Chapter: Lily, lingering for a moment on the corner, looked out on the afternoon
spectacle of Fifth Avenue. It was a day in late April, and the sweetness
of spring was in the air. It mitigated the ugliness of the long crowded
thoroughfare, blurred the gaunt roof-lines, threw a mauve veil over the
discouraging perspective of the side streets, and gave a touch of poetry
to the delicate haze of green that marked the entrance to the Park.

As Lily stood there, she recognized several familiar faces in the passing
carriages. The season was over, and its ruling forces had disbanded; but
a few still lingered, delaying their departure for Europe, or passing
through town on their return from the South.  Among them was Mrs. Van
Osburgh, swaying majestically in her C-spring barouche, with Mrs. Percy
Gryce at her side, and the new heir to the Gryce millions enthroned
before them on his nurse's knees. They were succeeded by Mrs. Hatch's
electric victoria, in which that lady reclined in the lonely splendour of
a spring toilet obviously designed for company; and a moment or two later
came Judy Trenor, accompanied by Lady Skiddaw, who had come over for her
annual tarpon fishing and a dip into "the street."

This fleeting glimpse of her past served to emphasize the sense of
aimlessness with which Lily at length turned toward home. She had nothing
to do for the rest of the day, nor for the days to come; for the season
was over in millinery as well as in society, and a week earlier Mme.
Regina had notified her that her services were no longer required. Mme.
Regina always reduced her staff on the first of May, and Miss Bart's
attendance had of late been so irregular--she had so often been unwell,
and had done so little work when she came--that it was only as a favour
that her dismissal had hitherto been deferred.

Lily did not question the justice of the decision. She was conscious of
having been forgetful, awkward and slow to learn. It was bitter to
acknowledge her inferiority even to herself, but the fact had been
brought home to her that as a bread-winner she could never compete with
professional ability.  Since she had been brought up to be ornamental,
she could hardly blame herself for failing to serve any practical
purpose; but the discovery put an end to her consoling sense of universal
efficiency.

As she turned homeward her thoughts shrank in anticipation from the fact
that there would be nothing to get up for the next morning. The luxury of
lying late in bed was a pleasure belonging to the life of ease; it had no
part in the utilitarian existence of the boarding-house. She liked to
leave her room early, and to return to it as late as possible; and she
was walking slowly now in order to postpone the detested approach to her
doorstep.

But the doorstep, as she drew near it, acquired a sudden interest from
the fact that it was occupied--and indeed filled--by the conspicuous
figure of Mr. Rosedale, whose presence seemed to take on an added
amplitude from the meanness of his surroundings.

The sight stirred Lily with an irresistible sense of triumph.  Rosedale,
a day or two after their chance meeting, had called to enquire if she had
recovered from her indisposition; but since then she had not seen or
heard from him, and his absence seemed to betoken a struggle to keep
away, to let her pass once more out of his life. If this were the case,
his return showed that the struggle had been unsuccessful, for Lily knew
he was not the man to waste his time in an ineffectual sentimental
dalliance. He was too busy, too practical, and above all too much
preoccupied with his own advancement, to indulge in such unprofitable
asides.

In the peacock-blue parlour, with its bunches of dried pampas grass, and
discoloured steel engravings of sentimental episodes, he looked about him
with unconcealed disgust, laying his hat distrustfully on the dusty
console adorned with a Rogers statuette.

Lily sat down on one of the plush and rosewood sofas, and he deposited
himself in a rocking-chair draped with a starched antimacassar which
scraped unpleasantly against the pink fold of skin above his collar.

"My goodness--you can't go on living here!" he exclaimed.

Lily smiled at his tone. "I am not sure that I can; but I have gone over
my expenses very carefully, and I rather think I shall be able to manage
it."

"Be able to manage it? That's not what I mean--it's no place for you!"

"It's what I mean; for I have been out of work for the last week."

"Out of work--out of work! What a way for you to talk! The idea of your
having to work--it's preposterous." He brought out his sentences in short
violent jerks, as though they were forced up from a deep inner crater of
indignation. "It's a farce--a crazy farce," he repeated, his eyes fixed
on the long vista of the room reflected in the blotched glass between the
windows.

