prompt:
Chapter: It came vividly to Selden on the Casino steps that Monte Carlo had, more
than any other place he knew, the gift of accommodating itself to each
man's humour. His own, at the moment, lent it a festive readiness of
welcome that might well, in a disenchanted eye, have turned to paint and
facility. So frank an appeal for participation--so outspoken a
recognition of the holiday vein in human nature--struck refreshingly on a
mind jaded by prolonged hard work in surroundings made for the discipline
of the senses.  As he surveyed the white square set in an exotic coquetry
of architecture, the studied tropicality of the gardens, the groups
loitering in the foreground against mauve mountains which suggested a
sublime stage-setting forgotten in a hurried shifting of scenes--as he
took in the whole outspread effect of light and leisure, he felt a
movement of revulsion from the last few months of his life.

The New York winter had presented an interminable perspective of
snow-burdened days, reaching toward a spring of raw sunshine and furious
air, when the ugliness of things rasped the eye as the gritty wind ground
into the skin. Selden, immersed in his work, had told himself that
external conditions did not matter to a man in his state, and that cold
and ugliness were a good tonic for relaxed sensibilities.  When an urgent
case summoned him abroad to confer with a client in Paris, he broke
reluctantly with the routine of the office; and it was only now that,
having despatched his business, and slipped away for a week in the south,
he began to feel the renewed zest of spectatorship that is the solace of
those who take an objective interest in life.

The multiplicity of its appeals--the perpetual surprise of its contrasts
and resemblances! All these tricks and turns of the show were upon him
with a spring as he descended the Casino steps and paused on the pavement
at its doors. He had not been abroad for seven years--and what changes
the renewed contact produced!  If the central depths were untouched,
hardly a pin-point of surface remained the same. And this was the very
place to bring out the completeness of the renewal. The sublimities, the
perpetuities, might have left him as he was: but this tent pitched for a
day's revelry spread a roof of oblivion between himself and his fixed sky.

It was mid-April, and one felt that the revelry had reached its climax
and that the desultory groups in the square and gardens would soon
dissolve and re-form in other scenes. Meanwhile the last moments of the
performance seemed to gain an added brightness from the hovering threat
of the curtain. The quality of the air, the exuberance of the flowers,
the blue intensity of sea and sky, produced the effect of a closing
TABLEAU, when all the lights are turned on at once. This impression was
presently heightened by the way in which a consciously conspicuous group
of people advanced to the middle front, and stood before Selden with the
air of the chief performers gathered together by the exigencies of the
final effect. Their appearance confirmed the impression that the show had
been staged regardless of expense, and emphasized its resemblance to one
of those "costume-plays" in which the protagonists walk through the
passions without displacing a drapery.  The ladies stood in unrelated
attitudes calculated to isolate their effects, and the men hung about
them as irrelevantly as stage heroes whose tailors are named in the
programme. It was Selden himself who unwittingly fused the group by
arresting the attention of one of its members.

"Why, Mr. Selden!" Mrs. Fisher exclaimed in surprise; and with a gesture
toward Mrs. Jack Stepney and Mrs. Wellington Bry, she added plaintively:
"We're starving to death because we can't decide where to lunch."

Welcomed into their group, and made the confidant of their difficulty,
Selden learned with amusement that there were several places where one
might miss something by not lunching, or forfeit something by lunching;
so that eating actually became a minor consideration on the very spot
consecrated to its rites.

"Of course one gets the best things at the TERRASSE--but that looks as if
one hadn't any other reason for being there: the Americans who don't know
any one always rush for the best food.  And the Duchess of Beltshire has
taken up Becassin's lately," Mrs. Bry earnestly summed up.

Mrs. Bry, to Mrs. Fisher's despair, had not progressed beyond the point
of weighing her social alternatives in public. She could not acquire the
air of doing things because she wanted to, and making her choice the
final seal of their fitness.

Mr. Bry, a short pale man, with a business face and leisure clothes, met
the dilemma hilariously.

"I guess the Duchess goes where it's cheapest, unless she can get her
meal paid for. If you offered to blow her off at the TERRASSE she'd turn
up fast enough."

But Mrs. Jack Stepney interposed. "The Grand Dukes go to that little
place at the Condamine. Lord Hubert says it's the only restaurant in
Europe where they can cook peas."

Lord Hubert Dacey, a slender shabby-looking man, with a charming worn
smile, and the air of having spent his best years in piloting the wealthy
to the right restaurant, assented with gentle emphasis: "It's quite that."

"PEAS?" said Mr. Bry contemptuously. "Can they cook terrapin? It just
shows," he continued, "what these European markets are, when a fellow can
make a reputation cooking peas!"

Jack Stepney intervened with authority. "I don't know that I quite agree
with Dacey: there's a little hole in Paris, off the Quai Voltaire--but in
any case, I can't advise the Condamine GARGOTE; at least not with ladies."

Stepney, since his marriage, had thickened and grown prudish, as the Van
Osburgh husbands were apt to do; but his wife, to his surprise and
discomfiture, had developed an earth-shaking fastness of gait which left
him trailing breathlessly in her wake.

"That's where we'll go then!" she declared, with a heavy toss of her
plumage. "I'm so tired of the TERRASSE: it's as dull as one of mother's
dinners. And Lord Hubert has promised to tell us who all the awful people
are at the other place--hasn't he, Carry?  Now, Jack, don't look so
solemn!"

"Well," said Mrs. Bry, "all I want to know is who their dress-makers are."

"No doubt Dacey can tell you that too," remarked Stepney, with an ironic
intention which the other received with the light murmur, "I can at least
FIND OUT, my dear fellow"; and Mrs. Bry having declared that she couldn't
walk another step, the party hailed two or three of the light phaetons
which hover attentively on the confines of the gardens, and rattled off
in procession toward the Condamine.

Their destination was one of the little restaurants overhanging the
boulevard which dips steeply down from Monte Carlo to the low
intermediate quarter along the quay. From the window in which they
presently found themselves installed, they overlooked the intense blue
curve of the harbour, set between the verdure of twin promontories: to
the right, the cliff of Monaco, topped by the mediaeval silhouette of its
church and castle, to the left the terraces and pinnacles of the
gambling-house. Between the two, the waters of the bay were furrowed by a
light coming and going of pleasure-craft, through which, just at the
culminating moment of luncheon, the majestic advance of a great
steam-yacht drew the company's attention from the peas.

"By Jove, I believe that's the Dorsets back!" Stepney exclaimed; and Lord
Hubert, dropping his single eye-glass, corroborated: "It's the
Sabrina--yes."

"So soon? They were to spend a month in Sicily," Mrs. Fisher observed.

"I guess they feel as if they had: there's only one up-to-date hotel in
the whole place," said Mr. Bry disparagingly.

"It was Ned Silverton's idea--but poor Dorset and Lily Bart must have
been horribly bored." Mrs. Fisher added in an undertone to Selden: "I do
hope there hasn't been a row."

"It's most awfully jolly having Miss Bart back," said Lord Hubert, in his
mild deliberate voice; and Mrs. Bry added ingenuously: "I daresay the
Duchess will dine with us, now that Lily's here."

"The Duchess admires her immensely: I'm sure she'd be charmed to have it
arranged," Lord Hubert agreed, with the professional promptness of the
man accustomed to draw his profit from facilitating social contacts:
Selden was struck by the businesslike change in his manner.

"Lily has been a tremendous success here," Mrs. Fisher continued, still
addressing herself confidentially to Selden. "She looks ten years
younger--I never saw her so handsome. Lady Skiddaw took her everywhere in
Cannes, and the Crown Princess of Macedonia had her to stop for a week at
Cimiez. People say that was one reason why Bertha whisked the yacht off
to Sicily: the Crown Princess didn't take much notice of her, and she
couldn't bear to look on at Lily's triumph."

Selden made no reply. He was vaguely aware that Miss Bart was cruising in
the Mediterranean with the Dorsets, but it had not occurred to him that
there was any chance of running across her on the Riviera, where the
season was virtually at an end. As he leaned back, silently contemplating
his filigree cup of Turkish coffee, he was trying to put some order in
his thoughts, to tell himself how the news of her nearness was really
affecting him. He had a personal detachment enabling him, even in moments
of emotional high-pressure, to get a fairly clear view of his feelings,
and he was sincerely surprised by the disturbance which the sight of the
Sabrina had produced in him. He had reason to think that his three months
of engrossing professional work, following on the sharp shock of his
disillusionment, had cleared his mind of its sentimental vapours. The
feeling he had nourished and given prominence to was one of thankfulness
for his escape: he was like a traveller so grateful for rescue from a
dangerous accident that at first he is hardly conscious of his bruises.
Now he suddenly felt the latent ache, and realized that after all he had
not come off unhurt.

An hour later, at Mrs. Fisher's side in the Casino gardens, he was trying
to find fresh reasons for forgetting the injury received in the
contemplation of the peril avoided. The party had dispersed with the
loitering indecision characteristic of social movements at Monte Carlo,
where the whole place, and the long gilded hours of the day, seem to
offer an infinity of ways of being idle. Lord Hubert Dacey had finally
gone off in quest of the Duchess of Beltshire, charged by Mrs. Bry with
the delicate negotiation of securing that lady's presence at dinner, the
Stepneys had left for Nice in their motor-car, and Mr. Bry had departed
to take his place in the pigeon shooting match which was at the moment
engaging his highest faculties.

