Chapter: In the hansom she leaned back with a sigh. Why must a girl pay so dearly
for her least escape from routine? Why could one never do a natural thing
without having to screen it behind a structure of artifice? She had
yielded to a passing impulse in going to Lawrence Selden's rooms, and it
was so seldom that she could allow herself the luxury of an impulse! This
one, at any rate, was going to cost her rather more than she could
afford. She was vexed to see that, in spite of so many years of
vigilance, she had blundered twice within five minutes. That stupid story
about her dress-maker was bad enough--it would have been so simple to
tell Rosedale that she had been taking tea with Selden! The mere
statement of the fact would have rendered it innocuous. But, after having
let herself be surprised in a falsehood, it was doubly stupid to snub the
witness of her discomfiture. If she had had the presence of mind to let
Rosedale drive her to the station, the concession might have purchased
his silence. He had his race's accuracy in the appraisal of values, and
to be seen walking down the platform at the crowded afternoon hour in the
company of Miss Lily Bart would have been money in his pocket, as he
might himself have phrased it. He knew, of course, that there would be a
large house-party at Bellomont, and the possibility of being taken for
one of Mrs. Trenor's guests was doubtless included in his calculations.
Mr. Rosedale was still at a stage in his social ascent when it was of
importance to produce such impressions.

The provoking part was that Lily knew all this--knew how easy it would
have been to silence him on the spot, and how difficult it might be to do
so afterward. Mr. Simon Rosedale was a man who made it his business to
know everything about every one, whose idea of showing himself to be at
home in society was to display an inconvenient familiarity with the
habits of those with whom he wished to be thought intimate. Lily was sure
that within twenty-four hours the story of her visiting her dress-maker
at the Benedick would be in active circulation among Mr. Rosedale's
acquaintances. The worst of it was that she had always snubbed and
ignored him. On his first appearance--when her improvident cousin, Jack
Stepney, had obtained for him (in return for favours too easily guessed)
a card to one of the vast impersonal Van Osburgh "crushes"--Rosedale,
with that mixture of artistic sensibility and business astuteness which
characterizes his race, had instantly gravitated toward Miss Bart. She
understood his motives, for her own course was guided by as nice
calculations. Training and experience had taught her to be hospitable to
newcomers, since the most unpromising might be useful later on, and there
were plenty of available OUBLIETTES to swallow them if they were not. But
some intuitive repugnance, getting the better of years of social
discipline, had made her push Mr. Rosedale into his OUBLIETTE without a
trial. He had left behind only the ripple of amusement which his speedy
despatch had caused among her friends; and though later (to shift the
metaphor) he reappeared lower down the stream, it was only in fleeting
glimpses, with long submergences between.

Hitherto Lily had been undisturbed by scruples. In her little set Mr.
Rosedale had been pronounced "impossible," and Jack Stepney roundly
snubbed for his attempt to pay his debts in dinner invitations. Even Mrs.
Trenor, whose taste for variety had led her into some hazardous
experiments, resisted Jack's attempts to disguise Mr. Rosedale as a
novelty, and declared that he was the same little Jew who had been served
up and rejected at the social board a dozen times within her memory; and
while Judy Trenor was obdurate there was small chance of Mr. Rosedale's
penetrating beyond the outer limbo of the Van Osburgh crushes. Jack gave
up the contest with a laughing "You'll see," and, sticking manfully to
his guns, showed himself with Rosedale at the fashionable restaurants, in
company with the personally vivid if socially obscure ladies who are
available for such purposes. But the attempt had hitherto been vain, and
as Rosedale undoubtedly paid for the dinners, the laugh remained with his
debtor.

Mr. Rosedale, it will be seen, was thus far not a factor to be
feared--unless one put one's self in his power. And this was precisely
what Miss Bart had done. Her clumsy fib had let him see that she had
something to conceal; and she was sure he had a score to settle with her.
Something in his smile told her he had not forgotten. She turned from the
thought with a little shiver, but it hung on her all the way to the
station, and dogged her down the platform with the persistency of Mr.
Rosedale himself.

