 Book 1 Chapter 14 of The House of Merth by Edith Wharton. Gertie Farage, the morning after the Wellington Brides' entertainment, woke from dreams as happy as Lily's. If they were less vivid in hue, more subdued to the half-tenths of her personality and her experience, they were for that very reason better suited to her mental vision. Such flashes of joy as Lily moved in would have blinded Miss Farage, who was accustomed in the way of happiness to such scant light as shown through the cracks of other people's lives. Now she was the centre of a little illumination of her own, a mild but unmistakable beam, compounded of Lawrence Sulden's growing kindness to herself, and the discovery that he extended his liking to Lily Bart. If these two factors seem incompatible to the student of feminine psychology, it must be remembered that Gertie had always been a parasite in the moral order, living on the crumbs of other tables, and content to look through the window at the banquet spread for her friends. Now that she was enjoying a little private feast of her own, it would have seemed incredibly selfish not to lay a plate for a friend, and there was no one with whom she would rather have shared her enjoyment than Miss Bart. As to the nature of Sulden's growing kindness, Gertie would no more have dared to define it than she would have tried to learn a butterfly's colours by knocking the dust from its wings. Decease on the wonder would be to brush off its bloom, and perhaps see it fade and stiffen in her hand. Better the sense of beauty palpitating out of reach, while she held her breath and watched where it would alight. Yet Sulden's manner at the brise had brought the flutter of wings so close that they seemed to beam beating in her own heart. She had never seen him so alert, so responsive, so attentive to what she had to say. His habitual manner had an absent-minded kindliness which she accepted and was grateful for as the liveliest sentiment her presence was likely to inspire, but she was quick to feel in him a change implying that for once she could give pleasure as well as receive it, and it was so delightful that this higher degree of sympathy should be reached through their interest in Lily Bart. Lily's affection for her friend, a sentiment that had learned to keep itself alive on the scantiest diet, had grown to active adoration since Lily's restless curiosity had drawn her into the circle of misfarish's work. Lily's taste of beneficence had wakened in her a momentary appetite for well-doing. Her visit to the girl's club had first brought her in contact with a dramatic contrast of life. She had always accepted with philosophic calm the fact that such existences as hers were pedestal on foundations of obscure humanity. The dreary limbo of dinginess lay all around and beneath that little illuminated circle in which life reached its finest efflorescence, as the mud and sleet of a winter night enclose a hot-house filled with tropical flowers. All this was in the natural order of things, and the orchid basking and its artificially created atmosphere could round the delicate curves of its petals undisturbed by the ice on the panes. But it is one thing to live comfortably with the abstract conception of poverty, another to be brought in contact with its human embodiments. Lily had never conceived of these victims of fate, otherwise than in the mass, that the mass was composed of individual lives, innumerable, separate centers of sensation, with her own eager reachings for pleasure, her own fierce revolutions from pain, that some of these bundles of feeling were clothed in shapes not so unlike her own, with eyes meant to look on, gladness, and young lips shaped for love. This discovery gave Lily one of those sudden shocks of pity that sometimes decentralize a life. Lily's nature was incapable of such renewal. She could feel other demands only through her own, and no pain was long vivid, which did not press on an answering nerve. But for the moment she was drawn out of herself by the interest of her direct relation with the world so unlike her own. She had supplemented her first gift by personal assistance to one or two of Miss Farish's most appealing subjects, and the admiration and interest her presence excited among the tired workers at the club, ministered in a new form to her insatiable desire to please. Gertie Farish was not a close enough reader of character to disentangle the mixed threads of which Lily's philanthropy was woven. She supposed her beautiful friend to be actuated by the same motive as herself, that sharpening of the moral vision which makes all human suffering so near and insistent that the other aspects of life fade into remoteness. Gertie lived by such simple formulas that she did not hesitate to class her friend's state with the emotional change of heart to which her dealings with the poor had accustomed her. And she rejoiced in the thought that she had been the humble instrument of this renewal. Now she had an answer to all criticisms of Lily's conduct. As she had said, she knew the real Lily, and the discovery that Selden shared her knowledge raised her placid acceptance of life to a dazzled sense of its possibilities. A sense farther enlarged in the course of the afternoon by the receipt of a telegram from Selden asking if he might dine with her that evening. While Gertie was lost in the happy bustle which this announcement produced in her small household, Selden was at once with her in thinking with intensity of Lily Bart. The case which had called him to Albany was not complicated enough to absorb all his attention, and he had the professional faculty of keeping a part of his mind free when its services were not needed. This part, which at the moment seemed dangerously like the whole, was filled to the brim with the sensations of the previous evening. Selden understood the symptoms. He recognized the fact that he was paying up as there had always been a chance of his having to pay up for the voluntary exclusions of his past. He meant to keep free from permanent ties, not from any poverty of feeling, but because in a different way he was, as much as Lily, the victim of his environment. There had been a germ of truth in his declaration to Gertie Farrish that he had never wanted to marry a nice girl. The adjective connoting in his cousin's vocabulary certain utilitarian qualities which are apt to preclude the luxury of charm. Now it had been Selden's fate to have a charming mother. Her graceful portrait, all smiles, and cashmere still emitted a faded scent of the undefinable quality. His father was the kind of man who delights in a charming woman who quotes her, stimulates her, and keeps her perennially charming. Neither one of the couple cared for money, but their disdain of it took the form of always spending a little more than was prudent. If their house was shabby, it was exquisitely kept. If there were good books on the shelves, there were also good dishes on the table. Selden Sr. had an eye for a picture, his wife and understanding of old lace, and both were so conscious of restraint and discrimination in buying that they never quite knew how it was that the bills mounted up. Though many of Selden's friends would have called his parents poor, he had grown up in an atmosphere where restricted means were felt only as a trek on aimless profusion, where the few possessions were so good that their rarity gave them a merited relief, and abstinence was combined with elegance in a way exemplified by Mrs. Selden's knack of wearing her old velvet as if it were new. A man has the advantage of being delivered early from the home point of view, and before Selden left college he had learned that there are as many different ways of going without money as of spending it. Unfortunately he found no way as agreeable as that practiced at home, and his views of womankind and a special were tanged by the remembrance of the one woman who had given him his sense of values. It was from her that he inherited his detachment from the sumptuary side of life. The stoic's carelessness of material things, combined with the Epicurean's pleasure in them, life shorn of either feeling, appeared to him a diminished thing, and nowhere was the blending of the two ingredients so essential as in the character of a pretty woman. It had always seemed to Selden that experience offered a great deal besides the sentimental adventure, yet he could vividly conceive of a love which should broaden and deepen till it became the central fact of life. What he could not accept, in his own case, was the makeshift alternative of a relation that should be less than this, that should leave some portions of his nature unsatisfied while it put an undue strain on others. He would not, in other words, yield to the growth of an affection which might appeal to pity, yet leave the understanding untouched. Sympathy should no more dilute him than a trick of the eyes, the grace of helplessness than a curve of the cheek. But now, that little butt passed like a sponge over all his vows, his reasoned-out resistances seemed for the moment so much less important than the question as to when Lily would receive his note. He yielded himself to the charm of trivial preoccupations, wondering at what hour her reply would be sent, with what words it would begin. As to its import he had no doubt. He was as sure of her surrender as of his own, and so he had leisure to muse on all its exquisite details as a hard worker on a holiday morning might lie still and watch the beam of light travel gradually across his room. But if the new light dazzled it did not blind him. He could still discern the outline of facts, though his own relation to them had changed. He was no less conscious than before of what was said of Lily Bart, but he could separate the woman he knew from the vulgar estimate of her. His mind turned to Gertie Farsh's words, and the wisdom of the world seemed a groping thing beside the insight of innocence. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God, even the hidden God in their neighbor's breast. Seldon was in the state of impassioned self-absorption that the first surrender to love produces. His craving was for the companionship of one whose point of view should justify his own, who should confirm by deliberate observation the truth to which his intuitions had leapt. He could not wait for the midday recess, but seized a moment's leisure and court to scribble his telegram to Gertie Farsh. Reaching town, he was driven direct to his club, where he hoped a note from Miss Bart might await him. But his box contained only a line of rapture's assent from Gertie, and he was turning away disappointed when he was hailed by a voice from the smoking-room. Hello, Lawrence. Dining here? Take a bite with me. I've ordered a canvas back. He discovered Traynor in his day-clothes, sitting with a tall glass at his elbow behind the folds of a sporting journal. Seldon thanked him, but pleaded an engagement. Hang it. I believe every man in town has an engagement tonight. I shall have the club to myself. You know how I'm living this winter, rattling round in that empty house. My wife meant to come to town today, but she's put it off again, and I was a fellow to dine alone in a room with the looking glasses covered, and nothing but a bottle of Harvey sauce on the sideboard. I say, Lawrence, chuck your engagement and take pity on me. It gives me the blue devils to dine alone, and there's nobody but that canning-ass weather-all in the club. Sorry, Gus. I can't do it. As Seldon turned away, he noticed the dark flush on Traynor's face, the unpleasant moisture of his intensely white forehead, the way his jeweled rings were wedged in the creases of his fat red fingers. Certainly the beast was predominating, the beast at the bottom of the glass. And he had heard this man's name coupled with lilies. Bah! the thoughts sickened him. All the way back to his rooms he was haunted by the sight of Traynor's fat-creased hands. On his table lay the note. Lily had sent it to his rooms. He knew what was in it before