prompt:
Chapter: As became persons of their rising consequence, the Gormers were engaged
in building a country-house on Long Island; and it was a part of Miss
Bart's duty to attend her hostess on frequent visits of inspection to the
new estate. There, while Mrs. Gormer plunged into problems of lighting
and sanitation, Lily had leisure to wander, in the bright autumn air,
along the tree-fringed bay to which the land declined.  Little as she was
addicted to solitude, there had come to be moments when it seemed a
welcome escape from the empty noises of her life. She was weary of being
swept passively along a current of pleasure and business in which she had
no share; weary of seeing other people pursue amusement and squander
money, while she felt herself of no more account among them than an
expensive toy in the hands of a spoiled child.

It was in this frame of mind that, striking back from the shore one
morning into the windings of an unfamiliar lane, she came suddenly upon
the figure of George Dorset. The Dorset place was in the immediate
neighbourhood of the Gormers' newly-acquired estate, and in her
motor-flights thither with Mrs. Gormer, Lily had caught one or two
passing glimpses of the couple; but they moved in so different an orbit
that she had not considered the possibility of a direct encounter.

Dorset, swinging along with bent head, in moody abstraction, did not see
Miss Bart till he was close upon her; but the sight, instead of bringing
him to a halt, as she had half-expected, sent him toward her with an
eagerness which found expression in his opening words.

"Miss Bart!--You'll shake hands, won't you? I've been hoping to meet
you--I should have written to you if I'd dared." His face, with its
tossed red hair and straggling moustache, had a driven uneasy look, as
though life had become an unceasing race between himself and the thoughts
at his heels.

The look drew a word of compassionate greeting from Lily, and he pressed
on, as if encouraged by her tone: "I wanted to apologize--to ask you to
forgive me for the miserable part I played----"

She checked him with a quick gesture. "Don't let us speak of it: I was
very sorry for you," she said, with a tinge of disdain which, as she
instantly perceived, was not lost on him.

He flushed to his haggard eyes, flushed so cruelly that she repented the
thrust. "You might well be; you don't know--you must let me explain. I
was deceived: abominably deceived----"

"I am still more sorry for you, then," she interposed, without irony;
"but you must see that I am not exactly the person with whom the subject
can be discussed."

He met this with a look of genuine wonder. "Why not? Isn't it to you, of
all people, that I owe an explanation----"

"No explanation is necessary: the situation was perfectly clear to me."

"Ah----" he murmured, his head drooping again, and his irresolute hand
switching at the underbrush along the lane. But as Lily made a movement
to pass on, he broke out with fresh vehemence: "Miss Bart, for God's sake
don't turn from me! We used to be good friends--you were always kind to
me--and you don't know how I need a friend now."

The lamentable weakness of the words roused a motion of pity in Lily's
breast. She too needed friends--she had tasted the pang of loneliness;
and her resentment of Bertha Dorset's cruelty softened her heart to the
poor wretch who was after all the chief of Bertha's victims.

"I still wish to be kind; I feel no ill-will toward you," she said.  "But
you must understand that after what has happened we can't be friends
again--we can't see each other."

"Ah, you ARE kind--you're merciful--you always were!" He fixed his
miserable gaze on her. "But why can't we be friends--why not, when I've
repented in dust and ashes? Isn't it hard that you should condemn me to
suffer for the falseness, the treachery of others? I was punished enough
at the time--is there to be no respite for me?"

"I should have thought you had found complete respite in the
reconciliation which was effected at my expense," Lily began, with
renewed impatience; but he broke in imploringly: "Don't put it in that
way--when that's been the worst of my punishment. My God! what could I
do--wasn't I powerless? You were singled out as a sacrifice: any word I
might have said would have been turned against you----"

"I have told you I don't blame you; all I ask you to understand is that,
after the use Bertha chose to make of me--after all that her behaviour
has since implied--it's impossible that you and I should meet."

He continued to stand before her, in his dogged weakness. "Is it--need it
be? Mightn't there be circumstances----?" he checked himself, slashing at
the wayside weeds in a wider radius. Then he began again: "Miss Bart,
listen--give me a minute. If we're not to meet again, at least let me
have a hearing now. You say we can't be friends after--after what has
happened. But can't I at least appeal to your pity? Can't I move you if I
ask you to think of me as a prisoner--a prisoner you alone can set free?"

Lily's inward start betrayed itself in a quick blush: was it possible
that this was really the sense of Carry Fisher's adumbrations?

"I can't see how I can possibly be of any help to you," she murmured,
drawing back a little from the mounting excitement of his look.

Her tone seemed to sober him, as it had so often done in his stormiest
moments. The stubborn lines of his face relaxed, and he said, with an
abrupt drop to docility: "You WOULD see, if you'd be as merciful as you
used to be: and heaven knows I've never needed it more!"

She paused a moment, moved in spite of herself by this reminder of her
influence over him. Her fibres had been softened by suffering, and the
sudden glimpse into his mocked and broken life disarmed her contempt for
his weakness.

"I am very sorry for you--I would help you willingly; but you must have
other friends, other advisers."

"I never had a friend like you," he answered simply. "And besides--can't
you see?--you're the only person"--his voice dropped to a whisper--"the
only person who knows."

Again she felt her colour change; again her heart rose in precipitate
throbs to meet what she felt was coming. He lifted his eyes to her
entreatingly. "You do see, don't you? You understand? I'm desperate--I'm
at the end of my tether. I want to be free, and you can free me. I know
you can. You don't want to keep me bound fast in hell, do you? You can't
want to take such a vengeance as that. You were always kind--your eyes
are kind now. You say you're sorry for me. Well, it rests with you to
show it; and heaven knows there's nothing to keep you back. You
understand, of course--there wouldn't be a hint of publicity--not a sound
or a syllable to connect you with the thing. It would never come to that,
you know: all I need is to be able to say definitely: 'I know this--and
this--and this'--and the fight would drop, and the way be cleared, and
the whole abominable business swept out of sight in a second."

He spoke pantingly, like a tired runner, with breaks of exhaustion
between his words; and through the breaks she caught, as through the
shifting rents of a fog, great golden vistas of peace and safety. For
there was no mistaking the definite intention behind his vague appeal;
she could have filled up the blanks without the help of Mrs. Fisher's
insinuations. Here was a man who turned to her in the extremity of his
loneliness and his humiliation: if she came to him at such a moment he
would be hers with all the force of his deluded faith. And the power to
make him so lay in her hand--lay there in a completeness he could not
even remotely conjecture. Revenge and rehabilitation might be hers at a
stroke--there was something dazzling in the completeness of the
opportunity.

She stood silent, gazing away from him down the autumnal stretch of the
deserted lane. And suddenly fear possessed her--fear of herself, and of
the terrible force of the temptation. All her past weaknesses were like
so many eager accomplices drawing her toward the path their feet had
already smoothed. She turned quickly, and held out her hand to Dorset.

"Goodbye--I'm sorry; there's nothing in the world that I can do."

"Nothing? Ah, don't say that," he cried; "say what's true: that you
abandon me like the others. You, the only creature who could have saved
me!"

"Goodbye--goodbye," she repeated hurriedly; and as she moved away she
heard him cry out on a last note of entreaty: "At least you'll let me see
you once more?"

Lily, on regaining the Gormer grounds, struck rapidly across the lawn
toward the unfinished house, where she fancied that her hostess might be
speculating, not too resignedly, on the cause of her delay; for, like
many unpunctual persons, Mrs. Gormer disliked to be kept waiting.

As Miss Bart reached the avenue, however, she saw a smart phaeton with a
high-stepping pair disappear behind the shrubbery in the direction of the
gate; and on the doorstep stood Mrs. Gormer, with a glow of retrospective
pleasure on her open countenance. At sight of Lily the glow deepened to
an embarrassed red, and she said with a slight laugh: "Did you see my
visitor? Oh, I thought you came back by the avenue. It was Mrs. George
Dorset--she said she'd dropped in to make a neighbourly call."

Lily met the announcement with her usual composure, though her experience
of Bertha's idiosyncrasies would not have led her to include the
neighbourly instinct among them; and Mrs. Gormer, relieved to see that
she gave no sign of surprise, went on with a deprecating laugh: "Of
course what really brought her was curiosity--she made me take her all
over the house. But no one could have been nicer--no airs, you know, and
so good-natured: I can quite see why people think her so fascinating."

This surprising event, coinciding too completely with her meeting with
Dorset to be regarded as contingent upon it, had yet immediately struck
Lily with a vague sense of foreboding. It was not in Bertha's habits to
be neighbourly, much less to make advances to any one outside the
immediate circle of her affinities. She had always consistently ignored
the world of outer aspirants, or had recognized its individual members
only when prompted by motives of self-interest; and the very
capriciousness of her condescensions had, as Lily was aware, given them
special value in the eyes of the persons she distinguished. Lily saw this
now in Mrs. Gormer's unconcealable complacency, and in the happy
irrelevance with which, for the next day or two, she quoted Bertha's
opinions and speculated on the origin of her gown. All the secret
ambitions which Mrs. Gormer's native indolence, and the attitude of her
companions, kept in habitual abeyance, were now germinating afresh in the
glow of Bertha's advances; and whatever the cause of the latter, Lily saw
that, if they were followed up, they were likely to have a disturbing
effect upon her own future.

She had arranged to break the length of her stay with her new friends by
one or two visits to other acquaintances as recent; and on her return
from this somewhat depressing excursion she was immediately conscious
that Mrs. Dorset's influence was still in the air. There had been another
exchange of visits, a tea at a country-club, an encounter at a hunt ball;
there was even a rumour of an approaching dinner, which Mattie Gormer,
with an unnatural effort at discretion, tried to smuggle out of the
conversation whenever Miss Bart took part in it.

The latter had already planned to return to town after a farewell Sunday
with her friends; and, with Gerty Farish's aid, had discovered a small
private hotel where she might establish herself for the winter.  The
hotel being on the edge of a fashionable neighbourhood, the price of the
few square feet she was to occupy was considerably in excess of her
means; but she found a justification for her dislike of poorer quarters
in the argument that, at this particular juncture, it was of the utmost
importance to keep up a show of prosperity. In reality, it was impossible
for her, while she had the means to pay her way for a week ahead, to
lapse into a form of existence like Gerty Farish's. She had never been so
near the brink of insolvency; but she could at least manage to meet her
weekly hotel bill, and having settled the heaviest of her previous debts
out of the money she had received from Trenor, she had a still fair
margin of credit to go upon. The situation, however, was not agreeable
enough to lull her to complete unconsciousness of its insecurity.  Her
rooms, with their cramped outlook down a sallow vista of brick walls and
fire-escapes, her lonely meals in the dark restaurant with its surcharged
ceiling and haunting smell of coffee--all these material discomforts,
which were yet to be accounted as so many privileges soon to be
withdrawn, kept constantly before her the disadvantages of her state; and
her mind reverted the more insistently to Mrs. Fisher's counsels.  Beat
about the question as she would, she knew the outcome of it was that she
must try to marry Rosedale; and in this conviction she was fortified by
an unexpected visit from George Dorset.

She found him, on the first Sunday after her return to town, pacing her
narrow sitting-room to the imminent peril of the few knick-knacks with
which she had tried to disguise its plush exuberances; but the sight of
her seemed to quiet him, and he said meekly that he hadn't come to bother
her--that he asked only to be allowed to sit for half an hour and talk of
anything she liked. In reality, as she knew, he had but one subject:
himself and his wretchedness; and it was the need of her sympathy that
had drawn him back. But he began with a pretence of questioning her about
herself, and as she replied, she saw that, for the first time, a faint
realization of her plight penetrated the dense surface of his
self-absorption. Was it possible that her old beast of an aunt had
actually cut her off? That she was living alone like this because there
was no one else for her to go to, and that she really hadn't more than
enough to keep alive on till the wretched little legacy was paid? The
fibres of sympathy were nearly atrophied in him, but he was suffering so
intensely that he had a faint glimpse of what other sufferings might
mean--and, as she perceived, an almost simultaneous perception of the way
in which her particular misfortunes might serve him.

When at length she dismissed him, on the pretext that she must dress for
dinner, he lingered entreatingly on the threshold to blurt out: "It's
been such a comfort--do say you'll let me see you again--" But to this
direct appeal it was impossible to give an assent; and she said with
friendly decisiveness: "I'm sorry--but you know why I can't."

He coloured to the eyes, pushed the door shut, and stood before her
embarrassed but insistent. "I know how you might, if you would--if things
were different--and it lies with you to make them so. It's just a word to
say, and you put me out of my misery!"

Their eyes met, and for a second she trembled again with the nearness of
the temptation. "You're mistaken; I know nothing; I saw nothing," she
exclaimed, striving, by sheer force of reiteration, to build a barrier
between herself and her peril; and as he turned away, groaning out "You
sacrifice us both," she continued to repeat, as if it were a charm: "I
know nothing--absolutely nothing."