She had just time to take her seat before the train started; but having
arranged herself in her corner with the instinctive feeling for effect
which never forsook her, she glanced about in the hope of seeing some
other member of the Trenors' party. She wanted to get away from herself,
and conversation was the only means of escape that she knew.

Her search was rewarded by the discovery of a very blond young man with a
soft reddish beard, who, at the other end of the carriage, appeared to be
dissembling himself behind an unfolded newspaper. Lily's eye brightened,
and a faint smile relaxed the drawn lines of her mouth. She had known
that Mr. Percy Gryce was to be at Bellomont, but she had not counted on
the luck of having him to herself in the train; and the fact banished all
perturbing thoughts of Mr. Rosedale. Perhaps, after all, the day was to
end more favourably than it had begun.

She began to cut the pages of a novel, tranquilly studying her prey
through downcast lashes while she organized a method of attack.
Something in his attitude of conscious absorption told her that he was
aware of her presence: no one had ever been quite so engrossed in an
evening paper! She guessed that he was too shy to come up to her, and
that she would have to devise some means of approach which should not
appear to be an advance on her part.  It amused her to think that any one
as rich as Mr. Percy Gryce should be shy; but she was gifted with
treasures of indulgence for such idiosyncrasies, and besides, his
timidity might serve her purpose better than too much assurance. She had
the art of giving self-confidence to the embarrassed, but she was not
equally sure of being able to embarrass the self-confident.

She waited till the train had emerged from the tunnel and was racing
between the ragged edges of the northern suburbs. Then, as it lowered its
speed near Yonkers, she rose from her seat and drifted slowly down the
carriage. As she passed Mr. Gryce, the train gave a lurch, and he was
aware of a slender hand gripping the back of his chair. He rose with a
start, his ingenuous face looking as though it had been dipped in
crimson: even the reddish tint in his beard seemed to deepen. The train
swayed again, almost flinging Miss Bart into his arms.

She steadied herself with a laugh and drew back; but he was enveloped in
the scent of her dress, and his shoulder had felt her fugitive touch.

"Oh, Mr. Gryce, is it you? I'm so sorry--I was trying to find the porter
and get some tea."

She held out her hand as the train resumed its level rush, and they stood
exchanging a few words in the aisle. Yes--he was going to Bellomont. He
had heard she was to be of the party--he blushed again as he admitted it.
And was he to be there for a whole week?  How delightful!

But at this point one or two belated passengers from the last station
forced their way into the carriage, and Lily had to retreat to her seat.

"The chair next to mine is empty--do take it," she said over her
shoulder; and Mr. Gryce, with considerable embarrassment, succeeded in
effecting an exchange which enabled him to transport himself and his bags
to her side.

"Ah--and here is the porter, and perhaps we can have some tea."

She signalled to that official, and in a moment, with the ease that
seemed to attend the fulfilment of all her wishes, a little table had
been set up between the seats, and she had helped Mr. Gryce to bestow his
encumbering properties beneath it.

When the tea came he watched her in silent fascination while her hands
flitted above the tray, looking miraculously fine and slender in contrast
to the coarse china and lumpy bread. It seemed wonderful to him that any
one should perform with such careless ease the difficult task of making
tea in public in a lurching train. He would never have dared to order it
for himself, lest he should attract the notice of his fellow-passengers;
but, secure in the shelter of her conspicuousness, he sipped the inky
draught with a delicious sense of exhilaration.

Lily, with the flavour of Selden's caravan tea on her lips, had no great
fancy to drown it in the railway brew which seemed such nectar to her
companion; but, rightly judging that one of the charms of tea is the fact
of drinking it together, she proceeded to give the last touch to Mr.
Gryce's enjoyment by smiling at him across her lifted cup.

"Is it quite right--I haven't made it too strong?" she asked
solicitously; and he replied with conviction that he had never tasted
better tea.

"I daresay it is true," she reflected; and her imagination was fired by
the thought that Mr. Gryce, who might have sounded the depths of the most
complex self-indulgence, was perhaps actually taking his first journey
alone with a pretty woman.

