prompt:
Chapter: Lily woke from happy dreams to find two notes at her bedside.

One was from Mrs. Trenor, who announced that she was coming to town that
afternoon for a flying visit, and hoped Miss Bart would be able to dine
with her. The other was from Selden. He wrote briefly that an important
case called him to Albany, whence he would be unable to return till the
evening, and asked Lily to let him know at what hour on the following day
she would see him.

Lily, leaning back among her pillows, gazed musingly at his letter. The
scene in the Brys' conservatory had been like a part of her dreams; she
had not expected to wake to such evidence of its reality. Her first
movement was one of annoyance: this unforeseen act of Selden's added
another complication to life. It was so unlike him to yield to such an
irrational impulse! Did he really mean to ask her to marry him? She had
once shown him the impossibility of such a hope, and his subsequent
behaviour seemed to prove that he had accepted the situation with a
reasonableness somewhat mortifying to her vanity. It was all the more
agreeable to find that this reasonableness was maintained only at the
cost of not seeing her; but, though nothing in life was as sweet as the
sense of her power over him, she saw the danger of allowing the episode
of the previous night to have a sequel. Since she could not marry him, it
would be kinder to him, as well as easier for herself, to write a line
amicably evading his request to see her: he was not the man to mistake
such a hint, and when next they met it would be on their usual friendly
footing.

Lily sprang out of bed, and went straight to her desk. She wanted to
write at once, while she could trust to the strength of her resolve.  She
was still languid from her brief sleep and the exhilaration of the
evening, and the sight of Selden's writing brought back the culminating
moment of her triumph: the moment when she had read in his eyes that no
philosophy was proof against her power. It would be pleasant to have that
sensation again . . . no one else could give it to her in its fulness;
and she could not bear to mar her mood of luxurious retrospection by an
act of definite refusal. She took up her pen and wrote hastily: "TOMORROW
AT FOUR;" murmuring to herself, as she slipped the sheet into its
envelope: "I can easily put him off when tomorrow comes."

Judy Trenor's summons was very welcome to Lily. It was the first time she
had received a direct communication from Bellomont since the close of her
last visit there, and she was still visited by the dread of having
incurred Judy's displeasure. But this characteristic command seemed to
reestablish their former relations; and Lily smiled at the thought that
her friend had probably summoned her in order to hear about the Brys'
entertainment. Mrs. Trenor had absented herself from the feast, perhaps
for the reason so frankly enunciated by her husband, perhaps because, as
Mrs. Fisher somewhat differently put it, she "couldn't bear new people
when she hadn't discovered them herself." At any rate, though she
remained haughtily at Bellomont, Lily suspected in her a devouring
eagerness to hear of what she had missed, and to learn exactly in what
measure Mrs. Wellington Bry had surpassed all previous competitors for
social recognition. Lily was quite ready to gratify this curiosity, but
it happened that she was dining out. She determined, however, to see Mrs.
Trenor for a few moments, and ringing for her maid she despatched a
telegram to say that she would be with her friend that evening at ten.

She was dining with Mrs. Fisher, who had gathered at an informal feast a
few of the performers of the previous evening. There was to be plantation
music in the studio after dinner--for Mrs. Fisher, despairing of the
republic, had taken up modelling, and annexed to her small crowded house
a spacious apartment, which, whatever its uses in her hours of plastic
inspiration, served at other times for the exercise of an indefatigable
hospitality. Lily was reluctant to leave, for the dinner was amusing, and
she would have liked to lounge over a cigarette and hear a few songs; but
she could not break her engagement with Judy, and shortly after ten she
asked her hostess to ring for a hansom, and drove up Fifth Avenue to the
Trenors'.

She waited long enough on the doorstep to wonder that Judy's presence in
town was not signalized by a greater promptness in admitting her; and her
surprise was increased when, instead of the expected footman, pushing his
shoulders into a tardy coat, a shabby care-taking person in calico let
her into the shrouded hall. Trenor, however, appeared at once on the
threshold of the drawing-room, welcoming her with unusual volubility
while he relieved her of her cloak and drew her into the room.

"Come along to the den; it's the only comfortable place in the house.
Doesn't this room look as if it was waiting for the body to be brought
down? Can't see why Judy keeps the house wrapped up in this awful
slippery white stuff--it's enough to give a fellow pneumonia to walk
through these rooms on a cold day. You look a little pinched yourself, by
the way: it's rather a sharp night out. I noticed it walking up from the
club. Come along, and I'll give you a nip of brandy, and you can toast
yourself over the fire and try some of my new Egyptians--that little
Turkish chap at the Embassy put me on to a brand that I want you to try,
and if you like 'em I'll get out a lot for you: they don't have 'em here
yet, but I'll cable."

He led her through the house to the large room at the back, where Mrs.
Trenor usually sat, and where, even in her absence, there was an air of
occupancy. Here, as usual, were flowers, newspapers, a littered
writing-table, and a general aspect of lamp-lit familiarity, so that it
was a surprise not to see Judy's energetic figure start up from the
arm-chair near the fire.

It was apparently Trenor himself who had been occupying the seat in
question, for it was overhung by a cloud of cigar smoke, and near it
stood one of those intricate folding tables which British ingenuity has
devised to facilitate the circulation of tobacco and spirits. The sight
of such appliances in a drawing-room was not unusual in Lily's set, where
smoking and drinking were unrestricted by considerations of time and
place, and her first movement was to help herself to one of the
cigarettes recommended by Trenor, while she checked his loquacity by
asking, with a surprised glance: "Where's Judy?"

Trenor, a little heated by his unusual flow of words, and perhaps by
prolonged propinquity with the decanters, was bending over the latter to
decipher their silver labels.

"Here, now, Lily, just a drop of cognac in a little fizzy water--you do
look pinched, you know: I swear the end of your nose is red. I'll take
another glass to keep you company--Judy?--Why, you see, Judy's got a
devil of a head ache--quite knocked out with it, poor thing--she asked me
to explain--make it all right, you know--Do come up to the fire, though;
you look dead-beat, really. Now do let me make you comfortable, there's a
good girl."

He had taken her hand, half-banteringly, and was drawing her toward a low
seat by the hearth; but she stopped and freed herself quietly.

"Do you mean to say that Judy's not well enough to see me?  Doesn't she
want me to go upstairs?"

Trenor drained the glass he had filled for himself, and paused to set it
down before he answered.

"Why, no--the fact is, she's not up to seeing anybody. It came on
suddenly, you know, and she asked me to tell you how awfully sorry she
was--if she'd known where you were dining she'd have sent you word."

"She did know where I was dining; I mentioned it in my telegram.  But it
doesn't matter, of course. I suppose if she's so poorly she won't go back
to Bellomont in the morning, and I can come and see her then."

"Yes: exactly--that's capital. I'll tell her you'll pop in tomorrow
morning. And now do sit down a minute, there's a dear, and let's have a
nice quiet jaw together. You won't take a drop, just for sociability?
Tell me what you think of that cigarette.  Why, don't you like it? What
are you chucking it away for?"

"I am chucking it away because I must go, if you'll have the goodness to
call a cab for me," Lily returned with a smile.

She did not like Trenor's unusual excitability, with its too evident
explanation, and the thought of being alone with him, with her friend out
of reach upstairs, at the other end of the great empty house, did not
conduce to a desire to prolong their TETE-A-TETE.

But Trenor, with a promptness which did not escape her, had moved between
herself and the door.

"Why must you go, I should like to know? If Judy'd been here you'd have
sat gossiping till all hours--and you can't even give me five minutes!
It's always the same story. Last night I couldn't get near you--I went to
that damned vulgar party just to see you, and there was everybody talking
about you, and asking me if I'd ever seen anything so stunning, and when
I tried to come up and say a word, you never took any notice, but just
went on laughing and joking with a lot of asses who only wanted to be
able to swagger about afterward, and look knowing when you were
mentioned."

He paused, flushed by his diatribe, and fixing on her a look in which
resentment was the ingredient she least disliked. But she had regained
her presence of mind, and stood composedly in the middle of the room,
while her slight smile seemed to put an ever increasing distance between
herself and Trenor.

Across it she said: "Don't be absurd, Gus. It's past eleven, and I must
really ask you to ring for a cab."

He remained immovable, with the lowering forehead she had grown to detest.

"And supposing I won't ring for one--what'll you do then?"

"I shall go upstairs to Judy if you force me to disturb her."

Trenor drew a step nearer and laid his hand on her arm. "Look here, Lily:
won't you give me five minutes of your own accord?"

"Not tonight, Gus: you----"

"Very good, then: I'll take 'em. And as many more as I want." He had
squared himself on the threshold, his hands thrust deep in his pockets.
He nodded toward the chair on the hearth.

"Go and sit down there, please: I've got a word to say to you."

Lily's quick temper was getting the better of her fears. She drew herself
up and moved toward the door.

"If you have anything to say to me, you must say it another time.  I
shall go up to Judy unless you call a cab for me at once."

He burst into a laugh. "Go upstairs and welcome, my dear; but you won't
find Judy. She ain't there."

Lily cast a startled look upon him. "Do you mean that Judy is not in the
house--not in town?" she exclaimed.

"That's just what I do mean," returned Trenor, his bluster sinking to
sullenness under her look.

"Nonsense--I don't believe you. I am going upstairs," she said
impatiently.

He drew unexpectedly aside, letting her reach the threshold unimpeded.

"Go up and welcome; but my wife is at Bellomont."

But Lily had a flash of reassurance. "If she hadn't come she would have
sent me word----"

"She did; she telephoned me this afternoon to let you know."

"I received no message."

"I didn't send any."

The two measured each other for a moment, but Lily still saw her opponent
through a blur of scorn that made all other considerations indistinct.

"I can't imagine your object in playing such a stupid trick on me; but if
you have fully gratified your peculiar sense of humour I must again ask
you to send for a cab."

It was the wrong note, and she knew it as she spoke. To be stung by irony
it is not necessary to understand it, and the angry streaks on Trenor's
face might have been raised by an actual lash.

"Look here, Lily, don't take that high and mighty tone with me." He had
again moved toward the door, and in her instinctive shrinking from him
she let him regain command of the threshold.  "I DID play a trick on you;
I own up to it; but if you think I'm ashamed you're mistaken. Lord knows
I've been patient enough--I've hung round and looked like an ass.  And
all the while you were letting a lot of other fellows make up to
you . . . letting 'em make fun of me, I daresay . . . I'm not sharp, and
can't dress my friends up to look funny, as you do . . . but I can tell
when it's being done to me . . . I can tell fast enough when I'm made a
fool of . . ."

