prompt:
Chapter: The street-lamps were lit, but the rain had ceased, and there was a
momentary revival of light in the upper sky. Lily walked on unconscious
of her surroundings. She was still treading the buoyant ether which
emanates from the high moments of life. But gradually it shrank away from
her and she felt the dull pavement beneath her feet. The sense of
weariness returned with accumulated force, and for a moment she felt that
she could walk no farther. She had reached the corner of Forty-first
Street and Fifth Avenue, and she remembered that in Bryant Park there
were seats where she might rest.

That melancholy pleasure-ground was almost deserted when she entered it,
and she sank down on an empty bench in the glare of an electric
street-lamp. The warmth of the fire had passed out of her veins, and she
told herself that she must not sit long in the penetrating dampness which
struck up from the wet asphalt. But her will-power seemed to have spent
itself in a last great effort, and she was lost in the blank reaction
which follows on an unwonted expenditure of energy. And besides, what was
there to go home to? Nothing but the silence of her cheerless room--that
silence of the night which may be more racking to tired nerves than the
most discordant noises: that, and the bottle of chloral by her bed. The
thought of the chloral was the only spot of light in the dark prospect:
she could feel its lulling influence stealing over her already. But she
was troubled by the thought that it was losing its power--she dared not
go back to it too soon. Of late the sleep it had brought her had been
more broken and less profound; there had been nights when she was
perpetually floating up through it to consciousness. What if the effect
of the drug should gradually fail, as all narcotics were said to fail?
She remembered the chemist's warning against increasing the dose; and she
had heard before of the capricious and incalculable action of the drug.
Her dread of returning to a sleepless night was so great that she
lingered on, hoping that excessive weariness would reinforce the waning
power of the chloral.

Night had now closed in, and the roar of traffic in Forty-second Street
was dying out. As complete darkness fell on the square the lingering
occupants of the benches rose and dispersed; but now and then a stray
figure, hurrying homeward, struck across the path where Lily sat, looming
black for a moment in the white circle of electric light. One or two of
these passers-by slackened their pace to glance curiously at her lonely
figure; but she was hardly conscious of their scrutiny.

Suddenly, however, she became aware that one of the passing shadows
remained stationary between her line of vision and the gleaming asphalt;
and raising her eyes she saw a young woman bending over her.

"Excuse me--are you sick?--Why, it's Miss Bart!" a half-familiar voice
exclaimed.

Lily looked up. The speaker was a poorly-dressed young woman with a
bundle under her arm. Her face had the air of unwholesome refinement
which ill-health and over-work may produce, but its common prettiness was
redeemed by the strong and generous curve of the lips.

"You don't remember me," she continued, brightening with the pleasure of
recognition, "but I'd know you anywhere, I've thought of you such a lot.
I guess my folks all know your name by heart.  I was one of the girls at
Miss Farish's club--you helped me to go to the country that time I had
lung-trouble. My name's Nettie Struther. It was Nettie Crane then--but I
daresay you don't remember that either."

Yes: Lily was beginning to remember. The episode of Nettie Crane's timely
rescue from disease had been one of the most satisfying incidents of her
connection with Gerty's charitable work. She had furnished the girl with
the means to go to a sanatorium in the mountains: it struck her now with
a peculiar irony that the money she had used had been Gus Trenor's.

She tried to reply, to assure the speaker that she had not forgotten; but
her voice failed in the effort, and she felt herself sinking under a
great wave of physical weakness. Nettie Struther, with a startled
exclamation, sat down and slipped a shabbily-clad arm behind her back.

"Why, Miss Bart, you ARE sick. Just lean on me a little till you feel
better."

A faint glow of returning strength seemed to pass into Lily from the
pressure of the supporting arm.

"I'm only tired--it is nothing," she found voice to say in a moment; and
then, as she met the timid appeal of her companion's eyes, she added
involuntarily: "I have been unhappy--in great trouble."

"YOU in trouble? I've always thought of you as being so high up, where
everything was just grand. Sometimes, when I felt real mean, and got to
wondering why things were so queerly fixed in the world, I used to
remember that you were having a lovely time, anyhow, and that seemed to
show there was a kind of justice somewhere. But you mustn't sit here too
long--it's fearfully damp. Don't you feel strong enough to walk on a
little ways now?" she broke off.

"Yes--yes; I must go home," Lily murmured, rising.

Her eyes rested wonderingly on the thin shabby figure at her side. She
had known Nettie Crane as one of the discouraged victims of over-work and
anaemic parentage: one of the superfluous fragments of life destined to
be swept prematurely into that social refuse-heap of which Lily had so
lately expressed her dread. But Nettie Struther's frail envelope was now
alive with hope and energy: whatever fate the future reserved for her,
she would not be cast into the refuse-heap without a struggle.