Mrs. Bry, who had a tendency to grow red and stertorous after luncheon,
had been judiciously prevailed upon by Carry Fisher to withdraw to her
hotel for an hour's repose; and Selden and his companion were thus left
to a stroll propitious to confidences. The stroll soon resolved itself
into a tranquil session on a bench overhung with laurel and Banksian
roses, from which they caught a dazzle of blue sea between marble
balusters, and the fiery shafts of cactus-blossoms shooting meteor-like
from the rock. The soft shade of their niche, and the adjacent glitter of
the air, were conducive to an easy lounging mood, and to the smoking of
many cigarettes; and Selden, yielding to these influences, suffered Mrs.
Fisher to unfold to him the history of her recent experiences. She had
come abroad with the Welly Brys at the moment when fashion flees the
inclemency of the New York spring. The Brys, intoxicated by their first
success, already thirsted for new kingdoms, and Mrs. Fisher, viewing the
Riviera as an easy introduction to London society, had guided their
course thither. She had affiliations of her own in every capital, and a
facility for picking them up again after long absences; and the carefully
disseminated rumour of the Brys' wealth had at once gathered about them a
group of cosmopolitan pleasure-seekers.

"But things are not going as well as I expected," Mrs. Fisher frankly
admitted. "It's all very well to say that every body with money can get
into society; but it would be truer to say that NEARLY everybody can.
And the London market is so glutted with new Americans that, to succeed
there now, they must be either very clever or awfully queer. The Brys are
neither. HE would get on well enough if she'd let him alone; they like
his slang and his brag and his blunders. But Louisa spoils it all by
trying to repress him and put herself forward. If she'd be natural
herself--fat and vulgar and bouncing--it would be all right; but as soon
as she meets anybody smart she tries to be slender and queenly.  She
tried it with the Duchess of Beltshire and Lady Skiddaw, and they fled.
I've done my best to make her see her mistake--I've said to her again and
again: 'Just let yourself go, Louisa'; but she keeps up the humbug even
with me--I believe she keeps on being queenly in her own room, with the
door shut.

"The worst of it is," Mrs. Fisher went on, "that she thinks it's all MY
fault. When the Dorsets turned up here six weeks ago, and everybody began
to make a fuss about Lily Bart, I could see Louisa thought that if she'd
had Lily in tow instead of me she would have been hob-nobbing with all
the royalties by this time. She doesn't realize that it's Lily's beauty
that does it: Lord Hubert tells me Lily is thought even handsomer than
when he knew her at Aix ten years ago. It seems she was tremendously
admired there. An Italian Prince, rich and the real thing, wanted to
marry her; but just at the critical moment a good-looking step-son turned
up, and Lily was silly enough to flirt with him while her
marriage-settlements with the step-father were being drawn up. Some
people said the young man did it on purpose. You can fancy the scandal:
there was an awful row between the men, and people began to look at Lily
so queerly that Mrs. Peniston had to pack up and finish her cure
elsewhere. Not that SHE ever understood: to this day she thinks that Aix
didn't suit her, and mentions her having been sent there as proof of the
incompetence of French doctors. That's Lily all over, you know: she works
like a slave preparing the ground and sowing her seed; but the day she
ought to be reaping the harvest she over-sleeps herself or goes off on a
picnic."

Mrs. Fisher paused and looked reflectively at the deep shimmer of sea
between the cactus-flowers. "Sometimes," she added, "I think it's just
flightiness--and sometimes I think it's because, at heart, she despises
the things she's trying for. And it's the difficulty of deciding that
makes her such an interesting study." She glanced tentatively at Selden's
motionless profile, and resumed with a slight sigh: "Well, all I can say
is, I wish she'd give ME some of her discarded opportunities.  I wish we
could change places now, for instance. She could make a very good thing
out of the Brys if she managed them properly, and I should know just how
to look after George Dorset while Bertha is reading Verlaine with Neddy
Silverton."

She met Selden's sound of protest with a sharp derisive glance.  "Well,
what's the use of mincing matters? We all know that's what Bertha brought
her abroad for. When Bertha wants to have a good time she has to provide
occupation for George. At first I thought Lily was going to play her
cards well THIS time, but there are rumours that Bertha is jealous of her
success here and at Cannes, and I shouldn't be surprised if there were a
break any day. Lily's only safeguard is that Bertha needs her badly--oh,
very badly. The Silverton affair is in the acute stage: it's necessary
that George's attention should be pretty continuously distracted. And I'm
bound to say Lily DOES distract it: I believe he'd marry her tomorrow if
he found out there was anything wrong with Bertha. But you know him--he's
as blind as he's jealous; and of course Lily's present business is to
keep him blind. A clever woman might know just the right moment to tear
off the bandage: but Lily isn't clever in that way, and when George does
open his eyes she'll probably contrive not to be in his line of vision."

Selden tossed away his cigarette. "By Jove--it's time for my train," he
exclaimed, with a glance at his watch; adding, in reply to Mrs. Fisher's
surprised comment--"Why, I thought of course you were at Monte!"--a
murmured word to the effect that he was making Nice his head-quarters.

"The worst of it is, she snubs the Brys now," he heard irrelevantly flung
after him.

Ten minutes later, in the high-perched bedroom of an hotel overlooking
the Casino, he was tossing his effects into a couple of gaping
portmanteaux, while the porter waited outside to transport them to the
cab at the door. It took but a brief plunge down the steep white road to
the station to land him safely in the afternoon express for Nice; and not
till he was installed in the corner of an empty carriage, did he exclaim
to himself, with a reaction of self-contempt: "What the deuce am I
running away from?"

The pertinence of the question checked Selden's fugitive impulse before
the train had started. It was ridiculous to be flying like an emotional
coward from an infatuation his reason had conquered.  He had instructed
his bankers to forward some important business letters to Nice, and at
Nice he would quietly await them. He was already annoyed with himself for
having left Monte Carlo, where he had intended to pass the week which
remained to him before sailing; but it would now be difficult to return
on his steps without an appearance of inconsistency from which his pride
recoiled. In his inmost heart he was not sorry to put himself beyond the
probability of meeting Miss Bart. Completely as he had detached himself
from her, he could not yet regard her merely as a social instance; and
viewed in a more personal ways she was not likely to be a reassuring
object of study. Chance encounters, or even the repeated mention of her
name, would send his thoughts back into grooves from which he had
resolutely detached them; whereas, if she could be entirely excluded from
his life, the pressure of new and varied impressions, with which no
thought of her was connected, would soon complete the work of separation.
Mrs. Fisher's conversation had, indeed, operated to that end; but the
treatment was too painful to be voluntarily chosen while milder remedies
were untried; and Selden thought he could trust himself to return
gradually to a reasonable view of Miss Bart, if only he did not see her.

Having reached the station early, he had arrived at this point in his
reflections before the increasing throng on the platform warned him that
he could not hope to preserve his privacy; the next moment there was a
hand on the door, and he turned to confront the very face he was fleeing.

Miss Bart, glowing with the haste of a precipitate descent upon the
train, headed a group composed of the Dorsets, young Silverton and Lord
Hubert Dacey, who had barely time to spring into the carriage, and
envelop Selden in ejaculations of surprise and welcome, before the
whistle of departure sounded. The party, it appeared, were hastening to
Nice in response to a sudden summons to dine with the Duchess of
Beltshire and to see the water-fete in the bay; a plan evidently
improvised--in spite of Lord Hubert's protesting "Oh, I say, you
know,"--for the express purpose of defeating Mrs. Bry's endeavour to
capture the Duchess.

During the laughing relation of this manoeuvre, Selden had time for a
rapid impression of Miss Bart, who had seated herself opposite to him in
the golden afternoon light. Scarcely three months had elapsed since he
had parted from her on the threshold of the Brys' conservatory; but a
subtle change had passed over the quality of her beauty. Then it had had
a transparency through which the fluctuations of the spirit were
sometimes tragically visible; now its impenetrable surface suggested a
process of crystallization which had fused her whole being into one hard
brilliant substance. The change had struck Mrs. Fisher as a rejuvenation:
to Selden it seemed like that moment of pause and arrest when the warm
fluidity of youth is chilled into its final shape.

He felt it in the way she smiled on him, and in the readiness and
competence with which, flung unexpectedly into his presence, she took up
the thread of their intercourse as though that thread had not been
snapped with a violence from which he still reeled. Such facility
sickened him--but he told himself that it was with the pang which
precedes recovery. Now he would really get well--would eject the last
drop of poison from his blood. Already he felt himself calmer in her
presence than he had learned to be in the thought of her. Her assumptions
and elisions, her short-cuts and long DETOURS, the skill with which she
contrived to meet him at a point from which no inconvenient glimpses of
the past were visible, suggested what opportunities she had had for
practising such arts since their last meeting. He felt that she had at
last arrived at an understanding with herself: had made a pact with her
rebellious impulses, and achieved a uniform system of self-government,
under which all vagrant tendencies were either held captive or forced
into the service of the state.

And he saw other things too in her manner: saw how it had adjusted itself
to the hidden intricacies of a situation in which, even after Mrs.
Fisher's elucidating flashes, he still felt himself agrope. Surely Mrs.
Fisher could no longer charge Miss Bart with neglecting her
opportunities! To Selden's exasperated observation she was only too
completely alive to them. She was "perfect" to every one: subservient to
Bertha's anxious predominance, good-naturedly watchful of Dorset's moods,
brightly companionable to Silverton and Dacey, the latter of whom met her
on an evident footing of old admiration, while young Silverton,
portentously self-absorbed, seemed conscious of her only as of something
vaguely obstructive. And suddenly, as Selden noted the fine shades of
manner by which she harmonized herself with her surroundings, it flashed
on him that, to need such adroit handling, the situation must indeed be
desperate. She was on the edge of something--that was the impression left
with him.  He seemed to see her poised on the brink of a chasm, with one
graceful foot advanced to assert her unconsciousness that the ground was
failing her.