"Ah, I shouldn't have thought that!" flashed from Lily; but her laugh
dropped to silence under his look.

"No; you wouldn't have thought it; but you'll know better now. That's
what you're here for tonight. I've been waiting for a quiet time to talk
things over, and now I've got it I mean to make you hear me out."

His first rush of inarticulate resentment had been followed by a
steadiness and concentration of tone more disconcerting to Lily than the
excitement preceding it. For a moment her presence of mind forsook her.
She had more than once been in situations where a quick sword-play of wit
had been needful to cover her retreat; but her frightened heart-throbs
told her that here such skill would not avail.

To gain time she repeated: "I don't understand what you want."

Trenor had pushed a chair between herself and the door. He threw himself
in it, and leaned back, looking up at her.

"I'll tell you what I want: I want to know just where you and I stand.
Hang it, the man who pays for the dinner is generally allowed to have a
seat at table."

She flamed with anger and abasement, and the sickening need of having to
conciliate where she longed to humble.

"I don't know what you mean--but you must see, Gus, that I can't stay
here talking to you at this hour----"

"Gad, you go to men's houses fast enough in broad day light--strikes me
you're not always so deuced careful of appearances."

The brutality of the thrust gave her the sense of dizziness that follows
on a physical blow. Rosedale had spoken then--this was the way men talked
of her--She felt suddenly weak and defenceless: there was a throb of
self-pity in her throat. But all the while another self was sharpening
her to vigilance, whispering the terrified warning that every word and
gesture must be measured.

"If you have brought me here to say insulting things----" she began.

Trenor laughed. "Don't talk stage-rot. I don't want to insult you. But a
man's got his feelings--and you've played with mine too long. I didn't
begin this business--kept out of the way, and left the track clear for
the other chaps, till you rummaged me out and set to work to make an ass
of me--and an easy job you had of it, too. That's the trouble--it was too
easy for you--you got reckless--thought you could turn me inside out, and
chuck me in the gutter like an empty purse.  But, by gad, that ain't
playing fair: that's dodging the rules of the game. Of course I know now
what you wanted--it wasn't my beautiful eyes you were after--but I tell
you what, Miss Lily, you've got to pay up for making me think so----"

He rose, squaring his shoulders aggressively, and stepped toward her with
a reddening brow; but she held her footing, though every nerve tore at
her to retreat as he advanced.

"Pay up?" she faltered. "Do you mean that I owe you money?"

He laughed again. "Oh, I'm not asking for payment in kind. But there's
such a thing as fair play--and interest on one's money--and hang me if
I've had as much as a look from you----"

"Your money? What have I to do with your money? You advised me how to
invest mine . . . you must have seen I knew nothing of business . . .
you told me it was all right----"

"It WAS all right--it is, Lily: you're welcome to all of it, and ten
times more. I'm only asking for a word of thanks from you." He was closer
still, with a hand that grew formidable; and the frightened self in her
was dragging the other down.

"I HAVE thanked you; I've shown I was grateful. What more have you done
than any friend might do, or any one accept from a friend?"

Trenor caught her up with a sneer. "I don't doubt you've accepted as much
before--and chucked the other chaps as you'd like to chuck me. I don't
care how you settled your score with them--if you fooled 'em I'm that
much to the good. Don't stare at me like that--I know I'm not talking the
way a man is supposed to talk to a girl--but, hang it, if you don't like
it you can stop me quick enough--you know I'm mad about you--damn the
money, there's plenty more of it--if THAT bothers you . . .  I was a
brute, Lily--Lily!--just look at me----"

Over and over her the sea of humiliation broke--wave crashing on wave so
close that the moral shame was one with the physical dread. It seemed to
her that self-esteem would have made her invulnerable--that it was her
own dishonour which put a fearful solitude about her.

His touch was a shock to her drowning consciousness. She drew back from
him with a desperate assumption of scorn.

"I've told you I don't understand--but if I owe you money you shall be
paid----"

Trenor's face darkened to rage: her recoil of abhorrence had called out
the primitive man.

"Ah--you'll borrow from Selden or Rosedale--and take your chances of
fooling them as you've fooled me! Unless--unless you've settled your
other scores already--and I'm the only one left out in the cold!"

She stood silent, frozen to her place. The words--the words were worse
than the touch! Her heart was beating all over her body--in her throat,
her limbs, her helpless useless hands. Her eyes travelled despairingly
about the room--they lit on the bell, and she remembered that help was in
call. Yes, but scandal with it--a hideous mustering of tongues. No, she
must fight her way out alone. It was enough that the servants knew her to
be in the house with Trenor--there must be nothing to excite conjecture
in her way of leaving it.

She raised her head, and achieved a last clear look at him.

"I am here alone with you," she said. "What more have you to say?"

To her surprise, Trenor answered the look with a speechless stare. With
his last gust of words the flame had died out, leaving him chill and
humbled. It was as though a cold air had dispersed the fumes of his
libations, and the situation loomed before him black and naked as the
ruins of a fire. Old habits, old restraints, the hand of inherited order,
plucked back the bewildered mind which passion had jolted from its ruts.
Trenor's eye had the haggard look of the sleep-walker waked on a deathly
ledge.

"Go home! Go away from here"----he stammered, and turning his back on her
walked toward the hearth.

The sharp release from her fears restored Lily to immediate lucidity.
The collapse of Trenor's will left her in control, and she heard herself,
in a voice that was her own yet outside herself, bidding him ring for the
servant, bidding him give the order for a hansom, directing him to put
her in it when it came. Whence the strength came to her she knew not; but
an insistent voice warned her that she must leave the house openly, and
nerved her, in the hall before the hovering care taker, to exchange light
words with Trenor, and charge him with the usual messages for Judy, while
all the while she shook with inward loathing. On the doorstep, with the
street before her, she felt a mad throb of liberation, intoxicating as
the prisoner's first draught of free air; but the clearness of brain
continued, and she noted the mute aspect of Fifth Avenue, guessed at the
lateness of the hour, and even observed a man's figure--was there
something half-familiar in its outline?--which, as she entered the
hansom, turned from the opposite corner and vanished in the obscurity of
the side street.

But with the turn of the wheels reaction came, and shuddering darkness
closed on her. "I can't think--I can't think," she moaned, and leaned her
head against the rattling side of the cab.  She seemed a stranger to
herself, or rather there were two selves in her, the one she had always
known, and a new abhorrent being to which it found itself chained. She
had once picked up, in a house where she was staying, a translation of
the EUMENIDES, and her imagination had been seized by the high terror of
the scene where Orestes, in the cave of the oracle, finds his implacable
huntresses asleep, and snatches an hour's repose.  Yes, the Furies might
sometimes sleep, but they were there, always there in the dark corners,
and now they were awake and the iron clang of their wings was in her
brain . . . She opened her eyes and saw the streets passing--the familiar
alien streets. All she looked on was the same and yet changed. There was
a great gulf fixed between today and yesterday. Everything in the past
seemed simple, natural, full of daylight--and she was alone in a place of
darkness and pollution.--Alone! It was the loneliness that frightened
her. Her eyes fell on an illuminated clock at a street corner, and she
saw that the hands marked the half hour after eleven. Only half-past
eleven--there were hours and hours left of the night! And she must spend
them alone, shuddering sleepless on her bed. Her soft nature recoiled
from this ordeal, which had none of the stimulus of conflict to goad her
through it. Oh, the slow cold drip of the minutes on her head! She had a
vision of herself lying on the black walnut bed--and the darkness would
frighten her, and if she left the light burning the dreary details of the
room would brand themselves forever on her brain.  She had always hated
her room at Mrs. Peniston's--its ugliness, its impersonality, the fact
that nothing in it was really hers.  To a torn heart uncomforted by human
nearness a room may open almost human arms, and the being to whom no four
walls mean more than any others, is, at such hours, expatriate everywhere.

Lily had no heart to lean on. Her relation with her aunt was as
superficial as that of chance lodgers who pass on the stairs. But even
had the two been in closer contact, it was impossible to think of Mrs.
Peniston's mind as offering shelter or comprehension to such misery as
Lily's. As the pain that can be told is but half a pain, so the pity that
questions has little healing in its touch. What Lily craved was the
darkness made by enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but
compassion holding its breath.

She started up and looked forth on the passing streets.  Gerty!--they
were nearing Gerty's corner. If only she could reach there before this
labouring anguish burst from her breast to her lips--if only she could
feel the hold of Gerty's arms while she shook in the ague-fit of fear
that was coming upon her! She pushed up the door in the roof and called
the address to the driver. It was not so late--Gerty might still be
waking. And even if she were not, the sound of the bell would penetrate
every recess of her tiny apartment, and rouse her to answer her friend's
call.

Gerty Farish, the morning after the Wellington Brys' entertainment, woke
from dreams as happy as Lily's. If they were less vivid in hue, more
subdued to the half-tints of her personality and her experience, they
were for that very reason better suited to her mental vision. Such
flashes of joy as Lily moved in would have blinded Miss Farish, who was
accustomed, in the way of happiness, to such scant light as shone through
the cracks of other people's lives.

Now she was the centre of a little illumination of her own: a mild but
unmistakable beam, compounded of Lawrence Selden's growing kindness to
herself and the discovery that he extended his liking to Lily Bart. If
these two factors seem incompatible to the student of feminine
psychology, it must be remembered that Gerty had always been a parasite
in the moral order, living on the crumbs of other tables, and content to
look through the window at the banquet spread for her friends. Now that
she was enjoying a little private feast of her own, it would have seemed
incredibly selfish not to lay a plate for a friend; and there was no one
with whom she would rather have shared her enjoyment than Miss Bart.

As to the nature of Selden's growing kindness, Gerty would no more have
dared to define it than she would have tried to learn a butterfly's
colours by knocking the dust from its wings. To seize on the wonder would
be to brush off its bloom, and perhaps see it fade and stiffen in her
hand: better the sense of beauty palpitating out of reach, while she held
her breath and watched where it would alight. Yet Selden's manner at the
Brys' had brought the flutter of wings so close that they seemed to be
beating in her own heart. She had never seen him so alert, so responsive,
so attentive to what she had to say. His habitual manner had an
absent-minded kindliness which she accepted, and was grateful for, as the
liveliest sentiment her presence was likely to inspire; but she was quick
to feel in him a change implying that for once she could give pleasure as
well as receive it.