"I am very glad to have seen you," Lily continued, summoning a smile to
her unsteady lips. "It'll be my turn to think of you as happy--and the
world will seem a less unjust place to me too."

"Oh, but I can't leave you like this--you're not fit to go home alone.
And I can't go with you either!" Nettie Struther wailed with a start of
recollection. "You see, it's my husband's night-shift--he's a
motor-man--and the friend I leave the baby with has to step upstairs to
get HER husband's supper at seven. I didn't tell you I had a baby, did I?
She'll be four months old day after tomorrow, and to look at her you
wouldn't think I'd ever had a sick day. I'd give anything to show you the
baby, Miss Bart, and we live right down the street here--it's only three
blocks off." She lifted her eyes tentatively to Lily's face, and then
added with a burst of courage: "Why won't you get right into the cars and
come home with me while I get baby's supper?  It's real warm in our
kitchen, and you can rest there, and I'll take YOU home as soon as ever
she drops off to sleep."

It WAS warm in the kitchen, which, when Nettie Struther's match had made
a flame leap from the gas-jet above the table, revealed itself to Lily as
extraordinarily small and almost miraculously clean. A fire shone through
the polished flanks of the iron stove, and near it stood a crib in which
a baby was sitting upright, with incipient anxiety struggling for
expression on a countenance still placid with sleep.

Having passionately celebrated her reunion with her offspring, and
excused herself in cryptic language for the lateness of her return,
Nettie restored the baby to the crib and shyly invited Miss Bart to the
rocking-chair near the stove.

"We've got a parlour too," she explained with pardonable pride; "but I
guess it's warmer in here, and I don't want to leave you alone while I'm
getting baby's supper."

On receiving Lily's assurance that she much preferred the friendly
proximity of the kitchen fire, Mrs. Struther proceeded to prepare a
bottle of infantile food, which she tenderly applied to the baby's
impatient lips; and while the ensuing degustation went on, she seated
herself with a beaming countenance beside her visitor.

"You're sure you won't let me warm up a drop of coffee for you, Miss
Bart? There's some of baby's fresh milk left over--well, maybe you'd
rather just sit quiet and rest a little while. It's too lovely having you
here. I've thought of it so often that I can't believe it's really come
true. I've said to George again and again: 'I just wish Miss Bart could
see me NOW--' and I used to watch for your name in the papers, and we'd
talk over what you were doing, and read the descriptions of the dresses
you wore. I haven't seen your name for a long time, though, and I began
to be afraid you were sick, and it worried me so that George said I'd get
sick myself, fretting about it." Her lips broke into a reminiscent smile.
"Well, I can't afford to be sick again, that's a fact: the last spell
nearly finished me. When you sent me off that time I never thought I'd
come back alive, and I didn't much care if I did. You see I didn't know
about George and the baby then."

She paused to readjust the bottle to the child's bubbling mouth.

"You precious--don't you be in too much of a hurry! Was it mad with
mommer for getting its supper so late? Marry Anto'nette--that's what we
call her: after the French queen in that play at the Garden--I told
George the actress reminded me of you, and that made me fancy the
name . . . I never thought I'd get married, you know, and I'd never have
had the heart to go on working just for myself."

She broke off again, and meeting the encouragement in Lily's eyes, went
on, with a flush rising under her anaemic skin: "You see I wasn't only
just SICK that time you sent me off--I was dreadfully unhappy too. I'd
known a gentleman where I was employed--I don't know as you remember I
did type-writing in a big importing firm--and--well--I thought we were to
be married: he'd gone steady with me six months and given me his mother's
wedding ring. But I presume he was too stylish for me--he travelled for
the firm, and had seen a great deal of society.  Work girls aren't looked
after the way you are, and they don't always know how to look after
themselves. I didn't . . . and it pretty near killed me when he went away
and left off writing . . .

"It was then I came down sick--I thought it was the end of everything. I
guess it would have been if you hadn't sent me off.  But when I found I
was getting well I began to take heart in spite of myself.  And then,
when I got back home, George came round and asked me to marry him. At
first I thought I couldn't, because we'd been brought up together, and I
knew he knew about me. But after a while I began to see that that made it
easier. I never could have told another man, and I'd never have married
without telling; but if George cared for me enough to have me as I was, I
didn't see why I shouldn't begin over again--and I did."

The strength of the victory shone forth from her as she lifted her
irradiated face from the child on her knees. "But, mercy, I didn't mean
to go on like this about myself, with you sitting there looking so fagged
out. Only it's so lovely having you here, and letting you see just how
you've helped me." The baby had sunk back blissfully replete, and Mrs.
Struther softly rose to lay the bottle aside. Then she paused before Miss
Bart.

"I only wish I could help YOU--but I suppose there's nothing on earth I
could do," she murmured wistfully.