Lily continued to meet his expostulations with a smile. "I don't know why
I should regard myself as an exception----" she began.

"Because you ARE; that's why; and your being in a place like this is a
damnable outrage. I can't talk of it calmly."

She had in truth never seen him so shaken out of his usual glibness; and
there was something almost moving to her in his inarticulate struggle
with his emotions.

He rose with a start which left the rocking-chair quivering on its beam
ends, and placed himself squarely before her.

"Look here, Miss Lily, I'm going to Europe next week: going over to Paris
and London for a couple of months--and I can't leave you like this. I
can't do it. I know it's none of my business--you've let me understand
that often enough; but things are worse with you now than they have been
before, and you must see that you've got to accept help from somebody.
You spoke to me the other day about some debt to Trenor.  I know what you
mean--and I respect you for feeling as you do about it."

A blush of surprise rose to Lily's pale face, but before she could
interrupt him he had continued eagerly: "Well, I'll lend you the money to
pay Trenor; and I won't--I--see here, don't take me up till I've
finished. What I mean is, it'll be a plain business arrangement, such as
one man would make with another.  Now, what have you got to say against
that?"

Lily's blush deepened to a glow in which humiliation and gratitude were
mingled; and both sentiments revealed themselves in the unexpected
gentleness of her reply.

"Only this: that it is exactly what Gus Trenor proposed; and that I can
never again be sure of understanding the plainest business arrangement."
Then, realizing that this answer contained a germ of injustice, she
added, even more kindly: "Not that I don't appreciate your kindness--that
I'm not grateful for it. But a business arrangement between us would in
any case be impossible, because I shall have no security to give when my
debt to Gus Trenor has been paid."

Rosedale received this statement in silence: he seemed to feel the note
of finality in her voice, yet to be unable to accept it as closing the
question between them.

In the silence Lily had a clear perception of what was passing through
his mind. Whatever perplexity he felt as to the inexorableness of her
course--however little he penetrated its motive--she saw that it
unmistakably tended to strengthen her hold over him. It was as though the
sense in her of unexplained scruples and resistances had the same
attraction as the delicacy of feature, the fastidiousness of manner,
which gave her an external rarity, an air of being impossible to match.
As he advanced in social experience this uniqueness had acquired a
greater value for him, as though he were a collector who had learned to
distinguish minor differences of design and quality in some long-coveted
object.

Lily, perceiving all this, understood that he would marry her at once, on
the sole condition of a reconciliation with Mrs. Dorset; and the
temptation was the less easy to put aside because, little by little,
circumstances were breaking down her dislike for Rosedale. The dislike,
indeed, still subsisted; but it was penetrated here and there by the
perception of mitigating qualities in him: of a certain gross kindliness,
a rather helpless fidelity of sentiment, which seemed to be struggling
through the hard surface of his material ambitions.

Reading his dismissal in her eyes, he held out his hand with a gesture
which conveyed something of this inarticulate conflict.

"If you'd only let me, I'd set you up over them all--I'd put you where
you could wipe your feet on 'em!" he declared; and it touched her oddly
to see that his new passion had not altered his old standard of values.



Lily took no sleeping-drops that night. She lay awake viewing her
situation in the crude light which Rosedale's visit had shed on it. In
fending off the offer he was so plainly ready to renew, had she not
sacrificed to one of those abstract notions of honour that might be
called the conventionalities of the moral life?  What debt did she owe to
a social order which had condemned and banished her without trial?  She
had never been heard in her own defence; she was innocent of the charge
on which she had been found guilty; and the irregularity of her
conviction might seem to justify the use of methods as irregular in
recovering her lost rights. Bertha Dorset, to save herself, had not
scrupled to ruin her by an open falsehood; why should she hesitate to
make private use of the facts that chance had put in her way? After all,
half the opprobrium of such an act lies in the name attached to it.  Call
it blackmail and it becomes unthinkable; but explain that it injures no
one, and that the rights regained by it were unjustly forfeited, and he
must be a formalist indeed who can find no plea in its defence.

