methods, served rather at crucial moments the purpose of the juggler's chatter while he shifts the contents of his sleeves. Through the haze of her cigarette smoke she continued to gaze meditatively at Miss Bart, who, having dismissed her maid, sat before the toilet table shaking out over her shoulders the loosened undulations of her hair. Her hair is wonderful, Lily. Thinner? What does that matter when it's so light and alive? So many women's worries seem to go straight to their hair, but yours looks as if there had never been an anxious thought under it. I never saw you look better than you did this evening. Maddie Gormer told me that Morpeth wanted to paint you. Why don't you let him? Miss Bart's immediate answer was to address a critical glance to the reflection of the countenance under discussion. Then she said, with a slight touch of irritation, I don't care to accept a portrait from Paul Morpeth. Mrs. Fisher mused, No. And just now especially. Well he could do you after you are married. She waited a moment and then went on. By the way, I had a visit from Maddie the other day. She turned up here last Sunday, and with Bertha Dorsett of all people in the world. She paused again to measure the effect of this announcement on her hearer, but the brush and Miss Bart's lifted hand maintained its unwavering stroke from brow to nape. I was never more astonished, Mrs. Fisher pursued. I don't know two women less predestined to intimacy—from Bertha's standpoint, that is—for, of course, poor Maddie thinks it natural enough that she should be singled out. I have no doubt the rabbit always thinks it is fascinating the anaconda. While you know I've always told you that Maddie secretly longed to bore herself with the really fashionable, and now that the chance has come, I see that she's capable of sacrificing all her old friends to it. Lily laid aside her brush, and turned a penetrating glance upon her friend. Including me, she suggested. Ah, my dear, murmured Mrs. Fisher, rising to push back a log from the hearth. That's what Bertha means, isn't it? Miss Bart went on steadily. For, of course, she always means something, and before I left Long Island, I saw that she was beginning to lay her toils for Maddie. Mrs. Fisher sighed evasively. She has her fast now at any rate. To think of that loud independence of Maddie's being only a subtler form of snobbishness, Bertha can already make her believe anything she pleases, and I'm afraid she's begun, my poor child, by insinuating horrors about you. Lily flushed under the shadow of her drooping hair. The world is too vile, she murmured, averting herself from Mrs. Fisher's anxious scrutiny. It's not a pretty place, and the only way to keep a footing in it is to fight it on its own terms, and above all, my dear, not alone. Mrs. Fisher gathered up her floating implications in a resolute grasp. You've told me so little that I can only guess what has been happening, but in the rush we all live in there's no time to keep on hating any one without a cause, and if Bertha is still nasty enough to want to injure you with other people, it must be because she's still afraid of you. From her standpoint there's only one reason for being afraid of you, and my own idea is that, if you want to punish her, you hold the means in your hand. I believe you can marry George Dorsett to-morrow, but if you don't care for that particular form of retaliation, the only thing to save you from Bertha is to marry somebody else. CHAPTER VII The light projected on the situation by Mrs. Fisher had the cheerless distinctness of a winter dawn. It outlined the facts with a cold precision unmodified by shade or colour, and refracted, as it were, from the blank walls of the surrounding limitations. She had opened windows from which no sky was ever visible. But the idealists subdued to vulgar necessities must employ vulgar minds to draw the inference to which she cannot stoop, and it was easier for Lily to let Mrs. Fisher formulate her case than to put it plainly to herself. Once confronted with it, however, she went the full length of its consequences, and these had never been more clearly present to her than when, the next afternoon, she set out for a walk with Rosedale. It was one of those still-November days when the air is haunted with the light of summer, and something in the lines of the landscape, and in the golden haze which bathed them, recalled to Miss Bart the September afternoon when she had climbed the slopes of Bellamont with Seldon. The unfortunate memory was kept before her by its ironic contrast to her present situation, since her walk with Seldon had represented an irresistible flight from just such a climax as the present excursion was designed to bring about. But other memories important her also. The recollection of similar situations, as skillfully led up to, but through some malice of fortune, or her own unsteadiness of purpose, always failing of the intended result. Well, her purpose was steady enough now. She saw that the whole weary work of rehabilitation must begin again, and against far greater odds, if Bertha Dorsett should succeed in breaking up her friendship with the Gormers, and her longing for shelter and security was intensified by the passionate desire to triumph over Bertha, as only wealth and predominance could triumph over her. As the wife of Rosdale, the Rosdale she felt it in her power to create, she would at least present an invulnerable front to her enemy. She had to draw upon this thought, as upon some fiery stimulant, to keep up her part in the scene toward which Rosdale was too frankly tending. As she walked beside him, shrinking in every nerve from the way in which his look and tone made free of her, yet telling herself that this momentary endurance of his mood was the price she must pay for her ultimate power over him, she tried to calculate the exact point at which concession must turn to resistance, and the price he would have to pay be made equally clear to him. But his dapper self-confidence seemed impenetrable to such hints, and she had a sense of something hard and self-contained behind the superficial warmth of his manner. They had been seated for some time in the seclusion of a rocky glen above the lake, when she suddenly cut short the culmination of an impassioned period by turning upon him the grave loveliness of her gaze. "'I do believe what you say, Mr. Rosdale,' she said quietly, "'and I am ready to marry you whenever you wish.'" Rosdale, reddening to the roots of his glossy hair, received this announcement with a recoil which carried him to his feet, where he halted before her in an attitude of almost comic discomfiture. "'For I suppose that is what you do wish,' she continued, in the same quiet tone. "'And, though I was unable to consent when you spoke to me in this way before, I am ready, now that I know you so much better, to trust my happiness to your hands.'" She spoke with the noble directness which she could command on such occasions, and which was like a large, steady light thrown across the tortuous darkness of the situation. In its inconvenient brightness Rosdale seemed to waver a moment, as though conscious that every avenue of escape was unpleasantly illuminated. Then he gave a short laugh, and drew out a gold-cigarette case, in which, with plump, jeweled fingers, he groped for a gold-tipped cigarette. Selecting one, he paused to contemplate at a moment before saying, "'My dear Miss Lily, I'm sorry if there's been any little misapprehension between us, but you made me feel my suit was so hopeless, that I had really no intention of renewing it.'" Lily's blood tingled with the grossness of the rebuff, but she checked the first leap of her anger, and said in a tone of gentle dignity, "'I have no one but myself to blame if I gave you the impression that my decision was final.'" Her word-play was always too quick for him, and this reply held him in puzzled silence while she extended her hand and added, with the faintest inflection of sadness in her voice, Before we bid each other good-bye, I want at least to thank you for having once thought of me as you did. The touch of her hand, the moving softness of her look, thrilled a vulnerable fibre in Rosedale, it was her exquisite inaccessibleness, the sense of distance she could convey without a hint of disdain, that made it most difficult for him to give her up. "'Why do you talk of saying good-bye? Ain't we going to be good friends all the same?' he urged, without releasing her hand. She drew it away quietly. "'What is your idea of being good friends?' she returned with a slight smile. "'Making love to me without asking me to marry you.'" Rosedale laughed with a