Lily had seen little of Rosedale since her illuminating talk with Mrs.
Fisher, but on the two or three occasions when they had met she was
conscious of having distinctly advanced in his favour.  There could be no
doubt that he admired her as much as ever, and she believed it rested
with herself to raise his admiration to the point where it should bear
down the lingering counsels of expediency. The task was not an easy one;
but neither was it easy, in her long sleepless nights, to face the
thought of what George Dorset was so clearly ready to offer.  Baseness
for baseness, she hated the other least: there were even moments when a
marriage with Rosedale seemed the only honourable solution of her
difficulties. She did not indeed let her imagination range beyond the day
of plighting: after that everything faded into a haze of material
well-being, in which the personality of her benefactor remained
mercifully vague. She had learned, in her long vigils, that there were
certain things not good to think of, certain midnight images that must at
any cost be exorcised--and one of these was the image of herself as
Rosedale's wife.

Carry Fisher, on the strength, as she frankly owned, of the Brys' Newport
success, had taken for the autumn months a small house at Tuxedo; and
thither Lily was bound on the Sunday after Dorset's visit.  Though it was
nearly dinner-time when she arrived, her hostess was still out, and the
firelit quiet of the small silent house descended on her spirit with a
sense of peace and familiarity. It may be doubted if such an emotion had
ever before been evoked by Carry Fisher's surroundings; but, contrasted
to the world in which Lily had lately lived, there was an air of repose
and stability in the very placing of the furniture, and in the quiet
competence of the parlour-maid who led her up to her room. Mrs. Fisher's
unconventionality was, after all, a merely superficial divergence from an
inherited social creed, while the manners of the Gormer circle
represented their first attempt to formulate such a creed for themselves.

It was the first time since her return from Europe that Lily had found
herself in a congenial atmosphere, and the stirring of familiar
associations had almost prepared her, as she descended the stairs before
dinner, to enter upon a group of her old acquaintances. But this
expectation was instantly checked by the reflection that the friends who
remained loyal were precisely those who would be least willing to expose
her to such encounters; and it was hardly with surprise that she found,
instead, Mr. Rosedale kneeling domestically on the drawing-room hearth
before his hostess's little girl.

Rosedale in the paternal role was hardly a figure to soften Lily; yet she
could not but notice a quality of homely goodness in his advances to the
child. They were not, at any rate, the premeditated and perfunctory
endearments of the guest under his hostess's eye, for he and the little
girl had the room to themselves; and something in his attitude made him
seem a simple and kindly being compared to the small critical creature
who endured his homage. Yes, he would be kind--Lily, from the threshold,
had time to feel--kind in his gross, unscrupulous, rapacious way, the way
of the predatory creature with his mate.  She had but a moment in which
to consider whether this glimpse of the fireside man mitigated her
repugnance, or gave it, rather, a more concrete and intimate form; for at
sight of her he was immediately on his feet again, the florid and
dominant Rosedale of Mattie Gormer's drawing-room.

It was no surprise to Lily to find that he had been selected as her only
fellow-guest. Though she and her hostess had not met since the latter's
tentative discussion of her future, Lily knew that the acuteness which
enabled Mrs. Fisher to lay a safe and pleasant course through a world of
antagonistic forces was not infrequently exercised for the benefit of her
friends. It was, in fact, characteristic of Carry that, while she
actively gleaned her own stores from the fields of affluence, her real
sympathies were on the other side--with the unlucky, the unpopular, the
unsuccessful, with all her hungry fellow-toilers in the shorn stubble of
success.

Mrs. Fisher's experience guarded her against the mistake of exposing
Lily, for the first evening, to the unmitigated impression of Rosedale's
personality. Kate Corby and two or three men dropped in to dinner, and
Lily, alive to every detail of her friend's method, saw that such
opportunities as had been contrived for her were to be deferred till she
had, as it were, gained courage to make effectual use of them. She had a
sense of acquiescing in this plan with the passiveness of a sufferer
resigned to the surgeon's touch; and this feeling of almost lethargic
helplessness continued when, after the departure of the guests, Mrs.
Fisher followed her upstairs.

"May I come in and smoke a cigarette over your fire? If we talk in my
room we shall disturb the child." Mrs. Fisher looked about her with the
eye of the solicitous hostess. "I hope you've managed to make yourself
comfortable, dear? Isn't it a jolly little house? It's such a blessing to
have a few quiet weeks with the baby."

Carry, in her rare moments of prosperity, became so expansively maternal
that Miss Bart sometimes wondered whether, if she could ever get time and
money enough, she would not end by devoting them both to her daughter.

"It's a well-earned rest: I'll say that for myself," she continued,
sinking down with a sigh of content on the pillowed lounge near the fire.
"Louisa Bry is a stern task-master: I often used to wish myself back with
the Gormers. Talk of love making people jealous and suspicious--it's
nothing to social ambition!  Louisa used to lie awake at night wondering
whether the women who called on us called on ME because I was with her,
or on HER because she was with me; and she was always laying traps to
find out what I thought. Of course I had to disown my oldest friends,
rather than let her suspect she owed me the chance of making a single
acquaintance--when, all the while, that was what she had me there for,
and what she wrote me a handsome cheque for when the season was over!"

Mrs. Fisher was not a woman who talked of herself without cause, and the
practice of direct speech, far from precluding in her an occasional
resort to circuitous methods, served rather, at crucial moments, the
purpose of the juggler's chatter while he shifts the contents of his
sleeves. Through the haze of her cigarette smoke she continued to gaze
meditatively at Miss Bart, who, having dismissed her maid, sat before the
toilet-table shaking out over her shoulders the loosened undulations of
her hair.

"Your hair's wonderful, Lily. Thinner--? What does that matter, when it's
so light and alive? So many women's worries seem to go straight to their
hair--but yours looks as if there had never been an anxious thought under
it. I never saw you look better than you did this evening. Mattie Gormer
told me that Morpeth wanted to paint you--why don't you let him?"

Miss Bart's immediate answer was to address a critical glance to the
reflection of the countenance under discussion. Then she said, with a
slight touch of irritation: "I don't care to accept a portrait from Paul
Morpeth."

Mrs. Fisher mused. "N--no. And just now, especially--well, he can do you
after you're married." She waited a moment, and then went on: "By the
way, I had a visit from Mattie the other day.  She turned up here last
Sunday--and with Bertha Dorset, of all people in the world!"

She paused again to measure the effect of this announcement on her
hearer, but the brush in Miss Bart's lifted hand maintained its
unwavering stroke from brow to nape.

"I never was more astonished," Mrs. Fisher pursued. "I don't know two
women less predestined to intimacy--from Bertha's standpoint, that is;
for of course poor Mattie thinks it natural enough that she should be
singled out--I've no doubt the rabbit always thinks it is fascinating the
anaconda. Well, you know I've always told you that Mattie secretly longed
to bore herself with the really fashionable; and now that the chance has
come, I see that she's capable of sacrificing all her old friends to it."

Lily laid aside her brush and turned a penetrating glance upon her
friend. "Including ME?" she suggested.

"Ah, my dear," murmured Mrs. Fisher, rising to push back a log from the
hearth.

"That's what Bertha means, isn't it?" Miss Bart went on steadily.  "For
of course she always means something; and before I left Long Island I saw
that she was beginning to lay her toils for Mattie."

Mrs. Fisher sighed evasively. "She has her fast now, at any rate.  To
think of that loud independence of Mattie's being only a subtler form of
snobbishness! Bertha can already make her believe anything she
pleases--and I'm afraid she's begun, my poor child, by insinuating
horrors about you."

Lily flushed under the shadow of her drooping hair. "The world is too
vile," she murmured, averting herself from Mrs. Fisher's anxious scrutiny.

"It's not a pretty place; and the only way to keep a footing in it is to
fight it on its own terms--and above all, my dear, not alone!" Mrs.
Fisher gathered up her floating implications in a resolute grasp.
"You've told me so little that I can only guess what has been happening;
but in the rush we all live in there's no time to keep on hating any one
without a cause, and if Bertha is still nasty enough to want to injure
you with other people it must be because she's still afraid of you. From
her standpoint there's only one reason for being afraid of you; and my
own idea is that, if you want to punish her, you hold the means in your
hand. I believe you can marry George Dorset tomorrow; but if you don't
care for that particular form of retaliation, the only thing to save you
from Bertha is to marry somebody else."

The light projected on the situation by Mrs. Fisher had the cheerless
distinctness of a winter dawn. It outlined the facts with a cold
precision unmodified by shade or colour, and refracted, as it were, from
the blank walls of the surrounding limitations: she had opened windows
from which no sky was ever visible. But the idealist subdued to vulgar
necessities must employ vulgar minds to draw the inferences to which he
cannot stoop; and it was easier for Lily to let Mrs. Fisher formulate her
case than to put it plainly to herself. Once confronted with it, however,
she went the full length of its consequences; and these had never been
more clearly present to her than when, the next afternoon, she set out
for a walk with Rosedale.

It was one of those still November days when the air is haunted with the
light of summer, and something in the lines of the landscape, and in the
golden haze which bathed them, recalled to Miss Bart the September
afternoon when she had climbed the slopes of Bellomont with Selden. The
importunate memory was kept before her by its ironic contrast to her
present situation, since her walk with Selden had represented an
irresistible flight from just such a climax as the present excursion was
designed to bring about. But other memories importuned her also; the
recollection of similar situations, as skillfully led up to, but through
some malice of fortune, or her own unsteadiness of purpose, always
failing of the intended result. Well, her purpose was steady enough now.
She saw that the whole weary work of rehabilitation must begin again, and
against far greater odds, if Bertha Dorset should succeed in breaking up
her friendship with the Gormers; and her longing for shelter and security
was intensified by the passionate desire to triumph over Bertha, as only
wealth and predominance could triumph over her. As the wife of
Rosedale--the Rosedale she felt it in her power to create--she would at
least present an invulnerable front to her enemy.

She had to draw upon this thought, as upon some fiery stimulant, to keep
up her part in the scene toward which Rosedale was too frankly tending.
As she walked beside him, shrinking in every nerve from the way in which
his look and tone made free of her, yet telling herself that this
momentary endurance of his mood was the price she must pay for her
ultimate power over him, she tried to calculate the exact point at which
concession must turn to resistance, and the price HE would have to pay be
made equally clear to him. But his dapper self-confidence seemed
impenetrable to such hints, and she had a sense of something hard and
self-contained behind the superficial warmth of his manner.

They had been seated for some time in the seclusion of a rocky glen above
the lake, when she suddenly cut short the culmination of an impassioned
period by turning upon him the grave loveliness of her gaze.

"I DO believe what you say, Mr. Rosedale," she said quietly; "and I am
ready to marry you whenever you wish."

Rosedale, reddening to the roots of his glossy hair, received this
announcement with a recoil which carried him to his feet, where he halted
before her in an attitude of almost comic discomfiture.

"For I suppose that is what you do wish," she continued, in the same
quiet tone. "And, though I was unable to consent when you spoke to me in
this way before, I am ready, now that I know you so much better, to trust
my happiness to your hands."

She spoke with the noble directness which she could command on such
occasions, and which was like a large steady light thrown across the
tortuous darkness of the situation. In its inconvenient brightness
Rosedale seemed to waver a moment, as though conscious that every avenue
of escape was unpleasantly illuminated.

Then he gave a short laugh, and drew out a gold cigarette-case, in which,
with plump jewelled fingers, he groped for a gold-tipped cigarette.
Selecting one, he paused to contemplate it a moment before saying: "My
dear Miss Lily, I'm sorry if there's been any little misapprehension
between us-but you made me feel my suit was so hopeless that I had really
no intention of renewing it."

Lily's blood tingled with the grossness of the rebuff; but she checked
the first leap of her anger, and said in a tone of gentle dignity: "I
have no one but myself to blame if I gave you the impression that my
decision was final."

Her word-play was always too quick for him, and this reply held him in
puzzled silence while she extended her hand and added, with the faintest
inflection of sadness in her voice: "Before we bid each other goodbye, I
want at least to thank you for having once thought of me as you did."

The touch of her hand, the moving softness of her look, thrilled a
vulnerable fibre in Rosedale. It was her exquisite inaccessibleness, the
sense of distance she could convey without a hint of disdain, that made
it most difficult for him to give her up.

"Why do you talk of saying goodbye? Ain't we going to be good friends all
the same?" he urged, without releasing her hand.

She drew it away quietly. "What is your idea of being good friends?" she
returned with a slight smile. "Making love to me without asking me to
marry you?" Rosedale laughed with a recovered sense of ease.

"Well, that's about the size of it, I suppose. I can't help making love
to you--I don't see how any man could; but I don't mean to ask you to
marry me as long as I can keep out of it."

She continued to smile. "I like your frankness; but I am afraid our
friendship can hardly continue on those terms." She turned away, as
though to mark that its final term had in fact been reached, and he
followed her for a few steps with a baffled sense of her having after all
kept the game in her own hands.

"Miss Lily----" he began impulsively; but she walked on without seeming
to hear him.

