prompt:
Chapter: The autumn dragged on monotonously. Miss Bart had received one or two
notes from Judy Trenor, reproaching her for not returning to Bellomont;
but she replied evasively, alleging the obligation to remain with her
aunt. In truth, however, she was fast wearying of her solitary existence
with Mrs. Peniston, and only the excitement of spending her
newly-acquired money lightened the dulness of the days.

All her life Lily had seen money go out as quickly as it came in, and
whatever theories she cultivated as to the prudence of setting aside a
part of her gains, she had unhappily no saving vision of the risks of the
opposite course. It was a keen satisfaction to feel that, for a few
months at least, she would be independent of her friends' bounty, that
she could show herself abroad without wondering whether some penetrating
eye would detect in her dress the traces of Judy Trenor's refurbished
splendour. The fact that the money freed her temporarily from all minor
obligations obscured her sense of the greater one it represented, and
having never before known what it was to command so large a sum, she
lingered delectably over the amusement of spending it.

It was on one of these occasions that, leaving a shop where she had spent
an hour of deliberation over a dressing-case of the most complicated
elegance, she ran across Miss Farish, who had entered the same
establishment with the modest object of having her watch repaired.  Lily
was feeling unusually virtuous. She had decided to defer the purchase of
the dressing-case till she should receive the bill for her new
opera-cloak, and the resolve made her feel much richer than when she had
entered the shop. In this mood of self-approval she had a sympathetic eye
for others, and she was struck by her friend's air of dejection.

Miss Farish, it appeared, had just left the committee-meeting of a
struggling charity in which she was interested. The object of the
association was to provide comfortable lodgings, with a reading-room and
other modest distractions, where young women of the class employed in
down town offices might find a home when out of work, or in need of rest,
and the first year's financial report showed so deplorably small a
balance that Miss Farish, who was convinced of the urgency of the work,
felt proportionately discouraged by the small amount of interest it
aroused. The other-regarding sentiments had not been cultivated in Lily,
and she was often bored by the relation of her friend's philanthropic
efforts, but today her quick dramatizing fancy seized on the contrast
between her own situation and that represented by some of Gerty's
"cases." These were young girls, like herself; some perhaps pretty, some
not without a trace of her finer sensibilities. She pictured herself
leading such a life as theirs--a life in which achievement seemed as
squalid as failure--and the vision made her shudder sympathetically. The
price of the dressing-case was still in her pocket; and drawing out her
little gold purse she slipped a liberal fraction of the amount into Miss
Farish's hand.

The satisfaction derived from this act was all that the most ardent
moralist could have desired. Lily felt a new interest in herself as a
person of charitable instincts: she had never before thought of doing
good with the wealth she had so often dreamed of possessing, but now her
horizon was enlarged by the vision of a prodigal philanthropy.  Moreover,
by some obscure process of logic, she felt that her momentary burst of
generosity had justified all previous extravagances, and excused any in
which she might subsequently indulge. Miss Farish's surprise and
gratitude confirmed this feeling, and Lily parted from her with a sense
of self-esteem which she naturally mistook for the fruits of altruism.

About this time she was farther cheered by an invitation to spend the
Thanksgiving week at a camp in the Adirondacks. The invitation was one
which, a year earlier, would have provoked a less ready response, for the
party, though organized by Mrs. Fisher, was ostensibly given by a lady of
obscure origin and indomitable social ambitions, whose acquaintance Lily
had hitherto avoided. Now, however, she was disposed to coincide with
Mrs. Fisher's view, that it didn't matter who gave the party, as long as
things were well done; and doing things well (under competent direction)
was Mrs. Wellington Bry's strong point. The lady (whose consort was known
as "Welly" Bry on the Stock Exchange and in sporting circles) had already
sacrificed one husband, and sundry minor considerations, to her
determination to get on; and, having obtained a hold on Carry Fisher, she
was astute enough to perceive the wisdom of committing herself entirely
to that lady's guidance. Everything, accordingly, was well done, for
there was no limit to Mrs. Fisher's prodigality when she was not spending
her own money, and as she remarked to her pupil, a good cook was the best
introduction to society. If the company was not as select as the CUISINE,
the Welly Brys at least had the satisfaction of figuring for the first
time in the society columns in company with one or two noticeable names;
and foremost among these was of course Miss Bart's. The young lady was
treated by her hosts with corresponding deference; and she was in the
mood when such attentions are acceptable, whatever their source. Mrs.
Bry's admiration was a mirror in which Lily's self-complacency recovered
its lost outline. No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those
which will sustain the weight of human vanity; and the sense of being of
importance among the insignificant was enough to restore to Miss Bart the
gratifying consciousness of power. If these people paid court to her it
proved that she was still conspicuous in the world to which they aspired;
and she was not above a certain enjoyment in dazzling them by her
fineness, in developing their puzzled perception of her superiorities.

Perhaps, however, her enjoyment proceeded more than she was aware from
the physical stimulus of the excursion, the challenge of crisp cold and
hard exercise, the responsive thrill of her body to the influences of the
winter woods. She returned to town in a glow of rejuvenation, conscious
of a clearer colour in her cheeks, a fresh elasticity in her muscles. The
future seemed full of a vague promise, and all her apprehensions were
swept out of sight on the buoyant current of her mood.

A few days after her return to town she had the unpleasant surprise of a
visit from Mr. Rosedale. He came late, at the confidential hour when the
tea-table still lingers by the fire in friendly expectancy; and his
manner showed a readiness to adapt itself to the intimacy of the occasion.

Lily, who had a vague sense of his being somehow connected with her lucky
speculations, tried to give him the welcome he expected; but there was
something in the quality of his geniality which chilled her own, and she
was conscious of marking each step in their acquaintance by a fresh
blunder.

Mr. Rosedale--making himself promptly at home in an adjoining easy-chair,
and sipping his tea critically, with the comment: "You ought to go to my
man for something really good"--appeared totally unconscious of the
repugnance which kept her in frozen erectness behind the urn. It was
perhaps her very manner of holding herself aloof that appealed to his
collector's passion for the rare and unattainable. He gave, at any rate,
no sign of resenting it and seemed prepared to supply in his own manner
all the ease that was lacking in hers.

His object in calling was to ask her to go to the opera in his box on the
opening night, and seeing her hesitate he said persuasively: "Mrs. Fisher
is coming, and I've secured a tremendous admirer of yours, who'll never
forgive me if you don't accept."

As Lily's silence left him with this allusion on his hands, he added with
a confidential smile: "Gus Trenor has promised to come to town on
purpose. I fancy he'd go a good deal farther for the pleasure of seeing
you."

Miss Bart felt an inward motion of annoyance: it was distasteful enough
to hear her name coupled with Trenor's, and on Rosedale's lips the
allusion was peculiarly unpleasant.

"The Trenors are my best friends--I think we should all go a long way to
see each other," she said, absorbing herself in the preparation of fresh
tea.

Her visitor's smile grew increasingly intimate. "Well, I wasn't thinking
of Mrs. Trenor at the moment--they say Gus doesn't always, you know."
Then, dimly conscious that he had not struck the right note, he added,
with a well-meant effort at diversion: "How's your luck been going in
Wall Street, by the way? I hear Gus pulled off a nice little pile for you
last month."