On the Promenade des Anglais, where Ned Silverton hung on him for the
half hour before dinner, he received a deeper impression of the general
insecurity. Silverton was in a mood of Titanic pessimism. How any one
could come to such a damned hole as the Riviera--any one with a grain of
imagination--with the whole Mediterranean to choose from: but then, if
one's estimate of a place depended on the way they broiled a spring
chicken! Gad!  what a study might be made of the tyranny of the
stomach--the way a sluggish liver or insufficient gastric juices might
affect the whole course of the universe, overshadow everything in
reach--chronic dyspepsia ought to be among the "statutory causes"; a
woman's life might be ruined by a man's inability to digest fresh bread.
Grotesque? Yes--and tragic--like most absurdities. There's nothing
grimmer than the tragedy that wears a comic mask.... Where was he?
Oh--the reason they chucked Sicily and rushed back? Well--partly, no
doubt, Miss Bart's desire to get back to bridge and smartness. Dead as a
stone to art and poetry--the light never WAS on sea or land for her! And
of course she persuaded Dorset that the Italian food was bad for him. Oh,
she could make him believe anything--ANYTHING! Mrs. Dorset was aware of
it--oh, perfectly: nothing SHE didn't see! But she could hold her
tongue--she'd had to, often enough. Miss Bart was an intimate friend--she
wouldn't hear a word against her. Only it hurts a woman's pride--there
are some things one doesn't get used to . . . All this in confidence, of
course? Ah--and there were the ladies signalling from the balcony of the
hotel.... He plunged across the Promenade, leaving Selden to a meditative
cigar.

The conclusions it led him to were fortified, later in the evening, by
some of those faint corroborative hints that generate a light of their
own in the dusk of a doubting mind. Selden, stumbling on a chance
acquaintance, had dined with him, and adjourned, still in his company, to
the brightly lit Promenade, where a line of crowded stands commanded the
glittering darkness of the waters. The night was soft and persuasive.
Overhead hung a summer sky furrowed with the rush of rockets; and from
the east a late moon, pushing up beyond the lofty bend of the coast, sent
across the bay a shaft of brightness which paled to ashes in the red
glitter of the illuminated boats. Down the lantern-hung Promenade,
snatches of band-music floated above the hum of the crowd and the soft
tossing of boughs in dusky gardens; and between these gardens and the
backs of the stands there flowed a stream of people in whom the
vociferous carnival mood seemed tempered by the growing languor of the
season.

Selden and his companion, unable to get seats on one of the stands facing
the bay, had wandered for a while with the throng, and then found a point
of vantage on a high garden-parapet above the Promenade.  Thence they
caught but a triangular glimpse of the water, and of the flashing play of
boats across its surface; but the crowd in the street was under their
immediate view, and seemed to Selden, on the whole, of more interest than
the show itself. After a while, however, he wearied of his perch and,
dropping alone to the pavement, pushed his way to the first corner and
turned into the moonlit silence of a side street. Long garden-walls
overhung by trees made a dark boundary to the pavement; an empty cab
trailed along the deserted thoroughfare, and presently Selden saw two
persons emerge from the opposite shadows, signal to the cab, and drive
off in it toward the centre of the town. The moonlight touched them as
they paused to enter the carriage, and he recognized Mrs. Dorset and
young Silverton.

Beneath the nearest lamp-post he glanced at his watch and saw that the
time was close on eleven. He took another cross street, and without
breasting the throng on the Promenade, made his way to the fashionable
club which overlooks that thoroughfare. Here, amid the blaze of crowded
baccarat tables, he caught sight of Lord Hubert Dacey, seated with his
habitual worn smile behind a rapidly dwindling heap of gold. The heap
being in due course wiped out, Lord Hubert rose with a shrug, and joining
Selden, adjourned with him to the deserted terrace of the club.  It was
now past midnight, and the throng on the stands was dispersing, while the
long trails of red-lit boats scattered and faded beneath a sky
repossessed by the tranquil splendour of the moon.

Lord Hubert looked at his watch. "By Jove, I promised to join the Duchess
for supper at the LONDON HOUSE; but it's past twelve, and I suppose
they've all scattered. The fact is, I lost them in the crowd soon after
dinner, and took refuge here, for my sins. They had seats on one of the
stands, but of course they couldn't stop quiet: the Duchess never can.
She and Miss Bart went off in quest of what they call adventures--gad, it
ain't their fault if they don't have some queer ones!" He added
tentatively, after pausing to grope for a cigarette: "Miss Bart's an old
friend of yours, I believe? So she told me.--Ah, thanks--I don't seem to
have one left." He lit Selden's proffered cigarette, and continued, in
his high-pitched drawling tone: "None of my business, of course, but I
didn't introduce her to the Duchess.  Charming woman, the Duchess, you
understand; and a very good friend of mine; but RATHER a liberal
education."

Selden received this in silence, and after a few puffs Lord Hubert broke
out again: "Sort of thing one can't communicate to the young lady--though
young ladies nowadays are so competent to judge for themselves; but in
this case--I'm an old friend too, you know . . . and there seemed no one
else to speak to. The whole situation's a little mixed, as I see it--but
there used to be an aunt somewhere, a diffuse and innocent person, who
was great at bridging over chasms she didn't see . . . Ah, in New York,
is she? Pity New York's such a long way off!"

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

completion: The chapter opens with Selden in Monte Carlo. He is accompanying the Stepneys, the Brys, Lord Hubert Dacey, and Carry. Selden is informed that Lily is also in Europe, where she is vacationing with the Dorsets, and that she has been causing a mild sensation. Carry tells Selden that Lily appears 10 years younger, and that she has become a favorite companion of the Crown Princess of Macedonia. These revelations awaken Selden's hurt feelings over Lily, which surprises him as he believed he had recovered from his feelings of unrequited affection. Carry and Selden go for a walk together, and she tells Selden that Lily once had prospects to marry a rich Italian prince during a visit to Europe five years earlier. She reveals that marriage documents were being prepared between the prince and Mrs. Peniston when Lily began flirting with the prince's stepson. Carry further gossips that Lily's current visit to Europe was prompted by Bertha's desire to have Lily distract Dorset while Bertha carried on a flirtation with Ned Silverton. Shocked and dismayed by the candid nature of the conversation, Selden excuses himself. Upon catching the train back to Nice, Selden reemphasizes his resolve to avoid contact with Lily. As he boards the train, however, he is confronted by Lily, who is accompanying the Dorsets, Silverton, and Dacey to Nice in order to dine with the Duchess of Beltshire. He notices that Carry's assessment that Lily's beauty had blossomed while in Europe is correct. In Nice, Silverton tells Selden that the trip to Nice was prompted by Lily's manipulation of Dorset. This manipulation, he tells Selden, was performed in open view of Bertha, who refused to hear any ill words against Lily. Silverton confides to Selden, however, that such actions could not help but injure Bertha's pride. In the meantime, Bertha's flirtation with Silverton reaches its apex when Selden observes the pair hailing a carriage for what the reader can assume will be a romantic tryst.


prompt:
Chapter: Miss Bart, emerging late the next morning from her cabin, found herself
alone on the deck of the Sabrina. The cushioned chairs, disposed
expectantly under the wide awning, showed no signs of recent occupancy,
and she presently learned from a steward that Mrs. Dorset had not yet
appeared, and that the gentlemen--separately--had gone ashore as soon as
they had breakfasted. Supplied with these facts, Lily leaned awhile over
the side, giving herself up to a leisurely enjoyment of the spectacle
before her. Unclouded sunlight enveloped sea and shore in a bath of
purest radiancy. The purpling waters drew a sharp white line of foam at
the base of the shore; against its irregular eminences, hotels and villas
flashed from the greyish verdure of olive and eucalyptus; and the
background of bare and finely-pencilled mountains quivered in a pale
intensity of light.

How beautiful it was--and how she loved beauty! She had always felt that
her sensibility in this direction made up for certain obtusenesses of
feeling of which she was less proud; and during the last three months she
had indulged it passionately. The Dorsets' invitation to go abroad with
them had come as an almost miraculous release from crushing difficulties;
and her faculty for renewing herself in new scenes, and casting off
problems of conduct as easily as the surroundings in which they had
arisen, made the mere change from one place to another seem, not merely a
postponement, but a solution of her troubles. Moral complications existed
for her only in the environment that had produced them; she did not mean
to slight or ignore them, but they lost their reality when they changed
their background. She could not have remained in New York without
repaying the money she owed to Trenor; to acquit herself of that odious
debt she might even have faced a marriage with Rosedale; but the accident
of placing the Atlantic between herself and her obligations made them
dwindle out of sight as if they had been milestones and she had travelled
past them.

Her two months on the Sabrina had been especially calculated to aid this
illusion of distance. She had been plunged into new scenes, and had found
in them a renewal of old hopes and ambitions. The cruise itself charmed
her as a romantic adventure.  She was vaguely touched by the names and
scenes amid which she moved, and had listened to Ned Silverton reading
Theocritus by moonlight, as the yacht rounded the Sicilian promontories,
with a thrill of the nerves that confirmed her belief in her intellectual
superiority. But the weeks at Cannes and Nice had really given her more
pleasure. The gratification of being welcomed in high company, and of
making her own ascendency felt there, so that she found herself figuring
once more as the "beautiful Miss Bart" in the interesting journal devoted
to recording the least movements of her cosmopolitan companions--all
these experiences tended to throw into the extreme background of memory
the prosaic and sordid difficulties from which she had escaped.