He overtook her in a few quick strides, and laid an entreating hand on
her arm. "Miss Lily--don't hurry away like that. You're beastly hard on a
fellow; but if you don't mind speaking the truth I don't see why you
shouldn't allow me to do the same."

She had paused a moment with raised brows, drawing away instinctively
from his touch, though she made no effort to evade his words.

"I was under the impression," she rejoined, "that you had done so without
waiting for my permission."

"Well--why shouldn't you hear my reasons for doing it, then?  We're
neither of us such new hands that a little plain speaking is going to
hurt us. I'm all broken up on you: there's nothing new in that. I'm more
in love with you than I was this time last year; but I've got to face the
fact that the situation is changed."

She continued to confront him with the same air of ironic composure.
"You mean to say that I'm not as desirable a match as you thought me?"

"Yes; that's what I do mean," he answered resolutely. "I won't go into
what's happened. I don't believe the stories about you--I don't WANT to
believe them. But they're there, and my not believing them ain't going to
alter the situation."

She flushed to her temples, but the extremity of her need checked the
retort on her lip and she continued to face him composedly.  "If they are
not true," she said, "doesn't THAT alter the situation?"

He met this with a steady gaze of his small stock-taking eyes, which made
her feel herself no more than some superfine human merchandise. "I
believe it does in novels; but I'm certain it don't in real life. You
know that as well as I do: if we're speaking the truth, let's speak the
whole truth. Last year I was wild to marry you, and you wouldn't look at
me: this year--well, you appear to be willing. Now, what has changed in
the interval?  Your situation, that's all. Then you thought you could do
better; now----"

"You think you can?" broke from her ironically.

"Why, yes, I do: in one way, that is." He stood before her, his hands in
his pockets, his chest sturdily expanded under its vivid waistcoat.
"It's this way, you see: I've had a pretty steady grind of it these last
years, working up my social position.  Think it's funny I should say
that? Why should I mind saying I want to get into society? A man ain't
ashamed to say he wants to own a racing stable or a picture gallery.
Well, a taste for society's just another kind of hobby.  Perhaps I want
to get even with some of the people who cold-shouldered me last year--put
it that way if it sounds better. Anyhow, I want to have the run of the
best houses; and I'm getting it too, little by little. But I know the
quickest way to queer yourself with the right people is to be seen with
the wrong ones; and that's the reason I want to avoid mistakes."

Miss Bart continued to stand before him in a silence that might have
expressed either mockery or a half-reluctant respect for his candour, and
after a moment's pause he went on: "There it is, you see. I'm more in
love with you than ever, but if I married you now I'd queer myself for
good and all, and everything I've worked for all these years would be
wasted."

She received this with a look from which all tinge of resentment had
faded. After the tissue of social falsehoods in which she had so long
moved it was refreshing to step into the open daylight of an avowed
expediency.

"I understand you," she said. "A year ago I should have been of use to
you, and now I should be an encumbrance; and I like you for telling me so
quite honestly." She extended her hand with a smile.

Again the gesture had a disturbing effect upon Mr. Rosedale's
self-command. "By George, you're a dead game sport, you are!" he
exclaimed; and as she began once more to move away, he broke out
suddenly--"Miss Lily--stop. You know I don't believe those stories--I
believe they were all got up by a woman who didn't hesitate to sacrifice
you to her own convenience----"

Lily drew away with a movement of quick disdain: it was easier to endure
his insolence than his commiseration.

"You are very kind; but I don't think we need discuss the matter farther."

But Rosedale's natural imperviousness to hints made it easy for him to
brush such resistance aside. "I don't want to discuss anything; I just
want to put a plain case before you," he persisted.

She paused in spite of herself, held by the note of a new purpose in his
look and tone; and he went on, keeping his eyes firmly upon her: "The
wonder to me is that you've waited so long to get square with that woman,
when you've had the power in your hands." She continued silent under the
rush of astonishment that his words produced, and he moved a step closer
to ask with low-toned directness: "Why don't you use those letters of
hers you bought last year?"

Lily stood speechless under the shock of the interrogation. In the words
preceding it she had conjectured, at most, an allusion to her supposed
influence over George Dorset; nor did the astonishing indelicacy of the
reference diminish the likelihood of Rosedale's resorting to it. But now
she saw how far short of the mark she had fallen; and the surprise of
learning that he had discovered the secret of the letters left her, for
the moment, unconscious of the special use to which he was in the act of
putting his knowledge.

Her temporary loss of self-possession gave him time to press his point;
and he went on quickly, as though to secure completer control of the
situation: "You see I know where you stand--I know how completely she's
in your power. That sounds like stage-talk, don't it?--but there's a lot
of truth in some of those old gags; and I don't suppose you bought those
letters simply because you're collecting autographs."

She continued to look at him with a deepening bewilderment: her only
clear impression resolved itself into a scared sense of his power.

"You're wondering how I found out about 'em?" he went on, answering her
look with a note of conscious pride. "Perhaps you've forgotten that I'm
the owner of the Benedick--but never mind about that now. Getting on to
things is a mighty useful accomplishment in business, and I've simply
extended it to my private affairs. For this IS partly my affair, you
see--at least, it depends on you to make it so. Let's look the situation
straight in the eye. Mrs. Dorset, for reasons we needn't go into, did you
a beastly bad turn last spring. Everybody knows what Mrs. Dorset is, and
her best friends wouldn't believe her on oath where their own interests
were concerned; but as long as they're out of the row it's much easier to
follow her lead than to set themselves against it, and you've simply been
sacrificed to their laziness and selfishness. Isn't that a pretty fair
statement of the case?--Well, some people say you've got the neatest kind
of an answer in your hands: that George Dorset would marry you tomorrow,
if you'd tell him all you know, and give him the chance to show the lady
the door. I daresay he would; but you don't seem to care for that
particular form of getting even, and, taking a purely business view of
the question, I think you're right. In a deal like that, nobody comes out
with perfectly clean hands, and the only way for you to start fresh is to
get Bertha Dorset to back you up, instead of trying to fight her."

He paused long enough to draw breath, but not to give her time for the
expression of her gathering resistance; and as he pressed on, expounding
and elucidating his idea with the directness of the man who has no doubts
of his cause, she found the indignation gradually freezing on her lip,
found herself held fast in the grasp of his argument by the mere cold
strength of its presentation. There was no time now to wonder how he had
heard of her obtaining the letters: all her world was dark outside the
monstrous glare of his scheme for using them. And it was not, after the
first moment, the horror of the idea that held her spell-bound, subdued
to his will; it was rather its subtle affinity to her own inmost
cravings. He would marry her tomorrow if she could regain Bertha Dorset's
friendship; and to induce the open resumption of that friendship, and the
tacit retractation of all that had caused its withdrawal, she had only to
put to the lady the latent menace contained in the packet so miraculously
delivered into her hands. Lily saw in a flash the advantage of this
course over that which poor Dorset had pressed upon her. The other plan
depended for its success on the infliction of an open injury, while this
reduced the transaction to a private understanding, of which no third
person need have the remotest hint. Put by Rosedale in terms of
business-like give-and-take, this understanding took on the harmless air
of a mutual accommodation, like a transfer of property or a revision of
boundary lines. It certainly simplified life to view it as a perpetual
adjustment, a play of party politics, in which every concession had its
recognized equivalent: Lily's tired mind was fascinated by this escape
from fluctuating ethical estimates into a region of concrete weights and
measures.

Rosedale, as she listened, seemed to read in her silence not only a
gradual acquiescence in his plan, but a dangerously far-reaching
perception of the chances it offered; for as she continued to stand
before him without speaking, he broke out, with a quick return upon
himself: "You see how simple it is, don't you? Well, don't be carried
away by the idea that it's TOO simple.  It isn't exactly as if you'd
started in with a clean bill of health. Now we're talking let's call
things by their right names, and clear the whole business up. You know
well enough that Bertha Dorset couldn't have touched you if there hadn't
been--well--questions asked before--little points of interrogation, eh?
Bound to happen to a good-looking girl with stingy relatives, I suppose;
anyhow, they DID happen, and she found the ground prepared for her. Do
you see where I'm coming out? You don't want these little questions
cropping up again.  It's one thing to get Bertha Dorset into line--but
what you want is to keep her there. You can frighten her fast enough--but
how are you going to keep her frightened?  By showing her that you're as
powerful as she is. All the letters in the world won't do that for you as
you are now; but with a big backing behind you, you'll keep her just
where you want her to be. That's MY share in the business--that's what
I'm offering you. You can't put the thing through without me--don't run
away with any idea that you can. In six months you'd be back again among
your old worries, or worse ones; and here I am, ready to lift you out of
'em tomorrow if you say so. DO you say so, Miss Lily?" he added, moving
suddenly nearer.

The words, and the movement which accompanied them, combined to startle
Lily out of the state of tranced subservience into which she had
insensibly slipped. Light comes in devious ways to the groping
consciousness, and it came to her now through the disgusted perception
that her would-be accomplice assumed, as a matter of course, the
likelihood of her distrusting him and perhaps trying to cheat him of his
share of the spoils. This glimpse of his inner mind seemed to present the
whole transaction in a new aspect, and she saw that the essential
baseness of the act lay in its freedom from risk.

She drew back with a quick gesture of rejection, saying, in a voice that
was a surprise to her own ears: "You are mistaken--quite mistaken--both
in the facts and in what you infer from them."

Rosedale stared a moment, puzzled by her sudden dash in a direction so
different from that toward which she had appeared to be letting him guide
her.

"Now what on earth does that mean? I thought we understood each other!"
he exclaimed; and to her murmur of "Ah, we do NOW," he retorted with a
sudden burst of violence: "I suppose it's because the letters are to HIM,
then? Well, I'll be damned if I see what thanks you've got from him!"

The autumn days declined to winter. Once more the leisure world was in
transition between country and town, and Fifth Avenue, still deserted at
the week-end, showed from Monday to Friday a broadening stream of
carriages between house-fronts gradually restored to consciousness.

The Horse Show, some two weeks earlier, had produced a passing semblance
of reanimation, filling the theatres and restaurants with a human display
of the same costly and high-stepping kind as circled daily about its
ring. In Miss Bart's world the Horse Show, and the public it attracted,
had ostensibly come to be classed among the spectacles disdained of the
elect; but, as the feudal lord might sally forth to join in the dance on
his village green, so society, unofficially and incidentally, still
condescended to look in upon the scene. Mrs. Gormer, among the rest, was
not above seizing such an occasion for the display of herself and her
horses; and Lily was given one or two opportunities of appearing at her
friend's side in the most conspicuous box the house afforded. But this
lingering semblance of intimacy made her only the more conscious of a
change in the relation between Mattie and herself, of a dawning
discrimination, a gradually formed social standard, emerging from Mrs.
Gormer's chaotic view of life. It was inevitable that Lily herself should
constitute the first sacrifice to this new ideal, and she knew that, once
the Gormers were established in town, the whole drift of fashionable life
would facilitate Mattie's detachment from her. She had, in short, failed
to make herself indispensable; or rather, her attempt to do so had been
thwarted by an influence stronger than any she could exert. That
influence, in its last analysis, was simply the power of money: Bertha
Dorset's social credit was based on an impregnable bank-account.

Lily knew that Rosedale had overstated neither the difficulty of her own
position nor the completeness of the vindication he offered: once
Bertha's match in material resources, her superior gifts would make it
easy for her to dominate her adversary. An understanding of what such
domination would mean, and of the disadvantages accruing from her
rejection of it, was brought home to Lily with increasing clearness
during the early weeks of the winter. Hitherto, she had kept up a
semblance of movement outside the main flow of the social current; but
with the return to town, and the concentrating of scattered activities,
the mere fact of not slipping back naturally into her old habits of life
marked her as being unmistakably excluded from them. If one were not a
part of the season's fixed routine, one swung unsphered in a void of
social non-existence. Lily, for all her dissatisfied dreaming, had never
really conceived the possibility of revolving about a different centre:
it was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find
any other habitable region. Her sense of irony never quite deserted her,
and she could still note, with self-directed derision, the abnormal value
suddenly acquired by the most tiresome and insignificant details of her
former life. Its very drudgeries had a charm now that she was
involuntarily released from them: card-leaving, note-writing, enforced
civilities to the dull and elderly, and the smiling endurance of tedious
dinners--how pleasantly such obligations would have filled the emptiness
of her days! She did indeed leave cards in plenty; she kept herself, with
a smiling and valiant persistence, well in the eye of her world; nor did
she suffer any of those gross rebuffs which sometimes produce a wholesome
reaction of contempt in their victim. Society did not turn away from her,
it simply drifted by, preoccupied and inattentive, letting her feel, to
the full measure of her humbled pride, how completely she had been the
creature of its favour.

She had rejected Rosedale's suggestion with a promptness of scorn almost
surprising to herself: she had not lost her capacity for high flashes of
indignation. But she could not breathe long on the heights; there had
been nothing in her training to develop any continuity of moral strength:
what she craved, and really felt herself entitled to, was a situation in
which the noblest attitude should also be the easiest. Hitherto her
intermittent impulses of resistance had sufficed to maintain her
self-respect.  If she slipped she recovered her footing, and it was only
afterward that she was aware of having recovered it each time on a
slightly lower level. She had rejected Rosedale's offer without conscious
effort; her whole being had risen against it; and she did not yet
perceive that, by the mere act of listening to him, she had learned to
live with ideas which would once have been intolerable to her.