And it was so delightful that this higher degree of sympathy should be
reached through their interest in Lily Bart!

Gerty's affection for her friend--a sentiment that had learned to keep
itself alive on the scantiest diet--had grown to active adoration since
Lily's restless curiosity had drawn her into the circle of Miss Farish's
work. Lily's taste of beneficence had wakened in her a momentary appetite
for well-doing. Her visit to the Girls' Club had first brought her in
contact with the dramatic contrasts of life. She had always accepted with
philosophic calm the fact that such existences as hers were pedestalled
on foundations of obscure humanity. The dreary limbo of dinginess lay all
around and beneath that little illuminated circle in which life reached
its finest efflorescence, as the mud and sleet of a winter night enclose
a hot-house filled with tropical flowers. All this was in the natural
order of things, and the orchid basking in its artificially created
atmosphere could round the delicate curves of its petals undisturbed by
the ice on the panes.

But it is one thing to live comfortably with the abstract conception of
poverty, another to be brought in contact with its human embodiments.
Lily had never conceived of these victims of fate otherwise than in the
mass. That the mass was composed of individual lives, innumerable
separate centres of sensation, with her own eager reachings for pleasure,
her own fierce revulsions from pain--that some of these bundles of
feeling were clothed in shapes not so unlike her own, with eyes meant to
look on gladness, and young lips shaped for love--this discovery gave
Lily one of those sudden shocks of pity that sometimes decentralize a
life. Lily's nature was incapable of such renewal: she could feel other
demands only through her own, and no pain was long vivid which did not
press on an answering nerve. But for the moment she was drawn out of
herself by the interest of her direct relation with a world so unlike her
own. She had supplemented her first gift by personal assistance to one or
two of Miss Farish's most appealing subjects, and the admiration and
interest her presence excited among the tired workers at the club
ministered in a new form to her insatiable desire to please.

Gerty Farish was not a close enough reader of character to disentangle
the mixed threads of which Lily's philanthropy was woven. She supposed
her beautiful friend to be actuated by the same motive as herself--that
sharpening of the moral vision which makes all human suffering so near
and insistent that the other aspects of life fade into remoteness.  Gerty
lived by such simple formulas that she did not hesitate to class her
friend's state with the emotional "change of heart" to which her dealings
with the poor had accustomed her; and she rejoiced in the thought that
she had been the humble instrument of this renewal. Now she had an answer
to all criticisms of Lily's conduct: as she had said, she knew "the real
Lily," and the discovery that Selden shared her knowledge raised her
placid acceptance of life to a dazzled sense of its possibilities--a
sense farther enlarged, in the course of the afternoon, by the receipt of
a telegram from Selden asking if he might dine with her that evening.

While Gerty was lost in the happy bustle which this announcement produced
in her small household, Selden was at one with her in thinking with
intensity of Lily Bart. The case which had called him to Albany was not
complicated enough to absorb all his attention, and he had the
professional faculty of keeping a part of his mind free when its services
were not needed. This part--which at the moment seemed dangerously like
the whole--was filled to the brim with the sensations of the previous
evening.  Selden understood the symptoms: he recognized the fact that he
was paying up, as there had always been a chance of his having to pay up,
for the voluntary exclusions of his past. He had meant to keep free from
permanent ties, not from any poverty of feeling, but because, in a
different way, he was, as much as Lily, the victim of his environment.
There had been a germ of truth in his declaration to Gerty Farish that he
had never wanted to marry a "nice" girl: the adjective connoting, in his
cousin's vocabulary, certain utilitarian qualities which are apt to
preclude the luxury of charm.  Now it had been Selden's fate to have a
charming mother: her graceful portrait, all smiles and Cashmere, still
emitted a faded scent of the undefinable quality. His father was the kind
of man who delights in a charming woman: who quotes her, stimulates her,
and keeps her perennially charming. Neither one of the couple cared for
money, but their disdain of it took the form of always spending a little
more than was prudent. If their house was shabby, it was exquisitely
kept; if there were good books on the shelves there were also good dishes
on the table. Selden senior had an eye for a picture, his wife an
understanding of old lace; and both were so conscious of restraint and
discrimination in buying that they never quite knew how it was that the
bills mounted up.

Though many of Selden's friends would have called his parents poor, he
had grown up in an atmosphere where restricted means were felt only as a
check on aimless profusion: where the few possessions were so good that
their rarity gave them a merited relief, and abstinence was combined with
elegance in a way exemplified by Mrs. Selden's knack of wearing her old
velvet as if it were new. A man has the advantage of being delivered
early from the home point of view, and before Selden left college he had
learned that there are as many different ways of going without money as
of spending it. Unfortunately, he found no way as agreeable as that
practised at home; and his views of womankind in especial were tinged by
the remembrance of the one woman who had given him his sense of "values."
It was from her that he inherited his detachment from the sumptuary side
of life: the stoic's carelessness of material things, combined with the
Epicurean's pleasure in them. Life shorn of either feeling appeared to
him a diminished thing; and nowhere was the blending of the two
ingredients so essential as in the character of a pretty woman.

It had always seemed to Selden that experience offered a great deal
besides the sentimental adventure, yet he could vividly conceive of a
love which should broaden and deepen till it became the central fact of
life. What he could not accept, in his own case, was the makeshift
alternative of a relation that should be less than this: that should
leave some portions of his nature unsatisfied, while it put an undue
strain on others. He would not, in other words, yield to the growth of an
affection which might appeal to pity yet leave the understanding
untouched: sympathy should no more delude him than a trick of the eyes,
the grace of helplessness than a curve of the cheek.

But now--that little BUT passed like a sponge over all his vows.  His
reasoned-out resistances seemed for the moment so much less important
than the question as to when Lily would receive his note! He yielded
himself to the charm of trivial preoccupations, wondering at what hour
her reply would be sent, with what words it would begin. As to its import
he had no doubt--he was as sure of her surrender as of his own.  And so
he had leisure to muse on all its exquisite details, as a hard worker, on
a holiday morning, might lie still and watch the beam of light travel
gradually across his room. But if the new light dazzled, it did not blind
him. He could still discern the outline of facts, though his own relation
to them had changed. He was no less conscious than before of what was
said of Lily Bart, but he could separate the woman he knew from the
vulgar estimate of her.  His mind turned to Gerty Farish's words, and the
wisdom of the world seemed a groping thing beside the insight of
innocence.  BLESSED ARE THE PURE IN HEART, FOR THEY SHALL SEE GOD--even
the hidden god in their neighbour's breast! Selden was in the state of
impassioned self-absorption that the first surrender to love produces.
His craving was for the companionship of one whose point of view should
justify his own, who should confirm, by deliberate observation, the truth
to which his intuitions had leaped. He could not wait for the midday
recess, but seized a moment's leisure in court to scribble his telegram
to Gerty Farish.

Reaching town, he was driven direct to his club, where he hoped a note
from Miss Bart might await him. But his box contained only a line of
rapturous assent from Gerty, and he was turning away disappointed when he
was hailed by a voice from the smoking room.

"Hallo, Lawrence! Dining here? Take a bite with me--I've ordered a
canvas-back."

He discovered Trenor, in his day clothes, sitting, with a tall glass at
his elbow, behind the folds of a sporting journal.

Selden thanked him, but pleaded an engagement.

"Hang it, I believe every man in town has an engagement tonight.  I shall
have the club to myself. You know how I'm living this winter, rattling
round in that empty house. My wife meant to come to town today, but she's
put it off again, and how is a fellow to dine alone in a room with the
looking-glasses covered, and nothing but a bottle of Harvey sauce on the
side-board? I say, Lawrence, chuck your engagement and take pity on
me--it gives me the blue devils to dine alone, and there's nobody but
that canting ass Wetherall in the club."

"Sorry, Gus--I can't do it."

As Selden turned away, he noticed the dark flush on Trenor's face, the
unpleasant moisture of his intensely white forehead, the way his jewelled
rings were wedged in the creases of his fat red fingers.  Certainly the
beast was predominating--the beast at the bottom of the glass. And he had
heard this man's name coupled with Lily's! Bah--the thought sickened him;
all the way back to his rooms he was haunted by the sight of Trenor's fat
creased hands----

On his table lay the note: Lily had sent it to his rooms. He knew what
was in it before he broke the seal--a grey seal with BEYOND!  beneath a
flying ship. Ah, he would take her beyond--beyond the ugliness, the
pettiness, the attrition and corrosion of the soul----

Gerty's little sitting-room sparkled with welcome when Selden entered it.
Its modest "effects," compact of enamel paint and ingenuity, spoke to him
in the language just then sweetest to his ear. It is surprising how
little narrow walls and a low ceiling matter, when the roof of the soul
has suddenly been raised. Gerty sparkled too; or at least shone with a
tempered radiance. He had never before noticed that she had
"points"--really, some good fellow might do worse . . . Over the little
dinner (and here, again, the effects were wonderful) he told her she
ought to marry--he was in a mood to pair off the whole world. She had
made the caramel custard with her own hands? It was sinful to keep such
gifts to herself. He reflected with a throb of pride that Lily could trim
her own hats--she had told him so the day of their walk at Bellomont.

He did not speak of Lily till after dinner. During the little repast he
kept the talk on his hostess, who, fluttered at being the centre of
observation, shone as rosy as the candle-shades she had manufactured for
the occasion. Selden evinced an extraordinary interest in her household
arrangements: complimented her on the ingenuity with which she had
utilized every inch of her small quarters, asked how her servant managed
about afternoons out, learned that one may improvise delicious dinners in
a chafing-dish, and uttered thoughtful generalizations on the burden of a
large establishment.