If she was faintly aware of fresh difficulties ahead, she was sure of her
ability to meet them: it was characteristic of her to feel that the only
problems she could not solve were those with which she was familiar.
Meanwhile she could honestly be proud of the skill with which she had
adapted herself to somewhat delicate conditions. She had reason to think
that she had made herself equally necessary to her host and hostess; and
if only she had seen any perfectly irreproachable means of drawing a
financial profit from the situation, there would have been no cloud on
her horizon. The truth was that her funds, as usual, were inconveniently
low; and to neither Dorset nor his wife could this vulgar embarrassment
be safely hinted. Still, the need was not a pressing one; she could worry
along, as she had so often done before, with the hope of some happy
change of fortune to sustain her; and meanwhile life was gay and
beautiful and easy, and she was conscious of figuring not unworthily in
such a setting.

She was engaged to breakfast that morning with the Duchess of Beltshire,
and at twelve o'clock she asked to be set ashore in the gig.  Before this
she had sent her maid to enquire if she might see Mrs. Dorset; but the
reply came back that the latter was tired, and trying to sleep. Lily
thought she understood the reason of the rebuff. Her hostess had not been
included in the Duchess's invitation, though she herself had made the
most loyal efforts in that direction. But her grace was impervious to
hints, and invited or omitted as she chose. It was not Lily's fault if
Mrs. Dorset's complicated attitudes did not fall in with the Duchess's
easy gait. The Duchess, who seldom explained herself, had not formulated
her objection beyond saying: "She's rather a bore, you know. The only one
of your friends I like is that little Mr. Bry--HE'S funny--" but Lily
knew enough not to press the point, and was not altogether sorry to be
thus distinguished at her friend's expense. Bertha certainly HAD grown
tiresome since she had taken to poetry and Ned Silverton.

On the whole, it was a relief to break away now and then from the
Sabrina; and the Duchess's little breakfast, organized by Lord Hubert
with all his usual virtuosity, was the pleasanter to Lily for not
including her travelling-companions. Dorset, of late, had grown more than
usually morose and incalculable, and Ned Silverton went about with an air
that seemed to challenge the universe. The freedom and lightness of the
ducal intercourse made an agreeable change from these complications, and
Lily was tempted, after luncheon, to adjourn in the wake of her
companions to the hectic atmosphere of the Casino. She did not mean to
play; her diminished pocket-money offered small scope for the adventure;
but it amused her to sit on a divan, under the doubtful protection of the
Duchess's back, while the latter hung above her stakes at a neighbouring
table.

The rooms were packed with the gazing throng which, in the afternoon
hours, trickles heavily between the tables, like the Sunday crowd in a
lion-house. In the stagnant flow of the mass, identities were hardly
distinguishable; but Lily presently saw Mrs. Bry cleaving her determined
way through the doors, and, in the broad wake she left, the light figure
of Mrs. Fisher bobbing after her like a row-boat at the stern of a tug.
Mrs. Bry pressed on, evidently animated by the resolve to reach a certain
point in the rooms; but Mrs. Fisher, as she passed Lily, broke from her
towing-line, and let herself float to the girl's side.

"Lose her?" she echoed the latter's query, with an indifferent glance at
Mrs. Bry's retreating back. "I daresay--it doesn't matter: I HAVE lost
her already." And, as Lily exclaimed, she added: "We had an awful row
this morning. You know, of course, that the Duchess chucked her at dinner
last night, and she thinks it was my fault--my want of management. The
worst of it is, the message--just a mere word by telephone--came so late
that the dinner HAD to be paid for; and Becassin HAD run it up--it had
been so drummed into him that the Duchess was coming!" Mrs. Fisher
indulged in a faint laugh at the remembrance. "Paying for what she
doesn't get rankles so dreadfully with Louisa: I can't make her see that
it's one of the preliminary steps to getting what you haven't paid
for--and as I was the nearest thing to smash, she smashed me to atoms,
poor dear!"

Lily murmured her commiseration. Impulses of sympathy came naturally to
her, and it was instinctive to proffer her help to Mrs. Fisher.

"If there's anything I can do--if it's only a question of meeting the
Duchess! I heard her say she thought Mr. Bry amusing----"

But Mrs. Fisher interposed with a decisive gesture. "My dear, I have my
pride: the pride of my trade. I couldn't manage the Duchess, and I can't
palm off your arts on Louisa Bry as mine.  I've taken the final step: I
go to Paris tonight with the Sam Gormers. THEY'RE still in the elementary
stage; an Italian Prince is a great deal more than a Prince to them, and
they're always on the brink of taking a courier for one.  To save them
from that is my present mission." She laughed again at the picture. "But
before I go I want to make my last will and testament--I want to leave
you the Brys."

"Me?" Miss Bart joined in her amusement. "It's charming of you to
remember me, dear; but really----"

"You're already so well provided for?" Mrs. Fisher flashed a sharp glance
at her. "ARE you, though, Lily--to the point of rejecting my offer?"

Miss Bart coloured slowly. "What I really meant was, that the Brys
wouldn't in the least care to be so disposed of."

Mrs. Fisher continued to probe her embarrassment with an unflinching eye.
"What you really meant was that you've snubbed the Brys horribly; and you
know that they know----"

"Carry!"

"Oh, on certain sides Louisa bristles with perceptions. If you'd even
managed to have them asked once on the Sabrina--especially when royalties
were coming! But it's not too late," she ended earnestly, "it's not too
late for either of you."

Lily smiled. "Stay over, and I'll get the Duchess to dine with them."

"I shan't stay over--the Gormers have paid for my SALON-LIT," said Mrs.
Fisher with simplicity. "But get the Duchess to dine with them all the
same."

Lily's smile again flowed into a slight laugh: her friend's importunity
was beginning to strike her as irrelevant. "I'm sorry I have been
negligent about the Brys----" she began.

"Oh, as to the Brys--it's you I'm thinking of," said Mrs. Fisher
abruptly. She paused, and then, bending forward, with a lowered voice:
"You know we all went on to Nice last night when the Duchess chucked us.
It was Louisa's idea--I told her what I thought of it."

Miss Bart assented. "Yes--I caught sight of you on the way back, at the
station."

"Well, the man who was in the carriage with you and George Dorset--that
horrid little Dabham who does 'Society Notes from the Riviera'--had been
dining with us at Nice. And he's telling everybody that you and Dorset
came back alone after midnight."

"Alone--? When he was with us?" Lily laughed, but her laugh faded into
gravity under the prolonged implication of Mrs. Fisher's look. "We DID
come back alone--if that's so very dreadful! But whose fault was it?  The
Duchess was spending the night at Cimiez with the Crown Princess; Bertha
got bored with the show, and went off early, promising to meet us at the
station. We turned up on time, but she didn't--she didn't turn up at all!"

Miss Bart made this announcement in the tone of one who presents, with
careless assurance, a complete vindication; but Mrs. Fisher received it
in a manner almost inconsequent. She seemed to have lost sight of her
friend's part in the incident: her inward vision had taken another slant.

"Bertha never turned up at all? Then how on earth did she get back?"

"Oh, by the next train, I suppose; there were two extra ones for the
FETE. At any rate, I know she's safe on the yacht, though I haven't yet
seen her; but you see it was not my fault," Lily summed up.

"Not your fault that Bertha didn't turn up? My poor child, if only you
don't have to pay for it!" Mrs. Fisher rose--she had seen Mrs. Bry
surging back in her direction. "There's Louisa, and I must be off--oh,
we're on the best of terms externally; we're lunching together; but at
heart it's ME she's lunching on," she explained; and with a last
hand-clasp and a last look, she added: "Remember, I leave her to you;
she's hovering now, ready to take you in."

Lily carried the impression of Mrs. Fisher's leave-taking away with her
from the Casino doors. She had accomplished, before leaving, the first
step toward her reinstatement in Mrs. Bry's good graces. An affable
advance--a vague murmur that they must see more of each other--an
allusive glance to a near future that was felt to include the Duchess as
well as the Sabrina--how easily it was all done, if one possessed the
knack of doing it!  She wondered at herself, as she had so often
wondered, that, possessing the knack, she did not more consistently
exercise it.  But sometimes she was forgetful--and sometimes, could it be
that she was proud? Today, at any rate, she had been vaguely conscious of
a reason for sinking her pride, had in fact even sunk it to the point of
suggesting to Lord Hubert Dacey, whom she ran across on the Casino steps,
that he might really get the Duchess to dine with the Brys, if SHE
undertook to have them asked on the Sabrina. Lord Hubert had promised his
help, with the readiness on which she could always count: it was his only
way of ever reminding her that he had once been ready to do so much more
for her. Her path, in short, seemed to smooth itself before her as she
advanced; yet the faint stir of uneasiness persisted. Had it been
produced, she wondered, by her chance meeting with Selden?  She thought
not--time and change seemed so completely to have relegated him to his
proper distance. The sudden and exquisite reaction from her anxieties had
had the effect of throwing the recent past so far back that even Selden,
as part of it, retained a certain air of unreality. And he had made it so
clear that they were not to meet again; that he had merely dropped down
to Nice for a day or two, and had almost his foot on the next steamer.
No--that part of the past had merely surged up for a moment on the
fleeing surface of events; and now that it was submerged again, the
uncertainty, the apprehension persisted.

They grew to sudden acuteness as she caught sight of George Dorset
descending the steps of the Hotel de Paris and making for her across the
square. She had meant to drive down to the quay and regain the yacht; but
she now had the immediate impression that something more was to happen
first.

"Which way are you going? Shall we walk a bit?" he began, putting the
second question before the first was answered, and not waiting for a
reply to either before he directed her silently toward the comparative
seclusion of the lower gardens.

She detected in him at once all the signs of extreme nervous tension.
The skin was puffed out under his sunken eyes, and its sallowness had
paled to a leaden white against which his irregular eyebrows and long
reddish moustache were relieved with a saturnine effect. His appearance,
in short, presented an odd mixture of the bedraggled and the ferocious.