recovered sense of ease. "'Well, that's about the size of it, I suppose. I can't help making love to you. I don't see how any man could, but I don't mean to ask you to marry me as long as I can keep out of it.'" She continued to smile. "'I like your frankness, but I am afraid our friendship can hardly continue on those terms.' She turned away as though to mark that its final term had in fact been reached, and he followed her for a few steps with a baffled sense of her having, after all, kept the game in her own hands. "'Miss Lily,' he began impulsively, but she walked on without seeming to hear him. He overtook her in a few quick strides, and laid an intriguing hand on her arm. "'Miss Lily, don't hurry away like that—you're beastly hard on a fellow—but if you don't mind speaking the truth, I don't see why you shouldn't allow me to do the same.'" She had paused a moment with raised brows, drawing away instinctively from his touch, though she made no effort to evade his words. "'I was under the impression,' she rejoined, "'that you had done so without waiting for my permission.' "'Well, why shouldn't you hear my reasons for doing it, then? We're neither of us such new hands that a little plain speaking is going to hurt us. I'm all broken up on you—there's nothing new in that. I'm more in love with you than I was this time last year—but I've got to face the fact that the situation is changed.'" She continued to confront him with the same air of ironic composure. "'You mean to say that I'm not as desirable a match as you thought me?' "'Yes, that's what I do mean,' he answered resolutely. "'I won't go into what's happened. I don't believe the stories about you. I don't want to believe them. But there, there—and why not believing them ain't going to alter the situation?' She flushed to her temples, but the extremity of her need checked the retort on her lip, and she continued to face him composedly. "'If they are not true,' she said, "'doesn't that alter the situation?' He met this with a steady gaze of his small, stock-taking eyes, which made her feel herself no more than some super-fine human merchandise. I believe it does in novels, but I'm certain it don't in real life. You know that as well as I do. If we're speaking the truth, let's speak the whole truth. Last year I was wild to marry you, and you wouldn't look at me. This year, well, you appear to be willing. Now what has changed in the interval? Your situation, that's all. Then you thought you could do better. Now, you think you can?' broke from her ironically. "'Why, yes, I do. In one way, that is.' He stood before her, his hands and his pockets, his chest sturdily expanded under its vivid waistcoat. "'It's this way, you see. I've had a pretty steady grind of it these last years, working up my social position. Think it's funny, I should say that. Why should I mind saying I want to get into society? A man ain't ashamed to say he wants to own a racing-stable or a picture-gallery. Well a taste for society is just another kind of hobby. Perhaps I want to get even with some of the people who cold-shouldered me last year. Put it that way, if it sounds better. Anyhow. I want to have the run of the best houses, and I'm getting it, too, little by little. But I know the quickest way to queer yourself with the right people is to be seen with the wrong ones, and that's the reason I want to avoid mistakes." Miss Bart continued to stand before him in a silence that might have expressed either mockery or a half-reluctant respect for his candor, and after a moment's pause he went on, "'There it is, you see. I'm more in love with you than ever. But if I married you now, I'd queer myself for good and all, and everything I've worked for all these years would be wasted.'" She received this with a look from which all tinge of resentment had faded. After the tissue of social falsehoods in which she had so long moved, it was refreshing to step into the open daylight of an avowed expediency. "'I understand you,' she said. "'A year ago I should have been of use to you, and now I should be an encumbrance. And I like you for telling me so quite honestly.'" She extended her hand with a smile. Again the gesture had a disturbing effect upon Mr. Rosdale's self-command. "'Pied George, you're a dead game sport, you are,' he exclaimed, and as she began once more to move away, he broke out suddenly, "'Miss Lily, stop. You know I don't believe those stories. I believe they were all got up by a woman who didn't hesitate to sacrifice you to her own convenience.'" Lily drew away with a movement of quick disdain. It was easier to endure his insolence than his commiseration. "'You are very kind, but I don't think we need to discuss the matter farther.'" But Rosdale's natural imperviousness to hints made it easy for him to brush such resistance aside. "'I don't want to discuss anything. I just want to put a plain case before you,' he persisted. She paused in spite of herself, held by the note of a new purpose in his look and tone, and he went on, keeping his eyes firmly upon her. The wonder to me is that you've waited so long to get square with that woman when you've had the power in your hands. She continued silent under the rush of astonishment that his words produced, and he moved a step closer to ask with low-toned directness, "'Why don't you use those letters of hers you bought last year?' Lily stood speechless under the shock of the interrogation. In the words preceding it she had conjectured at most an allusion to her supposed influence over George Dorsett, nor did the astonishing indelicacy of the reference diminish the likelihood of Rosdale's resorting to it. But now she saw how far short of the mark she had fallen, and the surprise of learning that he had discovered the secret of the letters left her, for the moment, unconscious of the special use to which he was in the act of putting his knowledge. Her temporary loss of self-possession gave him time to press his point, and he went on quickly, as though to secure a completeer control of the situation. "'You see, I know where you stand. I know how completely she's in your power.' "'That sounds like stage-talk, don't it. But there's a lot of truth at some of those old gags. And I don't suppose you bought those letters simply because you're collecting autographs.' She continued to look at him with a deepening bewilderment. Her only clear impression resolved itself into a scared sense of his power. "'You're wondering how I found out about him?' he went on, answering her look with a note of conscious pride. "'Perhaps you've forgotten that I'm the owner of the Benedict. But never mind about that now. Getting on to things is a mighty useful accomplishment in business. But I've simply extended it to my private affairs. For this is partly my affair, you see. At least it depends on you to make it so.' "'Let's look the situation straight in the eye. Mrs. Dorsett—for reasons we needn't go into—did you a beastly bad turn last spring? Everybody knows what Mrs. Dorsett is, and her best friends wouldn't believe her on oath where their own interests were concerned. But as long as they're out of the row, it's much easier to follow her lead than to set themselves against it—and you've simply been sacrificed to their laziness and selfishness. Isn't that a pretty fair statement of the case? Well, some people say you've got the neatest kind of an answer in your hands, that George Dorsett would marry you to-morrow, if you'd tell him all you know, and give him the chance to show the lady the door. I daresay he would. But you don't seem to care for that particular form of getting even, and taking a purely business view of the question, I think you're right. In a deal like that, nobody comes out with perfectly clean hands, and the only way for you to start fresh is to get Bertha Dorsett to back you up, instead of trying to fight her. He paused long enough to draw breath, but not to give her time for the expression of her gathering resistance, and as he pressed on, expounding and elucidating his idea with the directness of the man who has no doubts of his cause, she found the indignation gradually freezing on her lip, found herself held fast in the grasp of his argument by the mere cold strength of its presentation. There was no time now to wonder how he had heard of her obtaining the letters. All her world was dark outside the monstrous glare of his scheme for using them. And it was not, after the first moment, the horror of the idea that held her spell-bound subdued to his will. It was rather its subtle affinity to her inmost cravings. He would marry her to-morrow, if she could regain Bertha Dorsett's friendship. And to induce