Lily put down the tea-caddy with an abrupt gesture. She felt that her
hands were trembling, and clasped them on her knee to steady them; but
her lip trembled too, and for a moment she was afraid the tremor might
communicate itself to her voice. When she spoke, however, it was in a
tone of perfect lightness.

"Ah, yes--I had a little bit of money to invest, and Mr. Trenor, who
helps me about such matters, advised my putting it in stocks instead of a
mortgage, as my aunt's agent wanted me to do; and as it happened, I made
a lucky 'turn'--is that what you call it? For you make a great many
yourself, I believe."

She was smiling back at him now, relaxing the tension of her attitude,
and admitting him, by imperceptible gradations of glance and manner, a
step farther toward intimacy. The protective instinct always nerved her
to successful dissimulation, and it was not the first time she had used
her beauty to divert attention from an inconvenient topic.

When Mr. Rosedale took leave, he carried with him, not only her
acceptance of his invitation, but a general sense of having comported
himself in a way calculated to advance his cause. He had always believed
he had a light touch and a knowing way with women, and the prompt manner
in which Miss Bart (as he would have phrased it) had "come into line,"
confirmed his confidence in his powers of handling this skittish sex. Her
way of glossing over the transaction with Trenor he regarded at once as a
tribute to his own acuteness, and a confirmation of his suspicions. The
girl was evidently nervous, and Mr. Rosedale, if he saw no other means of
advancing his acquaintance with her, was not above taking advantage of
her nervousness.

He left Lily to a passion of disgust and fear. It seemed incredible that
Gus Trenor should have spoken of her to Rosedale.  With all his faults,
Trenor had the safeguard of his traditions, and was the less likely to
overstep them because they were so purely instinctive. But Lily recalled
with a pang that there were convivial moments when, as Judy had confided
to her, Gus "talked foolishly": in one of these, no doubt, the fatal word
had slipped from him. As for Rosedale, she did not, after the first
shock, greatly care what conclusions he had drawn.  Though usually adroit
enough where her own interests were concerned, she made the mistake, not
uncommon to persons in whom the social habits are instinctive, of
supposing that the inability to acquire them quickly implies a general
dulness. Because a blue-bottle bangs irrationally against a window-pane,
the drawing-room naturalist may forget that under less artificial
conditions it is capable of measuring distances and drawing conclusions
with all the accuracy needful to its welfare; and the fact that Mr.
Rosedale's drawing-room manner lacked perspective made Lily class him
with Trenor and the other dull men she knew, and assume that a little
flattery, and the occasional acceptance of his hospitality, would suffice
to render him innocuous. However, there could be no doubt of the
expediency of showing herself in his box on the opening night of the
opera; and after all, since Judy Trenor had promised to take him up that
winter, it was as well to reap the advantage of being first in the field.

For a day or two after Rosedale's visit, Lily's thoughts were dogged by
the consciousness of Trenor's shadowy claim, and she wished she had a
clearer notion of the exact nature of the transaction which seemed to
have put her in his power; but her mind shrank from any unusual
application, and she was always helplessly puzzled by figures. Moreover
she had not seen Trenor since the day of the Van Osburgh wedding, and in
his continued absence the trace of Rosedale's words was soon effaced by
other impressions.

When the opening night of the opera came, her apprehensions had so
completely vanished that the sight of Trenor's ruddy countenance in the
back of Mr. Rosedale's box filled her with a sense of pleasant
reassurance. Lily had not quite reconciled herself to the necessity of
appearing as Rosedale's guest on so conspicuous an occasion, and it was a
relief to find herself supported by any one of her own set--for Mrs.
Fisher's social habits were too promiscuous for her presence to justify
Miss Bart's.

To Lily, always inspirited by the prospect of showing her beauty in
public, and conscious tonight of all the added enhancements of dress, the
insistency of Trenor's gaze merged itself in the general stream of
admiring looks of which she felt herself the centre. Ah, it was good to
be young, to be radiant, to glow with the sense of slenderness, strength
and elasticity, of well-poised lines and happy tints, to feel one's self
lifted to a height apart by that incommunicable grace which is the bodily
counterpart of genius!

All means seemed justifiable to attain such an end, or rather, by a happy
shifting of lights with which practice had familiarized Miss Bart, the
cause shrank to a pin-point in the general brightness of the effect. But
brilliant young ladies, a little blinded by their own effulgence, are apt
to forget that the modest satellite drowned in their light is still
performing its own revolutions and generating heat at its own rate. If
Lily's poetic enjoyment of the moment was undisturbed by the base thought
that her gown and opera cloak had been indirectly paid for by Gus Trenor,
the latter had not sufficient poetry in his composition to lose sight of
these prosaic facts. He knew only that he had never seen Lily look
smarter in her life, that there wasn't a woman in the house who showed
off good clothes as she did, and that hitherto he, to whom she owed the
opportunity of making this display, had reaped no return beyond that of
gazing at her in company with several hundred other pairs of eyes.

It came to Lily therefore as a disagreeable surprise when, in the back of
the box, where they found themselves alone between two acts, Trenor said,
without preamble, and in a tone of sulky authority: "Look here, Lily, how
is a fellow ever to see anything of you? I'm in town three or four days
in the week, and you know a line to the club will always find me, but you
don't seem to remember my existence nowadays unless you want to get a tip
out of me."

The fact that the remark was in distinctly bad taste did not make it any
easier to answer, for Lily was vividly aware that it was not the moment
for that drawing up of her slim figure and surprised lifting of the brows
by which she usually quelled incipient signs of familiarity.

"I'm very much flattered by your wanting to see me," she returned,
essaying lightness instead, "but, unless you have mislaid my address, it
would have been easy to find me any afternoon at my aunt's--in fact, I
rather expected you to look me up there."

If she hoped to mollify him by this last concession the attempt was a
failure, for he only replied, with the familiar lowering of the brows
that made him look his dullest when he was angry: "Hang going to your
aunt's, and wasting the afternoon listening to a lot of other chaps
talking to you! You know I'm not the kind to sit in a crowd and jaw--I'd
always rather clear out when that sort of circus is going on.  But why
can't we go off somewhere on a little lark together--a nice quiet little
expedition like that drive at Bellomont, the day you met me at the
station?"

He leaned unpleasantly close in order to convey this suggestion, and she
fancied she caught a significant aroma which explained the dark flush on
his face and the glistening dampness of his forehead.

The idea that any rash answer might provoke an unpleasant outburst
tempered her disgust with caution, and she answered with a laugh: "I
don't see how one can very well take country drives in town, but I am not
always surrounded by an admiring throng, and if you will let me know what
afternoon you are coming I will arrange things so that we can have a nice
quiet talk."

"Hang talking! That's what you always say," returned Trenor, whose
expletives lacked variety. "You put me off with that at the Van Osburgh
wedding--but the plain English of it is that, now you've got what you
wanted out of me, you'd rather have any other fellow about."

His voice had risen sharply with the last words, and Lily flushed with
annoyance, but she kept command of the situation and laid a persuasive
hand on his arm.

"Don't be foolish, Gus; I can't let you talk to me in that ridiculous
way. If you really want to see me, why shouldn't we take a walk in the
Park some afternoon? I agree with you that it's amusing to be rustic in
town, and if you like I'll meet you there, and we'll go and feed the
squirrels, and you shall take me out on the lake in the steam-gondola."