When they were in the sitting-room again, where they fitted as snugly as
bits in a puzzle, and she had brewed the coffee, and poured it into her
grandmother's egg-shell cups, his eye, as he leaned back, basking in the
warm fragrance, lighted on a recent photograph of Miss Bart, and the
desired transition was effected without an effort. The photograph was
well enough--but to catch her as she had looked last night! Gerty agreed
with him--never had she been so radiant. But could photography capture
that light? There had been a new look in her face--something different;
yes, Selden agreed there had been something different.  The coffee was so
exquisite that he asked for a second cup: such a contrast to the watery
stuff at the club! Ah, your poor bachelor with his impersonal club fare,
alternating with the equally impersonal CUISINE of the dinner-party! A
man who lived in lodgings missed the best part of life--he pictured the
flavourless solitude of Trenor's repast, and felt a moment's compassion
for the man . . . But to return to Lily--and again and again he returned,
questioning, conjecturing, leading Gerty on, draining her inmost thoughts
of their stored tenderness for her friend.

At first she poured herself out unstintingly, happy in this perfect
communion of their sympathies. His understanding of Lily helped to
confirm her own belief in her friend. They dwelt together on the fact
that Lily had had no chance. Gerty instanced her generous impulses--her
restlessness and discontent. The fact that her life had never satisfied
her proved that she was made for better things. She might have married
more than once--the conventional rich marriage which she had been taught
to consider the sole end of existence--but when the opportunity came she
had always shrunk from it. Percy Gryce, for instance, had been in love
with her--every one at Bellomont had supposed them to be engaged, and her
dismissal of him was thought inexplicable. This view of the Gryce
incident chimed too well with Selden's mood not to be instantly adopted
by him, with a flash of retrospective contempt for what had once seemed
the obvious solution. If rejection there had been--and he wondered now
that he had ever doubted it!--then he held the key to the secret, and the
hillsides of Bellomont were lit up, not with sunset, but with dawn. It
was he who had wavered and disowned the face of opportunity--and the joy
now warming his breast might have been a familiar inmate if he had
captured it in its first flight.

It was at this point, perhaps, that a joy just trying its wings in
Gerty's heart dropped to earth and lay still. She sat facing Selden,
repeating mechanically: "No, she has never been understood----" and all
the while she herself seemed to be sitting in the centre of a great glare
of comprehension. The little confidential room, where a moment ago their
thoughts had touched elbows like their chairs, grew to unfriendly
vastness, separating her from Selden by all the length of her new vision
of the future--and that future stretched out interminably, with her
lonely figure toiling down it, a mere speck on the solitude.

"She is herself with a few people only; and you are one of them," she
heard Selden saying. And again: "Be good to her, Gerty, won't you?" and:
"She has it in her to become whatever she is believed to be--you'll help
her by believing the best of her?"

The words beat on Gerty's brain like the sound of a language which has
seemed familiar at a distance, but on approaching is found to be
unintelligible. He had come to talk to her of Lily--that was all! There
had been a third at the feast she had spread for him, and that third had
taken her own place. She tried to follow what he was saying, to cling to
her own part in the talk--but it was all as meaningless as the boom of
waves in a drowning head, and she felt, as the drowning may feel, that to
sink would be nothing beside the pain of struggling to keep up.

Selden rose, and she drew a deep breath, feeling that soon she could
yield to the blessed waves.

"Mrs. Fisher's? You say she was dining there? There's music afterward; I
believe I had a card from her." He glanced at the foolish pink-faced
clock that was drumming out this hideous hour. "A quarter past ten? I
might look in there now; the Fisher evenings are amusing. I haven't kept
you up too late, Gerty? You look tired--I've rambled on and bored you."
And in the unwonted overflow of his feelings, he left a cousinly kiss
upon her cheek.

At Mrs. Fisher's, through the cigar-smoke of the studio, a dozen voices
greeted Selden. A song was pending as he entered, and he dropped into a
seat near his hostess, his eyes roaming in search of Miss Bart. But she
was not there, and the discovery gave him a pang out of all proportion to
its seriousness; since the note in his breast-pocket assured him that at
four the next day they would meet. To his impatience it seemed
immeasurably long to wait, and half-ashamed of the impulse, he leaned to
Mrs. Fisher to ask, as the music ceased, if Miss Bart had not dined with
her.

"Lily? She's just gone. She had to run off, I forget where.  Wasn't she
wonderful last night?"

"Who's that? Lily?" asked Jack Stepney, from the depths of a neighbouring
arm-chair. "Really, you know, I'm no prude, but when it comes to a girl
standing there as if she was up at auction--I thought seriously of
speaking to cousin Julia."

"You didn't know Jack had become our social censor?" Mrs. Fisher said to
Selden with a laugh; and Stepney spluttered, amid the general derision:
"But she's a cousin, hang it, and when a man's married--TOWN TALK was
full of her this morning."

"Yes: lively reading that was," said Mr. Ned Van Alstyne, stroking his
moustache to hide the smile behind it. "Buy the dirty sheet? No, of
course not; some fellow showed it to me--but I'd heard the stories
before. When a girl's as good-looking as that she'd better marry; then no
questions are asked. In our imperfectly organized society there is no
provision as yet for the young woman who claims the privileges of
marriage without assuming its obligations."

"Well, I understand Lily is about to assume them in the shape of Mr.
Rosedale," Mrs. Fisher said with a laugh.

"Rosedale--good heavens!" exclaimed Van Alstyne, dropping his eye-glass.
"Stepney, that's your fault for foisting the brute on us."

"Oh, confound it, you know, we don't MARRY Rosedale in our family,"
Stepney languidly protested; but his wife, who sat in oppressive bridal
finery at the other side of the room, quelled him with the judicial
reflection: "In Lily's circumstances it's a mistake to have too high a
standard."

"I hear even Rosedale has been scared by the talk lately," Mrs. Fisher
rejoined; "but the sight of her last night sent him off his head. What do
you think he said to me after her TABLEAU?  'My God, Mrs. Fisher, if I
could get Paul Morpeth to paint her like that, the picture'd appreciate a
hundred per cent in ten years.'"

"By Jove,--but isn't she about somewhere?" exclaimed Van Alstyne,
restoring his glass with an uneasy glance.

"No; she ran off while you were all mixing the punch down stairs.  Where
was she going, by the way? What's on tonight? I hadn't heard of anything."

"Oh, not a party, I think," said an inexperienced young Farish who had
arrived late. "I put her in her cab as I was coming in, and she gave the
driver the Trenors' address."

"The Trenors'?" exclaimed Mrs. Jack Stepney. "Why, the house is
closed--Judy telephoned me from Bellomont this evening."

"Did she? That's queer. I'm sure I'm not mistaken. Well, come now,
Trenor's there, anyhow--I--oh, well--the fact is, I've no head for
numbers," he broke off, admonished by the nudge of an adjoining foot, and
the smile that circled the room.

In its unpleasant light Selden had risen and was shaking hands with his
hostess. The air of the place stifled him, and he wondered why he had
stayed in it so long.

On the doorstep he stood still, remembering a phrase of Lily's: "It seems
to me you spend a good deal of time in the element you disapprove of."

Well--what had brought him there but the quest of her? It was her
element, not his. But he would lift her out of it, take her beyond!  That
BEYOND! on her letter was like a cry for rescue. He knew that Perseus's
task is not done when he has loosed Andromeda's chains, for her limbs are
numb with bondage, and she cannot rise and walk, but clings to him with
dragging arms as he beats back to land with his burden. Well, he had
strength for both--it was her weakness which had put the strength in him.
It was not, alas, a clean rush of waves they had to win through, but a
clogging morass of old associations and habits, and for the moment its
vapours were in his throat. But he would see clearer, breathe freer in
her presence: she was at once the dead weight at his breast and the spar
which should float them to safety. He smiled at the whirl of metaphor
with which he was trying to build up a defence against the influences of
the last hour. It was pitiable that he, who knew the mixed motives on
which social judgments depend, should still feel himself so swayed by
them. How could he lift Lily to a freer vision of life, if his own view
of her was to be coloured by any mind in which he saw her reflected?

The moral oppression had produced a physical craving for air, and he
strode on, opening his lungs to the reverberating coldness of the night.
At the corner of Fifth Avenue Van Alstyne hailed him with an offer of
company.

"Walking? A good thing to blow the smoke out of one's head. Now that
women have taken to tobacco we live in a bath of nicotine.  It would be a
curious thing to study the effect of cigarettes on the relation of the
sexes. Smoke is almost as great a solvent as divorce: both tend to
obscure the moral issue."

Nothing could have been less consonant with Selden's mood than Van
Alstyne's after-dinner aphorisms, but as long as the latter confined
himself to generalities his listener's nerves were in control. Happily
Van Alstyne prided himself on his summing up of social aspects, and with
Selden for audience was eager to show the sureness of his touch.  Mrs.
Fisher lived in an East side street near the Park, and as the two men
walked down Fifth Avenue the new architectural developments of that
versatile thoroughfare invited Van Alstyne's comment.

"That Greiner house, now--a typical rung in the social ladder!  The man
who built it came from a MILIEU where all the dishes are put on the table
at once. His facade is a complete architectural meal; if he had omitted a
style his friends might have thought the money had given out.  Not a bad
purchase for Rosedale, though: attracts attention, and awes the Western
sight-seer. By and bye he'll get out of that phase, and want something
that the crowd will pass and the few pause before.  Especially if he
marries my clever cousin----"

Selden dashed in with the query: "And the Wellington Brys'?  Rather
clever of its kind, don't you think?"

They were just beneath the wide white facade, with its rich restraint of
line, which suggested the clever corseting of a redundant figure.

"That's the next stage: the desire to imply that one has been to Europe,
and has a standard. I'm sure Mrs. Bry thinks her house a copy of the
TRIANON; in America every marble house with gilt furniture is thought to
be a copy of the TRIANON. What a clever chap that architect is,
though--how he takes his client's measure! He has put the whole of Mrs.
Bry in his use of the composite order. Now for the Trenors, you remember,
he chose the Corinthian: exuberant, but based on the best precedent. The
Trenor house is one of his best things--doesn't look like a
banqueting-hall turned inside out. I hear Mrs. Trenor wants to build out
a new ball-room, and that divergence from Gus on that point keeps her at
Bellomont. The dimensions of the Brys' ball-room must rankle: you may be
sure she knows 'em as well as if she'd been there last night with a
yard-measure. Who said she was in town, by the way?  That Farish boy? She
isn't, I know; Mrs. Stepney was right; the house is dark, you see: I
suppose Gus lives in the back."

He had halted opposite the Trenors' corner, and Selden perforce stayed
his steps also. The house loomed obscure and uninhabited; only an oblong
gleam above the door spoke of provisional occupancy.