It struck her as providential that she should be the instrument of his
initiation. Some girls would not have known how to manage him. They would
have over-emphasized the novelty of the adventure, trying to make him
feel in it the zest of an escapade.  But Lily's methods were more
delicate. She remembered that her cousin Jack Stepney had once defined
Mr. Gryce as the young man who had promised his mother never to go out in
the rain without his overshoes; and acting on this hint, she resolved to
impart a gently domestic air to the scene, in the hope that her
companion, instead of feeling that he was doing something reckless or
unusual, would merely be led to dwell on the advantage of always having a
companion to make one's tea in the train.

But in spite of her efforts, conversation flagged after the tray had been
removed, and she was driven to take a fresh measurement of Mr. Gryce's
limitations. It was not, after all, opportunity but imagination that he
lacked: he had a mental palate which would never learn to distinguish
between railway tea and nectar.  There was, however, one topic she could
rely on: one spring that she had only to touch to set his simple
machinery in motion. She had refrained from touching it because it was a
last resource, and she had relied on other arts to stimulate other
sensations; but as a settled look of dulness began to creep over his
candid features, she saw that extreme measures were necessary.

"And how," she said, leaning forward, "are you getting on with your
Americana?"

His eye became a degree less opaque: it was as though an incipient film
had been removed from it, and she felt the pride of a skilful operator.

"I've got a few new things," he said, suffused with pleasure, but
lowering his voice as though he feared his fellow-passengers might be in
league to despoil him.

She returned a sympathetic enquiry, and gradually he was drawn on to talk
of his latest purchases. It was the one subject which enabled him to
forget himself, or allowed him, rather, to remember himself without
constraint, because he was at home in it, and could assert a superiority
that there were few to dispute. Hardly any of his acquaintances cared for
Americana, or knew anything about them; and the consciousness of this
ignorance threw Mr. Gryce's knowledge into agreeable relief. The only
difficulty was to introduce the topic and to keep it to the front; most
people showed no desire to have their ignorance dispelled, and Mr. Gryce
was like a merchant whose warehouses are crammed with an unmarketable
commodity.

But Miss Bart, it appeared, really did want to know about Americana; and
moreover, she was already sufficiently informed to make the task of
farther instruction as easy as it was agreeable.  She questioned him
intelligently, she heard him submissively; and, prepared for the look of
lassitude which usually crept over his listeners' faces, he grew eloquent
under her receptive gaze.  The "points" she had had the presence of mind
to glean from Selden, in anticipation of this very contingency, were
serving her to such good purpose that she began to think her visit to him
had been the luckiest incident of the day. She had once more shown her
talent for profiting by the unexpected, and dangerous theories as to the
advisability of yielding to impulse were germinating under the surface of
smiling attention which she continued to present to her companion.

Mr. Gryce's sensations, if less definite, were equally agreeable.  He
felt the confused titillation with which the lower organisms welcome the
gratification of their needs, and all his senses floundered in a vague
well-being, through which Miss Bart's personality was dimly but
pleasantly perceptible.

Mr. Gryce's interest in Americana had not originated with himself: it was
impossible to think of him as evolving any taste of his own. An uncle had
left him a collection already noted among bibliophiles; the existence of
the collection was the only fact that had ever shed glory on the name of
Gryce, and the nephew took as much pride in his inheritance as though it
had been his own work. Indeed, he gradually came to regard it as such,
and to feel a sense of personal complacency when he chanced on any
reference to the Gryce Americana. Anxious as he was to avoid personal
notice, he took, in the printed mention of his name, a pleasure so
exquisite and excessive that it seemed a compensation for his shrinking
from publicity.

To enjoy the sensation as often as possible, he subscribed to all the
reviews dealing with book-collecting in general, and American history in
particular, and as allusions to his library abounded in the pages of
these journals, which formed his only reading, he came to regard himself
as figuring prominently in the public eye, and to enjoy the thought of
the interest which would be excited if the persons he met in the street,
or sat among in travelling, were suddenly to be told that he was the
possessor of the Gryce Americana.