he broke the seal, a grey seal with, beyond, beneath a flying ship. Ah! he would take her beyond, beyond the ugliness, the pettiness, the attrition, and corrosion of the soul. Gertie's little sitting-room sparkled with welcome when Seldon entered it. Its modest effects, compact of enamel paint and ingenuity, spoke to him in the language just then sweetest to his ear. It is surprising how little narrow walls and a low-sailing matter when the roof of the soul has suddenly been raised. Gertie sparkled, too, or at least shown with a temperate radiance. He had never before noticed that she had points. Really some good fellow might do worse. Over the little dinner and here again the effects were wonderful, he told her she ought to marry. He was in a mood to pair off the whole world. She had made the caramel custard with her own hands. It was sinful to keep such gifts to herself. He reflected, with a throb of pride, that Lily could trim her own hats. She had told him so the day of their walk at Bellamont. He did not speak of Lily till after dinner. During the little repast he kept the talk on his hostess, who fluttered at being the center of observation, shown as rosy as the candle-shades she had manufactured for the occasion. Seldon events and extraordinary interest in her household arrangements complimented her on the ingenuity with which she had utilized every inch of her small quarters. Asked how her servant managed, about afternoons out, learned that one may improvise delicious dinners in a chafing-dish, and uttered thoughtful generalizations on the burden of a large establishment. When they were in the sitting-room again, where they fitted as snugly as bits in a puzzle, and she had brewed the coffee and poured it into her grandmother's egg-shell cups, his eye, as he leaned back, basking in the warm fragrance, lighted on a recent photograph of Miss Bart, and the desired transition was affected without an effort. The photograph was well enough, but to catch her as she had looked last night, Gertie agreed with him, never had she been so radiant. But could photography capture that light? There had been a new look in her face, something different, yes. Seldon agreed there had been something different. The coffee was so exquisite that he asked for a second cup, such a contrast to the watery stuff at the club. Ah, your poor bachelor with his impersonal club-fare, alternating with the equally impersonal cuisine of the dinner-party. A man who lived in lodgings missed the best part of life. He pictured the flavorless solitude of Trenner's repast, and felt a moment's compassion for the man. But to return to Lily, and again and again he returned, questioning, conjecturing, leading Gertie on, draining her inmost thoughts of their stored tenderness for her friend. At first she poured herself out, unstintingly, happy in this perfect communion of their sympathies. His understanding of Lily helped to confirm her own belief in her friend. They dwelt together on the fact that Lily had had no chance. Gertie, for instance, her generous impulses, her restlessness and discontent. The fact that her life had never satisfied her proved that she was made for better things. She might have married more than once, the conventional rich marriage which she had been taught to consider the soul of existence, but when the opportunity came she had always shrunk from it. Percy Gries, for instance, had been in love with her. Every one at Bellamond had supposed them to be engaged, and her dismissal of him was thought inexplicable. This view of the Gries' incident chimed too well with Solon's mood, not to be instantly adopted by him, with a flash of retrospective contempt for what had once seemed the obvious solution. If rejection there had been, and he wondered now that he had ever doubted it, then he held the key to the secret, and the hillsides of Bellamond were lit up, not with sunset, but with dawn. It was he who had wavered and disowned the face of opportunity, and the joy now warming his breast might have been a familiar inmate if he had captured it in its first flight. It was at this point, perhaps, that a joy just trying its wings in Gertie's heart dropped to earth and lay still. She sat facing Solon, repeating mechanically, no, she had never been understood, and all the while she herself seemed to be sitting in the center of a great glare of comprehension. The little confidential room where a moment ago their thoughts had touched elbows like their chairs grew to unfriendly vastness, separating her from Solon by all the length of her new vision of the future, and that future stretched out interminably with her lonely figure toiling down it a mere speck on the solitude. She is herself with a few people only, and you are one of them, she heard Seldon saying, and again, be good to her, Gertie, won't you? And she has it in her to become whatever she is believed to be. You'll help her by believing the best of her. The words beat on Gertie's brain like the sound of a language which has seemed familiar at a distance, but on approaching is found to be unintelligible. He had come to talk to her of Lily. That was all. There had been a third at the feast she had spread for him, and that third had taken her own place. She tried to follow what he was saying to cling to her own part in the talk, but it was all as meaningless as the boom of waves in a drowning head, and she felt, as the drowning may feel, that to sink would be nothing beside the pain of struggling to keep up. Seldon rose, and she drew a deep breath. Failing that soon she could yield to the blessed waves. Mrs. Fishers, you say she was dining there. There's music afterward. I believe I had a card from her. He glanced at the foolish pink-faced clock that was drumming out this hideous hour. A quarter past ten I might look in there now. The Fisher evenings are amusing. I haven't kept you up to late, Gertie. You look tired. I've rambled on and bored you. And in the unwanted overflow of his feelings he left a cousinly kiss upon her cheek. At Mrs. Fishers, through the cigar smoke of the studio, a dozen voices greeted Seldon. A song was pending as he entered, and he dropped into a seat near his hostess, his eyes roaming in search of Miss Bart. But she was not there, and the discovery gave him a pang out of all proportion to its seriousness, since the note in his breast pocket assured him that at four the next day they would meet. To his impatience it seemed immeasurably long to wait, and half ashamed of the impulse he leaned to Mrs. Fisher to ask, as the music ceased, if Miss Bart had not dined with her. Lily! She's just gone. She had to run off. I forget where. Wasn't she wonderful last night? Who's that? Lily? asked Jack Steppney, from the depths of a neighboring armchair. Really, you know, I'm no prude, but when it comes to a girl standing there as if she was up at auction I thought seriously of speaking to Cousin Julia. You didn't know Jack had become our social censor? Mrs. Fisher said to Seldon with a laugh, and Steppney splittered amid the general derision. But she's a cousin, hang it, and when a man's married, town talk was full of her this morning. Yes, lively reading that was, said Mr. Ned Van Allstein, striking his moustache to hide the smile behind it. By the dirty sheet? No, of course not. Some fellow showed it to me, but I'd heard the stories before. When a girl's as good looking as that, she'd better marry, than no questions are asked. In our imperfectly organized society there is no provision as yet for the young woman who claims the privileges of marriage without assuming its obligations. Well, I understand Lily is about to assume them in the shape of Mr. Rosedale, Mrs. Fisher said with a laugh. Rosedale, good heavens! exclaimed Van Allstein, dropping his eyeglass. Steppney, that's your fault for foisting the brute on us. Oh, confound it, you know, we don't marry Rosedale in our family. Steppney languidly protested, but his wife, who sat in oppressive bridal finery at the other side of the room, quelled him with the judicial reflection. In Lily's circumstances it's a mistake to have too high a standard. I hear even Rosedale has been scared by the talk lately. Mrs. Fisher rejoined, but the sight of her last night sent him off his head. What do you think he said to me after her tablo? My God, Mrs. Fisher, if I could get Paul Morpeth to paint her like that, the picture'd appreciate a hundred percent and ten years. Bites, Jove, but isn't she about somewhere? exclaimed Van Allstein, restring his glass with an uneasy glance. No, she ran off while you were all mixing the punch downstairs. Where was she going, by the way? What's on tonight? I hadn't heard of anything. Oh, not a party, I think, said an inexperienced young ferrish, who had arrived late. I put her in her cab as I was coming in, and she gave the driver the trener's address. The trener's! exclaimed Mrs. Jack Steppney. Why, the house is closed. Judy telephoned me from Bellamont this evening. Did she? That's queer. I'm sure I'm not mistaken. Well, come now. Trener's there, anyhow. I—oh, well. The fact is, I've no head for numbers, he broke off, admonished by the nudge of an adjoining foot and the smile that circled the room. In its unpleasant light, Saldon had risen and was shaking hands with his hostess. The air of the place stifled him, and he wondered why he had stayed in it so long. On the doorstep he stood still, remembering a phrase of Lily's. It seems to me you spend a good deal of time in the element you disapprove of. Well, what had brought him there but the quest of her? It was her element, not his, but he would lift her out of it, take her beyond, that beyond, on her letter, was like a cry for rescue. He knew that Perseus's task is not done when he has loosed Andromeda's chains, for her limbs are numb with bondage, and she cannot rise and walk but clings to him with dragging arms as he beats back to land with his burden. Well, he had strength for both. It was her weakness which had put the strength in him. It was not, alas, a clean rush of waves they had to win through, but a clogging morass of old associations and habits, and for the moment its vapors were in his throat. But he would see clear, breath freer in her presence. She was at once the dead weight at his breast, and the spar which had float them to safety. He smiled at the whirl of metaphor with which he was trying to build up a defense against the influences of the last hour. It was pitiable that he, who knew the mixed motives on which social judgments depend, should still feel himself so swayed by them. How could he have lived a lily to a freer vision of life if his own view of her was to be colored by any mind in which he saw her reflected? The moral oppression had produced a physical craving for error. And he strode on, opening his lungs to the reverberating coldness of the night. At the corner of Fifth Avenue, Van Allstein hailed him with an offer of company. Walking. A good thing to blow the smoke out of one's head. Now that women have taken to tobacco we live in a bath of nicotine. It would be a curious thing to study the effect of cigarettes on the relation of the sexes. Smoke is almost as great a solvent as divorce. Both tend to obscure the moral issue. Nothing could have been less consonant with Seldon's mood than Van Allstein's after-dinner aphorisms. But as long as the latter confined himself to generalities his listeners' nerves were in control. Happily Van Allstein prided himself on his summing up of social aspects, and with Seldon for audience was eager to show the sureness of his touch. Mrs. Fisher lived in an east-side street near the park, and as the two men walked down Fifth Avenue the new architectural developments of that versatile thoroughfare invited Van Allstein's comment. That granar house. Now, a typical rung in the social ladder. The man who built it came from a milieu where all the dishes are put on the table at once. His façade is a complete architectural meal. If he had omitted a style his friends might have thought the money had given out. Not a bad