Lily, instead of answering, rose with a smile and held out her arms; and
the mother, understanding the gesture, laid her child in them.

The baby, feeling herself detached from her habitual anchorage, made an
instinctive motion of resistance; but the soothing influences of
digestion prevailed, and Lily felt the soft weight sink trustfully
against her breast. The child's confidence in its safety thrilled her
with a sense of warmth and returning life, and she bent over, wondering
at the rosy blur of the little face, the empty clearness of the eyes, the
vague tendrilly motions of the folding and unfolding fingers. At first
the burden in her arms seemed as light as a pink cloud or a heap of down,
but as she continued to hold it the weight increased, sinking deeper, and
penetrating her with a strange sense of weakness, as though the child
entered into her and became a part of herself.

She looked up, and saw Nettie's eyes resting on her with tenderness and
exultation.

"Wouldn't it be too lovely for anything if she could grow up to be just
like you? Of course I know she never COULD--but mothers are always
dreaming the craziest things for their children."

Lily clasped the child close for a moment and laid her back in her
mother's arms.

"Oh, she must not do that--I should be afraid to come and see her too
often!" she said with a smile; and then, resisting Mrs. Struther's
anxious offer of companionship, and reiterating the promise that of
course she would come back soon, and make George's acquaintance, and see
the baby in her bath, she passed out of the kitchen and went alone down
the tenement stairs.

As she reached the street she realized that she felt stronger and
happier: the little episode had done her good. It was the first time she
had ever come across the results of her spasmodic benevolence, and the
surprised sense of human fellowship took the mortal chill from her heart.

It was not till she entered her own door that she felt the reaction of a
deeper loneliness. It was long after seven o'clock, and the light and
odours proceeding from the basement made it manifest that the
boarding-house dinner had begun. She hastened up to her room, lit the
gas, and began to dress. She did not mean to pamper herself any longer,
to go without food because her surroundings made it unpalatable. Since it
was her fate to live in a boarding-house, she must learn to fall in with
the conditions of the life. Nevertheless she was glad that, when she
descended to the heat and glare of the dining-room, the repast was nearly
over.

In her own room again, she was seized with a sudden fever of activity.
For weeks past she had been too listless and indifferent to set her
possessions in order, but now she began to examine systematically the
contents of her drawers and cupboard.  She had a few handsome dresses
left--survivals of her last phase of splendour, on the Sabrina and in
London--but when she had been obliged to part with her maid she had given
the woman a generous share of her cast-off apparel. The remaining
dresses, though they had lost their freshness, still kept the long
unerring lines, the sweep and amplitude of the great artist's stroke, and
as she spread them out on the bed the scenes in which they had been worn
rose vividly before her. An association lurked in every fold: each fall
of lace and gleam of embroidery was like a letter in the record of her
past. She was startled to find how the atmosphere of her old life
enveloped her. But, after all, it was the life she had been made for:
every dawning tendency in her had been carefully directed toward it, all
her interests and activities had been taught to centre around it.  She
was like some rare flower grown for exhibition, a flower from which every
bud had been nipped except the crowning blossom of her beauty.

Last of all, she drew forth from the bottom of her trunk a heap of white
drapery which fell shapelessly across her arm. It was the Reynolds dress
she had worn in the Bry TABLEAUX. It had been impossible for her to give
it away, but she had never seen it since that night, and the long
flexible folds, as she shook them out, gave forth an odour of violets
which came to her like a breath from the flower-edged fountain where she
had stood with Lawrence Selden and disowned her fate. She put back the
dresses one by one, laying away with each some gleam of light, some note
of laughter, some stray waft from the rosy shores of pleasure. She was
still in a state of highly-wrought impressionability, and every hint of
the past sent a lingering tremor along her nerves.

She had just closed her trunk on the white folds of the Reynolds dress
when she heard a tap at her door, and the red fist of the Irish
maid-servant thrust in a belated letter. Carrying it to the light, Lily
read with surprise the address stamped on the upper corner of the
envelope. It was a business communication from the office of her aunt's
executors, and she wondered what unexpected development had caused them
to break silence before the appointed time. She opened the envelope and a
cheque fluttered to the floor. As she stooped to pick it up the blood
rushed to her face.  The cheque represented the full amount of Mrs.
Peniston's legacy, and the letter accompanying it explained that the
executors, having adjusted the business of the estate with less delay
than they had expected, had decided to anticipate the date fixed for the
payment of the bequests.

Lily sat down beside the desk at the foot of her bed, and spreading out
the cheque, read over and over the TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS written across it
in a steely business hand. Ten months earlier the amount it stood for had
represented the depths of penury; but her standard of values had changed
in the interval, and now visions of wealth lurked in every flourish of
the pen. As she continued to gaze at it, she felt the glitter of the
visions mounting to her brain, and after a while she lifted the lid of
the desk and slipped the magic formula out of sight.  It was easier to
think without those five figures dancing before her eyes; and she had a
great deal of thinking to do before she slept.