To Gerty Farish, keeping watch over her with a tenderer if less
discerning eye than Mrs. Fisher's, the results of the struggle were
already distinctly visible. She did not, indeed, know what hostages Lily
had already given to expediency; but she saw her passionately and
irretrievably pledged to the ruinous policy of "keeping up." Gerty could
smile now at her own early dream of her friend's renovation through
adversity: she understood clearly enough that Lily was not of those to
whom privation teaches the unimportance of what they have lost. But this
very fact, to Gerty, made her friend the more piteously in want of aid,
the more exposed to the claims of a tenderness she was so little
conscious of needing.

Lily, since her return to town, had not often climbed Miss Farish's
stairs. There was something irritating to her in the mute interrogation
of Gerty's sympathy: she felt the real difficulties of her situation to
be incommunicable to any one whose theory of values was so different from
her own, and the restrictions of Gerty's life, which had once had the
charm of contrast, now reminded her too painfully of the limits to which
her own existence was shrinking. When at length, one afternoon, she put
into execution the belated resolve to visit her friend, this sense of
shrunken opportunities possessed her with unusual intensity.  The walk up
Fifth Avenue, unfolding before her, in the brilliance of the hard winter
sunlight, an interminable procession of fastidiously-equipped
carriages--giving her, through the little squares of brougham-windows,
peeps of familiar profiles bent above visiting-lists, of hurried hands
dispensing notes and cards to attendant footmen--this glimpse of the
ever-revolving wheels of the great social machine made Lily more than
ever conscious of the steepness and narrowness of Gerty's stairs, and of
the cramped blind alley of life to which they led.  Dull stairs destined
to be mounted by dull people: how many thousands of insignificant figures
were going up and down such stairs all over the world at that very
moment--figures as shabby and uninteresting as that of the middle-aged
lady in limp black who descended Gerty's flight as Lily climbed to it!

"That was poor Miss Jane Silverton--she came to talk things over with me:
she and her sister want to do something to support themselves," Gerty
explained, as Lily followed her into the sitting-room.

"To support themselves? Are they so hard up?" Miss Bart asked with a
touch of irritation: she had not come to listen to the woes of other
people.

"I'm afraid they have nothing left: Ned's debts have swallowed up
everything. They had such hopes, you know, when he broke away from Carry
Fisher; they thought Bertha Dorset would be such a good influence,
because she doesn't care for cards, and--well, she talked quite
beautifully to poor Miss Jane about feeling as if Ned were her younger
brother, and wanting to carry him off on the yacht, so that he might have
a chance to drop cards and racing, and take up his literary work again."

Miss Farish paused with a sigh which reflected the perplexity of her
departing visitor. "But that isn't all; it isn't even the worst. It seems
that Ned has quarrelled with the Dorsets; or at least Bertha won't allow
him to see her, and he is so unhappy about it that he has taken to
gambling again, and going about with all sorts of queer people. And
cousin Grace Van Osburgh accuses him of having had a very bad influence
on Freddy, who left Harvard last spring, and has been a great deal with
Ned ever since. She sent for Miss Jane, and made a dreadful scene; and
Jack Stepney and Herbert Melson, who were there too, told Miss Jane that
Freddy was threatening to marry some dreadful woman to whom Ned had
introduced him, and that they could do nothing with him because now he's
of age he has his own money. You can fancy how poor Miss Jane felt--she
came to me at once, and seemed to think that if I could get her something
to do she could earn enough to pay Ned's debts and send him away--I'm
afraid she has no idea how long it would take her to pay for one of his
evenings at bridge. And he was horribly in debt when he came back from
the cruise--I can't see why he should have spent so much more money under
Bertha's influence than Carry's: can you?"

Lily met this query with an impatient gesture. "My dear Gerty, I always
understand how people can spend much more money--never how they can spend
any less!"

She loosened her furs and settled herself in Gerty's easy-chair, while
her friend busied herself with the tea-cups.

"But what can they do--the Miss Silvertons? How do they mean to support
themselves?" she asked, conscious that the note of irritation still
persisted in her voice. It was the very last topic she had meant to
discuss--it really did not interest her in the least--but she was seized
by a sudden perverse curiosity to know how the two colourless shrinking
victims of young Silverton's sentimental experiments meant to cope with
the grim necessity which lurked so close to her own threshold.

"I don't know--I am trying to find something for them. Miss Jane reads
aloud very nicely--but it's so hard to find any one who is willing to be
read to. And Miss Annie paints a little----"

"Oh, I know--apple-blossoms on blotting-paper; just the kind of thing I
shall be doing myself before long!" exclaimed Lily, starting up with a
vehemence of movement that threatened destruction to Miss Farish's
fragile tea-table.

Lily bent over to steady the cups; then she sank back into her seat.
"I'd forgotten there was no room to dash about in--how beautifully one
does have to behave in a small flat! Oh, Gerty, I wasn't meant to be
good," she sighed out incoherently.

Gerty lifted an apprehensive look to her pale face, in which the eyes
shone with a peculiar sleepless lustre.

"You look horribly tired, Lily; take your tea, and let me give you this
cushion to lean against."

Miss Bart accepted the cup of tea, but put back the cushion with an
impatient hand.

"Don't give me that! I don't want to lean back--I shall go to sleep if I
do."

"Well, why not, dear? I'll be as quiet as a mouse," Gerty urged
affectionately.

"No--no; don't be quiet; talk to me--keep me awake! I don't sleep at
night, and in the afternoon a dreadful drowsiness creeps over me."

"You don't sleep at night? Since when?"

"I don't know--I can't remember." She rose and put the empty cup on the
tea-tray. "Another, and stronger, please; if I don't keep awake now I
shall see horrors tonight--perfect horrors!"

"But they'll be worse if you drink too much tea."

"No, no--give it to me; and don't preach, please," Lily returned
imperiously. Her voice had a dangerous edge, and Gerty noticed that her
hand shook as she held it out to receive the second cup.

"But you look so tired: I'm sure you must be ill----"

Miss Bart set down her cup with a start. "Do I look ill? Does my face
show it?" She rose and walked quickly toward the little mirror above the
writing-table. "What a horrid looking-glass--it's all blotched and
discoloured. Any one would look ghastly in it!" She turned back, fixing
her plaintive eyes on Gerty. "You stupid dear, why do you say such odious
things to me? It's enough to make one ill to be told one looks so! And
looking ill means looking ugly." She caught Gerty's wrists, and drew her
close to the window. "After all, I'd rather know the truth.  Look me
straight in the face, Gerty, and tell me: am I perfectly frightful?"

"You're perfectly beautiful now, Lily: your eyes are shining, and your
cheeks have grown so pink all of a sudden----"

"Ah, they WERE pale, then--ghastly pale, when I came in? Why don't you
tell me frankly that I'm a wreck? My eyes are bright now because I'm so
nervous--but in the mornings they look like lead. And I can see the lines
coming in my face--the lines of worry and disappointment and failure!
Every sleepless night leaves a new one--and how can I sleep, when I have
such dreadful things to think about?"

"Dreadful things--what things?" asked Gerty, gently detaching her wrists
from her friend's feverish fingers.

"What things? Well, poverty, for one--and I don't know any that's more
dreadful." Lily turned away and sank with sudden weariness into the
easy-chair near the tea-table. "You asked me just now if I could
understand why Ned Silverton spent so much money. Of course I
understand--he spends it on living with the rich. You think we live ON
the rich, rather than with them: and so we do, in a sense--but it's a
privilege we have to pay for! We eat their dinners, and drink their wine,
and smoke their cigarettes, and use their carriages and their opera-boxes
and their private cars--yes, but there's a tax to pay on every one of
those luxuries. The man pays it by big tips to the servants, by playing
cards beyond his means, by flowers and presents--and--and--lots of other
things that cost; the girl pays it by tips and cards too--oh, yes, I've
had to take up bridge again--and by going to the best dress-makers, and
having just the right dress for every occasion, and always keeping
herself fresh and exquisite and amusing!"

She leaned back for a moment, closing her eyes, and as she sat there, her
pale lips slightly parted, and the lids dropped above her fagged
brilliant gaze, Gerty had a startled perception of the change in her
face--of the way in which an ashen daylight seemed suddenly to extinguish
its artificial brightness. She looked up, and the vision vanished.

"It doesn't sound very amusing, does it? And it isn't--I'm sick to death
of it! And yet the thought of giving it all up nearly kills me--it's what
keeps me awake at night, and makes me so crazy for your strong tea. For I
can't go on in this way much longer, you know--I'm nearly at the end of
my tether. And then what can I do--how on earth am I to keep myself
alive? I see myself reduced to the fate of that poor Silverton
woman--slinking about to employment agencies, and trying to sell painted
blotting-pads to Women's Exchanges! And there are thousands and thousands
of women trying to do the same thing already, and not one of the number
who has less idea how to earn a dollar than I have!"

She rose again with a hurried glance at the clock. "It's late, and I must
be off--I have an appointment with Carry Fisher. Don't look so worried,
you dear thing--don't think too much about the nonsense I've been
talking." She was before the mirror again, adjusting her hair with a
light hand, drawing down her veil, and giving a dexterous touch to her
furs. "Of course, you know, it hasn't come to the employment agencies and
the painted blotting-pads yet; but I'm rather hard-up just for the
moment, and if I could find something to do--notes to write and
visiting-lists to make up, or that kind of thing--it would tide me over
till the legacy is paid. And Carry has promised to find somebody who
wants a kind of social secretary--you know she makes a specialty of the
helpless rich."

Miss Bart had not revealed to Gerty the full extent of her anxiety. She
was in fact in urgent and immediate need of money: money to meet the
vulgar weekly claims which could neither be deferred nor evaded. To give
up her apartment, and shrink to the obscurity of a boarding-house, or the
provisional hospitality of a bed in Gerty Farish's sitting-room, was an
expedient which could only postpone the problem confronting her; and it
seemed wiser as well as more agreeable to remain where she was and find
some means of earning her living. The possibility of having to do this
was one which she had never before seriously considered, and the
discovery that, as a bread-winner, she was likely to prove as helpless
and ineffectual as poor Miss Silverton, was a severe shock to her
self-confidence.

Having been accustomed to take herself at the popular valuation, as a
person of energy and resource, naturally fitted to dominate any situation
in which she found herself, she vaguely imagined that such gifts would be
of value to seekers after social guidance; but there was unfortunately no
specific head under which the art of saying and doing the right thing
could be offered in the market, and even Mrs. Fisher's resourcefulness
failed before the difficulty of discovering a workable vein in the vague
wealth of Lily's graces. Mrs. Fisher was full of indirect expedients for
enabling her friends to earn a living, and could conscientiously assert
that she had put several opportunities of this kind before Lily; but more
legitimate methods of bread-winning were as much out of her line as they
were beyond the capacity of the sufferers she was generally called upon
to assist. Lily's failure to profit by the chances already afforded her
might, moreover, have justified the abandonment of farther effort on her
behalf; but Mrs. Fisher's inexhaustible good-nature made her an adept at
creating artificial demands in response to an actual supply. In the
pursuance of this end she at once started on a voyage of discovery in
Miss Bart's behalf; and as the result of her explorations she now
summoned the latter with the announcement that she had "found something."

Left to herself, Gerty mused distressfully upon her friend's plight, and
her own inability to relieve it. It was clear to her that Lily, for the
present, had no wish for the kind of help she could give. Miss Farish
could see no hope for her friend but in a life completely reorganized and
detached from its old associations; whereas all Lily's energies were
centred in the determined effort to hold fast to those associations, to
keep herself visibly identified with them, as long as the illusion could
be maintained. Pitiable as such an attitude seemed to Gerty, she could
not judge it as harshly as Selden, for instance, might have done. She had
not forgotten the night of emotion when she and Lily had lain in each
other's arms, and she had seemed to feel her very heart's blood passing
into her friend. The sacrifice she had made had seemed unavailing enough;
no trace remained in Lily of the subduing influences of that hour; but
Gerty's tenderness, disciplined by long years of contact with obscure and
inarticulate suffering, could wait on its object with a silent
forbearance which took no account of time. She could not, however, deny
herself the solace of taking anxious counsel with Lawrence Selden, with
whom, since his return from Europe, she had renewed her old relation of
cousinly confidence.

Selden himself had never been aware of any change in their relation. He
found Gerty as he had left her, simple, undemanding and devoted, but with
a quickened intelligence of the heart which he recognized without seeking
to explain it. To Gerty herself it would once have seemed impossible that
she should ever again talk freely with him of Lily Bart; but what had
passed in the secrecy of her own breast seemed to resolve itself, when
the mist of the struggle cleared, into a breaking down of the bounds of
self, a deflecting of the wasted personal emotion into the general
current of human understanding.