He walked beside her in silence, with quick precipitate steps, till they
reached the embowered slopes to the east of the Casino; then, pulling up
abruptly, he said: "Have you seen Bertha?"

"No--when I left the yacht she was not yet up."

He received this with a laugh like the whirring sound in a disabled
clock. "Not yet up? Had she gone to bed? Do you know at what time she
came on board? This morning at seven!" he exclaimed.

"At seven?" Lily started. "What happened--an accident to the train?"

He laughed again. "They missed the train--all the trains--they had to
drive back."

"Well----?" She hesitated, feeling at once how little even this necessity
accounted for the fatal lapse of hours.

"Well, they couldn't get a carriage at once--at that time of night, you
know--" the explanatory note made it almost seem as though he were
putting the case for his wife--"and when they finally did, it was only a
one-horse cab, and the horse was lame!"

"How tiresome! I see," she affirmed, with the more earnestness because
she was so nervously conscious that she did not; and after a pause she
added: "I'm so sorry--but ought we to have waited?"

"Waited for the one-horse cab? It would scarcely have carried the four of
us, do you think?"

She took this in what seemed the only possible way, with a laugh intended
to sink the question itself in his humorous treatment of it.  "Well, it
would have been difficult; we should have had to walk by turns. But it
would have been jolly to see the sunrise."

"Yes: the sunrise WAS jolly," he agreed.

"Was it? You saw it, then?"

"I saw it, yes; from the deck. I waited up for them."

"Naturally--I suppose you were worried. Why didn't you call on me to
share your vigil?"

He stood still, dragging at his moustache with a lean weak hand.  "I
don't think you would have cared for its DENOUEMENT," he said with sudden
grimness.

Again she was disconcerted by the abrupt change in his tone, and as in
one flash she saw the peril of the moment, and the need of keeping her
sense of it out of her eyes.

"DENOUEMENT--isn't that too big a word for such a small incident?  The
worst of it, after all, is the fatigue which Bertha has probably slept
off by this time."

She clung to the note bravely, though its futility was now plain to her
in the glare of his miserable eyes.

"Don't--don't----!" he broke out, with the hurt cry of a child; and while
she tried to merge her sympathy, and her resolve to ignore any cause for
it, in one ambiguous murmur of deprecation, he dropped down on the bench
near which they had paused, and poured out the wretchedness of his soul.

It was a dreadful hour--an hour from which she emerged shrinking and
seared, as though her lids had been scorched by its actual glare. It was
not that she had never had premonitory glimpses of such an outbreak; but
rather because, here and there throughout the three months, the surface
of life had shown such ominous cracks and vapours that her fears had
always been on the alert for an upheaval. There had been moments when the
situation had presented itself under a homelier yet more vivid
image--that of a shaky vehicle, dashed by unbroken steeds over a bumping
road, while she cowered within, aware that the harness wanted mending,
and wondering what would give way first.  Well--everything had given way
now; and the wonder was that the crazy outfit had held together so long.
Her sense of being involved in the crash, instead of merely witnessing it
from the road, was intensified by the way in which Dorset, through his
furies of denunciation and wild reactions of self-contempt, made her feel
the need he had of her, the place she had taken in his life. But for her,
what ear would have been open to his cries?  And what hand but hers could
drag him up again to a footing of sanity and self-respect? All through
the stress of the struggle with him, she had been conscious of something
faintly maternal in her efforts to guide and uplift him. But for the
present, if he clung to her, it was not in order to be dragged up, but to
feel some one floundering in the depths with him: he wanted her to suffer
with him, not to help him to suffer less.

Happily for both, there was little physical strength to sustain his
frenzy. It left him, collapsed and breathing heavily, to an apathy so
deep and prolonged that Lily almost feared the passers-by would think it
the result of a seizure, and stop to offer their aid. But Monte Carlo is,
of all places, the one where the human bond is least close, and odd
sights are the least arresting. If a glance or two lingered on the
couple, no intrusive sympathy disturbed them; and it was Lily herself who
broke the silence by rising from her seat. With the clearing of her
vision the sweep of peril had extended, and she saw that the post of
danger was no longer at Dorset's side.

"If you won't go back, I must--don't make me leave you!" she urged.

But he remained mutely resistant, and she added: "What are you going to
do? You really can't sit here all night."

"I can go to an hotel. I can telegraph my lawyers." He sat up, roused by
a new thought. "By Jove, Selden's at Nice--I'll send for Selden!"

Lily, at this, reseated herself with a cry of alarm. "No, no, NO!" she
protested.

He swung round on her distrustfully. "Why not Selden? He's a lawyer isn't
he? One will do as well as another in a case like this."

"As badly as another, you mean. I thought you relied on ME to help you."

"You do--by being so sweet and patient with me. If it hadn't been for you
I'd have ended the thing long ago. But now it's got to end." He rose
suddenly, straightening himself with an effort.  "You can't want to see
me ridiculous."

She looked at him kindly. "That's just it." Then, after a moment's
pondering, almost to her own surprise she broke out with a flash of
inspiration: "Well, go over and see Mr. Selden. You'll have time to do it
before dinner."

"Oh, DINNER----" he mocked her; but she left him with the smiling
rejoinder: "Dinner on board, remember; we'll put it off till nine if you
like."

It was past four already; and when a cab had dropped her at the quay, and
she stood waiting for the gig to put off for her, she began to wonder
what had been happening on the yacht. Of Silverton's whereabouts there
had been no mention. Had he returned to the Sabrina? Or could Bertha--the
dread alternative sprang on her suddenly--could Bertha, left to herself,
have gone ashore to rejoin him? Lily's heart stood still at the thought.
All her concern had hitherto been for young Silverton, not only because,
in such affairs, the woman's instinct is to side with the man, but
because his case made a peculiar appeal to her sympathies. He was so
desperately in earnest, poor youth, and his earnestness was of so
different a quality from Bertha's, though hers too was desperate enough.
The difference was that Bertha was in earnest only about herself, while
he was in earnest about her.  But now, at the actual crisis, this
difference seemed to throw the weight of destitution on Bertha's side,
since at least he had her to suffer for, and she had only herself. At any
rate, viewed less ideally, all the disadvantages of such a situation were
for the woman; and it was to Bertha that Lily's sympathies now went out.
She was not fond of Bertha Dorset, but neither was she without a sense of
obligation, the heavier for having so little personal liking to sustain
it. Bertha had been kind to her, they had lived together, during the last
months, on terms of easy friendship, and the sense of friction of which
Lily had recently become aware seemed to make it the more urgent that she
should work undividedly in her friend's interest.

It was in Bertha's interest, certainly, that she had despatched Dorset to
consult with Lawrence Selden. Once the grotesqueness of the situation
accepted, she had seen at a glance that it was the safest in which Dorset
could find himself. Who but Selden could thus miraculously combine the
skill to save Bertha with the obligation of doing so? The consciousness
that much skill would be required made Lily rest thankfully in the
greatness of the obligation. Since he would HAVE to pull Bertha through
she could trust him to find a way; and she put the fulness of her trust
in the telegram she managed to send him on her way to the quay.

Thus far, then, Lily felt that she had done well; and the conviction
strengthened her for the task that remained. She and Bertha had never
been on confidential terms, but at such a crisis the barriers of reserve
must surely fall: Dorset's wild allusions to the scene of the morning
made Lily feel that they were down already, and that any attempt to
rebuild them would be beyond Bertha's strength. She pictured the poor
creature shivering behind her fallen defences and awaiting with suspense
the moment when she could take refuge in the first shelter that offered.
If only that shelter had not already offered itself elsewhere! As the gig
traversed the short distance between the quay and the yacht, Lily grew
more than ever alarmed at the possible consequences of her long absence.
What if the wretched Bertha, finding in all the long hours no soul to
turn to--but by this time Lily's eager foot was on the side-ladder, and
her first step on the Sabrina showed the worst of her apprehensions to be
unfounded; for there, in the luxurious shade of the after-deck, the
wretched Bertha, in full command of her usual attenuated elegance, sat
dispensing tea to the Duchess of Beltshire and Lord Hubert.

The sight filled Lily with such surprise that she felt that Bertha, at
least, must read its meaning in her look, and she was proportionately
disconcerted by the blankness of the look returned. But in an instant she
saw that Mrs. Dorset had, of necessity, to look blank before the others,
and that, to mitigate the effect of her own surprise, she must at once
produce some simple reason for it. The long habit of rapid transitions
made it easy for her to exclaim to the Duchess: "Why, I thought you'd
gone back to the Princess!" and this sufficed for the lady she addressed,
if it was hardly enough for Lord Hubert.

At least it opened the way to a lively explanation of how the Duchess
was, in fact, going back the next moment, but had first rushed out to the
yacht for a word with Mrs. Dorset on the subject of tomorrow's
dinner--the dinner with the Brys, to which Lord Hubert had finally
insisted on dragging them.

"To save my neck, you know!" he explained, with a glance that appealed to
Lily for some recognition of his promptness; and the Duchess added, with
her noble candour: "Mr. Bry has promised him a tip, and he says if we go
he'll pass it onto us."

This led to some final pleasantries, in which, as it seemed to Lily, Mrs.
Dorset bore her part with astounding bravery, and at the close of which
Lord Hubert, from half way down the side-ladder, called back, with an air
of numbering heads: "And of course we may count on Dorset too?"

"Oh, count on him," his wife assented gaily. She was keeping up well to
the last--but as she turned back from waving her adieux over the side,
Lily said to herself that the mask must drop and the soul of fear look
out.

Mrs. Dorset turned back slowly; perhaps she wanted time to steady her
muscles; at any rate, they were still under perfect control when,
dropping once more into her seat behind the tea-table, she remarked to
Miss Bart with a faint touch of irony: "I suppose I ought to say good
morning."