"They've bought the house at the back: it gives them a hundred and fifty
feet in the side street. There's where the ball-room's to be, with a
gallery connecting it: billiard-room and so on above. I suggested
changing the entrance, and carrying the drawing-room across the whole
Fifth Avenue front; you see the front door corresponds with the
windows----"

The walking-stick which Van Alstyne swung in demonstration dropped to a
startled "Hallo!" as the door opened and two figures were seen
silhouetted against the hall-light. At the same moment a hansom halted at
the curb-stone, and one of the figures floated down to it in a haze of
evening draperies; while the other, black and bulky, remained
persistently projected against the light.

For an immeasurable second the two spectators of the incident were
silent; then the house-door closed, the hansom rolled off, and the whole
scene slipped by as if with the turn of a stereopticon.

Van Alstyne dropped his eye-glass with a low whistle.

"A--hem--nothing of this, eh, Selden? As one of the family, I know I may
count on you--appearances are deceptive--and Fifth Avenue is so
imperfectly lighted----"

"Goodnight," said Selden, turning sharply down the side street without
seeing the other's extended hand.

Alone with her cousin's kiss, Gerty stared upon her thoughts. He had
kissed her before--but not with another woman on his lips. If he had
spared her that she could have drowned quietly, welcoming the dark flood
as it submerged her. But now the flood was shot through with glory, and
it was harder to drown at sunrise than in darkness. Gerty hid her face
from the light, but it pierced to the crannies of her soul. She had been
so contented, life had seemed so simple and sufficient--why had he come
to trouble her with new hopes? And Lily--Lily, her best friend!
Woman-like, she accused the woman.  Perhaps, had it not been for Lily,
her fond imagining might have become truth. Selden had always liked
her--had understood and sympathized with the modest independence of her
life. He, who had the reputation of weighing all things in the nice
balance of fastidious perceptions, had been uncritical and simple in his
view of her: his cleverness had never overawed her because she had felt
at home in his heart. And now she was thrust out, and the door barred
against her by Lily's hand! Lily, for whose admission there she herself
had pleaded! The situation was lighted up by a dreary flash of irony. She
knew Selden--she saw how the force of her faith in Lily must have helped
to dispel his hesitations.  She remembered, too, how Lily had talked of
him--she saw herself bringing the two together, making them known to each
other. On Selden's part, no doubt, the wound inflicted was inconscient;
he had never guessed her foolish secret; but Lily--Lily must have known!
When, in such matters, are a woman's perceptions at fault? And if she
knew, then she had deliberately despoiled her friend, and in mere
wantonness of power, since, even to Gerty's suddenly flaming jealousy, it
seemed incredible that Lily should wish to be Selden's wife. Lily might
be incapable of marrying for money, but she was equally incapable of
living without it, and Selden's eager investigations into the small
economies of house-keeping made him appear to Gerty as tragically duped
as herself.

She remained long in her sitting-room, where the embers were crumbling to
cold grey, and the lamp paled under its gay shade.  Just beneath it stood
the photograph of Lily Bart, looking out imperially on the cheap
gimcracks, the cramped furniture of the little room. Could Selden picture
her in such an interior? Gerty felt the poverty, the insignificance of
her surroundings: she beheld her life as it must appear to Lily. And the
cruelty of Lily's judgments smote upon her memory. She saw that she had
dressed her idol with attributes of her own making. When had Lily ever
really felt, or pitied, or understood?  All she wanted was the taste of
new experiences: she seemed like some cruel creature experimenting in a
laboratory.

The pink-faced clock drummed out another hour, and Gerty rose with a
start. She had an appointment early the next morning with a district
visitor on the East side. She put out her lamp, covered the fire, and
went into her bedroom to undress. In the little glass above her
dressing-table she saw her face reflected against the shadows of the
room, and tears blotted the reflection. What right had she to dream the
dreams of loveliness?  A dull face invited a dull fate. She cried quietly
as she undressed, laying aside her clothes with her habitual precision,
setting everything in order for the next day, when the old life must be
taken up as though there had been no break in its routine.  Her servant
did not come till eight o'clock, and she prepared her own tea-tray and
placed it beside the bed. Then she locked the door of the flat,
extinguished her light and lay down.  But on her bed sleep would not
come, and she lay face to face with the fact that she hated Lily Bart. It
closed with her in the darkness like some formless evil to be blindly
grappled with.  Reason, judgment, renunciation, all the sane daylight
forces, were beaten back in the sharp struggle for self-preservation. She
wanted happiness--wanted it as fiercely and unscrupulously as Lily did,
but without Lily's power of obtaining it.  And in her conscious impotence
she lay shivering, and hated her friend----

A ring at the door-bell caught her to her feet. She struck a light and
stood startled, listening. For a moment her heart beat incoherently, then
she felt the sobering touch of fact, and remembered that such calls were
not unknown in her charitable work. She flung on her dressing-gown to
answer the summons, and unlocking her door, confronted the shining vision
of Lily Bart.

Gerty's first movement was one of revulsion. She shrank back as though
Lily's presence flashed too sudden a light upon her misery. Then she
heard her name in a cry, had a glimpse of her friend's face, and felt
herself caught and clung to.

"Lily--what is it?" she exclaimed.

Miss Bart released her, and stood breathing brokenly, like one who has
gained shelter after a long flight.

"I was so cold--I couldn't go home. Have you a fire?"

Gerty's compassionate instincts, responding to the swift call of habit,
swept aside all her reluctances. Lily was simply some one who needed
help--for what reason, there was no time to pause and conjecture:
disciplined sympathy checked the wonder on Gerty's lips, and made her
draw her friend silently into the sitting-room and seat her by the
darkened hearth.

"There is kindling wood here: the fire will burn in a minute."

She knelt down, and the flame leapt under her rapid hands. It flashed
strangely through the tears which still blurred her eyes, and smote on
the white ruin of Lily's face. The girls looked at each other in silence;
then Lily repeated: "I couldn't go home."

"No--no--you came here, dear! You're cold and tired--sit quiet, and I'll
make you some tea."

Gerty had unconsciously adopted the soothing note of her trade: all
personal feeling was merged in the sense of ministry, and experience had
taught her that the bleeding must be stayed before the wound is probed.

Lily sat quiet, leaning to the fire: the clatter of cups behind her
soothed her as familiar noises hush a child whom silence has kept
wakeful. But when Gerty stood at her side with the tea she pushed it
away, and turned an estranged eye on the familiar room.

"I came here because I couldn't bear to be alone," she said.

Gerty set down the cup and knelt beside her.

"Lily! Something has happened--can't you tell me?"

"I couldn't bear to lie awake in my room till morning. I hate my room at
Aunt Julia's--so I came here----"

She stirred suddenly, broke from her apathy, and clung to Gerty in a
fresh burst of fear.

"Oh, Gerty, the furies . . . you know the noise of their wings--alone, at
night, in the dark? But you don't know--there is nothing to make the dark
dreadful to you----"

The words, flashing back on Gerty's last hours, struck from her a faint
derisive murmur; but Lily, in the blaze of her own misery, was blinded to
everything outside it.

"You'll let me stay? I shan't mind when daylight comes--Is it late? Is
the night nearly over? It must be awful to be sleepless--everything
stands by the bed and stares----"

Miss Farish caught her straying hands. "Lily, look at me!  Something has
happened--an accident? You have been frightened--what has frightened you?
Tell me if you can--a word or two--so that I can help you."

Lily shook her head.

"I am not frightened: that's not the word. Can you imagine looking into
your glass some morning and seeing a disfigurement--some hideous change
that has come to you while you slept? Well, I seem to myself like that--I
can't bear to see myself in my own thoughts--I hate ugliness, you
know--I've always turned from it--but I can't explain to you--you
wouldn't understand."

She lifted her head and her eyes fell on the clock.

"How long the night is! And I know I shan't sleep tomorrow. Some one told
me my father used to lie sleepless and think of horrors.  And he was not
wicked, only unfortunate--and I see now how he must have suffered, lying
alone with his thoughts! But I am bad--a bad girl--all my thoughts are
bad--I have always had bad people about me. Is that any excuse? I thought
I could manage my own life--I was proud--proud! but now I'm on their
level----"

Sobs shook her, and she bowed to them like a tree in a dry storm.

Gerty knelt beside her, waiting, with the patience born of experience,
till this gust of misery should loosen fresh speech.  She had first
imagined some physical shock, some peril of the crowded streets, since
Lily was presumably on her way home from Carry Fisher's; but she now saw
that other nerve-centres were smitten, and her mind trembled back from
conjecture.

Lily's sobs ceased, and she lifted her head.

"There are bad girls in your slums. Tell me--do they ever pick themselves
up? Ever forget, and feel as they did before?"

"Lily! you mustn't speak so--you're dreaming."

"Don't they always go from bad to worse? There's no turning back--your
old self rejects you, and shuts you out."

She rose, stretching her arms as if in utter physical weariness.  "Go to
bed, dear! You work hard and get up early. I'll watch here by the fire,
and you'll leave the light, and your door open. All I want is to feel
that you are near me." She laid both hands on Gerty's shoulders, with a
smile that was like sunrise on a sea strewn with wreckage.

"I can't leave you, Lily. Come and lie on my bed. Your hands are
frozen--you must undress and be made warm." Gerty paused with sudden
compunction. "But Mrs. Peniston--it's past midnight! What will she think?"

"She goes to bed. I have a latch-key. It doesn't matter--I can't go back
there."

"There's no need to: you shall stay here. But you must tell me where you
have been. Listen, Lily--it will help you to speak!" She regained Miss
Bart's hands, and pressed them against her.  "Try to tell me--it will
clear your poor head. Listen--you were dining at Carry Fisher's." Gerty
paused and added with a flash of heroism: "Lawrence Selden went from here
to find you."

At the word, Lily's face melted from locked anguish to the open misery of
a child. Her lips trembled and her gaze widened with tears.

"He went to find me? And I missed him! Oh, Gerty, he tried to help me.
He told me--he warned me long ago--he foresaw that I should grow hateful
to myself!"