She smiled as she spoke, letting her eyes rest on his in a way that took
the edge from her banter and made him suddenly malleable to her will.

"All right, then: that's a go. Will you come tomorrow? Tomorrow at three
o'clock, at the end of the Mall. I'll be there sharp, remember; you won't
go back on me, Lily?"

But to Miss Bart's relief the repetition of her promise was cut short by
the opening of the box door to admit George Dorset.

Trenor sulkily yielded his place, and Lily turned a brilliant smile on
the newcomer. She had not talked with Dorset since their visit at
Bellomont, but something in his look and manner told her that he recalled
the friendly footing on which they had last met. He was not a man to whom
the expression of admiration came easily: his long sallow face and
distrustful eyes seemed always barricaded against the expansive emotions.
But, where her own influence was concerned, Lily's intuitions sent out
thread-like feelers, and as she made room for him on the narrow sofa she
was sure he found a dumb pleasure in being near her. Few women took the
trouble to make themselves agreeable to Dorset, and Lily had been kind to
him at Bellomont, and was now smiling on him with a divine renewal of
kindness.

"Well, here we are, in for another six months of caterwauling," he began
complainingly. "Not a shade of difference between this year and last,
except that the women have got new clothes and the singers haven't got
new voices. My wife's musical, you know--puts me through a course of this
every winter. It isn't so bad on Italian nights--then she comes late, and
there's time to digest.  But when they give Wagner we have to rush
dinner, and I pay up for it. And the draughts are damnable--asphyxia in
front and pleurisy in the back. There's Trenor leaving the box without
drawing the curtain! With a hide like that draughts don't make any
difference. Did you ever watch Trenor eat? If you did, you'd wonder why
he's alive; I suppose he's leather inside too.--But I came to say that my
wife wants you to come down to our place next Sunday. Do for heaven's
sake say yes. She's got a lot of bores coming--intellectual ones, I mean;
that's her new line, you know, and I'm not sure it ain't worse than the
music. Some of 'em have long hair, and they start an argument with the
soup, and don't notice when things are handed to them. The consequence is
the dinner gets cold, and I have dyspepsia. That silly ass Silverton
brings them to the house--he writes poetry, you know, and Bertha and he
are getting tremendously thick. She could write better than any of 'em if
she chose, and I don't blame her for wanting clever fellows about; all I
say is: 'Don't let me see 'em eat!'"

The gist of this strange communication gave Lily a distinct thrill of
pleasure. Under ordinary circumstances, there would have been nothing
surprising in an invitation from Bertha Dorset; but since the Bellomont
episode an unavowed hostility had kept the two women apart. Now, with a
start of inner wonder, Lily felt that her thirst for retaliation had died
out. IF YOU WOULD FORGIVE YOUR ENEMY, says the Malay proverb, FIRST
INFLICT A HURT ON HIM; and Lily was experiencing the truth of the
apothegm.  If she had destroyed Mrs. Dorset's letters, she might have
continued to hate her; but the fact that they remained in her possession
had fed her resentment to satiety.

She uttered a smiling acceptance, hailing in the renewal of the tie an
escape from Trenor's importunities.

Meanwhile the holidays had gone by and the season was beginning.  Fifth
Avenue had become a nightly torrent of carriages surging upward to the
fashionable quarters about the Park, where illuminated windows and
outspread awnings betokened the usual routine of hospitality. Other
tributary currents crossed the mainstream, bearing their freight to the
theatres, restaurants or opera; and Mrs. Peniston, from the secluded
watch-tower of her upper window, could tell to a nicety just when the
chronic volume of sound was increased by the sudden influx setting toward
a Van Osburgh ball, or when the multiplication of wheels meant merely
that the opera was over, or that there was a big supper at Sherry's.

Mrs. Peniston followed the rise and culmination of the season as keenly
as the most active sharer in its gaieties; and, as a looker-on, she
enjoyed opportunities of comparison and generalization such as those who
take part must proverbially forego. No one could have kept a more
accurate record of social fluctuations, or have put a more unerring
finger on the distinguishing features of each season: its dulness, its
extravagance, its lack of balls or excess of divorces. She had a special
memory for the vicissitudes of the "new people" who rose to the surface
with each recurring tide, and were either submerged beneath its rush or
landed triumphantly beyond the reach of envious breakers; and she was apt
to display a remarkable retrospective insight into their ultimate fate,
so that, when they had fulfilled their destiny, she was almost always
able to say to Grace Stepney--the recipient of her prophecies--that she
had known exactly what would happen.

This particular season Mrs. Peniston would have characterized as that in
which everybody "felt poor" except the Welly Brys and Mr. Simon Rosedale.
It had been a bad autumn in Wall Street, where prices fell in accordance
with that peculiar law which proves railway stocks and bales of cotton to
be more sensitive to the allotment of executive power than many estimable
citizens trained to all the advantages of self-government. Even fortunes
supposed to be independent of the market either betrayed a secret
dependence on it, or suffered from a sympathetic affection: fashion
sulked in its country houses, or came to town incognito, general
entertainments were discountenanced, and informality and short dinners
became the fashion.

But society, amused for a while at playing Cinderella, soon wearied of
the hearthside role, and welcomed the Fairy Godmother in the shape of any
magician powerful enough to turn the shrunken pumpkin back again into the
golden coach. The mere fact of growing richer at a time when most
people's investments are shrinking, is calculated to attract envious
attention; and according to Wall Street rumours, Welly Bry and Rosedale
had found the secret of performing this miracle.

Rosedale, in particular, was said to have doubled his fortune, and there
was talk of his buying the newly-finished house of one of the victims of
the crash, who, in the space of twelve short months, had made the same
number of millions, built a house in Fifth Avenue, filled a
picture-gallery with old masters, entertained all New York in it, and
been smuggled out of the country between a trained nurse and a doctor,
while his creditors mounted guard over the old masters, and his guests
explained to each other that they had dined with him only because they
wanted to see the pictures. Mr. Rosedale meant to have a less meteoric
career. He knew he should have to go slowly, and the instincts of his
race fitted him to suffer rebuffs and put up with delays. But he was
prompt to perceive that the general dulness of the season afforded him an
unusual opportunity to shine, and he set about with patient industry to
form a background for his growing glory.  Mrs. Fisher was of immense
service to him at this period. She had set off so many newcomers on the
social stage that she was like one of those pieces of stock scenery which
tell the experienced spectator exactly what is going to take place. But
Mr. Rosedale wanted, in the long run, a more individual environment. He
was sensitive to shades of difference which Miss Bart would never have
credited him with perceiving, because he had no corresponding variations
of manner; and it was becoming more and more clear to him that Miss Bart
herself possessed precisely the complementary qualities needed to round
off his social personality.