the open resumption of that friendship, and the tacit retraction of all that had caused his withdrawal, she had only to put to the lady the latent menace contained in the packet so miraculously delivered into her hands. Lily saw in a flash the advantage of this course over that which poor Dorsett had pressed upon her. The other plan depended for its success on the infliction of an open injury, while this reduced the transaction to a private understanding, of which no third person need have the remotest hint. Put by Rosedale in terms of business-like give-and-take, this understanding took on the harmless air of a mutual accommodation, like a transfer of property, or a revision of boundary lines. It certainly simplified life to view it as a perpetual adjustment, a play of party politics, in which every concession had its recognized equivalent. Lily's tired mind was fascinated by this escape from fluctuating ethical estimates into a region of concrete weights and measures. Rosedale, as she listened, seemed to read in her silence not only a gradual acquiescence in his plan, but a dangerously far-reaching perception of the chances it offered. For as she continued to stand before him without speaking, he broke out with a quick return upon himself. You see how simple it is, don't you? Well don't be carried away by the idea that it's too simple. It isn't exactly as if you'd started in with a clean bill of health. Now we're talking, let's call things by their right names, and clear the whole business up. You know well enough that Bertha Dorsett couldn't have touched you if there hadn't been—well—questions, asked before—little points of interrogation, eh?—bound to happen to a good-looking girl with stingy relatives, I suppose. Anyhow, they did happen, and she found the ground prepared for her. Do you see where I'm coming out? You don't want these little questions cropping up again. It's one thing to get Bertha Dorsett into line, but what you want is to keep her there. You can frighten her fast enough, but how are you going to keep her frightened? By showing her that you're as powerful as she is. All the letters in the world won't do that for you as you are now. But with a big backing behind you, you'll keep her just where you want her to be. That's my share in the business. That's what I'm offering you. You can't put the thing through without me. Don't run away with any idea that you can. In six months you'd be back again among your old worries, or worse ones. And here I am, ready to lift you out of them to-morrow, if you say so. Do you say so, Miss Lily? She added, moving suddenly nearer. The words, and the movement which accompanied them, combined to startle Lily out of the state of tranced subservience into which she had insensibly slipped. Light comes in devious ways to the groping consciousness, and it came to her now through the disgusted perception that her would-be accomplice assumed, as a matter of course, the likelihood of her distrusting him, and perhaps trying to cheat him if his share of the spoils. This glimpse of his inner mind seemed to present the whole transaction in a new aspect, as she saw that the essential baseness of the act lay in its freedom from risk. She drew back with a quick gesture of rejection, saying in a voice that was a surprise to her own ears, "'You are mistaken, quite mistaken, both in the facts, and in what you infer from them.' Rosdale stared a moment, puzzled by her sudden dash in a direction so different from that toward which she had appeared to be letting him guide her. "'Now what on earth does that mean? I thought we understood each other,' he exclaimed, and to her murmur of, "'Ah, we do now.' He retorted with a sudden burst of violence. I suppose it's because the letters are to him, then. "'Well, I'll be damned if I see what thanks you've got from him.'" The autumn days declined to winter. Once more the leisure world was in transition between country and town, and Fifth Avenue, still deserted at the weekend, showed from Monday to Friday a broadening stream of carriages between house fronts gradually restored to consciousness. The horse show, some two weeks earlier, had produced a passing semblance of reanimation, filling the theatres and restaurants with a human display of the same costly and high-stepping kind as circled daily about its ring. In Miss Bart's world, the horse show, and the public it attracted, had ostensibly come to be classed among the spectacles disdained of the elect, but as the feudal lord might sally forth to join in the dance on his village green, so society, unofficially and incidentally, still condescended to look in upon the scene. Mrs. Gormer, among the rest, was not above seizing such an occasion for the display of herself and her horses, and Lily was given one or two opportunities of appearing at her friend's side in the most conspicuous box the house afforded. But this lingering semblance of intimacy made her only the more conscious of a change in the relation between Matty and herself, of a dawning discrimination, a gradually formed social standard, emerging from Mrs. Gormer's chaotic view of life. It was inevitable that Lily herself should constitute the first sacrifice to this new ideal, and she knew that, once the Gormers were established in town, the whole drift of fashionable life would facilitate Matty's detachment from her. She had, in short, failed to make herself indispensable, or rather her attempt to do so had been thwarted by an influence stronger than any she could exert. That influence, in its last analysis, was simply the power of money. With Adorsett's social credit was based on an impregnable bank account. Lily knew that Rosedale had overstated neither the difficulty of her own position, nor the completeness of the vindication he offered. Once Bertha's match in material resources, her superior gifts would make it easy for her to dominate her adversary. An understanding of what such domination would mean, and of the disadvantages accruing from her rejection of it, was brought home to Lily with increasing clearness during the early weeks of the winter. Hitherto she had kept up a semblance of movement outside the main flow of the social current. But with the return to town, and the concentrating of scattered activities, the mere fact of not slipping back naturally into her old habits of life marked her as being unmistakably excluded from them. If one were not a part of the season's fixed routine, one swung unspired in a void of social non-existence. Lily, for all her dissatisfied dreaming, had never really conceived the possibility of revolving about a different centre. It was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly different to find any other habitable region. Her sense of irony never quite deserted her, and she could still note, with self-directed derision, the abnormal value suddenly acquired by the most tiresome and insignificant details of her former life. Its very drudgeries had a charm now that she was involuntarily released from them. Card-leaving note-writing enforced civilities to the dull and elderly, and the smiling endurance of tedious dinners. How pleasantly such obligations would have filled the emptiness of her days. She did indeed leave cards in plenty. She kept herself, with a smiling and valiant persistence, well in the eye of her world. Or did she suffer any of those gross rebuffs which sometimes produce a wholesome reaction of contempt in their victim? Society did not turn away from her. It simply drifted by, preoccupied and inattentive, letting her feel to the full measure of her humbled pride, how completely she had been the creature of its favour. She had rejected Rosedale's suggestion with a promptness of scorn almost surprising to herself. She had not lost her capacity for high flashes of indignation. But she could not breathe long on the heights. There had been nothing in her training to develop any continuity of moral strength. What she craved, and really felt herself entitled to, was a situation in which the noblest attitude should also be the easiest. Hitherto her intermittent impulses of resistance had suffice to maintain her self-respect. If she slipped, she recovered her footing, and it was only afterward that she was aware of having recovered it each time on a slightly lower level. She had rejected Rosedale's offer without conscious effort. Her whole being had risen against it. And she did not yet perceive that, by the mere act of listening to him, she had learned to live with ideas which would once have been intolerable to her. To Gertie Farrish, keeping watch over her with a tenderer, if less discerning eye than Mrs. Fisher's, the results