The name, as Gerty saw with a clutch at the heart, had loosened the
springs of self-pity in her friend's dry breast, and tear by tear Lily
poured out the measure of her anguish. She had dropped sideways in
Gerty's big arm-chair, her head buried where lately Selden's had leaned,
in a beauty of abandonment that drove home to Gerty's aching senses the
inevitableness of her own defeat.  Ah, it needed no deliberate purpose on
Lily's part to rob her of her dream! To look on that prone loveliness was
to see in it a natural force, to recognize that love and power belong to
such as Lily, as renunciation and service are the lot of those they
despoil. But if Selden's infatuation seemed a fatal necessity, the effect
that his name produced shook Gerty's steadfastness with a last pang. Men
pass through such superhuman loves and outlive them: they are the
probation subduing the heart to human joys. How gladly Gerty would have
welcomed the ministry of healing: how willingly have soothed the sufferer
back to tolerance of life! But Lily's self-betrayal took this last hope
from her. The mortal maid on the shore is helpless against the siren who
loves her prey: such victims are floated back dead from their adventure.

Lily sprang up and caught her with strong hands. "Gerty, you know
him--you understand him--tell me; if I went to him, if I told him
everything--if I said: 'I am bad through and through--I want admiration,
I want excitement, I want money--' yes, MONEY!  That's my shame,
Gerty--and it's known, it's said of me--it's what men think of me--If I
said it all to him--told him the whole story--said plainly: 'I've sunk
lower than the lowest, for I've taken what they take, and not paid as
they pay'--oh, Gerty, you know him, you can speak for him: if I told him
everything would he loathe me? Or would he pity me, and understand me,
and save me from loathing myself?"

Gerty stood cold and passive. She knew the hour of her probation had
come, and her poor heart beat wildly against its destiny. As a dark river
sweeps by under a lightning flash, she saw her chance of happiness surge
past under a flash of temptation. What prevented her from saying: "He is
like other men?" She was not so sure of him, after all! But to do so
would have been like blaspheming her love. She could not put him before
herself in any light but the noblest: she must trust him to the height of
her own passion.

"Yes: I know him; he will help you," she said; and in a moment Lily's
passion was weeping itself out against her breast.

There was but one bed in the little flat, and the two girls lay down on
it side by side when Gerty had unlaced Lily's dress and persuaded her to
put her lips to the warm tea. The light extinguished, they lay still in
the darkness, Gerty shrinking to the outer edge of the narrow couch to
avoid contact with her bed-fellow. Knowing that Lily disliked to be
caressed, she had long ago learned to check her demonstrative impulses
toward her friend. But tonight every fibre in her body shrank from Lily's
nearness: it was torture to listen to her breathing, and feel the sheet
stir with it. As Lily turned, and settled to completer rest, a strand of
her hair swept Gerty's cheek with its fragrance. Everything about her was
warm and soft and scented: even the stains of her grief became her as
rain-drops do the beaten rose. But as Gerty lay with arms drawn down her
side, in the motionless narrowness of an effigy, she felt a stir of sobs
from the breathing warmth beside her, and Lily flung out her hand, groped
for her friend's, and held it fast.

"Hold me, Gerty, hold me, or I shall think of things," she moaned; and
Gerty silently slipped an arm under her, pillowing her head in its hollow
as a mother makes a nest for a tossing child. In the warm hollow Lily lay
still and her breathing grew low and regular. Her hand still clung to
Gerty's as if to ward off evil dreams, but the hold of her fingers
relaxed, her head sank deeper into its shelter, and Gerty felt that she
slept.

When Lily woke she had the bed to herself, and the winter light was in
the room.

She sat up, bewildered by the strangeness of her surroundings; then
memory returned, and she looked about her with a shiver. In the cold
slant of light reflected from the back wall of a neighbouring building,
she saw her evening dress and opera cloak lying in a tawdry heap on a
chair. Finery laid off is as unappetizing as the remains of a feast, and
it occurred to Lily that, at home, her maid's vigilance had always spared
her the sight of such incongruities. Her body ached with fatigue, and
with the constriction of her attitude in Gerty's bed. All through her
troubled sleep she had been conscious of having no space to toss in, and
the long effort to remain motionless made her feel as if she had spent
her night in a train.

This sense of physical discomfort was the first to assert itself; then
she perceived, beneath it, a corresponding mental prostration, a languor
of horror more insufferable than the first rush of her disgust.  The
thought of having to wake every morning with this weight on her breast
roused her tired mind to fresh effort. She must find some way out of the
slough into which she had stumbled: it was not so much compunction as the
dread of her morning thoughts that pressed on her the need of action. But
she was unutterably tired; it was weariness to think connectedly. She lay
back, looking about the poor slit of a room with a renewal of physical
distaste. The outer air, penned between high buildings, brought no
freshness through the window; steam-heat was beginning to sing in a coil
of dingy pipes, and a smell of cooking penetrated the crack of the door.

The door opened, and Gerty, dressed and hatted, entered with a cup of
tea. Her face looked sallow and swollen in the dreary light, and her dull
hair shaded imperceptibly into the tones of her skin.

She glanced shyly at Lily, asking in an embarrassed tone how she felt;
Lily answered with the same constraint, and raised herself up to drink
the tea.

"I must have been over-tired last night; I think I had a nervous attack
in the carriage," she said, as the drink brought clearness to her
sluggish thoughts.

"You were not well; I am so glad you came here," Gerty returned.

"But how am I to get home? And Aunt Julia--?"

"She knows; I telephoned early, and your maid has brought your things.
But won't you eat something? I scrambled the eggs myself."

Lily could not eat; but the tea strengthened her to rise and dress under
her maid's searching gaze. It was a relief to her that Gerty was obliged
to hasten away: the two kissed silently, but without a trace of the
previous night's emotion.

Lily found Mrs. Peniston in a state of agitation. She had sent for Grace
Stepney and was taking digitalis. Lily breasted the storm of enquiries as
best she could, explaining that she had had an attack of faintness on her
way back from Carry Fisher's; that, fearing she would not have strength
to reach home, she had gone to Miss Farish's instead; but that a quiet
night had restored her, and that she had no need of a doctor.

This was a relief to Mrs. Peniston, who could give herself up to her own
symptoms, and Lily was advised to go and lie down, her aunt's panacea for
all physical and moral disorders. In the solitude of her own room she was
brought back to a sharp contemplation of facts. Her daylight view of them
necessarily differed from the cloudy vision of the night. The winged
furies were now prowling gossips who dropped in on each other for tea.
But her fears seemed the uglier, thus shorn of their vagueness; and
besides, she had to act, not rave. For the first time she forced herself
to reckon up the exact amount of her debt to Trenor; and the result of
this hateful computation was the discovery that she had, in all, received
nine thousand dollars from him. The flimsy pretext on which it had been
given and received shrivelled up in the blaze of her shame: she knew that
not a penny of it was her own, and that to restore her self-respect she
must at once repay the whole amount. The inability thus to solace her
outraged feelings gave her a paralyzing sense of insignificance. She was
realizing for the first time that a woman's dignity may cost more to keep
up than her carriage; and that the maintenance of a moral attribute
should be dependent on dollars and cents, made the world appear a more
sordid place than she had conceived it.

After luncheon, when Grace Stepney's prying eyes had been removed, Lily
asked for a word with her aunt. The two ladies went upstairs to the
sitting-room, where Mrs. Peniston seated herself in her black satin
arm-chair tufted with yellow buttons, beside a bead-work table bearing a
bronze box with a miniature of Beatrice Cenci in the lid. Lily felt for
these objects the same distaste which the prisoner may entertain for the
fittings of the court-room. It was here that her aunt received her rare
confidences, and the pink-eyed smirk of the turbaned Beatrice was
associated in her mind with the gradual fading of the smile from Mrs.
Peniston's lips. That lady's dread of a scene gave her an inexorableness
which the greatest strength of character could not have produced, since
it was independent of all considerations of right or wrong; and knowing
this, Lily seldom ventured to assail it. She had never felt less like
making the attempt than on the present occasion; but she had sought in
vain for any other means of escape from an intolerable situation.

Mrs. Peniston examined her critically. "You're a bad colour, Lily: this
incessant rushing about is beginning to tell on you," she said.

Miss Bart saw an opening. "I don't think it's that, Aunt Julia; I've had
worries," she replied.

"Ah," said Mrs. Peniston, shutting her lips with the snap of a purse
closing against a beggar.

"I'm sorry to bother you with them," Lily continued, "but I really
believe my faintness last night was brought on partly by anxious
thoughts--"

"I should have said Carry Fisher's cook was enough to account for it.
She has a woman who was with Maria Melson in 1891--the spring of the year
we went to Aix--and I remember dining there two days before we sailed,
and feeling SURE the coppers hadn't been scoured."

"I don't think I ate much; I can't eat or sleep." Lily paused, and then
said abruptly: "The fact is, Aunt Julia, I owe some money."

Mrs. Peniston's face clouded perceptibly, but did not express the
astonishment her niece had expected. She was silent, and Lily was forced
to continue: "I have been foolish----"

"No doubt you have: extremely foolish," Mrs. Peniston interposed.  "I
fail to see how any one with your income, and no expenses--not to mention
the handsome presents I've always given you----"

"Oh, you've been most generous, Aunt Julia; I shall never forget your
kindness. But perhaps you don't quite realize the expense a girl is put
to nowadays----"

"I don't realize that YOU are put to any expense except for your clothes
and your railway fares. I expect you to be handsomely dressed; but I paid
Celeste's bill for you last October."

Lily hesitated: her aunt's implacable memory had never been more
inconvenient. "You were as kind as possible; but I have had to get a few
things since----"

"What kind of things? Clothes? How much have you spent? Let me see the
bill--I daresay the woman is swindling you."

"Oh, no, I think not: clothes have grown so frightfully expensive; and
one needs so many different kinds, with country visits, and golf and
skating, and Aiken and Tuxedo----"

"Let me see the bill," Mrs. Peniston repeated.

Lily hesitated again. In the first place, Mme. Celeste had not yet sent
in her account, and secondly, the amount it represented was only a
fraction of the sum that Lily needed.

"She hasn't sent in the bill for my winter things, but I KNOW it's large;
and there are one or two other things; I've been careless and
imprudent--I'm frightened to think of what I owe----"

She raised the troubled loveliness of her face to Mrs. Peniston, vainly
hoping that a sight so moving to the other sex might not be without
effect upon her own. But the effect produced was that of making Mrs.
Peniston shrink back apprehensively.