She opened her cheque-book, and plunged into such anxious calculations as
had prolonged her vigil at Bellomont on the night when she had decided to
marry Percy Gryce. Poverty simplifies book-keeping, and her financial
situation was easier to ascertain than it had been then; but she had not
yet learned the control of money, and during her transient phase of
luxury at the Emporium she had slipped back into habits of extravagance
which still impaired her slender balance. A careful examination of her
cheque-book, and of the unpaid bills in her desk, showed that, when the
latter had been settled, she would have barely enough to live on for the
next three or four months; and even after that, if she were to continue
her present way of living, without earning any additional money, all
incidental expenses must be reduced to the vanishing point. She hid her
eyes with a shudder, beholding herself at the entrance of that
ever-narrowing perspective down which she had seen Miss Silverton's dowdy
figure take its despondent way.

It was no longer, however, from the vision of material poverty that she
turned with the greatest shrinking. She had a sense of deeper
empoverishment--of an inner destitution compared to which outward
conditions dwindled into insignificance. It was indeed miserable to be
poor--to look forward to a shabby, anxious middle-age, leading by dreary
degrees of economy and self-denial to gradual absorption in the dingy
communal existence of the boarding-house. But there was something more
miserable still--it was the clutch of solitude at her heart, the sense of
being swept like a stray uprooted growth down the heedless current of the
years. That was the feeling which possessed her now--the feeling of being
something rootless and ephemeral, mere spin-drift of the whirling surface
of existence, without anything to which the poor little tentacles of self
could cling before the awful flood submerged them. And as she looked back
she saw that there had never been a time when she had had any real
relation to life. Her parents too had been rootless, blown hither and
thither on every wind of fashion, without any personal existence to
shelter them from its shifting gusts. She herself had grown up without
any one spot of earth being dearer to her than another: there was no
centre of early pieties, of grave endearing traditions, to which her
heart could revert and from which it could draw strength for itself and
tenderness for others. In whatever form a slowly-accumulated past lives
in the blood--whether in the concrete image of the old house stored with
visual memories, or in the conception of the house not built with hands,
but made up of inherited passions and loyalties--it has the same power of
broadening and deepening the individual existence, of attaching it by
mysterious links of kinship to all the mighty sum of human striving.

Such a vision of the solidarity of life had never before come to Lily.
She had had a premonition of it in the blind motions of her
mating-instinct; but they had been checked by the disintegrating
influences of the life about her. All the men and women she knew were
like atoms whirling away from each other in some wild centrifugal dance:
her first glimpse of the continuity of life had come to her that evening
in Nettie Struther's kitchen.

The poor little working-girl who had found strength to gather up the
fragments of her life, and build herself a shelter with them, seemed to
Lily to have reached the central truth of existence. It was a meagre
enough life, on the grim edge of poverty, with scant margin for
possibilities of sickness or mischance, but it had the frail audacious
permanence of a bird's nest built on the edge of a cliff--a mere wisp of
leaves and straw, yet so put together that the lives entrusted to it may
hang safely over the abyss.

Yes--but it had taken two to build the nest; the man's faith as well as
the woman's courage. Lily remembered Nettie's words: I KNEW HE KNEW ABOUT
ME. Her husband's faith in her had made her renewal possible--it is so
easy for a woman to become what the man she loves believes her to be!
Well--Selden had twice been ready to stake his faith on Lily Bart; but
the third trial had been too severe for his endurance. The very quality
of his love had made it the more impossible to recall to life.  If it had
been a simple instinct of the blood, the power of her beauty might have
revived it. But the fact that it struck deeper, that it was inextricably
wound up with inherited habits of thought and feeling, made it as
impossible to restore to growth as a deep-rooted plant torn from its bed.
Selden had given her of his best; but he was as incapable as herself of
an uncritical return to former states of feeling.

There remained to her, as she had told him, the uplifting memory of his
faith in her; but she had not reached the age when a woman can live on
her memories. As she held Nettie Struther's child in her arms the frozen
currents of youth had loosed themselves and run warm in her veins: the
old life-hunger possessed her, and all her being clamoured for its share
of personal happiness. Yes--it was happiness she still wanted, and the
glimpse she had caught of it made everything else of no account. One by
one she had detached herself from the baser possibilities, and she saw
that nothing now remained to her but the emptiness of renunciation.