purchase for Rosedale, though, attracts attention and odds the western sights here. By and by he'll get out of that phase and want something that the crowd will pass, and the few pause before, especially if he marries my clever cousin. Seldon dashed in with the quarry, and the Wellington brise, with the clever of its kind, don't you think? They were just beneath the wide white façade with its rich restraint of line, which suggested the clever corseting of a redundant figure. That's the next stage, the desire to imply that one has been to Europe, and has a standard. I'm sure Mrs. Bride thinks her house a copy of the Trionon. In America every marble house with gilt furniture is thought to be a copy of the Trionon. What a clever chap that architect is, though, how he takes his client's measure. He has put the whole of Mrs. Bride in his use of the composite order. Now for the Trenors, you remember, he chose the Corinthian, exuberant, but based on the best precedent. The Trenor house is one of his best things, doesn't look like a banqueting hall turned inside out. I hear Mrs. Trenor wants to build out a new ballroom, and that divergence from Gus, on that point, keeps her at Belamond. The dimensions of the Bride's ballroom must wrinkle. You may be sure she knows him, as well as if she'd been there last night, with a yard measure. Who said she was in town, by the way, that ferrish boy? She isn't, I know. Mrs. Stephanie was right. The house is dark, you see. I suppose Gus lives in the back. He had halted opposite the Trenor's corner, and seldom, per force, stayed his steps also. The house loomed obscure and uninhabited, only an oblong gleam above the door spoke of provisional occupancy. They bought the house at the back. It gives them a hundred and fifty feet in the side street. There's where the ballroom's to be, with a gallery connecting it, billiard room, and so on above. I suggested changing the entrance and carrying the drawing-room across the whole Fifth Avenue front. You see, the front door corresponds with the windows. The walking-stick, which Van Allstein swung in demonstration, dropped to a startled, hallo, as the door opened, and two figures were seen silhouetted against the hall light. At the same moment a handsome halted at the curved stone, and one of the figures floated down to it in a haze of evening draperies, while the other, black and bulky, remained persistently projected against the light. For an immeasurable second, the two spectators of the incident were silent. Then the house door closed, the handsome rolled off, and the whole scene slipped by as if with the turn of a stereo-opticon. Van Allstein dropped his eyeglass with a low whistle. Uh, him nothing of this, eh, Seldon, as one of the family I know I may count on you. Appearances are deceptive, and Fifth Avenue is so imperfectly lighted. Good night, said Seldon, turning sharply down the side street, without seeing the other's extended hand. Alone with her cousin's kiss, Gertie stared upon her thoughts. He had kissed her before, but not with another woman on his lips. If he had spared her that, she could have drowned quietly, welcoming the dark flood as it submerged her. But now the flood was shot through with glory, and it was harder to drown at sunrise than in darkness. Gertie had her face from the light, but it pierced to the crannies of her soul. She had been so contented, life had seemed so simple and sufficient, why had he come to trouble her with new hopes? And Lily, Lily, her best friend, womanlike, she accused the woman. Perhaps had it not been for Lily, her fond imagining might have become truth. Seldon had always liked her, had understood and sympathized with the modest independence of her life. He, who had the reputation of weighing all things in the nice balance of a steadiest perceptions, had been uncritical and simple in his view of her. His cleverness had never overawed her, because she had felt at home in his heart. And now she was thrust out, and the door barred against her by Lily's hand. Lily, for whose admission there she herself had pleaded. The situation was lighted up by a dreary flash of irony. She knew Seldon. She saw how the force of her faith in Lily must have helped dispel his hesitations. She remembered, too, how Lily had talked of him. She saw herself bringing the two together, making them known to each other. On Seldon's part, no doubt, the wound inflicted was inconscient. He had never guessed her fuller secret. But Lily, Lily must have known when, in such matters, are a woman's perceptions at fault. And if she knew, then she had deliberately despoiled her friend. And in mere wantonness of power, sense, even to Gertie's suddenly flaming jealousy, it seemed incredible that Lily should wish to be Seldon's wife. Lily might be incapable of marrying for money, but she was equally incapable of living without it, and Seldon's eager investigations into the small economies of housekeeping made him appear to Gertie as tragically duped as herself. She remained long in her sitting-room, where the embers were crumbling to cold gray, and the lamp paled under its gay shade. Just beneath it stood the photograph of Lily Bort, looking out imperially on the cheap gym-cracks, the cramped furniture of the little room. Could Seldon picture her in such an interior? Gertie felt the poverty, the insignificance of her surroundings. She beheld her life as it must appear to Lily, and the cruelty of Lily's judgments smote upon her memory. She saw that she had dressed her idol with attributes of her own making. When had Lily ever really felt, or pitied, or understood, all she wanted was the taste of no experiences. She seemed like some cruel creature experimenting in a laboratory. The pink-faced clock drummed out another hour, and Gertie rose with a start. She had an appointment early the next morning, with a district visitor on the east side. She put out her lamp, covered the fire, and went into her bedroom to undress. In the little glass above her dressing-table she saw her face reflected against the shadows of the room, and tears blotted the reflection. What right had she to dream the dreams of loveliness? A dull face, invited a dull fate. She cried quietly as she undressed, laying aside her clothes with her habitual precision, setting everything in order for the next day, when the old life must be taken up as though there had been no break in its routine. Her servant did not come till eight o'clock, and she prepared her own tea-tray and placed it beside the bed. Then she locked the door of the flat, extinguished her light, and lay down. But on her bed sleep would not come, and she lay face to face with the fact that she hated Lily Bart. It closed with her in the darkness like some formless evil to be blindly grappled with. Reason, judgment, renunciation, all the same daylight forces were beaten back in the sharp struggle for self-preservation. She wanted happiness, wanted it as fiercely and unscrupulously as Lily did, but without Lily's power of obtaining it, and in her conscious impotence she lay shivering and hated her friend. A ring at the doorbell caught her to her feet. She struck a light and stood startled, listening, for a moment her heart beat incoherently. Then she felt the sobering touch of fact, and remembered that such calls were not unknown in her charitable work. She flung on her dressing-gown to answer the summons, and unlocking her door confronted the shining vision of Lily Bart. Gordy's first movement was one of revulsion. She shrank back as though Lily's presence flashed to sudden a light upon her misery. Then she heard her name in a cry, had a glimpse of her friend's face, and felt her so caught and clung to. "'Lily, what is it?' she exclaimed. Miss Bart released her and stood breathing, brokenly, like one who has gained shelter after a long flight. I was so cold I couldn't go home. Have you a fire?' Gordy's compassionate instincts, responding to the swift call of habit, swept aside all her reluctances. Lily was simply someone who needed help. For what reason there was no time to pause and conjecture. Disciplined sympathy checked the wonder on Gordy's lips, and made her draw her friend silently into the setting-room, and seat her by the darkened hearth. Gordy's kindling would hear. The fire will burn in a minute. She knelt down, and the flame leapt under her rapid hands. It flashed strangely through the tears which still blurred her eyes, and smote on the white ruin of Lily's face. The girls looked at each other in silence. Then Lily repeated, "'I couldn't go home.' "'No, no, you came here, dear. You're cold and tired. Sit quiet, and I'll make you some tea.' Gordy had unconsciously adopted the soothing note of her trade. All personal failing was merged in the sense of ministry, and experience had taught her that the bleeding must be stayed before the wound is probed. Lily sat quiet, leaning to the fire. The clatter of cups behind her soothed her as familiar noises hushed a child, whom silence has kept wakeful. But when Gordy stood at her side with the tea, she pushed it away, and turned an estranged eye on the familiar room. "'I came here because I couldn't bear to be alone,' she said. Gordy sat down the cup, and knelt beside her. "'Lily, something has happened. Can't you tell me?' "'I couldn't bear to lie awake in my room till morning. I hate my room at Aunt Julia's, so I came here.' She stirred suddenly, broke from her apathy, and clung to Gordy in a fresh burst of fear. "'Oh, Gordy, the furies, you know the noise of their wings alone at night in the dark, but you don't know. There is nothing to make the dark dreadful to you.' The words, flashing back on Gordy's last hours, struck from her a faint derisive murmur. But Lily, in the blaze of her own misery, was blinded to everything outside it. "'You let me stay? I shan't mind when daylight comes. Is it late? Is the night nearly over? It must be awful to be sleepless. Everything stands by the bed and stares.' Ms. Farrish caught her straying hands. "'Lily, look at me. Something has happened. An accident. You have been frightened. What has frightened you? Tell me if you can, a word or two, so that I can help you.' Lily shook her head. "'I am not frightened. That's not the word. Can you imagine looking into your glass some morning and seeing a disfigurement, some hideous change that has come to you while you slept? Well, I seem to hit myself like that. I can't bear to see myself in my own thoughts. I hate ugliness, you know. I've always turned from it. But I can't explain it to you. You wouldn't understand.' She lifted her head, and her eyes fell on the clock. "'How long the night is? And I know I shan't sleep to-morrow. Someone told me my father used to lie sleepless and think of horrors. And he was not wicked, only unfortunate. And I see now how he must have suffered, lying alone with his thoughts. But I am bad, a bad girl. All my thoughts are bad. I have always had bad people about me. Is that any excuse? I thought I could manage my own life. I was proud. Proud! But now I'm on their level.' Sobs shook her, and she bowed to them like a tree in a dry storm. Girty note beside her, waiting, with the patience born of experience, till this gust of misery should loosen fresh speech. She had first imagined some physical shock, some peril of the crowded streets, since Lily was presumably on her way home from Carrie Fisher's. But she now saw that other nerve centers were smitten, and her mind trembled back from conjecture. Lily's Sobs ceased, and she lifted her head. "'There are bad girls in your slums. Tell me, do they ever peck themselves up? Ever forget, and feel as they did before?' "'Lily, you mustn't speak so. You're dreaming.' "'Don't they always go from bad to worse? There's no turning back. Your old self rejects you, and shuts you out.' She rose, stretching her arms as if in utter physical wariness. "'Go to bed, dear. You work hard, and get up early. I'll watch here by the fire. And you'll leave the light, and your door open. All I want is to feel that you are near me.' She laid both hands on