"Really, Lily, you are old enough to manage your own affairs, and after
frightening me to death by your performance of last night you might at
least choose a better time to worry me with such matters." Mrs. Peniston
glanced at the clock, and swallowed a tablet of digitalis. "If you owe
Celeste another thousand, she may send me her account," she added, as
though to end the discussion at any cost.

"I am very sorry, Aunt Julia; I hate to trouble you at such a time; but I
have really no choice--I ought to have spoken sooner--I owe a great deal
more than a thousand dollars."

"A great deal more? Do you owe two? She must have robbed you!"

"I told you it was not only Celeste. I--there are other bills--more
pressing--that must be settled."

"What on earth have you been buying? Jewelry? You must have gone off your
head," said Mrs. Peniston with asperity. "But if you have run into debt,
you must suffer the consequences, and put aside your monthly income till
your bills are paid. If you stay quietly here until next spring, instead
of racing about all over the country, you will have no expenses at all,
and surely in four or five months you can settle the rest of your bills
if I pay the dress-maker now."

Lily was again silent. She knew she could not hope to extract even a
thousand dollars from Mrs. Peniston on the mere plea of paying Celeste's
bill: Mrs. Peniston would expect to go over the dress-maker's account,
and would make out the cheque to her and not to Lily. And yet the money
must be obtained before the day was over!

"The debts I speak of are--different--not like tradesmen's bills," she
began confusedly; but Mrs. Peniston's look made her almost afraid to
continue. Could it be that her aunt suspected anything? The idea
precipitated Lily's avowal.

"The fact is, I've played cards a good deal--bridge; the women all do it;
girls too--it's expected. Sometimes I've won--won a good deal--but lately
I've been unlucky--and of course such debts can't be paid off
gradually----"

She paused: Mrs. Peniston's face seemed to be petrifying as she listened.

"Cards--you've played cards for money? It's true, then: when I was told
so I wouldn't believe it. I won't ask if the other horrors I was told
were true too; I've heard enough for the state of my nerves. When I think
of the example you've had in this house! But I suppose it's your foreign
bringing-up--no one knew where your mother picked up her friends. And her
Sundays were a scandal--that I know."

Mrs. Peniston wheeled round suddenly. "You play cards on Sunday?"

Lily flushed with the recollection of certain rainy Sundays at Bellomont
and with the Dorsets.

"You're hard on me, Aunt Julia: I have never really cared for cards, but
a girl hates to be thought priggish and superior, and one drifts into
doing what the others do. I've had a dreadful lesson, and if you'll help
me out this time I promise you--"

Mrs. Peniston raised her hand warningly. "You needn't make any promises:
it's unnecessary. When I offered you a home I didn't undertake to pay
your gambling debts."

"Aunt Julia! You don't mean that you won't help me?"

"I shall certainly not do anything to give the impression that I
countenance your behaviour. If you really owe your dress-maker, I will
settle with her--beyond that I recognize no obligation to assume your
debts."

Lily had risen, and stood pale and quivering before her aunt.  Pride
stormed in her, but humiliation forced the cry from her lips: "Aunt
Julia, I shall be disgraced--I--" But she could go no farther. If her
aunt turned such a stony ear to the fiction of the gambling debts, in
what spirit would she receive the terrible avowal of the truth?

"I consider that you ARE disgraced, Lily: disgraced by your conduct far
more than by its results. You say your friends have persuaded you to play
cards with them; well, they may as well learn a lesson too. They can
probably afford to lose a little money--and at any rate, I am not going
to waste any of mine in paying them. And now I must ask you to leave
me--this scene has been extremely painful, and I have my own health to
consider.  Draw down the blinds, please; and tell Jennings I will see no
one this afternoon but Grace Stepney."

Lily went up to her own room and bolted the door. She was trembling with
fear and anger--the rush of the furies' wings was in her ears. She walked
up and down the room with blind irregular steps. The last door of escape
was closed--she felt herself shut in with her dishonour.

Suddenly her wild pacing brought her before the clock on the
chimney-piece. Its hands stood at half-past three, and she remembered
that Selden was to come to her at four. She had meant to put him off with
a word--but now her heart leaped at the thought of seeing him. Was there
not a promise of rescue in his love? As she had lain at Gerty's side the
night before, she had thought of his coming, and of the sweetness of
weeping out her pain upon his breast. Of course she had meant to clear
herself of its consequences before she met him--she had never really
doubted that Mrs. Peniston would come to her aid. And she had felt, even
in the full storm of her misery, that Selden's love could not be her
ultimate refuge; only it would be so sweet to take a moment's shelter
there, while she gathered fresh strength to go on.

But now his love was her only hope, and as she sat alone with her
wretchedness the thought of confiding in him became as seductive as the
river's flow to the suicide. The first plunge would be terrible--but
afterward, what blessedness might come! She remembered Gerty's words: "I
know him--he will help you"; and her mind clung to them as a sick person
might cling to a healing relic. Oh, if he really understood--if he would
help her to gather up her broken life, and put it together in some new
semblance in which no trace of the past should remain! He had always made
her feel that she was worthy of better things, and she had never been in
greater need of such solace. Once and again she shrank at the thought of
imperilling his love by her confession: for love was what she needed--it
would take the glow of passion to weld together the shattered fragments
of her self-esteem. But she recurred to Gerty's words and held fast to
them. She was sure that Gerty knew Selden's feeling for her, and it had
never dawned upon her blindness that Gerty's own judgment of him was
coloured by emotions far more ardent than her own.

Four o'clock found her in the drawing-room: she was sure that Selden
would be punctual. But the hour came and passed--it moved on feverishly,
measured by her impatient heart-beats. She had time to take a fresh
survey of her wretchedness, and to fluctuate anew between the impulse to
confide in Selden and the dread of destroying his illusions.  But as the
minutes passed the need of throwing herself on his comprehension became
more urgent: she could not bear the weight of her misery alone. There
would be a perilous moment, perhaps: but could she not trust to her
beauty to bridge it over, to land her safe in the shelter of his devotion?

But the hour sped on and Selden did not come. Doubtless he had been
detained, or had misread her hurriedly scrawled note, taking the four for
a five. The ringing of the door-bell a few minutes after five confirmed
this supposition, and made Lily hastily resolve to write more legibly in
future. The sound of steps in the hall, and of the butler's voice
preceding them, poured fresh energy into her veins. She felt herself once
more the alert and competent moulder of emergencies, and the remembrance
of her power over Selden flushed her with sudden confidence. But when the
drawing-room door opened it was Rosedale who came in.

The reaction caused her a sharp pang, but after a passing movement of
irritation at the clumsiness of fate, and at her own carelessness in not
denying the door to all but Selden, she controlled herself and greeted
Rosedale amicably. It was annoying that Selden, when he came, should find
that particular visitor in possession, but Lily was mistress of the art
of ridding herself of superfluous company, and to her present mood
Rosedale seemed distinctly negligible.

His own view of the situation forced itself upon her after a few moments'
conversation. She had caught at the Brys' entertainment as an easy
impersonal subject, likely to tide them over the interval till Selden
appeared, but Mr. Rosedale, tenaciously planted beside the tea-table, his
hands in his pockets, his legs a little too freely extended, at once gave
the topic a personal turn.

"Pretty well done--well, yes, I suppose it was: Welly Bry's got his back
up and don't mean to let go till he's got the hang of the thing.  Of
course, there were things here and there--things Mrs. Fisher couldn't be
expected to see to--the champagne wasn't cold, and the coats got mixed in
the coat-room. I would have spent more money on the music. But that's my
character: if I want a thing I'm willing to pay: I don't go up to the
counter, and then wonder if the article's worth the price. I wouldn't be
satisfied to entertain like the Welly Brys; I'd want something that would
look more easy and natural, more as if I took it in my stride. And it
takes just two things to do that, Miss Bart: money, and the right woman
to spend it."

He paused, and examined her attentively while she affected to rearrange
the tea-cups.

"I've got the money," he continued, clearing his throat, "and what I want
is the woman--and I mean to have her too."

He leaned forward a little, resting his hands on the head of his
walking-stick. He had seen men of Ned Van Alstyne's type bring their hats
and sticks into a drawing-room, and he thought it added a touch of
elegant familiarity to their appearance.

Lily was silent, smiling faintly, with her eyes absently resting on his
face. She was in reality reflecting that a declaration would take some
time to make, and that Selden must surely appear before the moment of
refusal had been reached. Her brooding look, as of a mind withdrawn yet
not averted, seemed to Mr. Rosedale full of a subtle encouragement. He
would not have liked any evidence of eagerness.

"I mean to have her too," he repeated, with a laugh intended to
strengthen his self-assurance. "I generally HAVE got what I wanted in
life, Miss Bart. I wanted money, and I've got more than I know how to
invest; and now the money doesn't seem to be of any account unless I can
spend it on the right woman. That's what I want to do with it: I want my
wife to make all the other women feel small. I'd never grudge a dollar
that was spent on that. But it isn't every woman can do it, no matter how
much you spend on her. There was a girl in some history book who wanted
gold shields, or something, and the fellows threw 'em at her, and she was
crushed under 'em: they killed her. Well, that's true enough: some women
looked buried under their jewelry. What I want is a woman who'll hold her
head higher the more diamonds I put on it.  And when I looked at you the
other night at the Brys', in that plain white dress, looking as if you
had a crown on, I said to myself: 'By gad, if she had one she'd wear it
as if it grew on her.'"

Still Lily did not speak, and he continued, warming with his theme: "Tell
you what it is, though, that kind of woman costs more than all the rest
of 'em put together. If a woman's going to ignore her pearls, they want
to be better than anybody else's--and so it is with everything else. You
know what I mean--you know it's only the showy things that are cheap.
Well, I should want my wife to be able to take the earth for granted if
she wanted to. I know there's one thing vulgar about money, and that's
the thinking about it; and my wife would never have to demean herself in
that way." He paused, and then added, with an unfortunate lapse to an
earlier manner: "I guess you know the lady I've got in view, Miss Bart."

Lily raised her head, brightening a little under the challenge.  Even
through the dark tumult of her thoughts, the clink of Mr. Rosedale's
millions had a faintly seductive note. Oh, for enough of them to cancel
her one miserable debt! But the man behind them grew increasingly
repugnant in the light of Selden's expected coming. The contrast was too
grotesque: she could scarcely suppress the smile it provoked. She decided
that directness would be best.