of the struggle were already distinctly visible. She did not, indeed, know what hostages Lily had already given to expediency. But she saw her passionately and irretrievably pledged to the ruinous policy of keeping up. Gertie could smile now at her own early dream of her friend's renovation through adversity. She understood clearly enough that Lily was not of those to whom privation teaches the unimportance of what they have lost. But this very fact, to Gertie, made her friend the more piteously in want of aid, the more exposed to the claims of a tenderness she was so little conscious of needing. Lily, since her return to town, had not often climbed Miss Farrish's stairs. There was something irritating to her in the mute interrogation of Gertie's sympathy. She felt the real difficulties of her situation to be incommunicable to anyone whose theory of values was so different from her own, and the restrictions of Gertie's life, which had once had the charm of contrast, now reminded her too painfully of the limits to which her own existence was shrinking. When at length one afternoon she put into execution the belated resolve to visit her friend, this sense of shrunken opportunities possessed her with unusual intensity. The walk up Fifth Avenue, unfolding before her, in the brilliance of the hard winter sunlight, an interminable procession of fastidiously equipped carriages, giving her through the little squares of broam windows, peeps of familiar profiles bent above visiting lists, of hurried hands dispensing notes and cards to attended footmen. This glimpse of the ever-revolving wheels of the great social machine made Lily more than ever conscious of the steepness and narrowness of Gertie's stairs, and of the cramped, blind alley of life to which they led. Dull stairs destined to be mounted by dull people. How many thousands of insignificant figures were going up and down such stairs all over the world at that very moment? figures as shabby and uninteresting as that of the middle-aged lady in limp black who descended Gertie's flight as Lily climbed to it. That was poor Miss Jane Silverton. She came to talk things over with me. She and her sister want to do something to support themselves, Gertie explained, as Lily followed her into the sitting-room. To support themselves? Are they so hard up? Miss Bart asked with a touch of irritation. She had not come to listen to the woes of other people. I'm afraid they have nothing left. Ned's debts have swallowed up everything. They had such hopes, you know, when he broke away from Carrie Fisher. They thought Bertha Dorsett would be such a good influence, because she doesn't care for cards, and—well, she talked quite beautifully to poor Miss Jane about feeling as if Ned were her younger brother, and wanting to carry him off on the yacht, so that he might have a chance to drop cards and racing and take up his literary work again. Miss Farish paused with a sigh which reflected the perplexity of her departing visitor. But that isn't all. It isn't even the worst. It seems that Ned has quarreled with the Dorsets, or at least Bertha won't allow him to see her, and he is so unhappy about it that he is taken to gambling again, and going about with all sorts of queer people. And cousin Grace Van Osburg accuses him of having a very bad influence on Freddie, who left Harvard last spring, and has been a great deal with Ned ever since. She sent for Miss Jane, and made a dreadful scene, and Jack Stepney and Herbert Melson, who were there too, told Miss Jane that Freddie was threatening to marry some dreadful woman to whom Ned had introduced him, and that they could do nothing with him because now he's of age he has his own money. You can fancy how poor Miss Jane felt. She came to me at once, and seemed to think that if I could get her something to do she could earn enough to pay Ned's debts, and send him away. I'm afraid she has no idea how long it would take her to pay for one of his evenings at Bridge. And he was horribly in debt when he came back from the cruise. I can't see why he should have spent so much more money under Bertha's influence than Carrie's. Can you?" Lily met this query with an impatient gesture. My dear Gertie, I always understand how people can spend much more money, never how they can spend any less. She loosened her furs and settled herself in Gertie's easy-chair, while her friend busied herself with the tea-cups. But what can they do, the Miss Silverton's? How do they mean to support themselves? She asked, conscious that the note of irritation still persisted in her voice. It was the very last topic she had meant to discuss. It really did not interest her in the least. But she was seized by a sudden perverse curiosity to know how the two colourless, shrinking victims of young Silverton's sentimental experiments meant to cope with the grim necessity which looked so close to her own threshold. I don't know. I am trying to find something for them. Miss Jane reads aloud very nicely. But it's so hard to find any one who is willing to be read to. And Miss Annie paints a little. Oh, I know! Apple blossoms on blotting paper—just the kind of thing I shall be doing myself before long! exclaimed Lily, starting up with the vehemence of movement that threatened destruction to Miss Farish's fragile tea-table. Lily bent over to steady the cups. Then she sank back into her seat. I had forgotten there was no room to dash about in. How beautifully one does have to behave in a small flat! Oh, Gertie! I wasn't meant to be good! She sighed out incoherently. Gertie lifted an apprehensive look to her pale face, in which the eyes shone with a peculiar sleepless luster. You look horribly tired, Lily. Take your tea, and let me give you this cushion to lead against. Miss Bart accepted the cup of tea, but put back the cushion with an impatient hand. Don't give me that. I don't want to lean back. I shall go to sleep if I do. Well, why not, dear? I'll be as quiet as a mouse. She urged affectionately. No, no. Don't be quiet. Talk to me. Keep me awake. I don't sleep at night, and in the afternoon a dreadful drowsiness creeps over me. You don't sleep at night? Since when? I don't know. I can't remember. She rose and put the empty cup on the tea-tray. Another, and stronger, please. If I don't keep awake now I shall see horrors to-night. Perfect horrors! But they'll be worse if you drink too much tea. No. No, give it to me, and don't preach, please." Lily returned imperiously. Her voice had a dangerous edge, and Gertie noticed that her hand shook as she held it out to receive the second cup. But you look so tired. I'm sure you must be ill. Miss Bart sat down her cup with a start. Do I look ill? Does my face show it? She rose and walked quickly toward the little mirror above the writing-table. What a horrid-looking glass! It's all blotched and discoloured. Anyone would look ghastly in it. She turned back, fixing her plaintive eyes on Gertie. You stupid deer! Why do you say such odious things to me? It's enough to make one ill to be told one looks so. And looking ill means looking ugly. She caught Gertie's wrists, and drew her close to the window. After all, I'd rather know the truth. Look me straight in the face, Gertie, and tell me, am I perfectly frightful? You're perfectly beautiful now, Lily. Your eyes are shining, and your cheeks have grown so pink all of a sudden. Huh! They were pale then, ghastly pale when I came in. Why don't you tell me frankly that I'm a wreck? My eyes are bright now because I'm so nervous, but in the mornings they look like lead. And I can see lines coming in my face, the lines of worry and disappointment and failure. Every sleepless night leaves a new one. And how can I sleep when I have such dreadful things to think about? Dreadful things? What things? Asked Gertie, gently detaching her wrists from her friend's feverish fingers. What things? Well, poverty for one, and I don't know any that's more dreadful. Lily turned away and sank with sudden weariness into the easy-chair near the tea-table. You asked me just now if I could understand why Ned Silverton spent so much money. Of course I understand. He spends it on living with the rich. You think we live on the rich rather than with them. And so we do, in a sense, but it's a privilege we have to pay for. We eat their dinners, and drink their wine, and smoke their cigarettes, and use their carriages in their opera-boxes in their private cars. Yes, but there's a tax to pay on every one of those luxuries. The man pays it by big tips to the servants, by playing cards beyond his means, by flowers and presents, and—and lots of other things that cost. The girl pays it by tips and cards, too—oh