The arguments pleading for it with Lily were the old unanswerable ones of
the personal situation: the sense of injury, the sense of failure, the
passionate craving for a fair chance against the selfish despotism of
society. She had learned by experience that she had neither the aptitude
nor the moral constancy to remake her life on new lines; to become a
worker among workers, and let the world of luxury and pleasure sweep by
her unregarded. She could not hold herself much to blame for this
ineffectiveness, and she was perhaps less to blame than she believed.
Inherited tendencies had combined with early training to make her the
highly specialized product she was: an organism as helpless out of its
narrow range as the sea-anemone torn from the rock. She had been
fashioned to adorn and delight; to what other end does nature round the
rose-leaf and paint the humming-bird's breast?  And was it her fault that
the purely decorative mission is less easily and harmoniously fulfilled
among social beings than in the world of nature? That it is apt to be
hampered by material necessities or complicated by moral scruples?

These last were the two antagonistic forces which fought out their battle
in her breast during the long watches of the night; and when she rose the
next morning she hardly knew where the victory lay. She was exhausted by
the reaction of a night without sleep, coming after many nights of rest
artificially obtained; and in the distorting light of fatigue the future
stretched out before her grey, interminable and desolate.

She lay late in bed, refusing the coffee and fried eggs which the
friendly Irish servant thrust through her door, and hating the intimate
domestic noises of the house and the cries and rumblings of the street.
Her week of idleness had brought home to her with exaggerated force these
small aggravations of the boarding-house world, and she yearned for that
other luxurious world, whose machinery is so carefully concealed that one
scene flows into another without perceptible agency.

At length she rose and dressed. Since she had left Mme. Regina's she had
spent her days in the streets, partly to escape from the uncongenial
promiscuities of the boarding-house, and partly in the hope that physical
fatigue would help her to sleep. But once out of the house, she could not
decide where to go; for she had avoided Gerty since her dismissal from
the milliner's, and she was not sure of a welcome anywhere else.

The morning was in harsh contrast to the previous day. A cold grey sky
threatened rain, and a high wind drove the dust in wild spirals up and
down the streets. Lily walked up Fifth Avenue toward the Park, hoping to
find a sheltered nook where she might sit; but the wind chilled her, and
after an hour's wandering under the tossing boughs she yielded to her
increasing weariness, and took refuge in a little restaurant in
Fifty-ninth Street. She was not hungry, and had meant to go without
luncheon; but she was too tired to return home, and the long perspective
of white tables showed alluringly through the windows.

The room was full of women and girls, all too much engaged in the rapid
absorption of tea and pie to remark her entrance. A hum of shrill voices
reverberated against the low ceiling, leaving Lily shut out in a little
circle of silence. She felt a sudden pang of profound loneliness. She had
lost the sense of time, and it seemed to her as though she had not spoken
to any one for days. Her eyes sought the faces about her, craving a
responsive glance, some sign of an intuition of her trouble. But the
sallow preoccupied women, with their bags and note-books and rolls of
music, were all engrossed in their own affairs, and even those who sat by
themselves were busy running over proof-sheets or devouring magazines
between their hurried gulps of tea.  Lily alone was stranded in a great
waste of disoccupation.

She drank several cups of the tea which was served with her portion of
stewed oysters, and her brain felt clearer and livelier when she emerged
once more into the street. She realized now that, as she sat in the
restaurant, she had unconsciously arrived at a final decision. The
discovery gave her an immediate illusion of activity: it was exhilarating
to think that she had actually a reason for hurrying home.  To prolong
her enjoyment of the sensation she decided to walk; but the distance was
so great that she found herself glancing nervously at the clocks on the
way. One of the surprises of her unoccupied state was the discovery that
time, when it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it,
cannot be trusted to move at any recognized pace.  Usually it loiters;
but just when one has come to count upon its slowness, it may suddenly
break into a wild irrational gallop.