Girty's shoulders, with a smile that was like sunrise on a seized drone with wreckage. "'I can't leave you, Lily. Come and lie in my bed. Your hands are frozen. You must undress and be made warm.' Girty paused with sudden compunction. "'But Mrs. Peniston is past midnight. What will she think?' She goes to bed. I have a latch-key. It doesn't matter. I can't go back there.' "'There's no need to. You shall stay here. But you must tell me where you have been. Listen, Lily. It will help you to speak.' She regained Miss Bart's hands, and pressed them against her. "'Try to tell me. It will clear your poor head. Listen. You were dining at Cary Fisher's.' Girty paused and added with a flash of heroism. Laurence Selden went from here to find you. At the word Lily's face melted from locked anguish to the open misery of a child. Her lips trembled, and her gaze widened with tears. "'He went to find me? And I missed him? Oh, Girty. He tried to help me. He told me. He warned me long ago. He foresaw that I should grow hateful to myself.' The name, as Girty saw with clutch at the heart, had loosened the springs of self-pity in her friend's dry breast, and tear by tear Lily poured out the measure of her anguish. She had dropped sideways in Girty's big arm-chair, her head buried, where lately Selden's had leaned, in a beauty of abandonment that drove home Girty's aching senses the inevitableness of her own defeat. Ah, it needed no deliberate purpose on Lily's part to rob her of her dream, to look on that prone loveliness was to see it in a natural force, to recognize that love and power belong to such as Lily, as renunciation and service are the lot of those they disfoil. But if Selden's infatuation seemed a fatal necessity, the effect that his name produced shook Girty's steadfastness with the last pang. Men pass through such superhuman loves and outlive them. They are the probations of doing the heart to human joys. How gladly Girty would have welcomed the ministry of healing, how willingly have stood the sufferer back to tolerance of life, but Lily's self-betrayal took this last hope from her. The mortal maid on the shore is hopeless against the siren who loves her prey. Such victims are floated back dead from their adventure. Lily sprang up and caught her with strong hands. Girty, you know him. You understand him. Tell me. If I went to him. If I told him everything. If I said, I am bad through and through. I want admiration. I want excitement. I want money. Yes, money. That's my shame, Girty. And it's known. It's said of me. It's what men think of me. If I said it all to him. Told him the whole story. Said plainly, I've sunk lower than the lowest, for I've taken what they take and not paid as they pay. Oh, Girty, you know him. You can speak for him. If I told him everything, would he loathe me, or would he pity me, and understand me, and save me from loathing myself? Girty stood cold and passive. She knew the hour of her probation had come, and her poor heart beat wildly against its destiny. As a dark river sweeps by under a lightning flash, she saw her chance of happiness search past under a flash of temptation. What prevented her from saying, he is like other men? She was not so sure of him after all. But to do so would have been like blaspheming her love. She could not put him before herself in any light but the noblest. She must trust him to the height of her own passion. Yes, I know him. He will help you, she said. And in a moment Lily's passion was weeping itself out against her breast. There was but one bed in the little flat, and the two girls lay down on its side-by-side when Girty had unlaced Lily's dress and persuaded her to put her lips to the warm tea. The light extinguished, they lay still in the darkness, Girty shrinking to the outer edge of the narrow couch to avoid contact with her bed-fellow. Knowing that Lily disliked to be caressed, she had long ago learned to check her demonstrative impulses toward her friend. But tonight every fiber in her body shrank from Lily's nearness. It was torture to listen to her breathing and feel the sheet stir with it. As Lily turned and settled to complete her rest, a strand of her hair swept Girty's cheek with its fragrance. Everything about her was warm and soft and scented. Even the stains of her grief became her as raindrops do the beaten rose. But as Girty lay with arms drawn down her side in the motionless narrowness of an effigy, she felt a stir of sobs from the breathing warmth beside her, and Lily flung out her hand, groped for her friends, and held it fast. Hold me, Girty, hold me, or I shall think of things. She moaned, and Girty silently slipped an arm under her, pillowing her head in its hollow as a mother makes a nest for a tossing child. In the warm hollow Lily lay still, and her breathing grew low and regular. Her hand still clunked at Girty's as if to ward off evil dreams, but the hold of her fingers relaxed. Her head sank deeper into its shelter, and Girty felt that she slept. When Lily woke she had the bed to herself, and the winter light was in the room. She sat up bewildered by the strangeness of her surroundings, then memory returned, and she looked about her with a shiver. In the cold slant of light reflected from the back wall of a neighboring building she saw her evening dress, an opera cloak, lying in a tawdry heap on a chair. Finery laid off is as unappetizing as the remains of a feast, and it occurred to Lily that, at home, her maid's vigilance had always spared her the sight of such incongruities. Her body ached with fatigue, and with the constriction of her attitude and Girty's bed. All through her troubled sleep she had been conscious of having no space to toss in, and the long effort to remain motionless made her feel as if she had spent her night in a train. This sense of physical discomfort was the first to assert itself. Then she perceived, beneath it, a corresponding mental prostration, a langer of horror more insufferable than the first rush of her disgust. The thought of having to wake every morning with this weight on her breast roused her tired mind to fresh effort. She must find some way out of the slow into which she had stumbled. It was not so much compunction as the dread of her morning thoughts that pressed on her the need of action. But she was unutterably tired. It was weariness to think connectedly. She lay back, looking about the poor slit of a room with a renewal of physical distaste. The outer air, penned between high buildings, brought no freshness through the window. Steam heat was beginning to sing in a coil of dingy pipes, and a smell of cooking penetrated the crack of the door. The door opened, and Girty, dressed and hatted, entered with a cup of tea. Her face looked sallow and swollen in the dreary light, and her dull hair shaded imperceptibly into the tones of her skin. She glanced shyly at Lily, asking in an embarrassed tone how she felt. Lily answered with the same constraint, and raised herself up to drink the tea. I must have been overtired last night. I think I had a nervous attack in the carriage, she said, as the drink brought clearness to her sluggish thoughts. You were not well. I am so glad you came here," Girty returned. But how am I to get home, and on Chilia? She knows I telephoned early, and your maid has brought your things. But won't you eat something? I scrambled the eggs myself. Lily could not eat, but the tea strengthened her to rise and dress under her maid's searching gaze. It was a relief to her that Girty was obliged to hasten away. The two kissed silently, but without a trace of the previous night's emotion. Lily found Mrs. Peniston in a state of agitation. She had sent for Grace Stepney, and was taking Digitalis. Lily breasted the storm of inquiries as best she could, explaining that she had had an attack of faintness on her way back from Cary Fisher's, that fearing she would not have strength to reach home, she had gone to Miss Ferris's instead. But that a quiet night had restored her, and that she had no need of a doctor. This was a relief to Mrs. Peniston, who could give herself up to her own symptoms, and Lily was advised to go and lie down, her aunt's panacea for all physical and moral disorders. In the solitude of her own roam she was brought back to a sharp contemplation of facts. Her daylight view of them necessarily differed from the cloudy vision of the night. The winged furies were now prowling gossips, who dropped in on each other for tea. But her fears seemed the uglier, thus shorn of their vagueness, and besides she had to act, not rave. For the first time she forced herself to reckon up the exact amount of her debt to Trenor, and the result of this hateful computation was the discovery that she had, in all, received $9,000 from him. The flimsy pretext on which it had been given, and received, shriveled up in the blaze of her shame. She knew that not a penny of it was her own, and that to restore her self- respect she must at once repay the whole amount. The inability thus to solace her outraged feelings gave her a paralyzing sense of insignificance. She was realizing for the first time that a woman's dignity may cost more to keep up than her carriage, and that the maintenance of a moral attribute should be dependent on dollars and cents made the world appear a more sordid place than she had conceived it. After luncheon, when Grace Stepney's prying eyes had been removed, Lily asked for a word with her aunt. The two ladies went upstairs to the sitting-room where Mrs. Peniston seated herself in her black satin arm-chair, tufted with yellow buttons, beside a beadwork table, bearing a bronze box with a miniature of Beatrice Sensy in the lid. Lily felt for these objects the same distaste which the prisoner may entertain for the fittings of the courtroom. It was here that her aunt received her rare confidences, and the pink-eyed smirk of the turbaned Beatrice was associated in her mind with a gradual fading of the smile from Mrs. Peniston's lips. That lady's dread of a scene gave her an inexorableness which the greatest strength of character could not have produced since it was independent of all considerations of right or wrong, and knowing this Lily seldom ventured to assail it. She had never felt less like making the attempt than on the present occasion, but she had sought in vain for any other means of escape from an intolerable situation. Mrs. Peniston examined her critically. "'You're a bad color, Lily. This incessant rushing about is beginning to tell on you,' she said. Miss Bart saw an opening. "'I don't think it's that, Antrulia. I've had worries,' she replied. "'Ah!' said Mrs. Peniston, shutting her lips with a snap of a purse, closing against a beggar. "'I'm sorry to bother you with them,' Lily continued, but I really believe my faintness last night was brought on partly by anxious thoughts.' "'I should have said. Carrie Fisher's cook was enough to account for it. She has a woman who was with Maria Melson in 1891, the spring of the year we went to X, and I remember dining there two days before we sailed, and feeling sure the coppers hadn't been scoured. "'I don't think I ate much. I can't eat or sleep,' Lily paused, and then said abruptly, "'The fact is, Antrulia, I owe some money.'" Mrs. Peniston's face clouded perceptibly, but did not express the astonishment her niece had expected. She was silent, and Lily was forced to continue. "'I have been foolish.' "'No doubt you have—extremely foolish,' Mrs. Peniston interposed. "'I fail to see how any one with your income and no expenses, not to mention the handsome presence I've always given you. "'Oh, you've been most generous, Antrulia. I shall never forget your kindness. But perhaps you don't quite realize the expense a girl is put to nowadays.' "'I don't realize that you are put to any expense, except for your clothes and your railway fares. I expect you to be handsomely dressed. But I paid Celeste's bill for you last October.'" Lily hesitated. Her aunt's implacable memory had never been more inconvenient. You were as kind as possible, but I have had