It was growing late, and an immense weariness once more possessed her.
It was not the stealing sense of sleep, but a vivid wakeful fatigue, a
wan lucidity of mind against which all the possibilities of the future
were shadowed forth gigantically. She was appalled by the intense
cleanness of the vision; she seemed to have broken through the merciful
veil which intervenes between intention and action, and to see exactly
what she would do in all the long days to come. There was the cheque in
her desk, for instance--she meant to use it in paying her debt to Trenor;
but she foresaw that when the morning came she would put off doing so,
would slip into gradual tolerance of the debt. The thought terrified
her--she dreaded to fall from the height of her last moment with Lawrence
Selden. But how could she trust herself to keep her footing? She knew the
strength of the opposing impulses-she could feel the countless hands of
habit dragging her back into some fresh compromise with fate. She felt an
intense longing to prolong, to perpetuate, the momentary exaltation of
her spirit. If only life could end now--end on this tragic yet sweet
vision of lost possibilities, which gave her a sense of kinship with all
the loving and foregoing in the world!

She reached out suddenly and, drawing the cheque from her writing-desk,
enclosed it in an envelope which she addressed to her bank. She then
wrote out a cheque for Trenor, and placing it, without an accompanying
word, in an envelope inscribed with his name, laid the two letters side
by side on her desk. After that she continued to sit at the table,
sorting her papers and writing, till the intense silence of the house
reminded her of the lateness of the hour. In the street the noise of
wheels had ceased, and the rumble of the "elevated" came only at long
intervals through the deep unnatural hush. In the mysterious nocturnal
separation from all outward signs of life, she felt herself more
strangely confronted with her fate. The sensation made her brain reel,
and she tried to shut out consciousness by pressing her hands against her
eyes. But the terrible silence and emptiness seemed to symbolize her
future--she felt as though the house, the street, the world were all
empty, and she alone left sentient in a lifeless universe.

But this was the verge of delirium . . . she had never hung so near the
dizzy brink of the unreal. Sleep was what she wanted--she remembered that
she had not closed her eyes for two nights. The little bottle was at her
bed-side, waiting to lay its spell upon her. She rose and undressed
hastily, hungering now for the touch of her pillow. She felt so
profoundly tired that she thought she must fall asleep at once; but as
soon as she had lain down every nerve started once more into separate
wakefulness. It was as though a great blaze of electric light had been
turned on in her head, and her poor little anguished self shrank and
cowered in it, without knowing where to take refuge.

She had not imagined that such a multiplication of wakefulness was
possible: her whole past was reenacting itself at a hundred different
points of consciousness. Where was the drug that could still this legion
of insurgent nerves? The sense of exhaustion would have been sweet
compared to this shrill beat of activities; but weariness had dropped
from her as though some cruel stimulant had been forced into her veins.

She could bear it--yes, she could bear it; but what strength would be
left her the next day? Perspective had disappeared--the next day pressed
close upon her, and on its heels came the days that were to follow--they
swarmed about her like a shrieking mob.  She must shut them out for a few
hours; she must take a brief bath of oblivion. She put out her hand, and
measured the soothing drops into a glass; but as she did so, she knew
they would be powerless against the supernatural lucidity of her brain.
She had long since raised the dose to its highest limit, but tonight she
felt she must increase it. She knew she took a slight risk in doing
so--she remembered the chemist's warning.  If sleep came at all, it might
be a sleep without waking. But after all that was but one chance in a
hundred: the action of the drug was incalculable, and the addition of a
few drops to the regular dose would probably do no more than procure for
her the rest she so desperately needed....

She did not, in truth, consider the question very closely--the physical
craving for sleep was her only sustained sensation. Her mind shrank from
the glare of thought as instinctively as eyes contract in a blaze of
light--darkness, darkness was what she must have at any cost. She raised
herself in bed and swallowed the contents of the glass; then she blew out
her candle and lay down.

She lay very still, waiting with a sensuous pleasure for the first
effects of the soporific. She knew in advance what form they would
take--the gradual cessation of the inner throb, the soft approach of
passiveness, as though an invisible hand made magic passes over her in
the darkness. The very slowness and hesitancy of the effect increased its
fascination: it was delicious to lean over and look down into the dim
abysses of unconsciousness. Tonight the drug seemed to work more slowly
than usual: each passionate pulse had to be stilled in turn, and it was
long before she felt them dropping into abeyance, like sentinels falling
asleep at their posts. But gradually the sense of complete subjugation
came over her, and she wondered languidly what had made her feel so
uneasy and excited. She saw now that there was nothing to be excited
about--she had returned to her normal view of life. Tomorrow would not be
so difficult after all: she felt sure that she would have the strength to
meet it.  She did not quite remember what it was that she had been afraid
to meet, but the uncertainty no longer troubled her. She had been
unhappy, and now she was happy--she had felt herself alone, and now the
sense of loneliness had vanished.