Most timidities have such secret compensations, and Miss Bart was
discerning enough to know that the inner vanity is generally in
proportion to the outer self-depreciation. With a more confident person
she would not have dared to dwell so long on one topic, or to show such
exaggerated interest in it; but she had rightly guessed that Mr. Gryce's
egoism was a thirsty soil, requiring constant nurture from without. Miss
Bart had the gift of following an undercurrent of thought while she
appeared to be sailing on the surface of conversation; and in this case
her mental excursion took the form of a rapid survey of Mr. Percy Gryce's
future as combined with her own. The Gryces were from Albany, and but
lately introduced to the metropolis, where the mother and son had come,
after old Jefferson Gryce's death, to take possession of his house in
Madison Avenue--an appalling house, all brown stone without and black
walnut within, with the Gryce library in a fire-proof annex that looked
like a mausoleum.  Lily, however, knew all about them: young Mr. Gryce's
arrival had fluttered the maternal breasts of New York, and when a girl
has no mother to palpitate for her she must needs be on the alert for
herself. Lily, therefore, had not only contrived to put herself in the
young man's way, but had made the acquaintance of Mrs. Gryce, a
monumental woman with the voice of a pulpit orator and a mind preoccupied
with the iniquities of her servants, who came sometimes to sit with Mrs.
Peniston and learn from that lady how she managed to prevent the
kitchen-maid's smuggling groceries out of the house. Mrs. Gryce had a
kind of impersonal benevolence: cases of individual need she regarded
with suspicion, but she subscribed to Institutions when their annual
reports showed an impressive surplus. Her domestic duties were manifold,
for they extended from furtive inspections of the servants' bedrooms to
unannounced descents to the cellar; but she had never allowed herself
many pleasures. Once, however, she had had a special edition of the Sarum
Rule printed in rubric and presented to every clergyman in the diocese;
and the gilt album in which their letters of thanks were pasted formed
the chief ornament of her drawing-room table.

Percy had been brought up in the principles which so excellent a woman
was sure to inculcate. Every form of prudence and suspicion had been
grafted on a nature originally reluctant and cautious, with the result
that it would have seemed hardly needful for Mrs. Gryce to extract his
promise about the overshoes, so little likely was he to hazard himself
abroad in the rain. After attaining his majority, and coming into the
fortune which the late Mr. Gryce had made out of a patent device for
excluding fresh air from hotels, the young man continued to live with his
mother in Albany; but on Jefferson Gryce's death, when another large
property passed into her son's hands, Mrs. Gryce thought that what she
called his "interests" demanded his presence in New York. She accordingly
installed herself in the Madison Avenue house, and Percy, whose sense of
duty was not inferior to his mother's, spent all his week days in the
handsome Broad Street office where a batch of pale men on small salaries
had grown grey in the management of the Gryce estate, and where he was
initiated with becoming reverence into every detail of the art of
accumulation.

As far as Lily could learn, this had hitherto been Mr. Gryce's only
occupation, and she might have been pardoned for thinking it not too hard
a task to interest a young man who had been kept on such low diet.  At
any rate, she felt herself so completely in command of the situation that
she yielded to a sense of security in which all fear of Mr. Rosedale, and
of the difficulties on which that fear was contingent, vanished beyond
the edge of thought.

The stopping of the train at Garrisons would not have distracted her from
these thoughts, had she not caught a sudden look of distress in her
companion's eye. His seat faced toward the door, and she guessed that he
had been perturbed by the approach of an acquaintance; a fact confirmed
by the turning of heads and general sense of commotion which her own
entrance into a railway-carriage was apt to produce.

She knew the symptoms at once, and was not surprised to be hailed by the
high notes of a pretty woman, who entered the train accompanied by a
maid, a bull-terrier, and a footman staggering under a load of bags and
dressing-cases.

"Oh, Lily--are you going to Bellomont? Then you can't let me have your
seat, I suppose? But I MUST have a seat in this carriage--porter, you
must find me a place at once. Can't some one be put somewhere else? I
want to be with my friends. Oh, how do you do, Mr. Gryce? Do please make
him understand that I must have a seat next to you and Lily."