to get a few things since. "'What kind of things? Clothes? How much have you spent? Let me see the bill. I daresay the woman is swendling you.' "'Oh, no, I think not. Clothes have grown so frightfully expensive, and one needs so many different kinds, with country visits and golf and skating and aching and tuxedo.' "'Let me see the bill,' Mrs. Peniston repeated." Lily hesitated again. In the first place, Madame Celeste had not yet sent in her account, and secondly the amount it represented was only a fraction of the sum that Lily needed. She hasn't sent in the bill for my winter things, but I know it's large, and there are one or two other things. I've been careless and imprudent. I'm frightened to think of what I owe. She raised the troubled loveliness of her face to Mrs. Peniston, vainly hoping that a sight so moving to the other sex might not be without effect upon her own, but the effect produced was that of making Mrs. Peniston shrink back apprehensively. "'Really, Lily, you are old enough to manage your own affairs, and after frightening me to death by your performance of last night, you might at least choose a better time to worry me with such matters.' Mrs. Peniston glanced at the clock and swallowed a tablet of Digitalis. "'If you owe Celeste another thousand, she may send me her account,' she added, as though to end the discussion at any cost. "'I am very sorry, Anjulia. I hate to trouble you at such a time, but I really have no choice. I ought to have spoken sooner. I owe a great deal more than a thousand dollars.' "'A great deal more? Do you owe two? She must have robbed you.' I told you it was not only Celeste. I—there are other bills, more pressing, that must be settled.' "'What on earth have you been buying, jewelry? You must have gone off your head,' said Mrs. Peniston with asperity. "'But if you have run into debt, you must suffer the consequences, and put aside your monthly income till your bills are paid. If you stay quietly here until next spring, instead of racing about all over the country, you will have no expenses at all, and surely in four or five months you can settle the rest of your bills if I paid the dressmaker now.' Lily was again silent. She knew she could not hope to extract even a thousand dollars for Mrs. Peniston on the mere plea of paying Celeste's bill. Mrs. Peniston would expect to go over the dressmaker's account and would make out the check to her, and not to Lily. And yet the money must be obtained before the day was over. The debts I speak of are different, not like tradesman's bills. She began confusedly. But Mrs. Peniston's look made her almost afraid to continue. Could it be that her aunt suspected anything? The idea precipitated Lily's avowal. The fact is I've played cards a good deal, bridge. The women all do it. Girls, too. It's expected. Sometimes I've won, won a good deal. But lately I've been unlucky. And of course such debts can't be paid off gradually. She paused. Mrs. Peniston's face seemed to be petrifying as she listened. Cards. You've played cards for money. It's true, then. When I was told so, I wouldn't believe it. I won't ask if the other horrors I was told were true, too. I've heard enough for the state of my nerves when I think of the example you've had in this house. But I suppose it's your foreign bringing up. No one knew where your mother picked up her friends, and her Sundays were a scandal. That I know. Mrs. Peniston wheeled round suddenly. You play cards on Sunday? Lily flushed with a recollection of certain rainy Sundays at Bellamont and with the Dorsets. You're hard on me, Aunt Julia. I have never really cared for cards, but a girl hates to be thought frigish and superior and wondrous into doing what the others do. I have had a dreadful lesson, and if you'll help me out this time, I promise you— Mrs. Peniston raised her hand, warningly. You needn't make any promises. It's unnecessary. When I offered you a home, I didn't undertake to pay your gambling debts. Aunt Julia, you don't mean that you won't help me? I shall certainly not do anything to give the impression that I countenance your behavior. If you really owe your dressmaker, I will settle with her. Beyond that, I recognize no obligation to assume your debts. Lily had risen and stood pale and quivering before her aunt. Pride stormed in her, but humiliation forced the cry from her lips. Aunt Julia, I shall be disgraced! But she could go no farther. If her aunt turned such a stony ear to the fiction of the gambling debts, in what spirit would she receive the terrible avowal of the truth? I consider that you are disgraced, Lily. Disgraced by your conduct, far more than by its results, you say your friends have persuaded you to play cards with them. Well, they may as well learn a lesson too. They can probably afford to lose a little money. And at any rate, I am not going to waste any of mine in paying them. And now I must ask you to leave me. This scene has been extremely painful, and I have my own health to consider. Draw down the blinds, please, and tell Jennings I will see no one this afternoon, but Grace Stepney. Lily went up to her own room and bolted the door. She was trembling with fear and anger. The rush of the fury's wings was in her ears. She walked up and down the room with blind irregular steps. The last door of escape was closed. She felt herself shut in with her dishonor. Suddenly her wild pacing brought her before the clock on the chimney-piece. Its hand stood at half-past three. And she remembered that sulden was to come to her at four. She had meant to put him off with a word, but now her heart leapt at the thought of seeing him. Was there not a promise of rescue in his love? As she had lain at Gertie's side the night before, she had thought of his coming and of the sweetness of weeping out her pain upon his breast. Of course she had meant to clear herself of its consequences before she met him. She had never really doubted that Mrs. Peniston would come to her aid. And she had felt, even in the full storm of her misery, that sulden's love could not be her ultimate refuge. Only it would be so sweet to take a moment's shelter there while she gathered fresh strength to go on. But now his love was her only hope, and as she sat alone with her wretchedness the thought of confiding in him became as seductive as the rivers flow to the suicide. The first plunge would be terrible, but afterward, what blessedness might come, she remembered Gertie's words. I know him. He will help you. And her mind clung to them as a sick person might cling to a healing relic. Oh, if he really understood, if he would help her to gather up her broken life and put it together in some new semblance in which no trace of the past should remain, he had always made her feel that she was worthy of better things, and she had never been in greater need of such solace. Once and again she shrank at the thought of imperiling his love by her confession. For love was what she needed. It would take the glow of passion to weld together the shattered fragments of her self-esteem. But she recurred to Gertie's words, and held fast to them. She was sure that Gertie knew Seldon's feeling for her, and it had never dawned upon her blindness that Gertie's own judgment of him was colored by emotions far more ardent than her own. Four o'clock found her in the drawing-room. She was sure that Seldon would be punctual, but the hour came and passed. It moved on feverishly, measured by her impatient heartbeats. She had time to take a fresh survey of her wretchedness, and to fluctuate anew between the impulse to confide in Seldon and the dread of destroying his illusions. But as the menace passed the need of throwing herself on his comprehension became more urgent. She could not bear the weight of her misery alone. There would be a perilous moment, perhaps, but could she not trust her beauty to bridge it over to land her safe in the shelter of his devotion? But the hour sped on, and Seldon did not come. Doubtless he had been detained, or had misread her hurriedly scrawled note, taking the four for a five. The ringing of the doorbell a few minutes after five confirmed this supposition, and made Lily hastily resolved to write more legibly in future. The sound of steps in the hall, and of the butler's voice preceding them, poured fresh energy into her veins. She felt herself once more the alert and competent molder of emergencies, and the remembrance of her power over Seldon flushed her with sudden confidence. But when the drawing-room door opened, it was Rosedale who came in. The reaction caused her a sharp pang, but after a passing movement of irritation at the clumsiness of fate, and at her own carelessness in not denying the door to all but Seldon, she controlled herself and greeted Rosedale amicably. It was annoying that Seldon, when he came, should find that particular visitor in possession, but Lily was mistress of the art of ridding herself of superfluous company, and to her present mood, Rosedale seemed distinctly negligible. His own view of the situation forced itself upon her after a few moments' conversation. She had caught at the Brise Entertainment as an easy impersonal subject, likely to tide them over the interval till Seldon appeared, but Mr. Rosedale tenaciously planted beside the tea-table his hands in his pockets, his legs a little too freely extended, at once gave the topic a personal turn. Pretty well done. Well, yes, I suppose it was. Welly Brise got his back up, and don't mean to let go till he's got the hang of the thing. Of course, there were things here and there. Things Mrs. Fisher couldn't be expected to see to. The champagne wasn't cold, and the coats got mixed in the coat room. I would have spent more money on the music, but that's my character. If I want a thing, I'm willing to pay. I don't go up to the counter, and then wonder if the article's worth the price. I wouldn't be satisfied to entertain like the Welly Brise. I'd want something that would look more easy and natural, more as if I took it in my stride, and it takes just two things to do that, Miss Bart, money, and the right woman to spend it. He paused and examined her attentively while she affected to rearrange the tea-cups. I've got the money, he continued, clearing his throat. And what I want is the woman, and I mean to have her too. He leaned forward a little, rusting his hands on the head of his walking-stick. He had seen men of Ned von Allstein's type bring their hats and sticks into a drawing-room, and he thought it added a touch of elegant familiarity to their appearance. Lily was silent, smiling faintly, with her eyes absently resting on his face. She was, in reality, reflecting that a declaration would take some time to make, and that Seldon must surely appear before the moment of refusal had been reached. Her brooding look, as of a mind withdrawn yet not averted, seemed to Mr. Rosedale full of a subtle encouragement. He would not have liked any evidence of eagerness. I mean to have her too, he repeated. With a laugh intended to strengthen his self-assurance, I generally have got what I wanted in life, Miss Bart. I wanted money, and I've got more than I know how to invest. And now the money doesn't seem to be of any account unless I can spend it on the right woman. That's what I want to do with it. I want my wife to make all the other women feel small. I'd never grudge a dollar that was spent on that. But it isn't every woman can do it, no matter how much you spend on her. There was a girl in some history-book who wanted gold shields or something, and the fellows throw matter, and she was crushed under them. They killed her. Well, that's true enough. Some women look buried under their jewelry. What I want is a woman who'll hold her head higher the more diamonds I put on it. And when I looked at you the other night at the brise, in that plain white dress, looking as if you had a crown on, I said to myself, by Gad, if she had one, she'd wear it as if it grew on her. Still, Lily did not speak. And he continued, warming with his theme. Tell you what it is, though. That