She stirred once, and turned on her side, and as she did so, she suddenly
understood why she did not feel herself alone. It was odd--but Nettie
Struther's child was lying on her arm: she felt the pressure of its
little head against her shoulder. She did not know how it had come there,
but she felt no great surprise at the fact, only a gentle penetrating
thrill of warmth and pleasure.  She settled herself into an easier
position, hollowing her arm to pillow the round downy head, and holding
her breath lest a sound should disturb the sleeping child.

As she lay there she said to herself that there was something she must
tell Selden, some word she had found that should make life clear between
them. She tried to repeat the word, which lingered vague and luminous on
the far edge of thought--she was afraid of not remembering it when she
woke; and if she could only remember it and say it to him, she felt that
everything would be well.

Slowly the thought of the word faded, and sleep began to enfold her.  She
struggled faintly against it, feeling that she ought to keep awake on
account of the baby; but even this feeling was gradually lost in an
indistinct sense of drowsy peace, through which, of a sudden, a dark
flash of loneliness and terror tore its way.

She started up again, cold and trembling with the shock: for a moment she
seemed to have lost her hold of the child. But no--she was mistaken--the
tender pressure of its body was still close to hers: the recovered warmth
flowed through her once more, she yielded to it, sank into it, and slept.

The next morning rose mild and bright, with a promise of summer in the
air. The sunlight slanted joyously down Lily's street, mellowed the
blistered house-front, gilded the paintless railings of the door-step,
and struck prismatic glories from the panes of her darkened window.

When such a day coincides with the inner mood there is intoxication in
its breath; and Selden, hastening along the street through the squalor of
its morning confidences, felt himself thrilling with a youthful sense of
adventure. He had cut loose from the familiar shores of habit, and
launched himself on uncharted seas of emotion; all the old tests and
measures were left behind, and his course was to be shaped by new stars.

That course, for the moment, led merely to Miss Bart's boarding-house;
but its shabby door-step had suddenly become the threshold of the
untried. As he approached he looked up at the triple row of windows,
wondering boyishly which one of them was hers. It was nine o'clock, and
the house, being tenanted by workers, already showed an awakened front to
the street. He remembered afterward having noticed that only one blind
was down.  He noticed too that there was a pot of pansies on one of the
window sills, and at once concluded that the window must be hers: it was
inevitable that he should connect her with the one touch of beauty in the
dingy scene.

Nine o'clock was an early hour for a visit, but Selden had passed beyond
all such conventional observances. He only knew that he must see Lily
Bart at once--he had found the word he meant to say to her, and it could
not wait another moment to be said. It was strange that it had not come
to his lips sooner--that he had let her pass from him the evening before
without being able to speak it. But what did that matter, now that a new
day had come? It was not a word for twilight, but for the morning.

Selden ran eagerly up the steps and pulled the bell; and even in his
state of self-absorption it came as a sharp surprise to him that the door
should open so promptly. It was still more of a surprise to see, as he
entered, that it had been opened by Gerty Farish--and that behind her, in
an agitated blur, several other figures ominously loomed.

"Lawrence!" Gerty cried in a strange voice, "how could you get here so
quickly?"--and the trembling hand she laid on him seemed instantly to
close about his heart.

He noticed the other faces, vague with fear and conjecture--he saw the
landlady's imposing bulk sway professionally toward him; but he shrank
back, putting up his hand, while his eyes mechanically mounted the steep
black walnut stairs, up which he was immediately aware that his cousin
was about to lead him.

A voice in the background said that the doctor might be back at any
minute--and that nothing, upstairs, was to be disturbed. Some one else
exclaimed: "It was the greatest mercy--" then Selden felt that Gerty had
taken him gently by the hand, and that they were to be suffered to go up
alone.

In silence they mounted the three flights, and walked along the passage
to a closed door. Gerty opened the door, and Selden went in after her.
Though the blind was down, the irresistible sunlight poured a tempered
golden flood into the room, and in its light Selden saw a narrow bed
along the wall, and on the bed, with motionless hands and calm
unrecognizing face, the semblance of Lily Bart.

That it was her real self, every pulse in him ardently denied.  Her real
self had lain warm on his heart but a few hours earlier--what had he to
do with this estranged and tranquil face which, for the first time,
neither paled nor brightened at his coming?

Gerty, strangely tranquil too, with the conscious self-control of one who
has ministered to much pain, stood by the bed, speaking gently, as if
transmitting a final message.

"The doctor found a bottle of chloral--she had been sleeping badly for a
long time, and she must have taken an overdose by mistake.... There is no
doubt of that--no doubt--there will be no question--he has been very
kind. I told him that you and I would like to be left alone with her--to
go over her things before any one else comes. I know it is what she would
have wished."