yes, I've had to take up bridge again—and by going to the best dress-makers and having just the right dress for every occasion, and always keeping herself fresh and exquisite and amusing. She leaned back for a moment, closing her eyes, and as she sat there her pale lips slightly parted, and the lids dropped above her fagged, brilliant gaze, Gertie had a startled perception of the change in her face, of the way in which an ashen daylight seemed suddenly to extinguish its artificial brightness. She looked up, and the vision vanished. It doesn't sound very amusing, does it? And it isn't. I'm sick to death of it. And yet the thought of giving it all up nearly kills me. It's what keeps me awake at night, and makes me so crazy for your strong tea. For I can't go on in this way much longer, you know. I'm nearly at the end of my tether. And then what can I do? How on earth am I to keep myself alive? I see myself reduced to the fate of that poor Silverton woman, slinking about to employment agencies, and trying to sell painted blotting-pads to women's exchanges. And there are thousands and thousands of women trying to do the same thing already, and not one of the number who has less idea how to earn a dollar than I have. She rose again with a hurried glance at the clock. It's late, and I must be off. I have an appointment with Carrie Fisher. Don't look so worried, you dear thing. Don't think too much about the nonsense I've been talking. She was before the mirror again, adjusting her hair with a light hand, drawing down her veil and giving a dexterous touch to her furs. Of course, you know, it hasn't come to the employment agencies and the painted blotting-pads yet. But I'm rather hard up just for the moment. And if I could find something to do—notes to write and visiting lists to make up or that kind of thing—it would tide me over till the legacy is paid. And Carrie has promised to find somebody who wants a kind of social secretary. You know she makes a specialty of the helpless rich. Miss Bart had not revealed to Gertie the full extent of her anxiety. She was, in fact, in urgent and immediate need of money—money to meet the vulgar weekly claims which could neither be deferred nor evaded. To give up her apartment, and shrink to the obscurity of a boarding-house, or the provisional hospitality of a bed in Gertie Farish's sitting-room, was an expedient which could only postpone the problem confronting her. And it seemed wiser as well as more agreeable to remain where she was, and find some means of earning her living. The possibility of having to do this was one which she had never before seriously considered, and the discovery that, as a breadwinner, she was likely to prove as helpless and ineffectual as poor Miss Silverton, was a severe shock to herself confidence. Having been accustomed to take herself at the popular valuation, as a person of energy and resource, naturally fitted to dominate any situation in which she found herself, she vaguely imagined that such gifts would be of value to seekers after social guidance. But there was, unfortunately, no specific head under which the art of saying and doing the right thing could be offered in the market. And even Mrs. Fisher's resourcefulness failed before the difficulty of discovering a workable vein in the vague wealth of Lily's graces. Mrs. Fisher was full of indirect expedience for enabling her friends to earn a living, and could conscientiously assert that she had put several opportunities of this kind before Lily. But more legitimate methods of breadwining were as much out of her line as they were beyond the capacity of the sufferers she was generally called upon to assist. Lily's failure to profit by the chances already afforded her might, moreover, have justified the abandonment of farther effort on her behalf. But Mrs. Fisher's inexhaustible good-nature made her an adept at creating artificial demands in response to an actual supply. In the pursuance of this end she had once started on a voyage of discovery in Miss Fort's behalf, and as the result of her explorations she now summoned the latter with the announcement that she had found something. Left to herself, Gertie mused distressfully upon her friend's plight, at her own inability to relieve it. It was clear to her that Lily, for the present, had no wish for the kind of help she could give. Miss Farish could see no hope for her friend, but in a life completely reorganized and detached from its old associations. Whereas all Lily's energies were centered in determined effort to hold fast to those associations, to keep herself visibly identified with them, as long as the illusion could be maintained. Pitiable as such an attitude seemed to Gertie, she could not judge it as harshly as Selden, for instance, might have done. She had not forgotten the night of emotion when she and Lily had lain in each other's arms, and she had seemed to feel her very heart's blood passing into her friend. The sacrifice she had made seemed unveiling enough. No trace remained in Lily of the subdued influences of that hour, but Gertie's tenderness, disciplined by long years of contact with obscure and inarticulate suffering, could wait on its object with a silent forbearance which took no account of time. She could not, however, deny herself the solace of taking anxious counsel with Lawrence Selden, with whom, since his return from Europe, she had renewed her old relation of cousinly confidence. Selden himself had never been aware of any change in their relation. He found Gertie as he had left her, simple, undemanding and devoted, but with a quickened intelligence of the heart which she recognized without seeking to explain it. To Gertie herself it would once have seemed impossible that she should ever again talk freely with him of Lily Bart, but what had passed in the secrecy of her own breast seemed to resolve itself when the mist of the struggle cleared, into a breaking down of the bounds of self, a deflecting of the wasted personal emotion into the general current of human understanding. It was not till some two weeks after her visit from Lily that Gertie had the opportunity of communicating her fears to Selden. The latter, having presented himself on a Sunday afternoon, had lingered on through the dowdy animation of his cousin's tea-hour, conscious of something in her voice and eye which solicited a word apart, and as soon as the last visitor was gone Gertie opened her case by asking how lately he had seen Miss Bart. Selden's perceptible pause gave her time for a slight stir of surprise. I haven't seen her at all. I've perpetually missed seeing her since she came back. This unexpected admission made Gertie pause too, and she was still hesitating on the brink of her subject when he relieved her by adding, I've wanted to see her, but she seems to have been absorbed by the Gormers' set since her return from Europe. That's all the more reason. She's been very unhappy. Unhappy at being with the Gormers. Oh, I don't defend her intimacy with the Gormers, but that too is at an end now, I think. You know people have been very unkind since Bertha Dorsett quarreled with her. Ah! Selden exclaimed, rising abruptly to walk to the window, where he remained with his eyes on the darkening street while his cousin continued to explain. Judy Trenner and her own family have deserted her too, and all because Bertha Dorsett has said such horrible things, and she is very poor. You know Mrs. Peniston cut her off with a small legacy, after giving her to understand that she was to have everything. Yes, I know. Selden assented curtly, turning back into the room, but only to stir about with restless steps in the circumscribed space between door and window. Yes, she's been abominably treated, but it's unfortunately the precise thing that a man who wants to show his sympathy can't say to her. His words caused Gertie a slight chill of disappointment. There would be other ways of showing your sympathy, she suggested. Selden with a slight laugh sat down beside her on the little sofa, which projected from the hearth. What are you thinking of, you incorrigible missionary? he asked. Gertie's colour rose, and her blush was, for a moment, her only answer. Then she made it more explicit by saying, I am thinking of the fact that you and she used to be great friends, that she used to care immensely for what you thought of her, and that, if she takes your staying away as a sign of what you think now, I can imagine it's adding a great deal to her unhappiness. My dear child, don't add to it still more, at least your conception of it, by attributing to her all sorts of susceptibilities of your own. Selden for his life could not