kind of woman costs more than all the rest of them put together. If a woman's going to ignore her pearls, they want to be better than anybody else's. And so it is with everything else. You know what I mean. You know it's only the showy things that are cheap. Well, I should want my wife to be able to take the earth for granted if she wanted to. I know there's one thing vulgar about money, and that's the thinking about it, and my wife would never have to demean herself in that way. He paused, and then added, with an unfortunate lapse to an earlier manner. I guess you know the lady I've gotten view, Miss Bart. Lily raised her head, brightening a little under the challenge. Even through the dark tumult of her thoughts, the clink of Mr. Rosdale's millions had a faintly seductive note. Oh, for enough of them to cancel her one miserable death. But the man behind them grew increasingly repugnant in the light of Seldon's expected coming. The contrast was too grotesque. She could scarcely suppress the smile it provoked. She decided that directness would be best. If you mean me, Mr. Rosdale, I am very grateful. Very much flattered. But I don't know what I have ever done to make you think. Oh, if you mean you're not dead in love with me, I've got sense enough to see that, and I ain't talking to you as if you were. I presume I know the kind of talk that's expected under those circumstances. I'm confoundedly gone on you. That's about the size of it, and I'm just giving you a plain business statement of the consequences. You're not very fond of me, yet. But you're fond of luxury, and style, and amusement, and of not having to worry about cash. You like to have a good time, and not have to settle for it. And what I propose to do is to provide for the good time and do the settling. He paused, and she returned with a chilling smile. You are mistaken. In one point, Mr. Rosdale, whatever I enjoy I am prepared to settle for. She spoke with the intention of making him see that. If his words implied a tentative allusion to her private affairs, she was prepared to meet and repudiate it. But if he recognized her meaning, it failed to abash him, and he went on in the same tone. I didn't mean to give a fence. Excuse me if I was spoken to plainly. But why ain't you straight with me? Why do you pick up that kind of bluff? You know there've been times when you were bothered, bothered, and as a girl gets older, and things keep moving along. Why, before she knows it, the things she wants are liable to move past her and not come back. I don't say it's anywhere near that with you, yet. But you've had a taste of bothers that a girl like you ought never to have known about, and what I'm offering you is the chance to turn your back on them once and for all. The color burned in Lily's face as he ended. There was no mistaking the point he meant to make, and to permit it to pass unheeded was a fatal confession of weakness. Well, to resent it too openly was to a risk offending him at a perilous moment. Indignation quivered on her lip, but it was quelled by the secret voice which warned her that she must not quarrel with him. He knew too much about her, and even at the moment when it was essential that he should show himself at his best, he did not scruple to let her see how much he knew. How then would he use his power when her expression of contempt had dispelled his one motive for restraint? Her whole future might hinge on her way of answering him. She had to stop and consider that in the stress of her other anxieties as a breathless fugitive may have to pause at the crossroads and try to decide coolly which turn to take. You are quite right, Mr. Rosdale, I have had bothers, and I am grateful to you for wanting to relieve me of them. It is not always easy to be quite independent and self-respecting when one is poor and lives among rich people. I have been careless about money and have worried about my bills, but I should be selfish and ungrateful if I made that a reason for accepting all you offer, with no better return to make than the desire to be free from my anxieties. You must give me time, time to think of your kindness, and of what I could give you and return for it. She held out her hand with a charming gesture in which dismissal was shorn of its rigor. Its hint of future leniency made Rosdale rise in obedience to it, a little fleshed with his unhopeful success, and disciplined by the tradition of his blood to accept what was conceited without undue haste to press for more. Something in his prompt acquiescence frightened her. She felt behind it the stored force of a patience that might subdue the strongest will. But at least they had parted amicably, and he was out of the house without meeting Saldon, whose continued absence now smote her with a new alarm. Rosdale had remained over an hour, and she understood that it was now too late to hope for Saldon. He would write, explaining his absence, of course, there would be a note from him by the late post, but her confession would have to be postponed, and the chill of the delay settled heavily on her fact spirit. It lay heavier when the postman's last ring brought no note for her, and she had to go upstairs to a lonely night, a night as grim and sleepless as her tortured fancy had pictured it to Gertie. She had never learned to live with her own thoughts, and to be confronted with them through such hours of lucid misery made the confused wretchedness of her previous vigil seem easily bearable. Daylight disbanded the phantom crew, and made it clear to her that she would hear from Saldon before noon, but the day passed without his writing or coming. Lily remained at home, lunching and dining alone with her aunt, who complained of fluttering of the heart and talked icily on general topics. Mrs. Peniston went to bed early, and when she had gone Lily sat down and wrote a note to Saldon. She was about to ring for a messenger to dispatch it when her eye fell on a paragraph in the evening paper which lay at her elbow. Mr. Lawrence Saldon was among the passengers sailing this afternoon for Havana and the West Indies on the windward liner and tillies. She lay down the paper and sat motionless, staring at her note. She understood now that he was never coming, that he had gone away because he was afraid that he might come. She rose and walking across the floor stood gazing at herself for a long time in the brightly lit mirror above the mantelpiece. The lines in her face came out terribly. She looked old, and when a girl looks old to herself how does she look to other people? She moved away and began to wander aimlessly about the room, fitting her steps with mechanical precision between the monstrous roses of Mrs. Peniston's ax-minster. Suddenly she noticed that the pen with which she had ridden to Saldon still rested against the uncovered ink-stand. She seated herself again, and taking out an envelope addressed it rapidly to Rosedale. Then she laid out a sheet of paper and sat over it with suspended pen. It had been easy enough to write the date, and dear Mr. Rosedale, but after that her inspiration flagged. She meant to tell him to come to her, but the words refused to shape themselves. At length she began, I have been thinking. Then she laid the pen down and sat with her elbows on the table and her face hidden in her hands. Suddenly she started up at the sound of the doorbell. It was not late, barely ten o'clock, and there might still be a note from Saldon or a message, or he might be there himself, on the other side of the door. The announcement of his sailing might have been a mistake. It might be another Lawrence Saldon who had gone to Havana. All these possibilities had time to flash through her mind and build up the conviction that she was, after all, to see or hear from him, before the drawing-room door opened to admit a servant carrying a telegram. Lily tore it open, with shaking hands, and read Bertha Dorsett's name below the message. Sailing unexpectedly to-morrow, will you join us on a cruise in Mediterranean? End of Book I, CHAPTER I It came vividly to Saldon on the casino steps that Monte Carlo had, more than any other place he knew, the gift of accommodating itself to each man's humor. His own, at the moment, linted a festive readiness of welcome that might well, in a disenchanted eye, have turned to paint and facility. So frank an appeal for participation, so outspoken a recognition of the holiday vein in human nature, struck refreshingly on a mind jaded by prolonged hard work in surroundings made for the discipline of the senses. As he surveyed the white square set in an exotic coquetry of architecture, the studied tropicality of the gardens, the groups loitering in the foreground against maw of mountains, which suggested a sublime stage setting forgotten in a hurried shifting of scenes. As he took in the whole outspread effect of light and leisure, he felt a movement of revulsion from the last few months of his life. The New York winter had presented an interminable perspective of snowburden days, reaching toward a spring of raw sunshine and furious air, when the ugliness of things rasped the eye as the gritty wind ground into the skin. Selden, immersed in his work, had told himself that external conditions did not matter to a man in his state, and that cold and ugliness were a good tonic for relaxed sensibilities. When an urgent case summoned him abroad to confer with a client in Paris, he broke reluctantly with the routine of the office, and it was only now that, having dispatched his business and slipped away for a week in the south, he began to feel the renewed zest of spectatorship that is the solace of those who take an objective interest in life. The multiplicity of its appeals, the perpetual surprise of its contrasts and resemblances, all these tricks and turns of the show were upon him with a spring as he descended the casino's steps and paused on the pavement at its doors. He had not been abroad for seven years and what changes the renewed contact produced. If the central depths were untouched, hardly a pinpoint of surface remained the same, and this was the very place to bring out the completeness of the renewal. The sublimities, the perpetuities, might have left him as he was, but this tent pitched for a day's revelry spread a roof of oblivion between himself and his fixed sky. It was mid-April, and one felt that the revelry had reached its climax, and that the desultory groups in the square and gardens would soon dissolve and reform in other scenes. Meanwhile, the last moments of the performance seemed to gain an added brightness from the hovering threat of the curtain. The quality of the air, the exuberance of the flowers, the blue intensity of sea and sky produced the effect of a closing tableau, when all the lights are turned on at once. This impression was presently heightened by the way in which a consciously conspicuous group of people advanced to the middle front and stood before Saldan with the air of the chief performers gathered together by the exgencies of the final effect. Their appearance confirmed the impression that the show had been staged regardless of expense, and emphasized its resemblance to one of those costume plays in which the protagonists walked through the passions without displacing a drapery. The ladies stood in unrelated attitudes calculated to isolate their effects, and the men hung about them as irreverently, as stage-heroes whose tailors are named in the program. It was Saldan himself who unwittingly fused the group by arresting the attention of one of its members. Why, Mr. Saldan, Mrs. Fisher exclaimed in surprise, and with a gesture toward Mrs. Jack Stepney and Mrs. Wellington Brie, she added plaintively, we're starving to death because we can't decide where to lunch. She came into their group and made the confident of their difficulty. Saldan learned with amusement that there were several places where one might miss something by not lunching or forfeit something by lunching, so that eating actually became a minor consideration on the very spot consecrated to