If it was a cue, Lily was ready to take it, though with only the vaguest
sense of what was expected of her in return. There was something
unnerving in the contemplation of Mrs. Dorset's composure, and she had to
force the light tone in which she answered: "I tried to see you this
morning, but you were not yet up."

"No--I got to bed late. After we missed you at the station I thought we
ought to wait for you till the last train." She spoke very gently, but
with just the least tinge of reproach.

"You missed us? You waited for us at the station?" Now indeed Lily was
too far adrift in bewilderment to measure the other's words or keep watch
on her own. "But I thought you didn't get to the station till after the
last train had left!"

Mrs. Dorset, examining her between lowered lids, met this with the
immediate query: "Who told you that?"

"George--I saw him just now in the gardens."

"Ah, is that George's version? Poor George--he was in no state to
remember what I told him. He had one of his worst attacks this morning,
and I packed him off to see the doctor. Do you know if he found him?"

Lily, still lost in conjecture, made no reply, and Mrs. Dorset settled
herself indolently in her seat. "He'll wait to see him; he was horribly
frightened about himself. It's very bad for him to be worried, and
whenever anything upsetting happens, it always brings on an attack."

This time Lily felt sure that a cue was being pressed on her; but it was
put forth with such startling suddenness, and with so incredible an air
of ignoring what it led up to, that she could only falter out doubtfully:
"Anything upsetting?"

"Yes--such as having you so conspicuously on his hands in the small
hours. You know, my dear, you're rather a big responsibility in such a
scandalous place after midnight."

At that--at the complete unexpectedness and the inconceivable audacity of
it--Lily could not restrain the tribute of an astonished laugh.

"Well, really--considering it was you who burdened him with the
responsibility!"

Mrs. Dorset took this with an exquisite mildness. "By not having the
superhuman cleverness to discover you in that frightful rush for the
train? Or the imagination to believe that you'd take it without us--you
and he all alone--instead of waiting quietly in the station till we DID
manage to meet you?"

Lily's colour rose: it was growing clear to her that Bertha was pursuing
an object, following a line she had marked out for herself.  Only, with
such a doom impending, why waste time in these childish efforts to avert
it? The puerility of the attempt disarmed Lily's indignation: did it not
prove how horribly the poor creature was frightened?

"No; by our simply all keeping together at Nice," she returned.

"Keeping together? When it was you who seized the first opportunity to
rush off with the Duchess and her friends? My dear Lily, you are not a
child to be led by the hand!"

"No--nor to be lectured, Bertha, really; if that's what you are doing to
me now."

Mrs. Dorset smiled on her reproachfully. "Lecture you--I? Heaven forbid!
I was merely trying to give you a friendly hint. But it's usually the
other way round, isn't it? I'm expected to take hints, not to give them:
I've positively lived on them all these last months."

"Hints--from me to you?" Lily repeated.

"Oh, negative ones merely--what not to be and to do and to see.  And I
think I've taken them to admiration. Only, my dear, if you'll let me say
so, I didn't understand that one of my negative duties was NOT to warn
you when you carried your imprudence too far."

A chill of fear passed over Miss Bart: a sense of remembered treachery
that was like the gleam of a knife in the dusk. But compassion, in a
moment, got the better of her instinctive recoil. What was this
outpouring of senseless bitterness but the tracked creature's attempt to
cloud the medium through which it was fleeing? It was on Lily's lips to
exclaim: "You poor soul, don't double and turn--come straight back to me,
and we'll find a way out!" But the words died under the impenetrable
insolence of Bertha's smile. Lily sat silent, taking the brunt of it
quietly, letting it spend itself on her to the last drop of its
accumulated falseness; then, without a word, she rose and went down to
her cabin.

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

completion: The following morning, Lily awakens aboard the Dorsets' yacht, the Sabrina. She requests a meeting with Bertha but is rebuffed. Instead, Lily leaves the yacht to attend a breakfast with the Duchess of Beltshire. On her way to breakfast, Lily encounters Carry, who offers Lily the chance to replace her as the Brys' social consort. She advises Lily to accept the position because she believes Lily is on the verge of social scandal. Carry reveals that the society writer Dabham has told everyone that he witnessed Lily returning alone with Dorset the previous evening after midnight. Lily protests that she and Dorset had waited for Bertha and Silverton at the train station, but the second couple never arrived. Lily then encounters Dorset, who tells Lily that Silverton and Bertha did not return to the Sabrina until after seven in the morning. He relates Bertha's excuse, which includes a preposterous scenario of a carriage drawn by one lame horse. Suspecting his wife has been unfaithful, Dorset takes Lily's advice to seek Selden's legal counsel. Lily speaks with Bertha, who tells a slightly different version of the story she had previously related to Dorset. When Lily notes the discrepancy, Bertha blames the inconsistency on her husband's "attack" of nerves. The two women engage in an argument during which it becomes apparent that Bertha is accusing Lily of seducing Dorset in order to mask her own infidelity.


prompt:
Chapter: Miss Bart's telegram caught Lawrence Selden at the door of his hotel; and
having read it, he turned back to wait for Dorset. The message
necessarily left large gaps for conjecture; but all that he had recently
heard and seen made these but too easy to fill in. On the whole he was
surprised; for though he had perceived that the situation contained all
the elements of an explosion, he had often enough, in the range of his
personal experience, seen just such combinations subside into
harmlessness. Still, Dorset's spasmodic temper, and his wife's reckless
disregard of appearances, gave the situation a peculiar insecurity; and
it was less from the sense of any special relation to the case than from
a purely professional zeal, that Selden resolved to guide the pair to
safety. Whether, in the present instance, safety for either lay in
repairing so damaged a tie, it was no business of his to consider: he had
only, on general principles, to think of averting a scandal, and his
desire to avert it was increased by his fear of its involving Miss Bart.
There was nothing specific in this apprehension; he merely wished to
spare her the embarrassment of being ever so remotely connected with the
public washing of the Dorset linen.

How exhaustive and unpleasant such a process would be, he saw even more
vividly after his two hours' talk with poor Dorset. If anything came out
at all, it would be such a vast unpacking of accumulated moral rags as
left him, after his visitor had gone, with the feeling that he must fling
open the windows and have his room swept out. But nothing should come
out; and happily for his side of the case, the dirty rags, however pieced
together, could not, without considerable difficulty, be turned into a
homogeneous grievance. The torn edges did not always fit--there were
missing bits, there were disparities of size and colour, all of which it
was naturally Selden's business to make the most of in putting them under
his client's eye. But to a man in Dorset's mood the completest
demonstration could not carry conviction, and Selden saw that for the
moment all he could do was to soothe and temporize, to offer sympathy and
to counsel prudence. He let Dorset depart charged to the brim with the
sense that, till their next meeting, he must maintain a strictly
noncommittal attitude; that, in short, his share in the game consisted
for the present in looking on. Selden knew, however, that he could not
long keep such violences in equilibrium; and he promised to meet Dorset,
the next morning, at an hotel in Monte Carlo. Meanwhile he counted not a
little on the reaction of weakness and self-distrust that, in such
natures, follows on every unwonted expenditure of moral force; and his
telegraphic reply to Miss Bart consisted simply in the injunction:
"Assume that everything is as usual."

On this assumption, in fact, the early part of the following day was
lived through. Dorset, as if in obedience to Lily's imperative bidding,
had actually returned in time for a late dinner on the yacht. The repast
had been the most difficult moment of the day. Dorset was sunk in one of
the abysmal silences which so commonly followed on what his wife called
his "attacks" that it was easy, before the servants, to refer it to this
cause; but Bertha herself seemed, perversely enough, little disposed to
make use of this obvious means of protection. She simply left the brunt
of the situation on her husband's hands, as if too absorbed in a
grievance of her own to suspect that she might be the object of one
herself. To Lily this attitude was the most ominous, because the most
perplexing, element in the situation. As she tried to fan the weak
flicker of talk, to build up, again and again, the crumbling structure of
"appearances," her own attention was perpetually distracted by the
question: "What on earth can she be driving at?" There was something
positively exasperating in Bertha's attitude of isolated defiance. If
only she would have given her friend a hint they might still have worked
together successfully; but how could Lily be of use, while she was thus
obstinately shut out from participation? To be of use was what she
honestly wanted; and not for her own sake but for the Dorsets'. She had
not thought of her own situation at all: she was simply engrossed in
trying to put a little order in theirs. But the close of the short dreary
evening left her with a sense of effort hopelessly wasted. She had not
tried to see Dorset alone: she had positively shrunk from a renewal of
his confidences. It was Bertha whose confidence she sought, and who
should as eagerly have invited her own; and Bertha, as if in the
infatuation of self-destruction, was actually pushing away her rescuing
hand.

Lily, going to bed early, had left the couple to themselves; and it
seemed part of the general mystery in which she moved that more than an
hour should elapse before she heard Bertha walk down the silent passage
and regain her room. The morrow, rising on an apparent continuance of the
same conditions, revealed nothing of what had occurred between the
confronted pair. One fact alone outwardly proclaimed the change they were
all conspiring to ignore; and that was the non-appearance of Ned
Silverton. No one referred to it, and this tacit avoidance of the subject
kept it in the immediate foreground of consciousness. But there was
another change, perceptible only to Lily; and that was that Dorset now
avoided her almost as pointedly as his wife. Perhaps he was repenting his
rash outpourings of the previous day; perhaps only trying, in his clumsy
way, to conform to Selden's counsel to behave "as usual." Such
instructions no more make for easiness of attitude than the
photographer's behest to "look natural"; and in a creature as unconscious
as poor Dorset of the appearance he habitually presented, the struggle to
maintain a pose was sure to result in queer contortions.