keep a note of dryness out of his voice, but he met Gertie's look of herplexity by saying more mildly. Not though you immensely exaggerate the importance of anything I could do for Miss Bart, you can't exaggerate my readiness to do it, if you ask me to. He laid his hand for a moment on hers, and there passed between them, on the current of the rare contact, one of those exchanges of meaning which fill the hidden reservoirs of affection. Gertie had the feeling that he measured the cost of her request as plainly as she read the significance of his reply, and the sense of all that was suddenly clear between them made her next words easier to find. I do ask you then. I ask you because she once told me that you had been a help to her, and because she needs help now as she has never needed it before. You know how dependent she has always been on ease and luxury, how she has hated what was shabby and ugly and uncomfortable. She can't help it. She was brought up with those ideas, and has never been able to find her way out of them. But now all the things she cared for have been taken from her, and the people who taught her to care for them have abandoned her too. And it seems to me that if someone could reach out a hand, and show her the other side, show her how much is left in life and in herself. Gertie broke off, abashed at the sound of her own eloquence, and impeded by the difficulty of giving precise expression to her vague yearning for her friend's retrieval. I can't help her myself. She's passed out of my reach," she continued. I think she's afraid of being a burden to me. When she was last here two weeks ago, she seemed dreadfully worried about her future. She said Carrie Fisher was trying to find something for her to do. A few days later she wrote me that she had taken a position as private secretary, and that I was not to be anxious, for everything was all right, and she would come in and tell me about it when she had time. But she has never come, and I don't like to go to her, because I am afraid of forcing myself on her when I'm not wanted. Once when we were children, and I had rushed up after a long separation, and thrown my arms about her, she said, Please don't kiss me unless I ask you to, Gertie. And she did ask me, a minute later. But since then I've always waited to be asked. Selden had listened in silence, with a concentrated look which his thin dark face could assume when he wished to guard it against involuntary change of expression. When his cousin ended, he said with a slight smile, Since you've learned the wisdom of waiting, I don't see why you urge me to rush in. But the troubled appeal of her eyes made him add as he rose to take leave. Still, I'll do what you wish, and not hold you responsible for my failure. Selden's avoidance of Miss Bart had not been as unintentional as he had allowed his cousin to think. At first, indeed, while the memory of their last hour at Monte Carlo still held the full heat of his indignation, it anxiously watched for her return. But she had disappointed him by lingering in England, and when she finally reappeared it happened that business had called him to the West, whence he came back only to learn that she was starting for Alaska with the Gormers. The revelation of this suddenly established intimacy effectually chilled his desire to see her. If, at a moment when her whole life seemed to be breaking up, she could cheerfully commit its reconstruction to the Gormers, there was no reason why such accidents should ever strike her as irreparable. Every step she took seemed, in fact, to carry her farther from the region where, once or twice, he and she had met for an illumined moment. And the recognition of this fact, when its first pang had been surmounted, produced in him a sense of negative relief. It was much simpler for him to judge Miss Bart by her habitual conduct than by the rare deviations from it which had thrown her so disturbingly in his way, and every act of hers which made the recurrence of such deviations more unlikely, confirmed the sense of relief with which she returned the conventional view of her. But Gertie Farrish's words had suffice to make him see how little this view was really his, and how impossible it was for him to live quietly with the thought of Lily Bart. To hear that she was in need of help, even such vague help as he could offer, was to be at once repossessed by that thought, and by the time he reached the street he had sufficiently convinced himself of the urgency of his cousin's appeal, to turn his steps directly toward Lily's hotel. There his zeal met a check in the unforeseen news that Miss Bart had moved away, but on his pressing his enquiries the clerk remembered that she had left an address, for which he presently began to search through his books. It was certainly strange that she should have taken this step without letting Gertie Farrish know of her decision, and seldom waited with a vague sense of uneasiness while the address was sought for. The process lasted long enough for uneasiness to turn to apprehension, but when at length a slip of paper was handed to him, and he read on it, Care of Mrs. Norma Hatch, Emporium Hotel. His apprehension passed into an incredulous stare, and this into the gesture of disgust, with which he tore the paper in two, and turned to walk quickly homeward. When Lily woke on the morning after her translation to the Emporium Hotel, her first feeling was one of purely physical satisfaction. The force of contrast gave an added keenness to the luxury of lying once more in a soft pillowed bed, and looking across a spacious, sunlit room at a breakfast-table set invitingly near the fire. Analysis and introspection might come later, but for the moment she was not even troubled by the excesses of the upholstery or the restless convolutions of the furniture. The sense of being once more lapped and folded in ease, as in some dense, mild, medium, impenetrable to discomfort, effectually stilled the faintest note of criticism. When at the afternoon before, she had presented herself to the lady to whom Carrie Fisher had directed her, she had been conscious of entering a new world. Carrie's vague pre-sentiment of Mrs. Norma Hatch, whose reversion to her Christian name was explained as the result of her latest divorce, left her under the implication of coming from the West, with the not unusual extenuation of having brought a great deal of money with her. She was, in short, rich, helpless, un-placed, the very subject for Lily's hand. Mrs. Fisher had not specified the line her friend was to take. She owned herself unequated with Mrs. Hatch, whom she knew about through Melville Stancy, a lawyer in his leisure moments, and the false staff of a certain section of festive club life. Socially Mr. Stancy might have been said to form a connecting link between the Gormer world, and the more dimly-lit region on which Miss Bart now found herself entering. It was, however, only figuratively that the illumination of Mrs. Hatch's world could be described as dim. In actual fact Lily found her seated in a blaze of electric light, impartially projected from various ornamental excrescences, on a vast concavity of pink damask and gilding, from which she rose like Venus from her shell. The analogy was justified by the appearance of the lady, whose large-eyed prettiness had the fixity of something impaled and shone under glass. This did not preclude the immediate discovery that she was some years younger than her visitor, and that under her showiness, her ease, the aggression of her dress and voice, there persisted that inner-radicable innocence which, in ladies of her nationality, so curiously co-exists with startling extremes of experience. The environment in which Lily found herself was as strange to her as its inhabitants. She was unacquainted with the world of the fashionable New York hotel, a world overheated, over-upholstered, and overfitted with mechanical appliances for the gratification of fantastic requirements, while the comforts of a civilized life were as unattainable as in a desert. Through this atmosphere of torrid splendor, moved Juan beings as richly upholstered as the furniture, beings without definite pursuits or permanent relations, who drifted on a languid tide of curiosity from restaurant to concert hall, from palm-garden to music-room, from art-exhibit to dress-makers' opening. High-stepping horses or elaborately equipped motors waited to carry these ladies into vague metropolitan distances, whence they returned, till more Juan from the weight of their sables, to be sucked back into the stifling inertia of the hotel routine. Somewhere behind them, in the background of their