Such details did not fall within the range of Mrs. Peniston's vision.
Like many minds of panoramic sweep, hers was apt to overlook the MINUTIAE
of the foreground, and she was much more likely to know where Carry
Fisher had found the Welly Brys' CHEF for them, than what was happening
to her own niece. She was not, however, without purveyors of information
ready to supplement her deficiencies. Grace Stepney's mind was like a
kind of moral fly-paper, to which the buzzing items of gossip were drawn
by a fatal attraction, and where they hung fast in the toils of an
inexorable memory. Lily would have been surprised to know how many
trivial facts concerning herself were lodged in Miss Stepney's head. She
was quite aware that she was of interest to dingy people, but she assumed
that there is only one form of dinginess, and that admiration for
brilliancy is the natural expression of its inferior state. She knew that
Gerty Farish admired her blindly, and therefore supposed that she
inspired the same sentiments in Grace Stepney, whom she classified as a
Gerty Farish without the saving traits of youth and enthusiasm.

In reality, the two differed from each other as much as they differed
from the object of their mutual contemplation. Miss Farish's heart was a
fountain of tender illusions, Miss Stepney's a precise register of facts
as manifested in their relation to herself. She had sensibilities which,
to Lily, would have seemed comic in a person with a freckled nose and red
eyelids, who lived in a boarding-house and admired Mrs. Peniston's
drawing-room; but poor Grace's limitations gave them a more concentrated
inner life, as poor soil starves certain plants into intenser
efflorescence. She had in truth no abstract propensity to malice: she did
not dislike Lily because the latter was brilliant and predominant, but
because she thought that Lily disliked her. It is less mortifying to
believe one's self unpopular than insignificant, and vanity prefers to
assume that indifference is a latent form of unfriendliness. Even such
scant civilities as Lily accorded to Mr. Rosedale would have made Miss
Stepney her friend for life; but how could she foresee that such a friend
was worth cultivating? How, moreover, can a young woman who has never
been ignored measure the pang which this injury inflicts? And, lastly,
how could Lily, accustomed to choose between a pressure of engagements,
guess that she had mortally offended Miss Stepney by causing her to be
excluded from one of Mrs. Peniston's infrequent dinner-parties?

Mrs. Peniston disliked giving dinners, but she had a high sense of family
obligation, and on the Jack Stepneys' return from their honeymoon she
felt it incumbent upon her to light the drawing-room lamps and extract
her best silver from the Safe Deposit vaults. Mrs. Peniston's rare
entertainments were preceded by days of heart-rending vacillation as to
every detail of the feast, from the seating of the guests to the pattern
of the table-cloth, and in the course of one of these preliminary
discussions she had imprudently suggested to her cousin Grace that, as
the dinner was a family affair, she might be included in it. For a week
the prospect had lighted up Miss Stepney's colourless existence; then she
had been given to understand that it would be more convenient to have her
another day. Miss Stepney knew exactly what had happened. Lily, to whom
family reunions were occasions of unalloyed dulness, had persuaded her
aunt that a dinner of "smart" people would be much more to the taste of
the young couple, and Mrs. Peniston, who leaned helplessly on her niece
in social matters, had been prevailed upon to pronounce Grace's exile.
After all, Grace could come any other day; why should she mind being put
off?

It was precisely because Miss Stepney could come any other day--and
because she knew her relations were in the secret of her unoccupied
evenings--that this incident loomed gigantically on her horizon. She was
aware that she had Lily to thank for it; and dull resentment was turned
to active animosity.

Mrs. Peniston, on whom she had looked in a day or two after the dinner,
laid down her crochet-work and turned abruptly from her oblique survey of
Fifth Avenue.

"Gus Trenor?--Lily and Gus Trenor?" she said, growing so suddenly pale
that her visitor was almost alarmed.

"Oh, cousin Julia . . . of course I don't mean . . ."

"I don't know what you DO mean," said Mrs. Peniston, with a frightened
quiver in her small fretful voice. "Such things were never heard of in my
day. And my own niece! I'm not sure I understand you. Do people say he's
in love with her?"

Mrs. Peniston's horror was genuine. Though she boasted an unequalled
familiarity with the secret chronicles of society, she had the innocence
of the school-girl who regards wickedness as a part of "history," and to
whom it never occurs that the scandals she reads of in lesson-hours may
be repeating themselves in the next street. Mrs. Peniston had kept her
imagination shrouded, like the drawing-room furniture. She knew, of
course, that society was "very much changed," and that many women her
mother would have thought "peculiar" were now in a position to be
critical about their visiting-lists; she had discussed the perils of
divorce with her rector, and had felt thankful at times that Lily was
still unmarried; but the idea that any scandal could attach to a young
girl's name, above all that it could be lightly coupled with that of a
married man, was so new to her that she was as much aghast as if she had
been accused of leaving her carpets down all summer, or of violating any
of the other cardinal laws of housekeeping.

Miss Stepney, when her first fright had subsided, began to feel the
superiority that greater breadth of mind confers. It was really pitiable
to be as ignorant of the world as Mrs. Peniston!  She smiled at the
latter's question. "People always say unpleasant things--and certainly
they're a great deal together. A friend of mine met them the other
afternoon in the Park--quite late, after the lamps were lit. It's a pity
Lily makes herself so conspicuous."

"CONSPICUOUS!" gasped Mrs. Peniston. She bent forward, lowering her voice
to mitigate the horror. "What sort of things do they say? That he means
to get a divorce and marry her?"

Grace Stepney laughed outright. "Dear me, no! He would hardly do that.
It--it's a flirtation--nothing more."

"A flirtation? Between my niece and a married man? Do you mean to tell me
that, with Lily's looks and advantages, she could find no better use for
her time than to waste it on a fat stupid man almost old enough to be her
father?" This argument had such a convincing ring that it gave Mrs.
Peniston sufficient reassurance to pick up her work, while she waited for
Grace Stepney to rally her scattered forces.

But Miss Stepney was on the spot in an instant. "That's the worst of
it--people say she isn't wasting her time! Every one knows, as you say,
that Lily is too handsome and--and charming--to devote herself to a man
like Gus Trenor unless--"

"Unless?" echoed Mrs. Peniston. Her visitor drew breath nervously. It was
agreeable to shock Mrs. Peniston, but not to shock her to the verge of
anger. Miss Stepney was not sufficiently familiar with the classic drama
to have recalled in advance how bearers of bad tidings are proverbially
received, but she now had a rapid vision of forfeited dinners and a
reduced wardrobe as the possible consequence of her disinterestedness. To
the honour of her sex, however, hatred of Lily prevailed over more
personal considerations. Mrs. Peniston had chosen the wrong moment to
boast of her niece's charms.

"Unless," said Grace, leaning forward to speak with low-toned emphasis,
"unless there are material advantages to be gained by making herself
agreeable to him."

She felt that the moment was tremendous, and remembered suddenly that
Mrs. Peniston's black brocade, with the cut jet fringe, would have been
hers at the end of the season.

Mrs. Peniston put down her work again. Another aspect of the same idea
had presented itself to her, and she felt that it was beneath her dignity
to have her nerves racked by a dependent relative who wore her old
clothes.

"If you take pleasure in annoying me by mysterious insinuations," she
said coldly, "you might at least have chosen a more suitable time than
just as I am recovering from the strain of giving a large dinner."

The mention of the dinner dispelled Miss Stepney's last scruples.  "I
don't know why I should be accused of taking pleasure in telling you
about Lily. I was sure I shouldn't get any thanks for it," she returned
with a flare of temper. "But I have some family feeling left, and as you
are the only person who has any authority over Lily, I thought you ought
to know what is being said of her."