It resulted, at any rate, in throwing Lily strangely on her own
resources. She had learned, on leaving her room, that Mrs. Dorset was
still invisible, and that Dorset had left the yacht early; and feeling
too restless to remain alone, she too had herself ferried ashore.
Straying toward the Casino, she attached herself to a group of
acquaintances from Nice, with whom she lunched, and in whose company she
was returning to the rooms when she encountered Selden crossing the
square. She could not, at the moment, separate herself definitely from
her party, who had hospitably assumed that she would remain with them
till they took their departure; but she found time for a momentary pause
of enquiry, to which he promptly returned: "I've seen him again--he's
just left me."

She waited before him anxiously. "Well? what has happened? What WILL
happen?"

"Nothing as yet--and nothing in the future, I think."

"It's over, then? It's settled? You're sure?"

He smiled. "Give me time. I'm not sure--but I'm a good deal surer." And
with that she had to content herself, and hasten on to the expectant
group on the steps.

Selden had in fact given her the utmost measure of his sureness, had even
stretched it a shade to meet the anxiety in her eyes.  And now, as he
turned away, strolling down the hill toward the station, that anxiety
remained with him as the visible justification of his own. It was not,
indeed, anything specific that he feared: there had been a literal truth
in his declaration that he did not think anything would happen. What
troubled him was that, though Dorset's attitude had perceptibly changed,
the change was not clearly to be accounted for. It had certainly not been
produced by Selden's arguments, or by the action of his own soberer
reason. Five minutes' talk sufficed to show that some alien influence had
been at work, and that it had not so much subdued his resentment as
weakened his will, so that he moved under it in a state of apathy, like a
dangerous lunatic who has been drugged.  Temporarily, no doubt, however
exerted, it worked for the general safety: the question was how long it
would last, and by what kind of reaction it was likely to be followed. On
these points Selden could gain no light; for he saw that one effect of
the transformation had been to shut him off from free communion with
Dorset. The latter, indeed, was still moved by the irresistible desire to
discuss his wrong; but, though he revolved about it with the same forlorn
tenacity, Selden was aware that something always restrained him from full
expression. His state was one to produce first weariness and then
impatience in his hearer; and when their talk was over, Selden began to
feel that he had done his utmost, and might justifiably wash his hands of
the sequel.

It was in this mind that he had been making his way back to the station
when Miss Bart crossed his path; but though, after his brief word with
her, he kept mechanically on his course, he was conscious of a gradual
change in his purpose. The change had been produced by the look in her
eyes; and in his eagerness to define the nature of that look, he dropped
into a seat in the gardens, and sat brooding upon the question.  It was
natural enough, in all conscience, that she should appear anxious: a
young woman placed, in the close intimacy of a yachting-cruise, between a
couple on the verge of disaster, could hardly, aside from her concern for
her friends, be insensible to the awkwardness of her own position. The
worst of it was that, in interpreting Miss Bart's state of mind, so many
alternative readings were possible; and one of these, in Selden's
troubled mind, took the ugly form suggested by Mrs. Fisher. If the girl
was afraid, was she afraid for herself or for her friends? And to what
degree was her dread of a catastrophe intensified by the sense of being
fatally involved in it? The burden of offence lying manifestly with Mrs.
Dorset, this conjecture seemed on the face of it gratuitously unkind; but
Selden knew that in the most one-sided matrimonial quarrel there are
generally counter-charges to be brought, and that they are brought with
the greater audacity where the original grievance is so emphatic. Mrs.
Fisher had not hesitated to suggest the likelihood of Dorset's marrying
Miss Bart if "anything happened"; and though Mrs. Fisher's conclusions
were notoriously rash, she was shrewd enough in reading the signs from
which they were drawn. Dorset had apparently shown marked interest in the
girl, and this interest might be used to cruel advantage in his wife's
struggle for rehabilitation. Selden knew that Bertha would fight to the
last round of powder: the rashness of her conduct was illogically
combined with a cold determination to escape its consequences. She could
be as unscrupulous in fighting for herself as she was reckless in
courting danger, and whatever came to her hand at such moments was likely
to be used as a defensive missile. He did not, as yet, see clearly just
what course she was likely to take, but his perplexity increased his
apprehension, and with it the sense that, before leaving, he must speak
again with Miss Bart. Whatever her share in the situation--and he had
always honestly tried to resist judging her by her surroundings--however
free she might be from any personal connection with it, she would be
better out of the way of a possible crash; and since she had appealed to
him for help, it was clearly his business to tell her so.

This decision at last brought him to his feet, and carried him back to
the gambling rooms, within whose doors he had seen her disappearing; but
a prolonged exploration of the crowd failed to put him on her traces. He
saw instead, to his surprise, Ned Silverton loitering somewhat
ostentatiously about the tables; and the discovery that this actor in the
drama was not only hovering in the wings, but actually inviting the
exposure of the footlights, though it might have seemed to imply that all
peril was over, served rather to deepen Selden's sense of foreboding.
Charged with this impression he returned to the square, hoping to see
Miss Bart move across it, as every one in Monte Carlo seemed inevitably
to do at least a dozen times a day; but here again he waited vainly for a
glimpse of her, and the conclusion was slowly forced on him that she had
gone back to the Sabrina. It would be difficult to follow her there, and
still more difficult, should he do so, to contrive the opportunity for a
private word; and he had almost decided on the unsatisfactory alternative
of writing, when the ceaseless diorama of the square suddenly unrolled
before him the figures of Lord Hubert and Mrs. Bry.

Hailing them at once with his question, he learned from Lord Hubert that
Miss Bart had just returned to the Sabrina in Dorset's company; an
announcement so evidently disconcerting to him that Mrs. Bry, after a
glance from her companion, which seemed to act like the pressure on a
spring, brought forth the prompt proposal that he should come and meet
his friends at dinner that evening--"At Becassin's--a little dinner to
the Duchess," she flashed out before Lord Hubert had time to remove the
pressure.

Selden's sense of the privilege of being included in such company brought
him early in the evening to the door of the restaurant, where he paused
to scan the ranks of diners approaching down the brightly lit terrace.
There, while the Brys hovered within over the last agitating alternatives
of the MENU, he kept watch for the guests from the Sabrina, who at length
rose on the horizon in company with the Duchess, Lord and Lady Skiddaw
and the Stepneys.  From this group it was easy for him to detach Miss
Bart on the pretext of a moment's glance into one of the brilliant shops
along the terrace, and to say to her, while they lingered together in the
white dazzle of a jeweller's window: "I stopped over to see you--to beg
of you to leave the yacht."

The eyes she turned on him showed a quick gleam of her former fear. "To
leave--? What do you mean? What has happened?"

"Nothing. But if anything should, why be in the way of it?"

The glare from the jeweller's window, deepening the pallour of her face,
gave to its delicate lines the sharpness of a tragic mask.  "Nothing
will, I am sure; but while there's even a doubt left, how can you think I
would leave Bertha?"

The words rang out on a note of contempt--was it possibly of contempt for
himself? Well, he was willing to risk its renewal to the extent of
insisting, with an undeniable throb of added interest: "You have yourself
to think of, you know--" to which, with a strange fall of sadness in her
voice, she answered, meeting his eyes: "If you knew how little difference
that makes!"

"Oh, well, nothing WILL happen," he said, more for his own reassurance
than for hers; and "Nothing, nothing, of course!" she valiantly assented,
as they turned to overtake their companions.

In the thronged restaurant, taking their places about Mrs. Bry's
illuminated board, their confidence seemed to gain support from the
familiarity of their surroundings. Here were Dorset and his wife once
more presenting their customary faces to the world, she engrossed in
establishing her relation with an intensely new gown, he shrinking with
dyspeptic dread from the multiplied solicitations of the MENU. The mere
fact that they thus showed themselves together, with the utmost openness
the place afforded, seemed to declare beyond a doubt that their
differences were composed. How this end had been attained was still
matter for wonder, but it was clear that for the moment Miss Bart rested
confidently in the result; and Selden tried to achieve the same view by
telling himself that her opportunities for observation had been ampler
than his own.

Meanwhile, as the dinner advanced through a labyrinth of courses, in
which it became clear that Mrs. Bry had occasionally broken away from
Lord Hubert's restraining hand, Selden's general watchfulness began to
lose itself in a particular study of Miss Bart. It was one of the days
when she was so handsome that to be handsome was enough, and all the
rest--her grace, her quickness, her social felicities--seemed the
overflow of a bounteous nature. But what especially struck him was the
way in which she detached herself, by a hundred undefinable shades, from
the persons who most abounded in her own style. It was in just such
company, the fine flower and complete expression of the state she aspired
to, that the differences came out with special poignancy, her grace
cheapening the other women's smartness as her finely-discriminated
silences made their chatter dull. The strain of the last hours had
restored to her face the deeper eloquence which Selden had lately missed
in it, and the bravery of her words to him still fluttered in her voice
and eyes. Yes, she was matchless--it was the one word for her; and he
could give his admiration the freer play because so little personal
feeling remained in it. His real detachment from her had taken place, not
at the lurid moment of disenchantment, but now, in the sober after-light
of discrimination, where he saw her definitely divided from him by the
crudeness of a choice which seemed to deny the very differences he felt
in her. It was before him again in its completeness--the choice in which
she was content to rest: in the stupid costliness of the food and the
showy dulness of the talk, in the freedom of speech which never arrived
at wit and the freedom of act which never made for romance. The strident
setting of the restaurant, in which their table seemed set apart in a
special glare of publicity, and the presence at it of little Dabham of
the "Riviera Notes," emphasized the ideals of a world where
conspicuousness passed for distinction, and the society column had become
the roll of fame.