lives, there was doubtless a real past, people by real human activities. They themselves were probably the product of strong ambitions, persistent energies, diversified contacts with the wholesome roughness of life, yet they had no more real existence than the poet's shades in limbo. Really had not been long in this pallid world without discovering that Mrs. Hatch was its most substantial figure. That lady, though still floating in the void, showed faint symptoms of developing an outline, and in this endeavour she was actively seconded by Mr. Melville Stancy. It was Mr. Stancy, a man of large resounding presence, suggestive of convivial occasions, and of a chivalry-finding expression in the first-night boxes, and thousand-dollar bonbonniers, who had transplanted Mrs. Hatch from the scene of her first development to the higher stage of hotel life in the metropolis. It was he who had selected the horses with which she had taken the blue ribbon at the show, had introduced her to the photographer whose portraits of her formed the recurring ornament of Sunday supplements, and had got together the group which constituted her social world. It was a small group still, with heterogeneous figures suspended in large, unpeopled spaces, but Lily did not take long to learn that its regulation was no longer in Mr. Stancy's hands. As often happens, the pupil had outstripped the teacher, and Mrs. Hatch was already aware of heights of elegance, as well as depths of luxury beyond the world of the Emporium. This discovery had once produced in her a craving for higher gardens, and for the adroit feminine hand which would give the right turn to her correspondence, the right look to her hats, the right succession to the items of her menus. It was, in short, as the regulator of a germinating social life that Miss Bart's guidance was required. Her ostensible duties as secretary being restricted by the fact that Mrs. Hatch, as yet, knew hardly anyone to write to. The daily details of Mrs. Hatch's existence were as strange to Lily as its general tenor. The lady's habits were marked by an oriental indolence and disorder peculiarly trying to her companion. Mrs. Hatch and her friends seemed to float together outside the bounds of time and space. No definite hours were kept. No fixed obligations existed. Night and day flowed into one another in a blur of confused and retarded engagements, so that one had the impression of lunching at the tea-hour, while dinner was often merged in the noisy after-theater supper, which prolonged Mrs. Hatch's vigil till daylight. Through this jumble of futile activities came and went a strange throng of hangers on—manicures, beauty-doctors, hairdressers, of bridge, of French, of physical development—figures sometimes indistinguishable by their appearance, or by Mrs. Hatch's relation to them, from the visitors constituting her recognized society. But strangest of all to Lily was the encounter, in this latter group, of several of her acquaintances. She had supposed, and not without relief, that she was passing for the moment completely out of her own circle. But she found that Mr. Stancy, one side of whose sprawling existence overlapped the edge of Mrs. Fisher's world, had drawn several of its brightest ornaments into the circle of the emporium. To find Ned Silverton among the habitual frequenters of Mrs. Hatch's drawing-room was one of Lily's first astonishments, but she soon discovered that he was not Mr. Stancy's most important recruit. It was on little Freddy Van Osberg, the small, slim air of the Van Osberg millions, that the attention of Mrs. Hatch's group was centred. Freddy, barely out of college, had risen above the horizon since Lily's eclipse, and she now saw with surprise what an effulgence he shed on the outer twilight of Mrs. Hatch's existence. This, then, was one of the things that young men went in for, when released from the official social routine. This was the kind of previous engagement that so frequently caused them to disappoint the hopes of anxious hostesses. Lily had an odd sense of being behind the social tapestry, on the side where the threads were knotted and the loose ends hung. For a moment she found a certain amusement in the show, and in her own share of it. The situation had an ease and unconventionality distinctly refreshing after her experience of the irony of conventions. But these flashes of amusement were but brief reactions from the long disgust of her days. Compared with the vast, gilded void of Mrs. Hatch's existence, the life of Lily's former friends seemed packed with ordered activities. Even the most irresponsible pretty woman of her acquaintance had her inherited obligations, her conventional benevolences, her share in the working of the great civic machine, and all hung together in the solidarity of these traditional functions. The performance of specific duties would have simplified Miss Bart's position, but the vague attendance on Mrs. Hatch was not without its perplexities. It was not her employer who created these perplexities. Mrs. Hatch showed from the first an almost touching desire for Lily's approval. Friar from asserting the superiority of wealth, her beautiful eyes seemed to urge the plea of inexperience. She wanted to do what was nice—to be taught how to be lovely. The difficulty was to find any point of contact between her ideals and Lily's. Mrs. Hatch swam in a haze of indeterminate enthousiasms, of aspirations culled from the stage, the newspapers, the fashion journals, and a gaudy world of sport still more completely beyond her companions can. To separate from these confused conceptions those most likely to advance the lady on her way was Lily's obvious duty. But its performance was hampered by rapidly growing doubts. Lily was in fact becoming more and more aware of a certain ambiguity in her situation. It was not that she had, in the conventional sense, any doubt of Mrs. Hatch's irreproachableness. The lady's offenses were always against taste rather than conduct. Divorce records seemed due to geographical rather than ethical conditions, and her worst laxities were likely to proceed from a wandering and extravagant good nature. But if Lily did not mind her detaining her manicure for luncheon, or offering the beauty doctor a seat in Freddie Van Osberg's box at the play, she was not equally at ease in regard to some less apparent lapses from convention. Ned Silverton's relation to stancy seemed, for instance, closer and less clear than any natural affinities would warrant, and both appeared united in the effort to cultivate Freddie Van Osberg's growing taste for Mrs. Hatch. There was as yet nothing definable in the situation, which might well resolve itself into a huge joke on the part of the other two. But Lily had a vague sense that the subject of their experiment was too young, too rich, and too credulous. Her embarrassment was increased by the fact that Freddie seemed to regard her as cooperating with himself in the social development of Mrs. Hatch, a view that suggested, on his part, a permanent interest in the lady's future. There were moments when Lily found an ironic amusement in this aspect of the case. The thought of launching such a missile as Mrs. Hatch at the perfidious bosom of society was not without its charm. Miss Bart had even beguiled her leisure with visions of the fair Norma, introduced for the first time to a family banquet at the Van Osberg's. But the thought of being personally connected with the transaction was less agreeable, and her momentary flashes of amusement were followed by increasing periods of doubt. The sense of these doubts was uppermost when, late one afternoon, she was surprised by a visit from Lawrence Selden. He found her alone in the wilderness of Pink Damask. For in Mrs. Hatch's world the tea-hour was not dedicated to social rights, and the lady was in the hands of her masseuse. Selden's entrance had caused Lily an inward start of embarrassment, but his air of constraint had the effect of restoring her self-possession, and she took at once the tone of surprise and pleasure, wondering frankly that he should have traced her to so unlikely a place, and asking what had inspired him to make the search. Selden met this with an unusual seriousness. She had never seen him so little master of the situation, so plainly at the mercy of any obstruction she might put in his way. "'I wanted to see you,' he said, and she could not resist observing and reply that he had kept his wishes under remarkable control. She had in truth felt his long absence as one of the chief bitternesses of the last months. His desertion had wounded sensibilities far below the surface of her pride. Selden met