It was not till some two weeks after her visit from Lily that Gerty had
the opportunity of communicating her fears to Selden.  The latter, having
presented himself on a Sunday afternoon, had lingered on through the
dowdy animation of his cousin's tea-hour, conscious of something in her
voice and eye which solicited a word apart; and as soon as the last
visitor was gone Gerty opened her case by asking how lately he had seen
Miss Bart.

Selden's perceptible pause gave her time for a slight stir of surprise.

"I haven't seen her at all--I've perpetually missed seeing her since she
came back."

This unexpected admission made Gerty pause too; and she was still
hesitating on the brink of her subject when he relieved her by adding:
"I've wanted to see her--but she seems to have been absorbed by the
Gormer set since her return from Europe."

"That's all the more reason: she's been very unhappy."

"Unhappy at being with the Gormers?"

"Oh, I don't defend her intimacy with the Gormers; but that too is at an
end now, I think. You know people have been very unkind since Bertha
Dorset quarrelled with her."

"Ah----" Selden exclaimed, rising abruptly to walk to the window, where
he remained with his eyes on the darkening street while his cousin
continued to explain: "Judy Trenor and her own family have deserted her
too--and all because Bertha Dorset has said such horrible things. And she
is very poor--you know Mrs. Peniston cut her off with a small legacy,
after giving her to understand that she was to have everything."

"Yes--I know," Selden assented curtly, turning back into the room, but
only to stir about with restless steps in the circumscribed space between
door and window. "Yes--she's been abominably treated; but it's
unfortunately the precise thing that a man who wants to show his sympathy
can't say to her."

His words caused Gerty a slight chill of disappointment. "There would be
other ways of showing your sympathy," she suggested.

Selden, with a slight laugh, sat down beside her on the little sofa which
projected from the hearth. "What are you thinking of, you incorrigible
missionary?" he asked.

Gerty's colour rose, and her blush was for a moment her only answer.
Then she made it more explicit by saying: "I am thinking of the fact that
you and she used to be great friends--that she used to care immensely for
what you thought of her--and that, if she takes your staying away as a
sign of what you think now, I can imagine its adding a great deal to her
unhappiness."

"My dear child, don't add to it still more--at least to your conception
of it--by attributing to her all sorts of susceptibilities of your own."
Selden, for his life, could not keep a note of dryness out of his voice;
but he met Gerty's look of perplexity by saying more mildly: "But, though
you immensely exaggerate the importance of anything I could do for Miss
Bart, you can't exaggerate my readiness to do it--if you ask me to." He
laid his hand for a moment on hers, and there passed between them, on the
current of the rare contact, one of those exchanges of meaning which fill
the hidden reservoirs of affection.  Gerty had the feeling that he
measured the cost of her request as plainly as she read the significance
of his reply; and the sense of all that was suddenly clear between them
made her next words easier to find.

"I do ask you, then; I ask you because she once told me that you had been
a help to her, and because she needs help now as she has never needed it
before. You know how dependent she has always been on ease and
luxury--how she has hated what was shabby and ugly and uncomfortable. She
can't help it--she was brought up with those ideas, and has never been
able to find her way out of them. But now all the things she cared for
have been taken from her, and the people who taught her to care for them
have abandoned her too; and it seems to me that if some one could reach
out a hand and show her the other side--show her how much is left in life
and in herself----" Gerty broke off, abashed at the sound of her own
eloquence, and impeded by the difficulty of giving precise expression to
her vague yearning for her friend's retrieval. "I can't help her myself:
she's passed out of my reach," she continued. "I think she's afraid of
being a burden to me.  When she was last here, two weeks ago, she seemed
dreadfully worried about her future: she said Carry Fisher was trying to
find something for her to do. A few days later she wrote me that she had
taken a position as private secretary, and that I was not to be anxious,
for everything was all right, and she would come in and tell me about it
when she had time; but she has never come, and I don't like to go to her,
because I am afraid of forcing myself on her when I'm not wanted.  Once,
when we were children, and I had rushed up after a long separation, and
thrown my arms about her, she said: 'Please don't kiss me unless I ask
you to, Gerty'--and she DID ask me, a minute later; but since then I've
always waited to be asked."

Selden had listened in silence, with the concentrated look which his thin
dark face could assume when he wished to guard it against any involuntary
change of expression. When his cousin ended, he said with a slight smile:
"Since you've learned the wisdom of waiting, I don't see why you urge me
to rush in--" but the troubled appeal of her eyes made him add, as he
rose to take leave: "Still, I'll do what you wish, and not hold you
responsible for my failure."

Selden's avoidance of Miss Bart had not been as unintentional as he had
allowed his cousin to think. At first, indeed, while the memory of their
last hour at Monte Carlo still held the full heat of his indignation, he
had anxiously watched for her return; but she had disappointed him by
lingering in England, and when she finally reappeared it happened that
business had called him to the West, whence he came back only to learn
that she was starting for Alaska with the Gormers. The revelation of this
suddenly-established intimacy effectually chilled his desire to see her.
If, at a moment when her whole life seemed to be breaking up, she could
cheerfully commit its reconstruction to the Gormers, there was no reason
why such accidents should ever strike her as irreparable.  Every step she
took seemed in fact to carry her farther from the region where, once or
twice, he and she had met for an illumined moment; and the recognition of
this fact, when its first pang had been surmounted, produced in him a
sense of negative relief. It was much simpler for him to judge Miss Bart
by her habitual conduct than by the rare deviations from it which had
thrown her so disturbingly in his way; and every act of hers which made
the recurrence of such deviations more unlikely, confirmed the sense of
relief with which he returned to the conventional view of her.

But Gerty Farish's words had sufficed to make him see how little this
view was really his, and how impossible it was for him to live quietly
with the thought of Lily Bart. To hear that she was in need of help--even
such vague help as he could offer--was to be at once repossessed by that
thought; and by the time he reached the street he had sufficiently
convinced himself of the urgency of his cousin's appeal to turn his steps
directly toward Lily's hotel.

There his zeal met a check in the unforeseen news that Miss Bart had
moved away; but, on his pressing his enquiries, the clerk remembered that
she had left an address, for which he presently began to search through
his books.

It was certainly strange that she should have taken this step without
letting Gerty Farish know of her decision; and Selden waited with a vague
sense of uneasiness while the address was sought for. The process lasted
long enough for uneasiness to turn to apprehension; but when at length a
slip of paper was handed him, and he read on it: "Care of Mrs. Norma
Hatch, Emporium Hotel," his apprehension passed into an incredulous
stare, and this into the gesture of disgust with which he tore the paper
in two, and turned to walk quickly homeward.

When Lily woke on the morning after her translation to the Emporium
Hotel, her first feeling was one of purely physical satisfaction. The
force of contrast gave an added keenness to the luxury of lying once more
in a soft-pillowed bed, and looking across a spacious sunlit room at a
breakfast-table set invitingly near the fire. Analysis and introspection
might come later; but for the moment she was not even troubled by the
excesses of the upholstery or the restless convolutions of the furniture.
The sense of being once more lapped and folded in ease, as in some dense
mild medium impenetrable to discomfort, effectually stilled the faintest
note of criticism.

When, the afternoon before, she had presented herself to the lady to whom
Carry Fisher had directed her, she had been conscious of entering a new
world. Carry's vague presentment of Mrs. Norma Hatch (whose reversion to
her Christian name was explained as the result of her latest divorce),
left her under the implication of coming "from the West," with the not
unusual extenuation of having brought a great deal of money with her. She
was, in short, rich, helpless, unplaced: the very subject for Lily's
hand. Mrs. Fisher had not specified the line her friend was to take; she
owned herself unacquainted with Mrs. Hatch, whom she "knew about" through
Melville Stancy, a lawyer in his leisure moments, and the Falstaff of a
certain section of festive club life.  Socially, Mr. Stancy might have
been said to form a connecting link between the Gormer world and the more
dimly-lit region on which Miss Bart now found herself entering. It was,
however, only figuratively that the illumination of Mrs. Hatch's world
could be described as dim: in actual fact, Lily found her seated in a
blaze of electric light, impartially projected from various ornamental
excrescences on a vast concavity of pink damask and gilding, from which
she rose like Venus from her shell. The analogy was justified by the
appearance of the lady, whose large-eyed prettiness had the fixity of
something impaled and shown under glass. This did not preclude the
immediate discovery that she was some years younger than her visitor, and
that under her showiness, her ease, the aggression of her dress and
voice, there persisted that ineradicable innocence which, in ladies of
her nationality, so curiously coexists with startling extremes of
experience.

The environment in which Lily found herself was as strange to her as its
inhabitants. She was unacquainted with the world of the fashionable New
York hotel--a world over-heated, over-upholstered, and over-fitted with
mechanical appliances for the gratification of fantastic requirements,
while the comforts of a civilized life were as unattainable as in a
desert. Through this atmosphere of torrid splendour moved wan beings as
richly upholstered as the furniture, beings without definite pursuits or
permanent relations, who drifted on a languid tide of curiosity from
restaurant to concert-hall, from palm-garden to music-room, from "art
exhibit" to dress-maker's opening.  High-stepping horses or elaborately
equipped motors waited to carry these ladies into vague metropolitan
distances, whence they returned, still more wan from the weight of their
sables, to be sucked back into the stifling inertia of the hotel routine.
Somewhere behind them, in the background of their lives, there was
doubtless a real past, peopled by real human activities: they themselves
were probably the product of strong ambitions, persistent energies,
diversified contacts with the wholesome roughness of life; yet they had
no more real existence than the poet's shades in limbo.

Lily had not been long in this pallid world without discovering that Mrs.
Hatch was its most substantial figure. That lady, though still floating
in the void, showed faint symptoms of developing an outline; and in this
endeavour she was actively seconded by Mr. Melville Stancy.  It was Mr.
Stancy, a man of large resounding presence, suggestive of convivial
occasions and of a chivalry finding expression in "first-night" boxes and
thousand dollar bonbonnieres, who had transplanted Mrs. Hatch from the
scene of her first development to the higher stage of hotel life in the
metropolis. It was he who had selected the horses with which she had
taken the blue ribbon at the Show, had introduced her to the photographer
whose portraits of her formed the recurring ornament of "Sunday
Supplements," and had got together the group which constituted her social
world. It was a small group still, with heterogeneous figures suspended
in large unpeopled spaces; but Lily did not take long to learn that its
regulation was no longer in Mr. Stancy's hands. As often happens, the
pupil had outstripped the teacher, and Mrs. Hatch was already aware of
heights of elegance as well as depths of luxury beyond the world of the
Emporium.  This discovery at once produced in her a craving for higher
guidance, for the adroit feminine hand which should give the right turn
to her correspondence, the right "look" to her hats, the right succession
to the items of her MENUS. It was, in short, as the regulator of a
germinating social life that Miss Bart's guidance was required; her
ostensible duties as secretary being restricted by the fact that Mrs.
Hatch, as yet, knew hardly any one to write to.

The daily details of Mrs. Hatch's existence were as strange to Lily as
its general tenor. The lady's habits were marked by an Oriental indolence
and disorder peculiarly trying to her companion. Mrs. Hatch and her
friends seemed to float together outside the bounds of time and space. No
definite hours were kept; no fixed obligations existed: night and day
flowed into one another in a blur of confused and retarded engagements,
so that one had the impression of lunching at the tea-hour, while dinner
was often merged in the noisy after-theatre supper which prolonged Mrs.
Hatch's vigil till daylight.

Through this jumble of futile activities came and went a strange throng
of hangers-on--manicures, beauty-doctors, hair-dressers, teachers of
bridge, of French, of "physical development": figures sometimes
indistinguishable, by their appearance, or by Mrs. Hatch's relation to
them, from the visitors constituting her recognized society. But
strangest of all to Lily was the encounter, in this latter group, of
several of her acquaintances.  She had supposed, and not without relief,
that she was passing, for the moment, completely out of her own circle;
but she found that Mr. Stancy, one side of whose sprawling existence
overlapped the edge of Mrs. Fisher's world, had drawn several of its
brightest ornaments into the circle of the Emporium. To find Ned
Silverton among the habitual frequenters of Mrs. Hatch's drawing-room was
one of Lily's first astonishments; but she soon discovered that he was
not Mr. Stancy's most important recruit. It was on little Freddy Van
Osburgh, the small slim heir of the Van Osburgh millions, that the
attention of Mrs. Hatch's group was centred. Freddy, barely out of
college, had risen above the horizon since Lily's eclipse, and she now
saw with surprise what an effulgence he shed on the outer twilight of
Mrs. Hatch's existence. This, then, was one of the things that young men
"went in" for when released from the official social routine; this was
the kind of "previous engagement" that so frequently caused them to
disappoint the hopes of anxious hostesses. Lily had an odd sense of being
behind the social tapestry, on the side where the threads were knotted
and the loose ends hung. For a moment she found a certain amusement in
the show, and in her own share of it: the situation had an ease and
unconventionality distinctly refreshing after her experience of the irony
of conventions. But these flashes of amusement were but brief reactions
from the long disgust of her days. Compared with the vast gilded void of
Mrs. Hatch's existence, the life of Lily's former friends seemed packed
with ordered activities. Even the most irresponsible pretty woman of her
acquaintance had her inherited obligations, her conventional
benevolences, her share in the working of the great civic machine; and
all hung together in the solidarity of these traditional functions. The
performance of specific duties would have simplified Miss Bart's
position; but the vague attendance on Mrs. Hatch was not without its
perplexities.