"Well," said Mrs. Peniston, "what I complain of is that you haven't told
me yet what IS being said."

"I didn't suppose I should have to put it so plainly. People say that Gus
Trenor pays her bills."

"Pays her bills--her bills?" Mrs. Peniston broke into a laugh. "I can't
imagine where you can have picked up such rubbish. Lily has her own
income--and I provide for her very handsomely--"

"Oh, we all know that," interposed Miss Stepney drily. "But Lily wears a
great many smart gowns--"

"I like her to be well-dressed--it's only suitable!"

"Certainly; but then there are her gambling debts besides."

Miss Stepney, in the beginning, had not meant to bring up this point; but
Mrs. Peniston had only her own incredulity to blame.  She was like the
stiff-necked unbelievers of Scripture, who must be annihilated to be
convinced.

"Gambling debts? Lily?" Mrs. Peniston's voice shook with anger and
bewilderment. She wondered whether Grace Stepney had gone out of her
mind. "What do you mean by her gambling debts?"

"Simply that if one plays bridge for money in Lily's set one is liable to
lose a great deal--and I don't suppose Lily always wins."

"Who told you that my niece played cards for money?"

"Mercy, cousin Julia, don't look at me as if I were trying to turn you
against Lily! Everybody knows she is crazy about bridge.  Mrs. Gryce told
me herself that it was her gambling that frightened Percy Gryce--it seems
he was really taken with her at first. But, of course, among Lily's
friends it's quite the custom for girls to play for money.  In fact,
people are inclined to excuse her on that account----"

"To excuse her for what?"

"For being hard up--and accepting attentions from men like Gus
Trenor--and George Dorset----"

Mrs. Peniston gave another cry. "George Dorset? Is there any one else?  I
should like to know the worst, if you please."

"Don't put it in that way, cousin Julia. Lately Lily has been a good deal
with the Dorsets, and he seems to admire her--but of course that's only
natural. And I'm sure there is no truth in the horrid things people say;
but she HAS been spending a great deal of money this winter. Evie Van
Osburgh was at Celeste's ordering her trousseau the other day--yes, the
marriage takes place next month--and she told me that Celeste showed her
the most exquisite things she was just sending home to Lily. And people
say that Judy Trenor has quarrelled with her on account of Gus; but I'm
sure I'm sorry I spoke, though I only meant it as a kindness."

Mrs. Peniston's genuine incredulity enabled her to dismiss Miss Stepney
with a disdain which boded ill for that lady's prospect of succeeding to
the black brocade; but minds impenetrable to reason have generally some
crack through which suspicion filters, and her visitor's insinuations did
not glide off as easily as she had expected. Mrs. Peniston disliked
scenes, and her determination to avoid them had always led her to hold
herself aloof from the details of Lily's life.  In her youth, girls had
not been supposed to require close supervision.  They were generally
assumed to be taken up with the legitimate business of courtship and
marriage, and interference in such affairs on the part of their natural
guardians was considered as unwarrantable as a spectator's suddenly
joining in a game. There had of course been "fast" girls even in Mrs.
Peniston's early experience; but their fastness, at worst, was understood
to be a mere excess of animal spirits, against which there could be no
graver charge than that of being "unladylike." The modern fastness
appeared synonymous with immorality, and the mere idea of immorality was
as offensive to Mrs. Peniston as a smell of cooking in the drawing-room:
it was one of the conceptions her mind refused to admit.

She had no immediate intention of repeating to Lily what she had heard,
or even of trying to ascertain its truth by means of discreet
interrogation. To do so might be to provoke a scene; and a scene, in the
shaken state of Mrs. Peniston's nerves, with the effects of her dinner
not worn off, and her mind still tremulous with new impressions, was a
risk she deemed it her duty to avoid.  But there remained in her thoughts
a settled deposit of resentment against her niece, all the denser because
it was not to be cleared by explanation or discussion.  It was horrible
of a young girl to let herself be talked about; however unfounded the
charges against her, she must be to blame for their having been made.
Mrs. Peniston felt as if there had been a contagious illness in the
house, and she was doomed to sit shivering among her contaminated
furniture.

Miss Bart had in fact been treading a devious way, and none of her
critics could have been more alive to the fact than herself; but she had
a fatalistic sense of being drawn from one wrong turning to another,
without ever perceiving the right road till it was too late to take it.

Lily, who considered herself above narrow prejudices, had not imagined
that the fact of letting Gus Trenor make a little money for her would
ever disturb her self-complacency. And the fact in itself still seemed
harmless enough; only it was a fertile source of harmful complications.
As she exhausted the amusement of spending the money these complications
became more pressing, and Lily, whose mind could be severely logical in
tracing the causes of her ill-luck to others, justified herself by the
thought that she owed all her troubles to the enmity of Bertha Dorset.
This enmity, however, had apparently expired in a renewal of friendliness
between the two women. Lily's visit to the Dorsets had resulted, for
both, in the discovery that they could be of use to each other; and the
civilized instinct finds a subtler pleasure in making use of its
antagonist than in confounding him.  Mrs. Dorset was, in fact, engaged in
a new sentimental experiment, of which Mrs. Fisher's late property, Ned
Silverton, was the rosy victim; and at such moments, as Judy Trenor had
once remarked, she felt a peculiar need of distracting her husband's
attention. Dorset was as difficult to amuse as a savage; but even his
self-engrossment was not proof against Lily's arts, or rather these were
especially adapted to soothe an uneasy egoism. Her experience with Percy
Gryce stood her in good stead in ministering to Dorset's humours, and if
the incentive to please was less urgent, the difficulties of her
situation were teaching her to make much of minor opportunities.

Intimacy with the Dorsets was not likely to lessen such difficulties on
the material side. Mrs. Dorset had none of Judy Trenor's lavish impulses,
and Dorset's admiration was not likely to express itself in financial
"tips," even had Lily cared to renew her experiences in that line. What
she required, for the moment, of the Dorsets' friendship, was simply its
social sanction. She knew that people were beginning to talk of her; but
this fact did not alarm her as it had alarmed Mrs. Peniston. In her set
such gossip was not unusual, and a handsome girl who flirted with a
married man was merely assumed to be pressing to the limit of her
opportunities. It was Trenor himself who frightened her.  Their walk in
the Park had not been a success.  Trenor had married young, and since his
marriage his intercourse with women had not taken the form of the
sentimental small-talk which doubles upon itself like the paths in a
maze. He was first puzzled and then irritated to find himself always led
back to the same starting-point, and Lily felt that she was gradually
losing control of the situation. Trenor was in truth in an unmanageable
mood. In spite of his understanding with Rosedale he had been somewhat
heavily "touched" by the fall in stocks; his household expenses weighed
on him, and he seemed to be meeting, on all sides, a sullen opposition to
his wishes, instead of the easy good luck he had hitherto encountered.