the challenge with directness. "'Why should I have come, unless I thought I could be of use to you? It is my only excuse for imagining you could want me.' This struck her as a clumsy evasion, and the thought gave a flash of keenness to her answer. "'Then you have come now because you think you can be of use to me.' He hesitated again. "'Yes. In the modest capacity of a person to talk things over with.' For a clever man it was certainly a stupid beginning, and the idea that his awkwardness was due to the fear of her attaching a personal significance to his visit chilled her pleasure in seeing him. Even under the most adverse conditions that pleasure always made itself felt. She might hate him, but she had never been able to wish him out of the room. She was very near hating him now. Yet the sound of his voice, the way the light fell in his thin dark hair, the way he sat and moved and wore his clothes, she was conscious that even these trivial things were inwoven with her deepest life. In his presence a sudden stillness came upon her, and the turmoil of her spirit ceased. But an impulse of resistance to this stealing influence now prompted her to say, "'It's very good of you to present yourself in that capacity. But what makes you think I have anything particular to talk about?' Though she kept the even tone of light intercourse, the question was framed in a way to remind him that his good offices were unsought, and for a moment Seldon was checked by it. The situation between them was one which could have been cleared up only by a sudden explosion of feeling, and their whole training and habit of mind were against the chances of such an explosion. Seldon's calmness seemed rather to harden into resistance, and Miss Bart's into a surface of glittering irony, as they faced each other from the opposite corners of one of Mrs. Hatch's elephantine sofas. The sofa in question, and the apartment peopled by its monstrous mates, served at length to suggest the turn of Seldon's reply. Gertie told me that you were acting as Mrs. Hatch's secretary, and I knew she was anxious to hear how you were getting on. Miss Bart received this explanation without perceptible softening. Why didn't she look me up herself, then? she asked. Because, as you didn't send her your address, she was afraid of being importunate. Seldon continued with a smile. You see no such scruples restrained me, but then I haven't as much to risk if I incur your displeasure. Lily answered his smile. You haven't incurred it as yet, but I have an idea that you are going to. From that rest with you, doesn't it? You see my initiative doesn't go beyond putting myself at your disposal. But in what capacity? What am I to do with you? She asked in the same light tone. Seldon again glanced about Mrs. Hatch's drawing-room. Then he said, with the decision which he seemed to have gathered from this final inspection, you are to let me take you away from here. Lily flushed at the suddenness of the attack. Then she stiffened under it and said coldly, And may I ask where you mean me to go? Back to Gertie in the first place, if you will. The essential thing is that it should be away from here. The unusual harshness of his tone might have shown her how much the words cost him, but she was in no state to measure his feelings while her own were in a flame of revolt. To neglect her, perhaps even to avoid her, at a time when she had most need of her life, and then suddenly and unwarrantably to break into her life with this strange assumption of authority, was to rouse in her every instinct of pride and self-defense. I am very much obliged to you, she said, for taking such an interest in my plans, but I am quite contented where I am, and have no intention of leaving. Seldon had risen, and was standing before her in an attitude of uncontrollable expectancy. That simply means that you don't know where you are, he exclaimed. Lily Rose also, with a quick flash of anger. If you have come here to say disagreeable things about Mrs. Hatch, it is only with your relation to Mrs. Hatch that I am concerned. My relation to Mrs. Hatch is one I have no reason to be ashamed of. She has helped me to earn a living when my old friends were quite resigned to seeing me starve. Nonsense! Starvation is not the only alternative. You know you can always find a home with Gertie till you are independent again. You show such an intimate acquaintance with my affairs, that I suppose you mean till my aunt's legacy is paid. I do mean that, Gertie told me of it. Seldon acknowledged without embarrassment. He was too much an earnest now to feel any false constraint in speaking his mind. But Gertie does not happen to know, Miss Bart rejoined, that I owe every penny of that legacy. Good God! Seldon exclaimed, startled out of his composure by the abruptness of the statement. Every penny of it—and more, too, Lily repeated—and you now perhaps see why I prefer to remain with Mrs. Hatch, rather than take advantage of Gertie's kindness. I have no money left, except my small income, and I must earn something more to keep myself alive. And hesitate in a moment. Then he rejoined in a quieter tone. But with your income and Gertie's—since you allow me to go so far into the details of the situation—you and she could surely contrive a life together which would put you beyond the need of having to support yourself. Gertie, I know, is eager to make such an arrangement, and would be quite happy in it. But I should not, Miss Barton proposed. There are many reasons why it would be neither kind to Gertie, nor wise for myself. She paused a moment, and as he seemed to await a further explanation, added with a quick lift of her head. You will perhaps excuse me from giving you these reasons. I have no claim to know them, Seldon answered, ignoring her tone—no claim to offer any comment or suggestion beyond the one I have already made. And my right to make that is simply the universal right of a man to enlighten a woman when he sees her unconsciously placed in a false position. Lily smiled. I suppose, she rejoined, that by a false position you mean one outside of what we call society. But you must remember that I had been excluded from those sacred precincts long before I met Mrs. Hatch. As far as I can see, there is very little real difference in being inside or out. And I remember your once telling me that it was only those inside who took the difference seriously. She had not been without intention in making this allusion to their memorable talk at Belamont, and she waited with an odd tremor of the nerves to see what response it would bring. But the result of the experiment was disappointing. Seldon did not allow the allusion to deflect him from his point. He merely said with complete erfulness of emphasis. The question of being inside or out is, as you say, a small one, and it happens to have nothing to do with the case, except insofar as Mrs. Hatch's desire to be inside may put you in the position I call false. In spite of the moderation of his tone, each word he spoke had the effect of confirming Lily's resistance. The very apprehensions he aroused hardened her against him. She had been on the alert for the note of personal sympathy, for any sign of recovered power over him, and his attitude of sober impartiality, the absence of all response to her appeal. She had turned her hurt pride to blind resentment of his interference, the conviction that he had been sent by Gertie, and that whatever straits he conceived her to be in, he would never voluntarily have come to her aid, strengthen her resolve not to admit him a hair's breadth farther into her confidence. However doubtful she might feel her situation to be, she would rather persist in darkness than owe her enlightenment to Seldon. I don't know, she said, when he had ceased to speak. Why you imagine me to be situated as you describe? But as you have always told me that this whole object of a bringing up like mine was to teach a girl to get what she wants, why not assume that that is precisely what I am doing? The smile with which she summed up her case was like a clear barrier raised against farther confidences. Its brightness held him at such a distance, that he had a sense of being almost out of hearing as he rejoined. I am not sure that I have ever called you a successful example of that kind of bringing up. Her color rose a little at the implication, but she steeled herself with a light laugh. Ha! Wait a little longer! Give me a little more time before you decide. And as he wavered before her, still watching for a break in the impenetrable front she presented, Don't give me up! I may still do credit to my training," she affirmed. End of Chapter 9