It was not her employer who created these perplexities. Mrs. Hatch showed
from the first an almost touching desire for Lily's approval.  Far from
asserting the superiority of wealth, her beautiful eyes seemed to urge
the plea of inexperience: she wanted to do what was "nice," to be taught
how to be "lovely." The difficulty was to find any point of contact
between her ideals and Lily's.

Mrs. Hatch swam in a haze of indeterminate enthusiasms, of aspirations
culled from the stage, the newspapers, the fashion journals, and a gaudy
world of sport still more completely beyond her companion's ken.  To
separate from these confused conceptions those most likely to advance the
lady on her way, was Lily's obvious duty; but its performance was
hampered by rapidly-growing doubts. Lily was in fact becoming more and
more aware of a certain ambiguity in her situation.  It was not that she
had, in the conventional sense, any doubt of Mrs. Hatch's
irreproachableness. The lady's offences were always against taste rather
than conduct; her divorce record seemed due to geographical rather than
ethical conditions; and her worst laxities were likely to proceed from a
wandering and extravagant good-nature.  But if Lily did not mind her
detaining her manicure for luncheon, or offering the "Beauty-Doctor" a
seat in Freddy Van Osburgh's box at the play, she was not equally at ease
in regard to some less apparent lapses from convention. Ned Silverton's
relation to Stancy seemed, for instance, closer and less clear than any
natural affinities would warrant; and both appeared united in the effort
to cultivate Freddy Van Osburgh's growing taste for Mrs. Hatch. There was
as yet nothing definable in the situation, which might well resolve
itself into a huge joke on the part of the other two; but Lily had a
vague sense that the subject of their experiment was too young, too rich
and too credulous.  Her embarrassment was increased by the fact that
Freddy seemed to regard her as cooperating with himself in the social
development of Mrs. Hatch: a view that suggested, on his part, a
permanent interest in the lady's future. There were moments when Lily
found an ironic amusement in this aspect of the case. The thought of
launching such a missile as Mrs. Hatch at the perfidious bosom of society
was not without its charm: Miss Bart had even beguiled her leisure with
visions of the fair Norma introduced for the first time to a family
banquet at the Van Osburghs'. But the thought of being personally
connected with the transaction was less agreeable; and her momentary
flashes of amusement were followed by increasing periods of doubt.

The sense of these doubts was uppermost when, late one afternoon, she was
surprised by a visit from Lawrence Selden. He found her alone in the
wilderness of pink damask, for in Mrs. Hatch's world the tea-hour was not
dedicated to social rites, and the lady was in the hands of her masseuse.

Selden's entrance had caused Lily an inward start of embarrassment; but
his air of constraint had the effect of restoring her self-possession,
and she took at once the tone of surprise and pleasure, wondering frankly
that he should have traced her to so unlikely a place, and asking what
had inspired him to make the search.

Selden met this with an unusual seriousness: she had never seen him so
little master of the situation, so plainly at the mercy of any
obstructions she might put in his way. "I wanted to see you," he said;
and she could not resist observing in reply that he had kept his wishes
under remarkable control. She had in truth felt his long absence as one
of the chief bitternesses of the last months: his desertion had wounded
sensibilities far below the surface of her pride.

Selden met the challenge with directness. "Why should I have come, unless
I thought I could be of use to you? It is my only excuse for imagining
you could want me."

This struck her as a clumsy evasion, and the thought gave a flash of
keenness to her answer. "Then you have come now because you think you can
be of use to me?"

He hesitated again. "Yes: in the modest capacity of a person to talk
things over with."

For a clever man it was certainly a stupid beginning; and the idea that
his awkwardness was due to the fear of her attaching a personal
significance to his visit, chilled her pleasure in seeing him. Even under
the most adverse conditions, that pleasure always made itself felt: she
might hate him, but she had never been able to wish him out of the room.
She was very near hating him now; yet the sound of his voice, the way the
light fell on his thin dark hair, the way he sat and moved and wore his
clothes--she was conscious that even these trivial things were inwoven
with her deepest life. In his presence a sudden stillness came upon her,
and the turmoil of her spirit ceased; but an impulse of resistance to
this stealing influence now prompted her to say: "It's very good of you
to present yourself in that capacity; but what makes you think I have
anything particular to talk about?"

Though she kept the even tone of light intercourse, the question was
framed in a way to remind him that his good offices were unsought; and
for a moment Selden was checked by it. The situation between them was one
which could have been cleared up only by a sudden explosion of feeling;
and their whole training and habit of mind were against the chances of
such an explosion. Selden's calmness seemed rather to harden into
resistance, and Miss Bart's into a surface of glittering irony, as they
faced each other from the opposite corners of one of Mrs. Hatch's
elephantine sofas. The sofa in question, and the apartment peopled by its
monstrous mates, served at length to suggest the turn of Selden's reply.

"Gerty told me that you were acting as Mrs. Hatch's secretary; and I knew
she was anxious to hear how you were getting on."

Miss Bart received this explanation without perceptible softening. "Why
didn't she look me up herself, then?" she asked.

"Because, as you didn't send her your address, she was afraid of being
importunate." Selden continued with a smile: "You see no such scruples
restrained me; but then I haven't as much to risk if I incur your
displeasure."

Lily answered his smile. "You haven't incurred it as yet; but I have an
idea that you are going to."

"That rests with you, doesn't it? You see my initiative doesn't go beyond
putting myself at your disposal."

"But in what capacity? What am I to do with you?" she asked in the same
light tone.

Selden again glanced about Mrs. Hatch's drawing-room; then he said, with
a decision which he seemed to have gathered from this final inspection:
"You are to let me take you away from here."

Lily flushed at the suddenness of the attack; then she stiffened under it
and said coldly: "And may I ask where you mean me to go?"

"Back to Gerty in the first place, if you will; the essential thing is
that it should be away from here."

The unusual harshness of his tone might have shown her how much the words
cost him; but she was in no state to measure his feelings while her own
were in a flame of revolt. To neglect her, perhaps even to avoid her, at
a time when she had most need of her friends, and then suddenly and
unwarrantably to break into her life with this strange assumption of
authority, was to rouse in her every instinct of pride and self-defence.

"I am very much obliged to you," she said, "for taking such an interest
in my plans; but I am quite contented where I am, and have no intention
of leaving."

Selden had risen, and was standing before her in an attitude of
uncontrollable expectancy.

"That simply means that you don't know where you are!" he exclaimed.

Lily rose also, with a quick flash of anger. "If you have come here to
say disagreeable things about Mrs. Hatch----"

"It is only with your relation to Mrs. Hatch that I am concerned."

"My relation to Mrs. Hatch is one I have no reason to be ashamed of.  She
has helped me to earn a living when my old friends were quite resigned to
seeing me starve."

"Nonsense! Starvation is not the only alternative. You know you can
always find a home with Gerty till you are independent again."

"You show such an intimate acquaintance with my affairs that I suppose
you mean--till my aunt's legacy is paid?"

"I do mean that; Gerty told me of it," Selden acknowledged without
embarrassment. He was too much in earnest now to feel any false
constraint in speaking his mind.

"But Gerty does not happen to know," Miss Bart rejoined, "that I owe
every penny of that legacy."

"Good God!" Selden exclaimed, startled out of his composure by the
abruptness of the statement.

"Every penny of it, and more too," Lily repeated; "and you now perhaps
see why I prefer to remain with Mrs. Hatch rather than take advantage of
Gerty's kindness. I have no money left, except my small income, and I
must earn something more to keep myself alive."

Selden hesitated a moment; then he rejoined in a quieter tone: "But with
your income and Gerty's--since you allow me to go so far into the details
of the situation--you and she could surely contrive a life together which
would put you beyond the need of having to support yourself. Gerty, I
know, is eager to make such an arrangement, and would be quite happy in
it----"

"But I should not," Miss Bart interposed. "There are many reasons why it
would be neither kind to Gerty nor wise for myself." She paused a moment,
and as he seemed to await a farther explanation, added with a quick lift
of her head: "You will perhaps excuse me from giving you these reasons."

"I have no claim to know them," Selden answered, ignoring her tone; "no
claim to offer any comment or suggestion beyond the one I have already
made. And my right to make that is simply the universal right of a man to
enlighten a woman when he sees her unconsciously placed in a false
position."

Lily smiled. "I suppose," she rejoined, "that by a false position you
mean one outside of what we call society; but you must remember that I
had been excluded from those sacred precincts long before I met Mrs.
Hatch. As far as I can see, there is very little real difference in being
inside or out, and I remember your once telling me that it was only those
inside who took the difference seriously."

She had not been without intention in making this allusion to their
memorable talk at Bellomont, and she waited with an odd tremor of the
nerves to see what response it would bring; but the result of the
experiment was disappointing. Selden did not allow the allusion to
deflect him from his point; he merely said with completer fulness of
emphasis: "The question of being inside or out is, as you say, a small
one, and it happens to have nothing to do with the case, except in so far
as Mrs. Hatch's desire to be inside may put you in the position I call
false."

In spite of the moderation of his tone, each word he spoke had the effect
of confirming Lily's resistance. The very apprehensions he aroused
hardened her against him: she had been on the alert for the note of
personal sympathy, for any sign of recovered power over him; and his
attitude of sober impartiality, the absence of all response to her
appeal, turned her hurt pride to blind resentment of his interference.
The conviction that he had been sent by Gerty, and that, whatever straits
he conceived her to be in, he would never voluntarily have come to her
aid, strengthened her resolve not to admit him a hair's breadth farther
into her confidence. However doubtful she might feel her situation to be,
she would rather persist in darkness than owe her enlightenment to Selden.

"I don't know," she said, when he had ceased to speak, "why you imagine
me to be situated as you describe; but as you have always told me that
the sole object of a bringing-up like mine was to teach a girl to get
what she wants, why not assume that that is precisely what I am doing?"

The smile with which she summed up her case was like a clear barrier
raised against farther confidences: its brightness held him at such a
distance that he had a sense of being almost out of hearing as he
rejoined: "I am not sure that I have ever called you a successful example
of that kind of bringing-up."

Her colour rose a little at the implication, but she steeled herself with
a light laugh. "Ah, wait a little longer--give me a little more time
before you decide!" And as he wavered before her, still watching for a
break in the impenetrable front she presented: "Don't give me up; I may
still do credit to my training!" she affirmed.

"Look at those spangles, Miss Bart--every one of 'em sewed on crooked."

The tall forewoman, a pinched perpendicular figure, dropped the condemned
structure of wire and net on the table at Lily's side, and passed on to
the next figure in the line.

There were twenty of them in the work-room, their fagged profiles, under
exaggerated hair, bowed in the harsh north light above the utensils of
their art; for it was something more than an industry, surely, this
creation of ever-varied settings for the face of fortunate womanhood.
Their own faces were sallow with the unwholesomeness of hot air and
sedentary toil, rather than with any actual signs of want: they were
employed in a fashionable millinery establishment, and were fairly well
clothed and well paid; but the youngest among them was as dull and
colourless as the middle-aged. In the whole work-room there was only one
skin beneath which the blood still visibly played; and that now burned
with vexation as Miss Bart, under the lash of the forewoman's comment,
began to strip the hat-frame of its over-lapping spangles.

To Gerty Farish's hopeful spirit a solution appeared to have been reached
when she remembered how beautifully Lily could trim hats.  Instances of
young lady-milliners establishing themselves under fashionable patronage,
and imparting to their "creations" that indefinable touch which the
professional hand can never give, had flattered Gerty's visions of the
future, and convinced even Lily that her separation from Mrs. Norma Hatch
need not reduce her to dependence on her friends.

The parting had occurred a few weeks after Selden's visit, and would have
taken place sooner had it not been for the resistance set up in Lily by
his ill-starred offer of advice. The sense of being involved in a
transaction she would not have cared to examine too closely had soon
afterward defined itself in the light of a hint from Mr. Stancy that, if
she "saw them through," she would have no reason to be sorry. The
implication that such loyalty would meet with a direct reward had
hastened her flight, and flung her back, ashamed and penitent, on the
broad bosom of Gerty's sympathy. She did not, however, propose to lie
there prone, and Gerty's inspiration about the hats at once revived her
hopes of profitable activity. Here was, after all, something that her
charming listless hands could really do; she had no doubt of their
capacity for knotting a ribbon or placing a flower to advantage. And of
course only these finishing touches would be expected of her: subordinate
fingers, blunt, grey, needle-pricked fingers, would prepare the shapes
and stitch the linings, while she presided over the charming little front
shop--a shop all white panels, mirrors, and moss-green hangings--where
her finished creations, hats, wreaths, aigrettes and the rest, perched on
their stands like birds just poising for flight.