its rights. Of course one gets the best of things at the terrace, but that looks as if one hadn't any other reason for being there. The Americans, who don't know anyone, always rush for the best food, and the Duchess of Belcher has taken up bechesons lately. Mrs. Brie earnestly summed up. Mrs. Brie, to Mrs. Fisher's despair, had not progressed beyond the point of weighing her social alternatives in public. She could not acquire the air of doing things because she wanted to, in making her choice, the final seal of their fitness. Mr. Brie, a short pale man, with a business face and leisure clothes, met the dilemma hilariously. I guess the Duchess goes where it's cheapest unless she can get her meal paid for. If you offer to blow her off at the terrace, she'd turn up fast enough. But Mrs. Jack Stepney, interposed. The Grand Dukes go to that little place at the Kandamine. Lord Hubert says it's the only restaurant in Europe where they can cook peas. Lord Hubert, daisy, a slender, shabby-looking man, with a charming, worn smile, and the air of having spent his best years in piloting the wealthy to the right restaurant, assented with gentle emphasis. It's quite that. Peas? said Mr. Brie contemptuously. Can they cook terrapin? It just shows, he continued, what these European markets are, when a fellow can make a reputation cooking peas. Jack Stepney, intervened with authority. I don't know that I quite agree with daisy. There's a little hole in Paris off the quick, Voltaire. But in any case, I can't advise the Kandamine gargote. At least not with ladies. Stepney, since his marriage, had thickened and grown prudish, as the Van Osberg husbands were apt to do, but his wife, to his surprise and discomforture, had developed an earth-shaking fastness of gate, which left him trailing breathlessly in her wake. That's where we'll go, then, she declared, with a heavy toss of her plumage. I'm so tired of the taurasse, it's as dull as one of mother's dinners. And Lord Hubert has promised to tell us who all the awful people are at the other place, hasn't he, Kerry? Now, Jack, don't look so solemn. Well, said Mrs. Brie, all I want to know is who their dressmakers are. No doubt daisy can tell you that, too, remarked Stepney, with an ironic intention which the other received with a light murmur. I can at least find out, my dear fellow. And Mrs. Brie, having declared that she couldn't walk another step, the party hailed two or three of the light-fatens, which hover attentively on the confines of the gardens, and rattled off in procession toward the condominium. Their destination was one of the little restaurants overhanging the boulevard, which dips steeply down from Monte Carlo to the low intermediate quarter, along the quay. From the window in which they presently found themselves installed, they overlooked the intense blue curve of the harbour, set between the verdure of twin promontories, to the right the cliff of Monaco, topped by the medieval silhouette of its church and castle, to the left the terraces and pentacles of the gambling-house. Between the two the waters of the bay were furrowed by a light coming and going of pleasure-craft, through which, just at the culminating moment of luncheon, the majestic advance of a great steam-yacht drew the company's attention from the peas. By chauve, I believe that's the dorset's back, Stefny exclaimed. And Lord Hubert, dropping his single eyeglass, corroborated. It's the Sabrina, yes. So soon they were to spend a month in Sicily, Mrs. Fischer observed. I guess they feel as if they had. There's only one up-to-date hotel in the whole place, said Mr. Brie, disparagingly. It was Ned Silverton's idea, but poor dorset and Lily Bart must have been horribly bored. Mrs. Fischer added, in an undertone to Seldon, I do hope there hasn't been a row. It's most awfully jolly, having mist-bought back, said Lord Hubert, in his mild deliberate voice, and Mrs. Brie added ingenuously. I daresay the Duchess will dine with us, now that Lily's here. The Duchess admires her immensely. I'm sure she'd be charmed to have it arranged, Lord Hubert agreed, with the professional promptness of the man accustomed to draw his profit from facilitating social contacts. Seldon was struck by the business-like change in his manner. Lily has been a tremendous success here, Mrs. Fischer continued, still addressing herself confidentially to Seldon. She looks ten years younger. I never saw her so handsome. Lady Skidot took her everywhere in Cannes, and the Crown Princess of Macedonia had her to stop for a week at Simye's. People say that was one reason why Bertha whisked the yacht off to Sicily. The Crown Princess didn't take much notice of her, and she couldn't bear to look on at Lily's triumph. Seldon made no reply. He was vaguely aware that Miss Bart was cruising in the Mediterranean with the Dorsets, but it had not occurred to him that there was any chance of running across her on the Riviera, where the season was virtually at an end. As he leaned back, silently contemplating his filigree cup of Turkish coffee, he was trying to put some order in his thoughts to tell himself how the news of her nearness was really affecting him. He had a personal detachment enabling him, even in moments of emotional high pressure, to get a fairly clear view of his feelings, and he was sincerely surprised by the disturbance which the sight of the Sabrina had produced in him. He had reason to think that his three months of engrossing professional work following on the sharp shock of his disillusionment had cleared his mind of its sentimental vapours. The feeling he had nourished and given prominence to was one of thankfulness for his escape. He was like a traveller so grateful for rescue from a dangerous accident that at first he is hardly conscious of his bruises. Now he suddenly felt the latent ache, and realized that after all he had not come off unhurt. An hour later, at Mrs. Fisher's side in the Casino Gardens, he was trying to find fresh reasons for forgetting the injury received in the contemplation of the peril avoided. The party had dispersed, with the loitering indecision characteristic of social movements at Monte Carlo, where the whole place and the long-guilded hours of the day seemed to offer an infinity of ways of being idle. Lord Hubert Daisy had finally gone off in quest of the Duchess of Belcher, charged by Mrs. Brie with a delicate negotiation of securing that lady's presence at dinner. The steppanese had left for Nice and their motor-car, and Mr. Brie had departed to take his place in the pigeon-shooting match which was at the moment engaging his highest faculties. Mrs. Brie, who had a tendency to grow red and sturtorous after luncheon, had been judiciously prevailed upon by Carrie Fisher to withdraw to her hotel for an hour's repose, and Seldon and his companion were thus left to a stroll, propitious to confidences. The stroll soon resolved itself into a tranquil session on a bench overhung with laurel and Bengsian roses, from which they caught a dazzle of blue sea between marble ballasters and the fiery shafts of cactus blossoms shooting meteor-like from the rock. The soft shade of their niche and the adjacent glitter of the air were conducive to an easy lounging mood and to the smoking of many cigarettes, and Seldon, yielding to these influences, suffered Mrs. Fisher to unfold to him the history of her recent experiences. She had come abroad with a welly brise at the moment when fashion flees the inclemency of the New York Spring. The brise, intoxicated by their first success, already thirsted for new kingdoms, and Mrs. Fisher, viewing the Riviera as an easy introduction to London society, had guided their course thither. She had affiliations of her own in every capital and a facility for picking them up again after long absences, and the carefully disseminated rumour of the brise wealth had at once gathered about them a group of cosmopolitan pleasure-seekers. But things are not going as well as I expected, Mrs. Fisher frankly admitted. It's all very well to say that everybody with money can get into society, but it would be truer to say that nearly everybody can. And the London market is so glutted with new Americans that, to succeed there now, they must be either very clever or awfully queer. The brise are neither. He would get on well enough if she'd let him alone. They like his slang and his brag and his blunders, but Louisa spoils it all by trying to repress him and put herself forward. If she'd be natural herself, fat and vulgar and bouncing, it would be all right, but as soon as she meets anybody smart she tries to be slender and queenly. She tried it with the Duchess of Belcher and Lady Skidaw, and they said, I've done my best to make her see her mistake. I've said to her again and again, just let yourself go, Louisa. But she keeps up the humbug even with me. I believe she keeps on being queenly in her own room, with a door shut. The worst of it is, Mrs. Fisher went on, that she thinks it's all my fault. When the doorsets turned up here six weeks ago and everybody began to make fuss about Lily Bart, I could see Louisa thought that if she'd had Lily in tow instead of me she would have been hobnobbing with all the royalties by this time. She doesn't realize that it's Lily's beauty that does it. Lord Hubert tells me Lily is thought even handsomer than when he knew her at eggs ten years ago. It seems she was tremendously admired there. An Italian prince, rich and the real thing, wanted to marry her, but just at the critical moment a good-looking stepson turned up and Lily was silly enough to flirt with him while her marriage settlements with the stepfather were being drawn up. Some people said the young men did it on purpose. You can fancy the scandal. There was an awful row between the men, and people began to look at Lily so querily that Mrs. Peniston had to pack up and finish her cure elsewhere. Not that she ever understood. To this day she thinks that eggs didn't suit her, and mentions her having been sent there as proof of the incompetence of French doctors. That's Lily all over, you know. She works like a slave preparing the ground and sowing her seed, but the day she ought to be reaping the harvest she oversleeps herself or goes off on a picnic. Mrs. Fisher paused and looked reflectively at the deep shimmer of sea between the cactus flowers. Sometimes, she added, I think it's just flightiness, and sometimes I think it's because, at heart, she despises the things she's trying for, and it's the difficulty of deciding that makes her such an interesting study. She glanced tentatively at Seldin's motionless profile, and resumed with a slight sigh. Ah, well, all I can say is, I wish she'd give me some of her discarded opportunities. I wish we could change places now, for instance. She could make a very good thing out of the Brise if she managed them properly, and I should know just how to look after George Dorsett while Bertha is reading Verlaine with Nettie Silverton. She met Seldin's sound of protest with a sharp derisive glance. Well, what's the use of menacing matters? We all know that's what Bertha brought her abroad for. When Bertha wants to have a good time, she has to provide occupation for George. At first, I thought Lily was going to play her cards well this time, but there are rumours that Bertha is jealous of her success here, and it can, and I shouldn't be surprised if there were a break any day. Lily's only safeguard is that Bertha needs her badly. Oh, very badly. The Silverton affair is in the acute stage. It's necessary that George's attention should be pretty continuously distracted. And I'm bound to say Lily does distract it. I believe he'd marry her to-morrow if he found out there was anything wrong with Bertha. But you know him. He's as blind as he's jealous. And, of course, Lily's present business is to keep him blind. A clever woman might know just the right moment to tear off the bandage, but Lily isn't clever in that way, and when George does open his eyes she'll probably contrive not to be in his line of vision. Seldin