Mrs. Trenor was still at Bellomont, keeping the town-house open, and
descending on it now and then for a taste of the world, but preferring
the recurrent excitement of week-end parties to the restrictions of a
dull season. Since the holidays she had not urged Lily to return to
Bellomont, and the first time they met in town Lily fancied there was a
shade of coldness in her manner.  Was it merely the expression of her
displeasure at Miss Bart's neglect, or had disquieting rumours reached
her? The latter contingency seemed improbable, yet Lily was not without a
sense of uneasiness. If her roaming sympathies had struck root anywhere,
it was in her friendship with Judy Trenor. She believed in the sincerity
of her friend's affection, though it sometimes showed itself in
self-interested ways, and she shrank with peculiar reluctance from any
risk of estranging it. But, aside from this, she was keenly conscious of
the way in which such an estrangement would react on herself. The fact
that Gus Trenor was Judy's husband was at times Lily's strongest reason
for disliking him, and for resenting the obligation under which he had
placed her. To set her doubts at rest, Miss Bart, soon after the New
Year, "proposed" herself for a week-end at Bellomont. She had learned in
advance that the presence of a large party would protect her from too
great assiduity on Trenor's part, and his wife's telegraphic "come by all
means" seemed to assure her of her usual welcome.

Judy received her amicably. The cares of a large party always prevailed
over personal feelings, and Lily saw no change in her hostess's manner.
Nevertheless, she was soon aware that the experiment of coming to
Bellomont was destined not to be successful. The party was made up of
what Mrs. Trenor called "poky people"--her generic name for persons who
did not play bridge--and, it being her habit to group all such
obstructionists in one class, she usually invited them together,
regardless of their other characteristics. The result was apt to be an
irreducible combination of persons having no other quality in common than
their abstinence from bridge, and the antagonisms developed in a group
lacking the one taste which might have amalgamated them, were in this
case aggravated by bad weather, and by the ill-concealed boredom of their
host and hostess. In such emergencies, Judy would usually have turned to
Lily to fuse the discordant elements; and Miss Bart, assuming that such a
service was expected of her, threw herself into it with her accustomed
zeal. But at the outset she perceived a subtle resistance to her efforts.
If Mrs. Trenor's manner toward her was unchanged, there was certainly a
faint coldness in that of the other ladies. An occasional caustic
allusion to "your friends the Wellington Brys," or to "the little Jew who
has bought the Greiner house--some one told us you knew him, Miss
Bart,"--showed Lily that she was in disfavour with that portion of
society which, while contributing least to its amusement, has assumed the
right to decide what forms that amusement shall take. The indication was
a slight one, and a year ago Lily would have smiled at it, trusting to
the charm of her personality to dispel any prejudice against her. But now
she had grown more sensitive to criticism and less confident in her power
of disarming it. She knew, moreover, that if the ladies at Bellomont
permitted themselves to criticize her friends openly, it was a proof that
they were not afraid of subjecting her to the same treatment behind her
back. The nervous dread lest anything in Trenor's manner should seem to
justify their disapproval made her seek every pretext for avoiding him,
and she left Bellomont conscious of having failed in every purpose which
had taken her there.

In town she returned to preoccupations which, for the moment, had the
happy effect of banishing troublesome thoughts. The Welly Brys, after
much debate, and anxious counsel with their newly acquired friends, had
decided on the bold move of giving a general entertainment. To attack
society collectively, when one's means of approach are limited to a few
acquaintances, is like advancing into a strange country with an
insufficient number of scouts; but such rash tactics have sometimes led
to brilliant victories, and the Brys had determined to put their fate to
the touch. Mrs. Fisher, to whom they had entrusted the conduct of the
affair, had decided that TABLEAUX VIVANTS and expensive music were the
two baits most likely to attract the desired prey, and after prolonged
negotiations, and the kind of wire-pulling in which she was known to
excel, she had induced a dozen fashionable women to exhibit themselves in
a series of pictures which, by a farther miracle of persuasion, the
distinguished portrait painter, Paul Morpeth, had been prevailed upon to
organize.

Lily was in her element on such occasions. Under Morpeth's guidance her
vivid plastic sense, hitherto nurtured on no higher food than
dress-making and upholstery, found eager expression in the disposal of
draperies, the study of attitudes, the shifting of lights and shadows.
Her dramatic instinct was roused by the choice of subjects, and the
gorgeous reproductions of historic dress stirred an imagination which
only visual impressions could reach. But keenest of all was the
exhilaration of displaying her own beauty under a new aspect: of showing
that her loveliness was no mere fixed quality, but an element shaping all
emotions to fresh forms of grace.

Mrs. Fisher's measures had been well-taken, and society, surprised in a
dull moment, succumbed to the temptation of Mrs. Bry's hospitality. The
protesting minority were forgotten in the throng which abjured and came;
and the audience was almost as brilliant as the show.

Lawrence Selden was among those who had yielded to the proffered
inducements. If he did not often act on the accepted social axiom that a
man may go where he pleases, it was because he had long since learned
that his pleasures were mainly to be found in a small group of the
like-minded. But he enjoyed spectacular effects, and was not insensible
to the part money plays in their production: all he asked was that the
very rich should live up to their calling as stage-managers, and not
spend their money in a dull way. This the Brys could certainly not be
charged with doing. Their recently built house, whatever it might lack as
a frame for domesticity, was almost as well-designed for the display of a
festal assemblage as one of those airy pleasure-halls which the Italian
architects improvised to set off the hospitality of princes.  The air of
improvisation was in fact strikingly present: so recent, so
rapidly-evoked was the whole MISE-EN-SCENE that one had to touch the
marble columns to learn they were not of cardboard, to seat one's self in
one of the damask-and-gold arm-chairs to be sure it was not painted
against the wall.

Selden, who had put one of these seats to the test, found himself, from
an angle of the ball-room, surveying the scene with frank enjoyment.  The
company, in obedience to the decorative instinct which calls for fine
clothes in fine surroundings, had dressed rather with an eye to Mrs.
Bry's background than to herself. The seated throng, filling the immense
room without undue crowding, presented a surface of rich tissues and
jewelled shoulders in harmony with the festooned and gilded walls, and
the flushed splendours of the Venetian ceiling. At the farther end of the
room a stage had been constructed behind a proscenium arch curtained with
folds of old damask; but in the pause before the parting of the folds
there was little thought of what they might reveal, for every woman who
had accepted Mrs. Bry's invitation was engaged in trying to find out how
many of her friends had done the same.

Gerty Farish, seated next to Selden, was lost in that indiscriminate and
uncritical enjoyment so irritating to Miss Bart's finer perceptions. It
may be that Selden's nearness had something to do with the quality of his
cousin's pleasure; but Miss Farish was so little accustomed to refer her
enjoyment of such scenes to her own share in them, that she was merely
conscious of a deeper sense of contentment.

"Wasn't it dear of Lily to get me an invitation? Of course it would never
have occurred to Carry Fisher to put me on the list, and I should have
been so sorry to miss seeing it all--and especially Lily herself.  Some
one told me the ceiling was by Veronese--you would know, of course,
Lawrence. I suppose it's very beautiful, but his women are so dreadfully
fat. Goddesses?  Well, I can only say that if they'd been mortals and had
to wear corsets, it would have been better for them. I think our women
are much handsomer. And this room is wonderfully becoming--every one
looks so well! Did you ever see such jewels? Do look at Mrs. George
Dorset's pearls--I suppose the smallest of them would pay the rent of our
Girls' Club for a year. Not that I ought to complain about the club;
every one has been so wonderfully kind.  Did I tell you that Lily had
given us three hundred dollars?  Wasn't it splendid of her? And then she
collected a lot of money from her friends--Mrs. Bry gave us five hundred,
and Mr. Rosedale a thousand. I wish Lily were not so nice to Mr.
Rosedale, but she says it's no use being rude to him, because he doesn't
see the difference. She really can't bear to hurt people's feelings--it
makes me so angry when I hear her called cold and conceited! The girls at
the club don't call her that. Do you know she has been there with me
twice?--yes, Lily! And you should have seen their eyes! One of them said
it was as good as a day in the country just to look at her. And she sat
there, and laughed and talked with them--not a bit as if she were being
CHARITABLE, you know, but as if she liked it as much as they did. They've
been asking ever since when she's coming back; and she's promised
me----oh!"