But at the very outset of Gerty's campaign this vision of the
green-and-white shop had been dispelled. Other young ladies of fashion
had been thus "set-up," selling their hats by the mere attraction of a
name and the reputed knack of tying a bow; but these privileged beings
could command a faith in their powers materially expressed by the
readiness to pay their shop-rent and advance a handsome sum for current
expenses. Where was Lily to find such support? And even could it have
been found, how were the ladies on whose approval she depended to be
induced to give her their patronage? Gerty learned that whatever sympathy
her friend's case might have excited a few months since had been
imperilled, if not lost, by her association with Mrs. Hatch. Once again,
Lily had withdrawn from an ambiguous situation in time to save her
self-respect, but too late for public vindication.  Freddy Van Osburgh
was not to marry Mrs. Hatch; he had been rescued at the eleventh
hour--some said by the efforts of Gus Trenor and Rosedale--and despatched
to Europe with old Ned Van Alstyne; but the risk he had run would always
be ascribed to Miss Bart's connivance, and would somehow serve as a
summing-up and corroboration of the vague general distrust of her. It was
a relief to those who had hung back from her to find themselves thus
justified, and they were inclined to insist a little on her connection
with the Hatch case in order to show that they had been right.

Gerty's quest, at any rate, brought up against a solid wall of
resistance; and even when Carry Fisher, momentarily penitent for her
share in the Hatch affair, joined her efforts to Miss Farish's, they met
with no better success. Gerty had tried to veil her failure in tender
ambiguities; but Carry, always the soul of candour, put the case squarely
to her friend.

"I went straight to Judy Trenor; she has fewer prejudices than the
others, and besides she's always hated Bertha Dorset. But what HAVE you
done to her, Lily? At the very first word about giving you a start she
flamed out about some money you'd got from Gus; I never knew her so hot
before. You know she'll let him do anything but spend money on his
friends: the only reason she's decent to me now is that she knows I'm not
hard up.--He speculated for you, you say? Well, what's the harm? He had
no business to lose. He DIDN'T lose? Then what on earth--but I never
COULD understand you, Lily!"

The end of it was that, after anxious enquiry and much deliberation, Mrs.
Fisher and Gerty, for once oddly united in their effort to help their
friend, decided on placing her in the work-room of Mme. Regina's renowned
millinery establishment. Even this arrangement was not effected without
considerable negotiation, for Mme. Regina had a strong prejudice against
untrained assistance, and was induced to yield only by the fact that she
owed the patronage of Mrs. Bry and Mrs. Gormer to Carry Fisher's
influence. She had been willing from the first to employ Lily in the
show-room: as a displayer of hats, a fashionable beauty might be a
valuable asset. But to this suggestion Miss Bart opposed a negative which
Gerty emphatically supported, while Mrs. Fisher, inwardly unconvinced,
but resigned to this latest proof of Lily's unreason, agreed that perhaps
in the end it would be more useful that she should learn the trade. To
Regina's work-room Lily was therefore committed by her friends, and there
Mrs. Fisher left her with a sigh of relief, while Gerty's watchfulness
continued to hover over her at a distance.

Lily had taken up her work early in January: it was now two months later,
and she was still being rebuked for her inability to sew spangles on a
hat-frame. As she returned to her work she heard a titter pass down the
tables. She knew she was an object of criticism and amusement to the
other work-women. They were, of course, aware of her history--the exact
situation of every girl in the room was known and freely discussed by all
the others--but the knowledge did not produce in them any awkward sense
of class distinction: it merely explained why her untutored fingers were
still blundering over the rudiments of the trade.  Lily had no desire
that they should recognize any social difference in her; but she had
hoped to be received as their equal, and perhaps before long to show
herself their superior by a special deftness of touch, and it was
humiliating to find that, after two months of drudgery, she still
betrayed her lack of early training.  Remote was the day when she might
aspire to exercise the talents she felt confident of possessing; only
experienced workers were entrusted with the delicate art of shaping and
trimming the hat, and the forewoman still held her inexorably to the
routine of preparatory work.

She began to rip the spangles from the frame, listening absently to the
buzz of talk which rose and fell with the coming and going of Miss
Haines's active figure. The air was closer than usual, because Miss
Haines, who had a cold, had not allowed a window to be opened even during
the noon recess; and Lily's head was so heavy with the weight of a
sleepless night that the chatter of her companions had the incoherence of
a dream.

"I TOLD her he'd never look at her again; and he didn't. I wouldn't have,
either--I think she acted real mean to him. He took her to the Arion
Ball, and had a hack for her both ways....  She's taken ten bottles, and
her headaches don't seem no better--but she's written a testimonial to
say the first bottle cured her, and she got five dollars and her picture
in the paper.... Mrs. Trenor's hat? The one with the green Paradise?
Here, Miss Haines--it'll be ready right off.... That was one of the
Trenor girls here yesterday with Mrs. George Dorset.  How'd I know? Why,
Madam sent for me to alter the flower in that Virot hat--the blue tulle:
she's tall and slight, with her hair fuzzed out--a good deal like Mamie
Leach, on'y thinner...."

On and on it flowed, a current of meaningless sound, on which,
startlingly enough, a familiar name now and then floated to the surface.
It was the strangest part of Lily's strange experience, the hearing of
these names, the seeing the fragmentary and distorted image of the world
she had lived in reflected in the mirror of the working-girls' minds. She
had never before suspected the mixture of insatiable curiosity and
contemptuous freedom with which she and her kind were discussed in this
underworld of toilers who lived on their vanity and self-indulgence.
Every girl in Mme. Regina's work-room knew to whom the headgear in her
hands was destined, and had her opinion of its future wearer, and a
definite knowledge of the latter's place in the social system. That Lily
was a star fallen from that sky did not, after the first stir of
curiosity had subsided, materially add to their interest in her. She had
fallen, she had "gone under," and true to the ideal of their race, they
were awed only by success--by the gross tangible image of material
achievement. The consciousness of her different point of view merely kept
them at a little distance from her, as though she were a foreigner with
whom it was an effort to talk.

"Miss Bart, if you can't sew those spangles on more regular I guess you'd
better give the hat to Miss Kilroy."

Lily looked down ruefully at her handiwork. The forewoman was right: the
sewing on of the spangles was inexcusably bad. What made her so much more
clumsy than usual? Was it a growing distaste for her task, or actual
physical disability? She felt tired and confused: it was an effort to put
her thoughts together. She rose and handed the hat to Miss Kilroy, who
took it with a suppressed smile.

"I'm sorry; I'm afraid I am not well," she said to the forewoman.

Miss Haines offered no comment. From the first she had augured ill of
Mme. Regina's consenting to include a fashionable apprentice among her
workers. In that temple of art no raw beginners were wanted, and Miss
Haines would have been more than human had she not taken a certain
pleasure in seeing her forebodings confirmed.

"You'd better go back to binding edges," she said drily. Lily slipped out
last among the band of liberated work-women. She did not care to be
mingled in their noisy dispersal: once in the street, she always felt an
irresistible return to her old standpoint, an instinctive shrinking from
all that was unpolished and promiscuous. In the days--how distant they
now seemed!--when she had visited the Girls' Club with Gerty Farish, she
had felt an enlightened interest in the working-classes; but that was
because she looked down on them from above, from the happy altitude of
her grace and her beneficence. Now that she was on a level with them, the
point of view was less interesting.

She felt a touch on her arm, and met the penitent eye of Miss Kilroy.
"Miss Bart, I guess you can sew those spangles on as well as I can when
you're feeling right. Miss Haines didn't act fair to you."

Lily's colour rose at the unexpected advance: it was a long time since
real kindness had looked at her from any eyes but Gerty's.

"Oh, thank you: I'm not particularly well, but Miss Haines was right. I
AM clumsy."

"Well, it's mean work for anybody with a headache." Miss Kilroy paused
irresolutely. "You ought to go right home and lay down.  Ever try
orangeine?"

"Thank you." Lily held out her hand. "It's very kind of you--I mean to go
home."

She looked gratefully at Miss Kilroy, but neither knew what more to say.
Lily was aware that the other was on the point of offering to go home
with her, but she wanted to be alone and silent--even kindness, the sort
of kindness that Miss Kilroy could give, would have jarred on her just
then.

"Thank you," she repeated as she turned away.

She struck westward through the dreary March twilight, toward the street
where her boarding-house stood. She had resolutely refused Gerty's offer
of hospitality. Something of her mother's fierce shrinking from
observation and sympathy was beginning to develop in her, and the
promiscuity of small quarters and close intimacy seemed, on the whole,
less endurable than the solitude of a hall bedroom in a house where she
could come and go unremarked among other workers. For a while she had
been sustained by this desire for privacy and independence; but now,
perhaps from increasing physical weariness, the lassitude brought about
by hours of unwonted confinement, she was beginning to feel acutely the
ugliness and discomfort of her surroundings. The day's task done, she
dreaded to return to her narrow room, with its blotched wallpaper and
shabby paint; and she hated every step of the walk thither, through the
degradation of a New York street in the last stages of decline from
fashion to commerce.

But what she dreaded most of all was having to pass the chemist's at the
corner of Sixth Avenue. She had meant to take another street: she had
usually done so of late. But today her steps were irresistibly drawn
toward the flaring plate-glass corner; she tried to take the lower
crossing, but a laden dray crowded her back, and she struck across the
street obliquely, reaching the sidewalk just opposite the chemist's door.

Over the counter she caught the eye of the clerk who had waited on her
before, and slipped the prescription into his hand. There could be no
question about the prescription: it was a copy of one of Mrs. Hatch's,
obligingly furnished by that lady's chemist.  Lily was confident that the
clerk would fill it without hesitation; yet the nervous dread of a
refusal, or even of an expression of doubt, communicated itself to her
restless hands as she affected to examine the bottles of perfume stacked
on the glass case before her.

The clerk had read the prescription without comment; but in the act of
handing out the bottle he paused.

"You don't want to increase the dose, you know," he remarked.  Lily's
heart contracted.

What did he mean by looking at her in that way?

"Of course not," she murmured, holding out her hand.

"That's all right: it's a queer-acting drug. A drop or two more, and off
you go--the doctors don't know why."

The dread lest he should question her, or keep the bottle back, choked
the murmur of acquiescence in her throat; and when at length she emerged
safely from the shop she was almost dizzy with the intensity of her
relief. The mere touch of the packet thrilled her tired nerves with the
delicious promise of a night of sleep, and in the reaction from her
momentary fear she felt as if the first fumes of drowsiness were already
stealing over her.

In her confusion she stumbled against a man who was hurrying down the
last steps of the elevated station. He drew back, and she heard her name
uttered with surprise. It was Rosedale, fur-coated, glossy and
prosperous--but why did she seem to see him so far off, and as if through
a mist of splintered crystals?  Before she could account for the
phenomenon she found herself shaking hands with him. They had parted with
scorn on her side and anger upon his; but all trace of these emotions
seemed to vanish as their hands met, and she was only aware of a confused
wish that she might continue to hold fast to him.

"Why, what's the matter, Miss Lily? You're not well!" he exclaimed; and
she forced her lips into a pallid smile of reassurance.

"I'm a little tired--it's nothing. Stay with me a moment, please," she
faltered. That she should be asking this service of Rosedale!

He glanced at the dirty and unpropitious corner on which they stood, with
the shriek of the "elevated" and the tumult of trams and waggons
contending hideously in their ears.

"We can't stay here; but let me take you somewhere for a cup of tea.  The
LONGWORTH is only a few yards off, and there'll be no one there at this
hour."

A cup of tea in quiet, somewhere out of the noise and ugliness, seemed
for the moment the one solace she could bear. A few steps brought them to
the ladies' door of the hotel he had named, and a moment later he was
seated opposite to her, and the waiter had placed the tea-tray between
them.

"Not a drop of brandy or whiskey first? You look regularly done up, Miss
Lily. Well, take your tea strong, then; and, waiter, get a cushion for
the lady's back."

Lily smiled faintly at the injunction to take her tea strong. It was the
temptation she was always struggling to resist. Her craving for the keen
stimulant was forever conflicting with that other craving for sleep--the
midnight craving which only the little phial in her hand could still. But
today, at any rate, the tea could hardly be too strong: she counted on it
to pour warmth and resolution into her empty veins.

As she leaned back before him, her lids drooping in utter lassitude,
though the first warm draught already tinged her face with returning
life, Rosedale was seized afresh by the poignant surprise of her beauty.
The dark pencilling of fatigue under her eyes, the morbid blue-veined
pallour of the temples, brought out the brightness of her hair and lips,
as though all her ebbing vitality were centred there.  Against the dull
chocolate-coloured background of the restaurant, the purity of her head
stood out as it had never done in the most brightly-lit ball-room. He
looked at her with a startled uncomfortable feeling, as though her beauty
were a forgotten enemy that had lain in ambush and now sprang out on him
unawares.