It was as the immortalizer of such occasions that little Dabham, wedged
in modest watchfulness between two brilliant neighbours, suddenly became
the centre of Selden's scrutiny. How much did he know of what was going
on, and how much, for his purpose, was still worth finding out? His
little eyes were like tentacles thrown out to catch the floating
intimations with which, to Selden, the air at moments seemed thick; then
again it cleared to its normal emptiness, and he could see nothing in it
for the journalist but leisure to note the elegance of the ladies' gowns.
Mrs. Dorset's, in particular, challenged all the wealth of Mr. Dabham's
vocabulary: it had surprises and subtleties worthy of what he would have
called "the literary style." At first, as Selden had noticed, it had been
almost too preoccupying to its wearer; but now she was in full command of
it, and was even producing her effects with unwonted freedom. Was she
not, indeed, too free, too fluent, for perfect naturalness? And was not
Dorset, to whom his glance had passed by a natural transition, too
jerkily wavering between the same extremes?  Dorset indeed was always
jerky; but it seemed to Selden that tonight each vibration swung him
farther from his centre.

The dinner, meanwhile, was moving to its triumphant close, to the evident
satisfaction of Mrs. Bry, who, throned in apoplectic majesty between Lord
Skiddaw and Lord Hubert, seemed in spirit to be calling on Mrs. Fisher to
witness her achievement. Short of Mrs. Fisher her audience might have
been called complete; for the restaurant was crowded with persons mainly
gathered there for the purpose of spectatorship, and accurately posted as
to the names and faces of the celebrities they had come to see. Mrs. Bry,
conscious that all her feminine guests came under that heading, and that
each one looked her part to admiration, shone on Lily with all the
pent-up gratitude that Mrs. Fisher had failed to deserve. Selden,
catching the glance, wondered what part Miss Bart had played in
organizing the entertainment. She did, at least, a great deal to adorn
it; and as he watched the bright security with which she bore herself, he
smiled to think that he should have fancied her in need of help. Never
had she appeared more serenely mistress of the situation than when, at
the moment of dispersal, detaching herself a little from the group about
the table, she turned with a smile and a graceful slant of the shoulders
to receive her cloak from Dorset.

The dinner had been protracted over Mr. Bry's exceptional cigars and a
bewildering array of liqueurs, and many of the other tables were empty;
but a sufficient number of diners still lingered to give relief to the
leave-taking of Mrs. Bry's distinguished guests. This ceremony was drawn
out and complicated by the fact that it involved, on the part of the
Duchess and Lady Skiddaw, definite farewells, and pledges of speedy
reunion in Paris, where they were to pause and replenish their wardrobes
on the way to England. The quality of Mrs. Bry's hospitality, and of the
tips her husband had presumably imparted, lent to the manner of the
English ladies a general effusiveness which shed the rosiest light over
their hostess's future. In its glow Mrs. Dorset and the Stepneys were
also visibly included, and the whole scene had touches of intimacy worth
their weight in gold to the watchful pen of Mr. Dabham.

A glance at her watch caused the Duchess to exclaim to her sister that
they had just time to dash for their train, and the flurry of this
departure over, the Stepneys, who had their motor at the door, offered to
convey the Dorsets and Miss Bart to the quay.  The offer was accepted,
and Mrs. Dorset moved away with her husband in attendance.  Miss Bart had
lingered for a last word with Lord Hubert, and Stepney, on whom Mr. Bry
was pressing a final, and still more expensive, cigar, called out: "Come
on, Lily, if you're going back to the yacht."

Lily turned to obey; but as she did so, Mrs. Dorset, who had paused on
her way out, moved a few steps back toward the table.

"Miss Bart is not going back to the yacht," she said in a voice of
singular distinctness.

A startled look ran from eye to eye; Mrs. Bry crimsoned to the verge of
congestion, Mrs. Stepney slipped nervously behind her husband, and
Selden, in the general turmoil of his sensations, was mainly conscious of
a longing to grip Dabham by the collar and fling him out into the street.

Dorset, meanwhile, had stepped back to his wife's side. His face was
white, and he looked about him with cowed angry eyes.  "Bertha!--Miss
Bart . . . this is some misunderstanding . . .  some mistake . . ."

"Miss Bart remains here," his wife rejoined incisively. "And, I think,
George, we had better not detain Mrs. Stepney any longer."

Miss Bart, during this brief exchange of words, remained in admirable
erectness, slightly isolated from the embarrassed group about her. She
had paled a little under the shock of the insult, but the discomposure of
the surrounding faces was not reflected in her own. The faint disdain of
her smile seemed to lift her high above her antagonist's reach, and it
was not till she had given Mrs. Dorset the full measure of the distance
between them that she turned and extended her hand to her hostess.

"I am joining the Duchess tomorrow," she explained, "and it seemed easier
for me to remain on shore for the night."

She held firmly to Mrs. Bry's wavering eye while she gave this
explanation, but when it was over Selden saw her send a tentative glance
from one to another of the women's faces. She read their incredulity in
their averted looks, and in the mute wretchedness of the men behind them,
and for a miserable half-second he thought she quivered on the brink of
failure. Then, turning to him with an easy gesture, and the pale bravery
of her recovered smile--"Dear Mr. Selden," she said, "you promised to see
me to my cab."

Outside, the sky was gusty and overcast, and as Lily and Selden moved
toward the deserted gardens below the restaurant, spurts of warm rain
blew fitfully against their faces. The fiction of the cab had been
tacitly abandoned; they walked on in silence, her hand on his arm, till
the deeper shade of the gardens received them, and pausing beside a
bench, he said: "Sit down a moment."

She dropped to the seat without answering, but the electric lamp at the
bend of the path shed a gleam on the struggling misery of her face.
Selden sat down beside her, waiting for her to speak, fearful lest any
word he chose should touch too roughly on her wound, and kept also from
free utterance by the wretched doubt which had slowly renewed itself
within him. What had brought her to this pass? What weakness had placed
her so abominably at her enemy's mercy? And why should Bertha Dorset have
turned into an enemy at the very moment when she so obviously needed the
support of her sex? Even while his nerves raged at the subjection of
husbands to their wives, and at the cruelty of women to their kind,
reason obstinately harped on the proverbial relation between smoke and
fire. The memory of Mrs. Fisher's hints, and the corroboration of his own
impressions, while they deepened his pity also increased his constraint,
since, whichever way he sought a free outlet for sympathy, it was blocked
by the fear of committing a blunder.

Suddenly it struck him that his silence must seem almost as accusatory as
that of the men he had despised for turning from her; but before he could
find the fitting word she had cut him short with a question.

"Do you know of a quiet hotel? I can send for my maid in the morning."

"An hotel--HERE--that you can go to alone? It's not possible."

She met this with a pale gleam of her old playfulness. "What IS, then?
It's too wet to sleep in the gardens."

"But there must be some one----"

"Some one to whom I can go? Of course--any number--but at THIS hour?  You
see my change of plan was rather sudden----"

"Good God--if you'd listened to me!" he cried, venting his helplessness
in a burst of anger.

She still held him off with the gentle mockery of her smile. "But haven't
I?" she rejoined. "You advised me to leave the yacht, and I'm leaving it."

He saw then, with a pang of self-reproach, that she meant neither to
explain nor to defend herself; that by his miserable silence he had
forfeited all chance of helping her, and that the decisive hour was past.

She had risen, and stood before him in a kind of clouded majesty, like
some deposed princess moving tranquilly to exile.

"Lily!" he exclaimed, with a note of despairing appeal; but--"Oh, not
now," she gently admonished him; and then, in all the sweetness of her
recovered composure: "Since I must find shelter somewhere, and since
you're so kindly here to help me----"

He gathered himself up at the challenge. "You will do as I tell you?
There's but one thing, then; you must go straight to your cousins, the
Stepneys."

"Oh--" broke from her with a movement of instinctive resistance; but he
insisted: "Come--it's late, and you must appear to have gone there
directly."

He had drawn her hand into his arm, but she held him back with a last
gesture of protest. "I can't--I can't--not that--you don't know Gwen: you
mustn't ask me!"

"I MUST ask you--you must obey me," he persisted, though infected at
heart by her own fear.

Her voice sank to a whisper: "And if she refuses?"--but, "Oh, trust
me--trust me!" he could only insist in return; and yielding to his touch,
she let him lead her back in silence to the edge of the square.

In the cab they continued to remain silent through the brief drive which
carried them to the illuminated portals of the Stepneys' hotel.  Here he
left her outside, in the darkness of the raised hood, while his name was
sent up to Stepney, and he paced the showy hall, awaiting the latter's
descent. Ten minutes later the two men passed out together between the
gold-laced custodians of the threshold; but in the vestibule Stepney drew
up with a last flare of reluctance.

"It's understood, then?" he stipulated nervously, with his hand on
Selden's arm. "She leaves tomorrow by the early train--and my wife's
asleep, and can't be disturbed."

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

completion: Selden receives Lily's telegram requesting his intercession on behalf of the Dorsets. Selden meets with Dorset and fears the worst for Lily's reputation. Lily remains aboard the Sabrina despite the tension between the Dorsets and Bertha's harsh treatment of Lily. Lily goes to town and encounters Selden, who relates his concern for Lily's reputation. He worries that Lily is unable to defend herself socially from Bertha's wrath, and advises Lily to leave the Dorsets' yacht during a dinner hosted by the Brys. Lily asserts that she is in no danger, but Selden's fears are later realized when Bertha announces to the group that Lily will not return with them to the Sabrina. Selden accompanies Lily from the dinner party, vowing to help her find a place to stay. He receives Stepney's permission to let Lily spend the night at their hotel provided that she not disturb Stepney's sleeping wife, Gwen, and that she leave by train the following morning.