Miss Farish's confidences were cut short by the parting of the curtain on
the first TABLEAU--a group of nymphs dancing across flower-strewn sward
in the rhythmic postures of Botticelli's Spring. TABLEAUX VIVANTS depend
for their effect not only on the happy disposal of lights and the
delusive-interposition of layers of gauze, but on a corresponding
adjustment of the mental vision.  To unfurnished minds they remain, in
spite of every enhancement of art, only a superior kind of wax-works; but
to the responsive fancy they may give magic glimpses of the boundary
world between fact and imagination. Selden's mind was of this order: he
could yield to vision-making influences as completely as a child to the
spell of a fairy-tale. Mrs. Bry's TABLEAUX wanted none of the qualities
which go to the producing of such illusions, and under Morpeth's
organizing hand the pictures succeeded each other with the rhythmic march
of some splendid frieze, in which the fugitive curves of living flesh and
the wandering light of young eyes have been subdued to plastic harmony
without losing the charm of life.

The scenes were taken from old pictures, and the participators had been
cleverly fitted with characters suited to their types.  No one, for
instance, could have made a more typical Goya than Carry Fisher, with her
short dark-skinned face, the exaggerated glow of her eyes, the
provocation of her frankly-painted smile. A brilliant Miss Smedden from
Brooklyn showed to perfection the sumptuous curves of Titian's Daughter,
lifting her gold salver laden with grapes above the harmonizing gold of
rippled hair and rich brocade, and a young Mrs. Van Alstyne, who showed
the frailer Dutch type, with high blue-veined forehead and pale eyes and
lashes, made a characteristic Vandyck, in black satin, against a
curtained archway. Then there were Kauffmann nymphs garlanding the altar
of Love; a Veronese supper, all sheeny textures, pearl-woven heads and
marble architecture; and a Watteau group of lute-playing comedians,
lounging by a fountain in a sunlit glade.

Each evanescent picture touched the vision-building faculty in Selden,
leading him so far down the vistas of fancy that even Gerty Farish's
running commentary--"Oh, how lovely Lulu Melson looks!" or: "That must be
Kate Corby, to the right there, in purple"--did not break the spell of
the illusion. Indeed, so skilfully had the personality of the actors been
subdued to the scenes they figured in that even the least imaginative of
the audience must have felt a thrill of contrast when the curtain
suddenly parted on a picture which was simply and undisguisedly the
portrait of Miss Bart.

Here there could be no mistaking the predominance of personality--the
unanimous "Oh!" of the spectators was a tribute, not to the brush-work of
Reynolds's "Mrs. Lloyd" but to the flesh and blood loveliness of Lily
Bart. She had shown her artistic intelligence in selecting a type so like
her own that she could embody the person represented without ceasing to
be herself. It was as though she had stepped, not out of, but into,
Reynolds's canvas, banishing the phantom of his dead beauty by the beams
of her living grace. The impulse to show herself in a splendid
setting--she had thought for a moment of representing Tiepolo's
Cleopatra--had yielded to the truer instinct of trusting to her
unassisted beauty, and she had purposely chosen a picture without
distracting accessories of dress or surroundings.  Her pale draperies,
and the background of foliage against which she stood, served only to
relieve the long dryad-like curves that swept upward from her poised foot
to her lifted arm. The noble buoyancy of her attitude, its suggestion of
soaring grace, revealed the touch of poetry in her beauty that Selden
always felt in her presence, yet lost the sense of when he was not with
her. Its expression was now so vivid that for the first time he seemed to
see before him the real Lily Bart, divested of the trivialities of her
little world, and catching for a moment a note of that eternal harmony of
which her beauty was a part.

"Deuced bold thing to show herself in that get-up; but, gad, there isn't
a break in the lines anywhere, and I suppose she wanted us to know it!"

These words, uttered by that experienced connoisseur, Mr. Ned Van
Alstyne, whose scented white moustache had brushed Selden's shoulder
whenever the parting of the curtains presented any exceptional
opportunity for the study of the female outline, affected their hearer in
an unexpected way. It was not the first time that Selden had heard Lily's
beauty lightly remarked on, and hitherto the tone of the comments had
imperceptibly coloured his view of her. But now it woke only a motion of
indignant contempt.  This was the world she lived in, these were the
standards by which she was fated to be measured! Does one go to Caliban
for a judgment on Miranda?

In the long moment before the curtain fell, he had time to feel the whole
tragedy of her life. It was as though her beauty, thus detached from all
that cheapened and vulgarized it, had held out suppliant hands to him
from the world in which he and she had once met for a moment, and where
he felt an overmastering longing to be with her again.

He was roused by the pressure of ecstatic fingers. "Wasn't she too
beautiful, Lawrence? Don't you like her best in that simple dress? It
makes her look like the real Lily--the Lily I know."

He met Gerty Farish's brimming gaze. "The Lily we know," he corrected;
and his cousin, beaming at the implied understanding, exclaimed joyfully:
"I'll tell her that! She always says you dislike her."

The performance over, Selden's first impulse was to seek Miss Bart.
During the interlude of music which succeeded the TABLEAUX, the actors
had seated themselves here and there in the audience, diversifying its
conventional appearance by the varied picturesqueness of their dress.
Lily, however, was not among them, and her absence served to protract the
effect she had produced on Selden: it would have broken the spell to see
her too soon in the surroundings from which accident had so happily
detached her. They had not met since the day of the Van Osburgh wedding,
and on his side the avoidance had been intentional.  Tonight, however, he
knew that, sooner or later, he should find himself at her side; and
though he let the dispersing crowd drift him whither it would, without
making an immediate effort to reach her, his procrastination was not due
to any lingering resistance, but to the desire to luxuriate a moment in
the sense of complete surrender.

Lily had not an instant's doubt as to the meaning of the murmur greeting
her appearance. No other tableau had been received with that precise note
of approval: it had obviously been called forth by herself, and not by
the picture she impersonated. She had feared at the last moment that she
was risking too much in dispensing with the advantages of a more
sumptuous setting, and the completeness of her triumph gave her an
intoxicating sense of recovered power. Not caring to diminish the
impression she had produced, she held herself aloof from the audience
till the movement of dispersal before supper, and thus had a second
opportunity of showing herself to advantage, as the throng poured slowly
into the empty drawing-room where she was standing.

She was soon the centre of a group which increased and renewed itself as
the circulation became general, and the individual comments on her
success were a delightful prolongation of the collective applause. At
such moments she lost something of her natural fastidiousness, and cared
less for the quality of the admiration received than for its quantity.
Differences of personality were merged in a warm atmosphere of praise, in
which her beauty expanded like a flower in sunlight; and if Selden had
approached a moment or two sooner he would have seen her turning on Ned
Van Alstyne and George Dorset the look he had dreamed of capturing for
himself.