To clear the air he tried to take an easy tone with her. "Why, Miss Lily,
I haven't seen you for an age. I didn't know what had become of you."

As he spoke, he was checked by an embarrassing sense of the complications
to which this might lead. Though he had not seen her he had heard of her;
he knew of her connection with Mrs. Hatch, and of the talk resulting from
it. Mrs. Hatch's MILIEU was one which he had once assiduously frequented,
and now as devoutly shunned.

Lily, to whom the tea had restored her usual clearness of mind, saw what
was in his thoughts and said with a slight smile: "You would not be
likely to know about me. I have joined the working classes."

He stared in genuine wonder. "You don't mean--? Why, what on earth are
you doing?"

"Learning to be a milliner--at least TRYING to learn," she hastily
qualified the statement.

Rosedale suppressed a low whistle of surprise. "Come off--you ain't
serious, are you?"

"Perfectly serious. I'm obliged to work for my living."

"But I understood--I thought you were with Norma Hatch."

"You heard I had gone to her as her secretary?"

"Something of the kind, I believe." He leaned forward to refill her cup.

Lily guessed the possibilities of embarrassment which the topic held for
him, and raising her eyes to his, she said suddenly: "I left her two
months ago."

Rosedale continued to fumble awkwardly with the tea-pot, and she felt
sure that he had heard what had been said of her. But what was there that
Rosedale did not hear?

"Wasn't it a soft berth?" he enquired, with an attempt at lightness.

"Too soft--one might have sunk in too deep." Lily rested one arm on the
edge of the table, and sat looking at him more intently than she had ever
looked before. An uncontrollable impulse was urging her to put her case
to this man, from whose curiosity she had always so fiercely defended
herself.

"You know Mrs. Hatch, I think? Well, perhaps you can understand that she
might make things too easy for one."

Rosedale looked faintly puzzled, and she remembered that allusiveness was
lost on him.

"It was no place for you, anyhow," he agreed, so suffused and immersed in
the light of her full gaze that he found himself being drawn into strange
depths of intimacy. He who had had to subsist on mere fugitive glances,
looks winged in flight and swiftly lost under covert, now found her eyes
settling on him with a brooding intensity that fairly dazzled him.

"I left," Lily continued, "lest people should say I was helping Mrs.
Hatch to marry Freddy Van Osburgh--who is not in the least too good for
her--and as they still continue to say it, I see that I might as well
have stayed where I was."

"Oh, Freddy----" Rosedale brushed aside the topic with an air of its
unimportance which gave a sense of the immense perspective he had
acquired. "Freddy don't count--but I knew YOU weren't mixed up in that.
It ain't your style."

Lily coloured slightly: she could not conceal from herself that the words
gave her pleasure. She would have liked to sit there, drinking more tea,
and continuing to talk of herself to Rosedale.  But the old habit of
observing the conventions reminded her that it was time to bring their
colloquy to an end, and she made a faint motion to push back her chair.

Rosedale stopped her with a protesting gesture. "Wait a minute--don't go
yet; sit quiet and rest a little longer. You look thoroughly played out.
And you haven't told me----" He broke off, conscious of going farther
than he had meant. She saw the struggle and understood it; understood
also the nature of the spell to which he yielded as, with his eyes on her
face, he began again abruptly: "What on earth did you mean by saying just
now that you were learning to be a milliner?"

"Just what I said. I am an apprentice at Regina's."

"Good Lord--YOU? But what for? I knew your aunt had turned you down: Mrs.
Fisher told me about it. But I understood you got a legacy from her----"

"I got ten thousand dollars; but the legacy is not to be paid till next
summer."

"Well, but--look here: you could BORROW on it any time you wanted."

She shook her head gravely. "No; for I owe it already."

"Owe it? The whole ten thousand?"

"Every penny." She paused, and then continued abruptly, with her eyes on
his face: "I think Gus Trenor spoke to you once about having made some
money for me in stocks."

She waited, and Rosedale, congested with embarrassment, muttered that he
remembered something of the kind.

"He made about nine thousand dollars," Lily pursued, in the same tone of
eager communicativeness. "At the time, I understood that he was
speculating with my own money: it was incredibly stupid of me, but I knew
nothing of business. Afterward I found out that he had NOT used my
money--that what he said he had made for me he had really given me. It
was meant in kindness, of course; but it was not the sort of obligation
one could remain under.  Unfortunately I had spent the money before I
discovered my mistake; and so my legacy will have to go to pay it back.
That is the reason why I am trying to learn a trade."

She made the statement clearly, deliberately, with pauses between the
sentences, so that each should have time to sink deeply into her hearer's
mind. She had a passionate desire that some one should know the truth
about this transaction, and also that the rumour of her intention to
repay the money should reach Judy Trenor's ears. And it had suddenly
occurred to her that Rosedale, who had surprised Trenor's confidence, was
the fitting person to receive and transmit her version of the facts. She
had even felt a momentary exhilaration at the thought of thus relieving
herself of her detested secret; but the sensation gradually faded in the
telling, and as she ended her pallour was suffused with a deep blush of
misery.

Rosedale continued to stare at her in wonder; but the wonder took the
turn she had least expected.

"But see here--if that's the case, it cleans you out altogether?"

He put it to her as if she had not grasped the consequences of her act;
as if her incorrigible ignorance of business were about to precipitate
her into a fresh act of folly.

"Altogether--yes," she calmly agreed.

He sat silent, his thick hands clasped on the table, his little puzzled
eyes exploring the recesses of the deserted restaurant.

"See here--that's fine," he exclaimed abruptly.

Lily rose from her seat with a deprecating laugh. "Oh, no--it's merely a
bore," she asserted, gathering together the ends of her feather scarf.

Rosedale remained seated, too intent on his thoughts to notice her
movement. "Miss Lily, if you want any backing--I like pluck----" broke
from him disconnectedly.

"Thank you." She held out her hand. "Your tea has given me a tremendous
backing. I feel equal to anything now."

Her gesture seemed to show a definite intention of dismissal, but her
companion had tossed a bill to the waiter, and was slipping his short
arms into his expensive overcoat.

"Wait a minute--you've got to let me walk home with you," he said.

Lily uttered no protest, and when he had paused to make sure of his
change they emerged from the hotel and crossed Sixth Avenue again. As she
led the way westward past a long line of areas which, through the
distortion of their paintless rails, revealed with increasing candour the
DISJECTA MEMBRA of bygone dinners, Lily felt that Rosedale was taking
contemptuous note of the neighbourhood; and before the doorstep at which
she finally paused he looked up with an air of incredulous disgust.

"This isn't the place? Some one told me you were living with Miss Farish."

"No: I am boarding here. I have lived too long on my friends."

He continued to scan the blistered brown stone front, the windows draped
with discoloured lace, and the Pompeian decoration of the muddy
vestibule; then he looked back at her face and said with a visible
effort: "You'll let me come and see you some day?"

She smiled, recognizing the heroism of the offer to the point of being
frankly touched by it. "Thank you--I shall be very glad," she made
answer, in the first sincere words she had ever spoken to him.

That evening in her own room Miss Bart--who had fled early from the heavy
fumes of the basement dinner-table--sat musing upon the impulse which had
led her to unbosom herself to Rosedale. Beneath it she discovered an
increasing sense of loneliness--a dread of returning to the solitude of
her room, while she could be anywhere else, or in any company but her
own. Circumstances, of late, had combined to cut her off more and more
from her few remaining friends. On Carry Fisher's part the withdrawal was
perhaps not quite involuntary. Having made her final effort on Lily's
behalf, and landed her safely in Mme. Regina's work-room, Mrs. Fisher
seemed disposed to rest from her labours; and Lily, understanding the
reason, could not condemn her. Carry had in fact come dangerously near to
being involved in the episode of Mrs. Norma Hatch, and it had taken some
verbal ingenuity to extricate herself. She frankly owned to having
brought Lily and Mrs. Hatch together, but then she did not know Mrs.
Hatch--she had expressly warned Lily that she did not know Mrs.
Hatch--and besides, she was not Lily's keeper, and really the girl was
old enough to take care of herself. Carry did not put her own case so
brutally, but she allowed it to be thus put for her by her latest bosom
friend, Mrs. Jack Stepney: Mrs. Stepney, trembling over the narrowness of
her only brother's escape, but eager to vindicate Mrs. Fisher, at whose
house she could count on the "jolly parties" which had become a necessity
to her since marriage had emancipated her from the Van Osburgh point of
view.

Lily understood the situation and could make allowances for it.  Carry
had been a good friend to her in difficult days, and perhaps only a
friendship like Gerty's could be proof against such an increasing strain.
Gerty's friendship did indeed hold fast; yet Lily was beginning to avoid
her also. For she could not go to Gerty's without risk of meeting Selden;
and to meet him now would be pure pain. It was pain enough even to think
of him, whether she considered him in the distinctness of her waking
thoughts, or felt the obsession of his presence through the blur of her
tormented nights. That was one of the reasons why she had turned again to
Mrs. Hatch's prescription. In the uneasy snatches of her natural dreams
he came to her sometimes in the old guise of fellowship and tenderness;
and she would rise from the sweet delusion mocked and emptied of her
courage. But in the sleep which the phial procured she sank far below
such half-waking visitations, sank into depths of dreamless annihilation
from which she woke each morning with an obliterated past.

Gradually, to be sure, the stress of the old thoughts would return; but
at least they did not importune her waking hour. The drug gave her a
momentary illusion of complete renewal, from which she drew strength to
take up her daily work. The strength was more and more needed as the
perplexities of her future increased. She knew that to Gerty and Mrs.
Fisher she was only passing through a temporary period of probation,
since they believed that the apprenticeship she was serving at Mme.
Regina's would enable her, when Mrs. Peniston's legacy was paid, to
realize the vision of the green-and-white shop with the fuller competence
acquired by her preliminary training. But to Lily herself, aware that the
legacy could not be put to such a use, the preliminary training seemed a
wasted effort. She understood clearly enough that, even if she could ever
learn to compete with hands formed from childhood for their special work,
the small pay she received would not be a sufficient addition to her
income to compensate her for such drudgery. And the realization of this
fact brought her recurringly face to face with the temptation to use the
legacy in establishing her business. Once installed, and in command of
her own work-women, she believed she had sufficient tact and ability to
attract a fashionable CLIENTELE; and if the business succeeded she could
gradually lay aside money enough to discharge her debt to Trenor. But the
task might take years to accomplish, even if she continued to stint
herself to the utmost; and meanwhile her pride would be crushed under the
weight of an intolerable obligation.

These were her superficial considerations; but under them lurked the
secret dread that the obligation might not always remain intolerable.
She knew she could not count on her continuity of purpose, and what
really frightened her was the thought that she might gradually
accommodate herself to remaining indefinitely in Trenor's debt, as she
had accommodated herself to the part allotted her on the Sabrina, and as
she had so nearly drifted into acquiescing with Stancy's scheme for the
advancement of Mrs. Hatch. Her danger lay, as she knew, in her old
incurable dread of discomfort and poverty; in the fear of that mounting
tide of dinginess against which her mother had so passionately warned
her. And now a new vista of peril opened before her. She understood that
Rosedale was ready to lend her money; and the longing to take advantage
of his offer began to haunt her insidiously. It was of course impossible
to accept a loan from Rosedale; but proximate possibilities hovered
temptingly before her. She was quite sure that he would come and see her
again, and almost sure that, if he did, she could bring him to the point
of offering to marry her on the terms she had previously rejected.  Would
she still reject them if they were offered? More and more, with every
fresh mischance befalling her, did the pursuing furies seem to take the
shape of Bertha Dorset; and close at hand, safely locked among her
papers, lay the means of ending their pursuit. The temptation, which her
scorn of Rosedale had once enabled her to reject, now insistently
returned upon her; and how much strength was left her to oppose it?

What little there was must at any rate be husbanded to the utmost; she
could not trust herself again to the perils of a sleepless night.
Through the long hours of silence the dark spirit of fatigue and
loneliness crouched upon her breast, leaving her so drained of bodily
strength that her morning thoughts swam in a haze of weakness. The only
hope of renewal lay in the little bottle at her bed-side; and how much
longer that hope would last she dared not conjecture.

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

completion: Book II, Chapter 6 Carrie accompanies the Gormers to one of their new houses and while there meets George Dorset while taking a walk. He pleads with her to give him some proof of his wife's infidelities, implying that he wants to divorce her and marry Lily instead. Lily becomes afraid and runs away from him, telling him she cannot help. When she returns to the Gormer house, Mrs. Gormer informs her that Bertha Dorset had been there for a visit. Lily head back to the city and finds a place in a hotel, paying more for her rent than she can afford. She is soon visited by Mr. Dorset who implores her to help him out of his situation, but Lily refuses to reveal anything. She then goes to visit Carrie Fisher and finds Rosedale in Carrie's house, most likely invited there so he and Lily could meet. After the dinner Carrie talks with Lily alone, and tells her that in order to defeat Bertha Dorset, Lily will have to either marry Mr. Dorset or marry someone else.