Mrs. George Dorset, regardless of the mild efforts of a traveller with a
carpet-bag, who was doing his best to make room for her by getting out of
the train, stood in the middle of the aisle, diffusing about her that
general sense of exasperation which a pretty woman on her travels not
infrequently creates.

She was smaller and thinner than Lily Bart, with a restless pliability of
pose, as if she could have been crumpled up and run through a ring, like
the sinuous draperies she affected. Her small pale face seemed the mere
setting of a pair of dark exaggerated eyes, of which the visionary gaze
contrasted curiously with her self-assertive tone and gestures; so that,
as one of her friends observed, she was like a disembodied spirit who
took up a great deal of room.

Having finally discovered that the seat adjoining Miss Bart's was at her
disposal, she possessed herself of it with a farther displacement of her
surroundings, explaining meanwhile that she had come across from Mount
Kisco in her motor-car that morning, and had been kicking her heels for
an hour at Garrisons, without even the alleviation of a cigarette, her
brute of a husband having neglected to replenish her case before they
parted that morning.

"And at this hour of the day I don't suppose you've a single one left,
have you, Lily?" she plaintively concluded.

Miss Bart caught the startled glance of Mr. Percy Gryce, whose own lips
were never defiled by tobacco.

"What an absurd question, Bertha!" she exclaimed, blushing at the thought
of the store she had laid in at Lawrence Selden's.

"Why, don't you smoke? Since when have you given it up? What--you
never---- And you don't either, Mr. Gryce? Ah, of course--how stupid of
me--I understand."

And Mrs. Dorset leaned back against her travelling cushions with a smile
which made Lily wish there had been no vacant seat beside her own.

 Once safely alone in the cab, Lily berates herself for her indiscretion with Selden. Mostly, she thinks it's ridiculous that a woman can't enjoy herself for two seconds without getting in trouble for it. Then, she realizes she's a fool for not just telling Rosedale the truth. By making up that story about her dress-maker, she made it sound like something fishy was going on, when in fact she only had tea with a friend. She's also an idiot for not accepting Rosedale's offer as an escort, since snubbing someone who's got dirt on you is a bad idea. She knows that Rosedale is a big social-climber, and that being seen with her would do wonders for his reputation. Lily is particularly worried since Rosedale makes it his business to know everything about everyone, and he's kind of a gossipy guy. She remembers when her cousin, Jack Stepney, befriended Rosedale and got him into some big parties thrown by the fashionable Van Osburghs. It didn't go over well. Rosedale was rejected for being new money and for being Jewish. But Jack was undeterred, knowing how valuable Rosedale would be in the future. Lily gets to the station and settles in on the train to the Trenors'. Looking around, she spots Mr. Percy Gryce, whom she zeroes in on as the perfect travel companion. Lily pretends to notice him when she's walking by and takes a seat across from him after confirming that he, too, is traveling to Bellomont. The two of them share tea. Lily realizes that Percy is shy and painfully inexperienced in conversing with women, so she steers the conversation toward a topic he'll be comfortable with: Americana. Remember Selden's discussion of the Jefferson Gryce collection? That was Percy's uncle. He died and left everything to Percy - lots of books, lots of cash. This explains Lily's interest in Percy... Percy is ecstatic to have 1) someone to listen to him talk about Americana, and 2) someone who isn't falling asleep listening to him talk about Americana. Also, Lily is gorgeous, which doesn't hurt. Meanwhile Lily is calculating how long it will take to get Percy to marry her. He's one of the most eligible bachelors around, on account of his money. We hear the general back-story on Percy and his upbringing, which we can sum up in two words: mama's boy. Mrs. Gryce brought her son to New York to install him in all the right circles, and Percy's current occupation is accumulating as much wealth as possible. As the conversation continues, Lily feels as though she's in complete control. Unfortunately, at the next train stop they are joined by Mrs. George Dorset, who takes the seat next to Lily and ruins the tete-a-tete. She asks for a cigarette from Lily, who exclaims with shock that she doesn't smoke.