Fortune willed, however, that the hurried approach of Mrs. Fisher, as
whose aide-de-camp Van Alstyne was acting, should break up the group
before Selden reached the threshold of the room. One or two of the men
wandered off in search of their partners for supper, and the others,
noticing Selden's approach, gave way to him in accordance with the tacit
freemasonry of the ball-room. Lily was therefore standing alone when he
reached her; and finding the expected look in her eye, he had the
satisfaction of supposing he had kindled it. The look did indeed deepen
as it rested on him, for even in that moment of self-intoxication Lily
felt the quicker beat of life that his nearness always produced.  She
read, too, in his answering gaze the delicious confirmation of her
triumph, and for the moment it seemed to her that it was for him only she
cared to be beautiful.

Selden had given her his arm without speaking. She took it in silence,
and they moved away, not toward the supper-room, but against the tide
which was setting thither. The faces about her flowed by like the
streaming images of sleep: she hardly noticed where Selden was leading
her, till they passed through a glass doorway at the end of the long
suite of rooms and stood suddenly in the fragrant hush of a garden.
Gravel grated beneath their feet, and about them was the transparent
dimness of a midsummer night. Hanging lights made emerald caverns in the
depths of foliage, and whitened the spray of a fountain falling among
lilies. The magic place was deserted: there was no sound but the splash
of the water on the lily-pads, and a distant drift of music that might
have been blown across a sleeping lake.

Selden and Lily stood still, accepting the unreality of the scene as a
part of their own dream-like sensations. It would not have surprised them
to feel a summer breeze on their faces, or to see the lights among the
boughs reduplicated in the arch of a starry sky. The strange solitude
about them was no stranger than the sweetness of being alone in it
together. At length Lily withdrew her hand, and moved away a step, so
that her white-robed slimness was outlined against the dusk of the
branches. Selden followed her, and still without speaking they seated
themselves on a bench beside the fountain.

Suddenly she raised her eyes with the beseeching earnestness of a child.
"You never speak to me--you think hard things of me," she murmured.

"I think of you at any rate, God knows!" he said.

"Then why do we never see each other? Why can't we be friends?  You
promised once to help me," she continued in the same tone, as though the
words were drawn from her unwillingly.

"The only way I can help you is by loving you," Selden said in a low
voice.

She made no reply, but her face turned to him with the soft motion of a
flower. His own met it slowly, and their lips touched. She drew back and
rose from her seat. Selden rose too, and they stood facing each other.
Suddenly she caught his hand and pressed it a moment against her cheek.

"Ah, love me, love me--but don't tell me so!" she sighed with her eyes in
his; and before he could speak she had turned and slipped through the
arch of boughs, disappearing in the brightness of the room beyond.

Selden stood where she had left him. He knew too well the transiency of
exquisite moments to attempt to follow her; but presently he reentered
the house and made his way through the deserted rooms to the door. A few
sumptuously-cloaked ladies were already gathered in the marble vestibule,
and in the coat-room he found Van Alstyne and Gus Trenor.

The former, at Selden's approach, paused in the careful selection of a
cigar from one of the silver boxes invitingly set out near the door.

"Hallo, Selden, going too? You're an Epicurean like myself, I see: you
don't want to see all those goddesses gobbling terrapin.  Gad, what a
show of good-looking women; but not one of 'em could touch that little
cousin of mine. Talk of jewels--what's a woman want with jewels when
she's got herself to show? The trouble is that all these fal-bals they
wear cover up their figures when they've got 'em. I never knew till
tonight what an outline Lily has."

"It's not her fault if everybody don't know it now," growled Trenor,
flushed with the struggle of getting into his fur-lined coat. "Damned bad
taste, I call it--no, no cigar for me. You can't tell what you're smoking
in one of these new houses--likely as not the CHEF buys the cigars. Stay
for supper? Not if I know it! When people crowd their rooms so that you
can't get near any one you want to speak to, I'd as soon sup in the
elevated at the rush hour. My wife was dead right to stay away: she says
life's too short to spend it in breaking in new people."

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

completion: Spending the autumn at home rather than the Bellomont, Lily begins to save up her finances. She also takes interest in philanthropy after being introduced to charitable giving by Gerty Farish, something which will factor in more later in the novel. Meanwhile, Carry Fisher invites her on an outing to the Adirondack Mountains over Thanksgiving, to which Lily readily assents, enjoying the trip very much. Upon returning, Lily receives a visit from Simon Rosedale, who invites her to the opera. He tells her that he knows of her investment successes, which angers Lily because she now knows that Gus Trenor has been telling people about her speculation. She goes to the opera in order to show off her beautiful looks, and she decides to forgive Trenor for telling people about her financial success. Nevertheless, Trenor confronts Lily and tells her that she does not spend enough time with him anymore; he thinks she is using him only to handle her finances. Trenor is very angry and blunt as he criticizes Lily, which scares her to some extent because she now knows that Trenor feels that she owes him something. Later on at the opera, Lily speaks with George Dorset, which reminds Lily that she still has the letters that Bertha Dorset wrote to Selden. Instead of using the letters against Bertha, Lily decides that she will forgive Bertha even though she ruined Lily's chances of marrying Gryce. As the holiday season begins in New York, we learn that the autumn made for bad trading on Wall Street, leaving thousands of people poor. However, Rosedale has almost doubled his money after investing in the right stocks. He is beginning to look upon Lily as a potential bride. Meanwhile, Lily is having troubles with her cousin, Grace Stepney. Both women are vying for the affection of Mrs. Peniston, and the resourceful Lily manages to deny Grace an invitation to one of Mrs. Peniston's big dinner parties. In turn, Grace tells Mrs. Peniston that Lily and Gus Trenor may be having an affair because they have been seen walking alone together in the park. Grace suspects that Lily has financial reasons for flirting with Trenor, and Grace further tells Mrs. Peniston that Lily plays cards for money and has accrued a gambling debt, news which infuriates Mrs. Peniston and makes her angry with Lily. We see that Lily enjoys spending time with George Dorset, but she does not like being around Trenor, who is in an "unimaginable mood." Trenor married young and has had difficulty relating to women, making him unpredictable. He also lost a lot of money in the stock market over the preceding several months. Nevertheless, Lily decides to return to the Bellomont after the New Year, and she finds the house inhabited by a different brand of people, who do not play bridge and share little in common with one another. Lily tries to be a unifying force, but meets with resistance because the others seem unwilling to accept her leadership. To establish the Bry family in the society, Mrs. Bry decides to put on a large fashion show, to be organized by Carry Fisher, in the Brys' conservatory. Lily is one of many people to participate in this "tableaux vivante"--an art form in which people wear costumes and pose in imitation of famous artistic works. To prepare for the party Lily adorns herself in her finest dress. Her visage is described by attendees as both realistic and beautiful. At the show, Lily and Selden retreat to the garden briefly, where they sit and talk on a bench. Selden moves in and kisses Lily lightly, but Lily stresses that she cannot marry him for financial reasons. They return to the house together, where Trenor finds Lily and once again expresses his bitter feelings toward her for not spending more time with him.