tossed away his cigarette. By Jove, it's time for my train, he exclaimed, with a glance at his watch, adding, in reply to Mrs. Fisher's surprise comment, Why, I thought, of course, you were at Monte, a murmured word to the effect that he was making niece his headquarters. The worst of it is she snubs the brides now, he heard, irrelevantly flung after him. Ten minutes later, in the high perched bedroom of a hotel overlooking the casino, he was tossing his effects into a couple of gaping poor men, too, while the porter waited outside to transport them to the cab at the door. It took but a brief plunge down the steep white road to the station to land him safely in the afternoon express for niece, and not till he was installed in the corner of an empty carriage did he exclaim to himself with a reaction of self-contempt. What the deuce am I running away from? The pertinence of the question checked Seldin's fugitive impulse before the train had started. It was ridiculous to be flying like an emotional coward from an infatuation. His reason had conquered. He had instructed his bankers to forward some important business letters to niece, and at niece he would quietly await them. He was already annoyed with himself, having left Monte Carlo, where he had intended to pass the week which remained to him before sailing, but it would now be difficult to return on his steps without any appearance of inconsistency from which his pride recoiled. In his inmost heart he was not sorry to put himself beyond the probability of meeting Miss Bart. Completely as he had detached himself from her he could not yet regard her merely as a social instance and viewed in a more personal way she was not likely to be a reassuring object of study. Chance encounters, or even the repeated mention of her name, would send his thoughts back into grooves from which he had resolutely detached them. Whereas if she could be entirely excluded from his life the pressure of new and varied impressions with which no thought of her was connected would soon complete the work of separation. Mrs. Fisher's conversation had, indeed, operated to that end, but the treatment was too painful to be voluntarily chosen while milder remedies were untried, and seldom thought he could trust himself to return gradually to a reasonable view of Miss Bart if only he did not see her. Having reached the station early he had arrived at this point in his reflections before the increasing throng on the platform warned him that he could not hope to preserve his privacy. The next moment there was a hand on the door and he turned to confront the very face he was fleeing. Miss Bart, glowing with the haste of precipitate descent upon the train, headed a group composed of the dorsets, Young Silverton and Lord Hubert Dacey, who had barely time to spring into the carriage and envelop seldom in ejaculations of surprise and welcome before the whistle of departure sounded. The party, it appeared, were hastening to niece in response to a sudden summons to dine with the Duchess of Belcher and to see the water-fate in the bay. A plan evidently improvised, in spite of Lord Hubert's protesting, oh, I say you know, for the express purpose of defeating Mrs. Brie's endeavour to capture the Duchess. During the laughing relation of this manoeuvre Selden had time for a rapid impression of Miss Bart, who had seeded herself opposite to him in the golden afternoon light. Scarcely three months had elapsed since he had parted from her on the threshold of the Brie's conservatory, but a subtle change had passed over the quality of her beauty. Then it had had a transparency through which the fluctuations of the spirit were sometimes tragically visible. Now its impenetrable surface suggested a process of crystallization which had fused her whole being into one hard brilliant substance. The change had struck Mrs. Fisher as a rejuvenation. To Selden it seemed like that moment of pause and arrest when the warm fluidity of youth is chilled into its final shape. He felt it in the way she smiled on him, and in the readiness and competence with which flung unexpectedly into his presence she took up the thread of their intercourse as though that thread had not been snapped with the violence from which he still reeled. Such facility seconded him, but he told himself that it was with the pang which precedes recovery. Now he would really get well, would eject the last drop of poison from his blood. Already he felt himself calmer in her presence than he had learned to be in the thought of her. Her assumptions and illusions, her shortcuts and long détours, the skill with which she contrived to meet him at a point from which no inconvenient glimpses of the past were visible, suggested what opportunities she had had for practicing such arts since their last meeting. He felt that she had at last arrived at an understanding with herself, had made a pact with her rebellious impulses, and achieved a uniform system of self-government under which all vagrant tendencies were either held captive or forced into the surface of the state. And he saw other things too in her manner, saw how it had adjusted itself to the hidden intricacies of a situation in which, even after Mrs. Fisher's elucidating flashes, he still felt himself aggrope. Surely Mrs. Fisher could no longer charge Miss Bart with neglecting her opportunities. Dysseldyn's exasperated observation she was only too completely alive to them. She was perfect to everyone, subservient to Bertha's anxious predominance, good-naturedly watchful of Dorset's moods brightly companionable to Ed Silverton and Dacey, the latter of whom met her on an evident footing of old admiration, while young Silverton, portentiously self-absorbed, seemed conscious of her only as of something vaguely obstructive. And suddenly, as Seldyn noted the fine shades of manner by which she harmonized herself with her surroundings, it flashed on him that, to need such a droid handling, the situation must indeed be desperate. She was on the edge of something. That was the impression left with him. He seemed to see her poised on the brink of a chasm, with one graceful foot advanced to assert her unconsciousness that the ground was failing her. On the promenade de Anglais, where Ned Silverton hung on him for the half hour before dinner, he received a deeper impression of the general insecurity. Silverton was in a mood of titanic pessimism. How could anyone come to such a damned whole as the Riviera? Anyone with a grain of imagination, with a whole Mediterranean to choose from. But then, if one's estimate of a place depended on the way they broiled a spring chicken, gad, what a study might be made of the tyranny of the stomach, the way a sluggish liver or insufficient gastric juices might affect the whole course of the universe, overshadow everything in reach. Chronic dyspepsia ought to be among the statutory causes. A woman's life might be ruined by a man's inability to digest fresh bread. Gross grotesque? Yes, and tragic, like most absurdities. There's nothing grimmer than the tragedy that wears a comic mask. Where was he? Oh, the reason they checked Sicily and rushed back? Well, partly, no doubt, Miss Bart's desire to get back to bridge and smartness. Dead is a stone to art and poetry. The light never was on sea or land for her. And, of course, she persuaded Dorsett that the Italian food was bad for him. Oh, she could make him believe anything. Anything. Mrs. Dorsett was aware of it. Oh, perfectly. Nothing she didn't see. But she could hold her tongue. She'd had to, often enough. Miss Bart was an intimate friend. She wouldn't hear a word against her. Only it hurts a woman's pride. There are some things one doesn't get used to. All this in confidence, of course. Ah, and there were the ladies signalling from the balcony of the hotel. He plunged across the promenade, leaving Seldon to a meditative cigar. The conclusions it led him to were fortified, later in the evening, by some of those faint corroborative hints that generate a light of their own in the dusk of a doubting mind. Seldon, stumbling on a chance acquaintance, had dined with him, and adjourned still in his company to the brightly lit promenade, where a line of crowded stands commanded the glittering darkness of the waters. The night was soft and persuasive. Overhead hung a summer sky, furrowed with a rush of rockets, and from the east a late moon, pushing up beyond the lofty bend of the coast, sent across the bay a shaft of brightness which paled to ashes in the red glitter of the illuminated boats. Down the lantern hung promenade. Snatches of band music floated above the hum of the crowd, and the soft tossing of boughs in dusky gardens, and between these gardens and the backs of the stands there flowed a stream of people, in whom the vociferous carnival mood seemed tempered by the growing languor of the season. Seldon and his companion, unable to get seats on one of the stands facing the bay, had wandered for a while with a throng, and then found a point of vantage on a high-garden parapet above the promenade. Thence they caught but a triangular glimpse of the water, and of the flashing play of boats across its surface, but the crowd in the street was under their immediate view, and seemed to Seldon, on the whole, of more interest than the show itself. After a while, however, he wearied of his perch, and dropping alone to the pavement pushed his way to the first corner, and turned into the moonlit silence of a side street. Long garden walls, overhung by trees, made a dark boundary to the pavement. An empty cab trailed along the deserted thoroughfare, and presently Seldon saw two persons emerge from the opposites' shadows, signal to the cab, and drive off in it toward the center of the town. The moonlight touched them as they paused to enter the carriage, and he recognized Mrs. Dorsett and young Soverton. Beneath the nearest lamppost he glanced at his watch, and saw that the time was close on eleven. He took another cross-street, and without breasting the throng on the promenade, made his way to the fashionable club, which overlooks that thoroughfare. Here, amid the blaze of crowded backer-out tables, he caught sight of Lord Hubert Desi, seated with his habitual, worn smile, behind a rapidly dwindling heap of gold. The heap, being in due course wiped out, was Hubert, rose with a shrug, and, joining Seldon, adjourned with him to the deserted terrace of the club. It was now past midnight, and the throng on the stands was dispersing, while the long trails of red-lit boats scattered and faded beneath the sky repossessed by the tranquil splendor of the moon. Lord Hubert looked at his watch. By jove I promised to join the Duchess for supper at the London house, but it's past twelve, and I suppose they've all scattered. The fact is, I lost them in the crowd soon after dinner, and took refuge here, for my sins. They had seats on one of the stands, but, of course, they couldn't stop quiet. The Duchess never can. She and Miss Bott went off in quest of what they call adventures. Gad, it ain't their fault if they don't have some queer ones. He added tentatively, after pausing to grow for a cigarette. Miss Bott's an old friend of yours, I believe. So she told me, ah, thanks, I don't seem to have one left. He let Seldon's profit cigarette and continued in his high-pitched, drawing tone. None of my business, of course, but I didn't introduce her to the Duchess. Charming woman, the Duchess, you understand, and a very good friend of mine, but rather at liberal education. Seldon received this in silence, and after a few puffs Lord Hubert broke out again. Sort of a thing one can't communicate to the young lady, though young ladies nowadays are so competent, judge for themselves, but in this case I'm an old friend, too, you know, and there seemed no one else to speak to. The whole situation's a little mixed as I see it, but there used to be an auntsomer, a diffuse and innocent person, who was great at bridging over chasms she didn't see. Ah, in New York is she. Pity, New York's such a long way off.