Selden was hardly conscious of what she said. He stood looking down on
the sleeping face which seemed to lie like a delicate impalpable mask
over the living lineaments he had known.  He felt that the real Lily was
still there, close to him, yet invisible and inaccessible; and the
tenuity of the barrier between them mocked him with a sense of
helplessness. There had never been more than a little impalpable barrier
between them--and yet he had suffered it to keep them apart!  And now,
though it seemed slighter and frailer than ever, it had suddenly hardened
to adamant, and he might beat his life out against it in vain.

He had dropped on his knees beside the bed, but a touch from Gerty
aroused him. He stood up, and as their eyes met he was struck by the
extraordinary light in his cousin's face.

"You understand what the doctor has gone for? He has promised that there
shall be no trouble--but of course the formalities must be gone through.
And I asked him to give us time to look through her things first----"

He nodded, and she glanced about the small bare room. "It won't take
long," she concluded.

"No--it won't take long," he agreed.

She held his hand in hers a moment longer, and then, with a last look at
the bed, moved silently toward the door. On the threshold she paused to
add: "You will find me downstairs if you want me."

Selden roused himself to detain her. "But why are you going? She would
have wished----"

Gerty shook her head with a smile. "No: this is what she would have
wished----" and as she spoke a light broke through Selden's stony misery,
and he saw deep into the hidden things of love.

The door closed on Gerty, and he stood alone with the motionless sleeper
on the bed. His impulse was to return to her side, to fall on his knees,
and rest his throbbing head against the peaceful cheek on the pillow.
They had never been at peace together, they two; and now he felt himself
drawn downward into the strange mysterious depths of her tranquillity.

But he remembered Gerty's warning words--he knew that, though time had
ceased in this room, its feet were hastening relentlessly toward the
door. Gerty had given him this supreme half-hour, and he must use it as
she willed.

He turned and looked about him, sternly compelling himself to regain his
consciousness of outward things. There was very little furniture in the
room. The shabby chest of drawers was spread with a lace cover, and set
out with a few gold-topped boxes and bottles, a rose-coloured
pin-cushion, a glass tray strewn with tortoise-shell hair-pins--he shrank
from the poignant intimacy of these trifles, and from the blank surface
of the toilet-mirror above them.

These were the only traces of luxury, of that clinging to the minute
observance of personal seemliness, which showed what her other
renunciations must have cost. There was no other token of her personality
about the room, unless it showed itself in the scrupulous neatness of the
scant articles of furniture: a washing-stand, two chairs, a small
writing-desk, and the little table near the bed. On this table stood the
empty bottle and glass, and from these also he averted his eyes.

The desk was closed, but on its slanting lid lay two letters which he
took up. One bore the address of a bank, and as it was stamped and
sealed, Selden, after a moment's hesitation, laid it aside. On the other
letter he read Gus Trenor's name; and the flap of the envelope was still
ungummed.

Temptation leapt on him like the stab of a knife. He staggered under it,
steadying himself against the desk. Why had she been writing to
Trenor--writing, presumably, just after their parting of the previous
evening? The thought unhallowed the memory of that last hour, made a mock
of the word he had come to speak, and defiled even the reconciling
silence upon which it fell. He felt himself flung back on all the ugly
uncertainties from which he thought he had cast loose forever. After all,
what did he know of her life? Only as much as she had chosen to show him,
and measured by the world's estimate, how little that was! By what
right--the letter in his hand seemed to ask--by what right was it he who
now passed into her confidence through the gate which death had left
unbarred? His heart cried out that it was by right of their last hour
together, the hour when she herself had placed the key in his hand.
Yes--but what if the letter to Trenor had been written afterward?

He put it from him with sudden loathing, and setting his lips, addressed
himself resolutely to what remained of his task. After all, that task
would be easier to perform, now that his personal stake in it was
annulled.

He raised the lid of the desk, and saw within it a cheque-book and a few
packets of bills and letters, arranged with the orderly precision which
characterized all her personal habits. He looked through the letters
first, because it was the most difficult part of the work. They proved to
be few and unimportant, but among them he found, with a strange commotion
of the heart, the note he had written her the day after the Brys'
entertainment.

"When may I come to you?"--his words overwhelmed him with a realization
of the cowardice which had driven him from her at the very moment of
attainment. Yes--he had always feared his fate, and he was too honest to
disown his cowardice now; for had not all his old doubts started to life
again at the mere sight of Trenor's name?

He laid the note in his card-case, folding it away carefully, as
something made precious by the fact that she had held it so; then,
growing once more aware of the lapse of time, he continued his
examination of the papers.