She found, however, on reaching home, that the hour was still early
enough for her to sit down and rest a few minutes before putting her plan
into execution. The delay did not perceptibly weaken her resolve.  She
was frightened and yet stimulated by the reserved force of resolution
which she felt within herself: she saw it was going to be easier, a great
deal easier, than she had imagined.

At five o'clock she rose, unlocked her trunk, and took out a sealed
packet which she slipped into the bosom of her dress. Even the contact
with the packet did not shake her nerves as she had half-expected it
would. She seemed encased in a strong armour of indifference, as though
the vigorous exertion of her will had finally benumbed her finer
sensibilities.

She dressed herself once more for the street, locked her door and went
out. When she emerged on the pavement, the day was still high, but a
threat of rain darkened the sky and cold gusts shook the signs projecting
from the basement shops along the street. She reached Fifth Avenue and
began to walk slowly northward. She was sufficiently familiar with Mrs.
Dorset's habits to know that she could always be found at home after
five.  She might not, indeed, be accessible to visitors, especially to a
visitor so unwelcome, and against whom it was quite possible that she had
guarded herself by special orders; but Lily had written a note which she
meant to send up with her name, and which she thought would secure her
admission.

She had allowed herself time to walk to Mrs. Dorset's, thinking that the
quick movement through the cold evening air would help to steady her
nerves; but she really felt no need of being tranquillized. Her survey of
the situation remained calm and unwavering.

As she reached Fiftieth Street the clouds broke abruptly, and a rush of
cold rain slanted into her face. She had no umbrella and the moisture
quickly penetrated her thin spring dress. She was still half a mile from
her destination, and she decided to walk across to Madison Avenue and
take the electric car. As she turned into the side street, a vague memory
stirred in her. The row of budding trees, the new brick and limestone
house-fronts, the Georgian flat-house with flowerboxes on its balconies,
were merged together into the setting of a familiar scene.  It was down
this street that she had walked with Selden, that September day two years
ago; a few yards ahead was the doorway they had entered together. The
recollection loosened a throng of benumbed sensations--longings, regrets,
imaginings, the throbbing brood of the only spring her heart had ever
known. It was strange to find herself passing his house on such an
errand. She seemed suddenly to see her action as he would see it--and the
fact of his own connection with it, the fact that, to attain her end, she
must trade on his name, and profit by a secret of his past, chilled her
blood with shame. What a long way she had travelled since the day of
their first talk together!  Even then her feet had been set in the path
she was now following--even then she had resisted the hand he had held
out.

All her resentment of his fancied coldness was swept away in this
overwhelming rush of recollection. Twice he had been ready to help
her--to help her by loving her, as he had said--and if, the third time,
he had seemed to fail her, whom but herself could she accuse? . . .
Well, that part of her life was over; she did not know why her thoughts
still clung to it. But the sudden longing to see him remained; it grew to
hunger as she paused on the pavement opposite his door. The street was
dark and empty, swept by the rain. She had a vision of his quiet room, of
the bookshelves, and the fire on the hearth. She looked up and saw a
light in his window; then she crossed the street and entered the house.

 Lily observes the traffic on Fifth Avenue, and sees Mrs. Van Osburgh, Evie, and the latter's new infant. She also sees Mrs. Hatch and Judy. Lily has been laid off from Mme. Regina's shop, a fate that she had anticipated. Rosedale visits Lily. He offers to loan her the money to repay Trenor, but she refuses, telling Rosedale that she has nothing to secure the loan. He tells her that he is leaving for Europe for a period of several months, and would like to help her. He renews his offer to marry her with the implied provision that she set aside her differences with Bertha. Lily is touched by his declaration that he could position her where she "could wipe feet on 'em!" Lily considers using the letters to convince Bertha to allow Lily's return to society. The following morning, she devises her plan at a restaurant on Fifty-ninth Street. She goes home to retrieve the letters, and then heads to Bertha's home. On her way, however, she passes the street where she had strolled with Selden two years prior. She considers how Selden would judge her intended action to blackmail Bertha. She sees a light in Selden's apartment and enters his building.