"If you mean me, Mr. Rosedale, I am very grateful--very much flattered;
but I don't know what I have ever done to make you think--"

"Oh, if you mean you're not dead in love with me, I've got sense enough
left to see that. And I ain't talking to you as if you were--I presume I
know the kind of talk that's expected under those circumstances. I'm
confoundedly gone on you--that's about the size of it--and I'm just
giving you a plain business statement of the consequences. You're not
very fond of me--YET--but you're fond of luxury, and style, and
amusement, and of not having to worry about cash. You like to have a good
time, and not have to settle for it; and what I propose to do is to
provide for the good time and do the settling."

He paused, and she returned with a chilling smile: "You are mistaken in
one point, Mr. Rosedale: whatever I enjoy I am prepared to settle for."

She spoke with the intention of making him see that, if his words implied
a tentative allusion to her private affairs, she was prepared to meet and
repudiate it. But if he recognized her meaning it failed to abash him,
and he went on in the same tone: "I didn't mean to give offence; excuse
me if I've spoken too plainly. But why ain't you straight with me--why do
you put up that kind of bluff? You know there've been times when you were
bothered--damned bothered--and as a girl gets older, and things keep
moving along, why, before she knows it, the things she wants are liable
to move past her and not come back.  I don't say it's anywhere near that
with you yet; but you've had a taste of bothers that a girl like yourself
ought never to have known about, and what I'm offering you is the chance
to turn your back on them once for all."

The colour burned in Lily's face as he ended; there was no mistaking the
point he meant to make, and to permit it to pass unheeded was a fatal
confession of weakness, while to resent it too openly was to risk
offending him at a perilous moment.  Indignation quivered on her lip; but
it was quelled by the secret voice which warned her that she must not
quarrel with him. He knew too much about her, and even at the moment when
it was essential that he should show himself at his best, he did not
scruple to let her see how much he knew. How then would he use his power
when her expression of contempt had dispelled his one motive for
restraint? Her whole future might hinge on her way of answering him: she
had to stop and consider that, in the stress of her other anxieties, as a
breathless fugitive may have to pause at the cross-roads and try to
decide coolly which turn to take.

"You are quite right, Mr. Rosedale. I HAVE had bothers; and I am grateful
to you for wanting to relieve me of them. It is not always easy to be
quite independent and self-respecting when one is poor and lives among
rich people; I have been careless about money, and have worried about my
bills. But I should be selfish and ungrateful if I made that a reason for
accepting all you offer, with no better return to make than the desire to
be free from my anxieties. You must give me time--time to think of your
kindness--and of what I could give you in return for it----"

She held out her hand with a charming gesture in which dismissal was
shorn of its rigour. Its hint of future leniency made Rosedale rise in
obedience to it, a little flushed with his unhoped-for success, and
disciplined by the tradition of his blood to accept what was conceded,
without undue haste to press for more. Something in his prompt
acquiescence frightened her; she felt behind it the stored force of a
patience that might subdue the strongest will. But at least they had
parted amicably, and he was out of the house without meeting
Selden--Selden, whose continued absence now smote her with a new alarm.
Rosedale had remained over an hour, and she understood that it was now
too late to hope for Selden. He would write explaining his absence, of
course; there would be a note from him by the late post. But her
confession would have to be postponed; and the chill of the delay settled
heavily on her fagged spirit.

It lay heavier when the postman's last ring brought no note for her, and
she had to go upstairs to a lonely night--a night as grim and sleepless
as her tortured fancy had pictured it to Gerty. She had never learned to
live with her own thoughts, and to be confronted with them through such
hours of lucid misery made the confused wretchedness of her previous
vigil seem easily bearable.

Daylight disbanded the phantom crew, and made it clear to her that she
would hear from Selden before noon; but the day passed without his
writing or coming. Lily remained at home, lunching and dining alone with
her aunt, who complained of flutterings of the heart, and talked icily on
general topics. Mrs. Peniston went to bed early, and when she had gone
Lily sat down and wrote a note to Selden. She was about to ring for a
messenger to despatch it when her eye fell on a paragraph in the evening
paper which lay at her elbow: "Mr. Lawrence Selden was among the
passengers sailing this afternoon for Havana and the West Indies on the
Windward Liner Antilles."

She laid down the paper and sat motionless, staring at her note. She
understood now that he was never coming--that he had gone away because he
was afraid that he might come.  She rose, and walking across the floor
stood gazing at herself for a long time in the brightly-lit mirror above
the mantel-piece.  The lines in her face came out terribly--she looked
old; and when a girl looks old to herself, how does she look to other
people? She moved away, and began to wander aimlessly about the room,
fitting her steps with mechanical precision between the monstrous roses
of Mrs. Peniston's Axminster. Suddenly she noticed that the pen with
which she had written to Selden still rested against the uncovered
inkstand. She seated herself again, and taking out an envelope, addressed
it rapidly to Rosedale. Then she laid out a sheet of paper, and sat over
it with suspended pen. It had been easy enough to write the date, and
"Dear Mr. Rosedale"--but after that her inspiration flagged. She meant to
tell him to come to her, but the words refused to shape themselves. At
length she began: "I have been thinking----" then she laid the pen down,
and sat with her elbows on the table and her face hidden in her hands.

Suddenly she started up at the sound of the door-bell. It was not
late--barely ten o'clock--and there might still be a note from Selden, or
a message--or he might be there himself, on the other side of the door!
The announcement of his sailing might have been a mistake--it might be
another Lawrence Selden who had gone to Havana--all these possibilities
had time to flash through her mind, and build up the conviction that she
was after all to see or hear from him, before the drawing-room door
opened to admit a servant carrying a telegram.

Lily tore it open with shaking hands, and read Bertha Dorset's name below
the message: "Sailing unexpectedly tomorrow. Will you join us on a cruise
in Mediterranean?"

                        BOOK TWO

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

completion: Lily awakens to receive letters from Mrs. Trenor and Selden, both requesting a meeting with her. Although she is worried about Selden's desire to marry her, she agrees to meet with him at four the following afternoon. In the meantime, Lily goes to the New York home of Mrs. Trenor, where she is met by Gus Trenor. He tells her that Mrs. Trenor is sick and cannot meet with Lily, and so Lily replies that she must then leave. Trenor becomes angry that she wants to leave and tells her that she may not, because he wants to speak with her. Trenor confesses that his wife is not even home; she asked him to cancel her appointments, but he did not so that Lily would come over and she could "hear out." He first explains that Simon Rosedale has been spreading rumors about an affair between Lily and Selden ever since he saw her leaving the Benedick at the end of Chapter One. Trenor has come to believe that Lily and Selden are together, which infuriates him because he thought Lily had a romantic interest in him. He tells her that she has led him on unfairly. After ranting, Trenor suddenly orders Lily to leave after the issue of her investments is raised. As she departs, Lily realizes that she is terrified of her own loneliness, which is evident to her now because she has "no heart to lean on" in this time of distress. She decides to seek comfort from Gerty Farish. Gerty, meanwhile, is becoming more infatuated with her cousin Selden. She thinks her fondness may be reciprocated, but she also suspects that Selden loves Lily. Nevertheless, as Lily becomes more involved in helping Gerty with her philanthropy work and learns what it means to truly live in poverty, Gerty finds herself liking Lily more. Chapter 14 also delves into Selden's personal family history. His parents were not particularly wealthy, nor did they place a large priority on the acquisition of wealth. Selden thus grew up learning how to make do with little money, and he has always retained a detachment from those who obsess over money, including Lily. Nevertheless, Selden recognizes his increasing love for her. On a trip into town, Selden encounters Trenor alone at a club. Trenor asks Selden to stay with him, and when Selden refuses, Trenor once again becomes angry and irritable. Later, Selden joins Gerty Farish for dinner, where they discuss Lily and her appearance during the tableaux vivants. After dinner, they discuss their thoughts on love and marriage. Selden states that even though Lily has had numerous opportunities to get married, she has always shrunk from them at the crucial moment. He leaves telling Gerty to "be good to her... you help her by believing the best of her." Gerty is jealous of Selden's obsession with Lily. Selden goes to Carry Fisher's house to find Lily, but when he arrives he learns that Lily has left already for the Trenor house. Mrs. Stepney comments that this is odd, because the Trenors are not supposed to be in town. Selden leaves Carry Fisher's and begins to walk to the Trenors accompanied, to his discomfort, by Ned Van Alstyne. As they arrive at the Trenor house, they see two figures emerge from the dark house, one of whom scurries down the steps to the hansom waiting in the street. Selden knows that the two figures are Lily and Trenor, which hurts him deeply; he now suspects that Lily is indeed having an affair with Trenor. Meanwhile, Gerty Farish is increasingly discontent, suspecting an affair between Selden and Lily. She is jealous of Lily's enjoyment of society, and believes that Lily judges her unfairly based on her lack of prestige. As she thinks of her hatred for Lily, someone, who turns out to be Lily, knocks on her door, which Gerty promptly opens. Lily looks distraught and says she needs help because she cannot go home. She hates the thought of herself, believing she is going from bad to worse. Gerty lets her stay at her home for the night. Lily confesses that she is in dire need of money, and Gerty tells her that Selden went looking for her at the Trenors. The next day, Lily wakens and goes home. She explains to Mrs. Peniston some of the events of the previous day before lying down to rest. Later, she confesses to Mrs. Peniston her financial problems, and Mrs. Peniston reluctantly agrees to pay her clothing debts. However, Mrs. Peniston is greatly angered by Lily's confession that she plays cards for money, even on Sundays. Mrs. Peniston calls Lily a disgrace and agrees to pay only her clothing debts. Lily becomes even more distressed and upset, but she still refuses to consider marrying Selden. She waits for his arrival, but Selden, disgusted by her dealings with Trenor and not wanting to have anything to do with her, has decided to stand her up. Instead of Selden, Rosedale appears at Lily's house and proposes marriage. He says has too much money, and he desires to get a wife and make her rich. Lily, who still dislikes Rosedale, asks for time to decide, which he grants before leaving. Selden does not show up; we learn he has left for the Caribbean Sea on a sailing ship. Instead, Lily receives a note from the Dorsets inviting her with them on an unexpected Mediterranean voyage to France. Lily decides to accompany them.