To his surprise, he found that all the bills were receipted; there was
not an unpaid account among them. He opened the cheque-book, and saw
that, the very night before, a cheque of ten thousand dollars from Mrs.
Peniston's executors had been entered in it. The legacy, then, had been
paid sooner than Gerty had led him to expect. But, turning another page
or two, he discovered with astonishment that, in spite of this recent
accession of funds, the balance had already declined to a few dollars.  A
rapid glance at the stubs of the last cheques, all of which bore the date
of the previous day, showed that between four or five hundred dollars of
the legacy had been spent in the settlement of bills, while the remaining
thousands were comprehended in one cheque, made out, at the same time, to
Charles Augustus Trenor.

Selden laid the book aside, and sank into the chair beside the desk. He
leaned his elbows on it, and hid his face in his hands. The bitter waters
of life surged high about him, their sterile taste was on his lips. Did
the cheque to Trenor explain the mystery or deepen it? At first his mind
refused to act--he felt only the taint of such a transaction between a
man like Trenor and a girl like Lily Bart. Then, gradually, his troubled
vision cleared, old hints and rumours came back to him, and out of the
very insinuations he had feared to probe, he constructed an explanation
of the mystery. It was true, then, that she had taken money from Trenor;
but true also, as the contents of the little desk declared, that the
obligation had been intolerable to her, and that at the first opportunity
she had freed herself from it, though the act left her face to face with
bare unmitigated poverty.

That was all he knew--all he could hope to unravel of the story.  The
mute lips on the pillow refused him more than this--unless indeed they
had told him the rest in the kiss they had left upon his forehead. Yes,
he could now read into that farewell all that his heart craved to find
there; he could even draw from it courage not to accuse himself for
having failed to reach the height of his opportunity.

He saw that all the conditions of life had conspired to keep them apart;
since his very detachment from the external influences which swayed her
had increased his spiritual fastidiousness, and made it more difficult
for him to live and love uncritically. But at least he HAD loved her--had
been willing to stake his future on his faith in her--and if the moment
had been fated to pass from them before they could seize it, he saw now
that, for both, it had been saved whole out of the ruin of their lives.

It was this moment of love, this fleeting victory over themselves, which
had kept them from atrophy and extinction; which, in her, had reached out
to him in every struggle against the influence of her surroundings, and
in him, had kept alive the faith that now drew him penitent and
reconciled to her side.

He knelt by the bed and bent over her, draining their last moment to its
lees; and in the silence there passed between them the word which made
all clear.

THE END

Notes:

1.  I have modernized this text by modernizing the contractions: do n't
becomes don't, etc.

2.  I have retained the British spelling of words like favour and colour.

3.  I found and corrected one instance of the name "Gertie," which I
changed to "Gerty" to be consistent with rest of the book.

Linda Ruoff

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Leaving Selden's apartment, Lily goes to rest in Bryant Park. She knows that there is nothing for her at home except a bed and her bottle of sleeping medicine. As night comes on, a passerby asks if she is sick before recognizing her. The passerby is Nettie Struther, a character we have not yet met but who met Lily when Lily saved her from an illness while participating in Gerty's charity organization. Although Nettie was sick, she has totally recovered, and is enjoying a successful marriage with her husband and their newborn child. Nettie, seeing that Lily is sick, takes her home to her house, where Lily warms up in the kitchen while Nettie tells Lily of her success in working her way up from the gutter to a happy family life. After briefly holding Nettie's baby, Lily says she must leave, but promises to return another day. The encounter has made her happier and stronger, although only briefly. At home, Lily begins to furiously sort out her various possessions for no apparent reason; she is interrupted by when a servant delivers a letter to her containing her check from Mrs. Peniston's estate. Shocked, Lily begins writing checks to pay off all her debts to Gus Trenor and other outstanding loans. She realizes that even though she is now free of all debt, she has absolutely no money, and all she can look forward to in life is a prevailing dinginess enshrouding middle age. Extraordinarily tired from lack of sleep, Lily takes out her sleeping medicine to help her doze off. In the medicine, she sees a long escape from the dreariness of her life, and decides to take much more than the prescribed amount in hopes of sleeping for a long time. In doing so, she overdoses on the medication and dies in her sleep. Whether or not she knew she was committing suicide is left ambiguous and unresolved by the novel. The next day is marked by beautiful weather, as Selden sets out from the Benedick to visit Lily. Realizing his love for her and her desperation, he has decided to propose marriage to her. When he arrives at her apartment, however, he is greeted by a distraught Gerty Farish, who has found Lily's dead body. Gerty leaves him to take care of Lily's papers and belongings, but before Selden can leave, he feels tempted to lie down next to Lily and rest his head on her shoulder, which he could never do while she still lived. Getting up, he goes through her check book, and finds that she received the estate check and paid off all her debts, including the one to Trenor. He cannot decide, though, if the check to Trenor explains the mystery of her demise or only deepens it. The novel ends with Selden and Lily, alone together at last, as he realizes how much he loved her and how his own cowardice had kept them apart at the crucial moment when they could have been married.