Chapter: Selden paused in surprise. In the afternoon rush of the Grand Central
Station his eyes had been refreshed by the sight of Miss Lily Bart.

It was a Monday in early September, and he was returning to his work from
a hurried dip into the country; but what was Miss Bart doing in town at
that season? If she had appeared to be catching a train, he might have
inferred that he had come on her in the act of transition between one and
another of the country-houses which disputed her presence after the close
of the Newport season; but her desultory air perplexed him. She stood
apart from the crowd, letting it drift by her to the platform or the
street, and wearing an air of irresolution which might, as he surmised,
be the mask of a very definite purpose. It struck him at once that she
was waiting for some one, but he hardly knew why the idea arrested him.
There was nothing new about Lily Bart, yet he could never see her without
a faint movement of interest: it was characteristic of her that she
always roused speculation, that her simplest acts seemed the result of
far-reaching intentions.

An impulse of curiosity made him turn out of his direct line to the door,
and stroll past her. He knew that if she did not wish to be seen she
would contrive to elude him; and it amused him to think of putting her
skill to the test.

"Mr. Selden--what good luck!"

She came forward smiling, eager almost, in her resolve to intercept him.
One or two persons, in brushing past them, lingered to look; for Miss
Bart was a figure to arrest even the suburban traveller rushing to his
last train.

Selden had never seen her more radiant. Her vivid head, relieved against
the dull tints of the crowd, made her more conspicuous than in a
ball-room, and under her dark hat and veil she regained the girlish
smoothness, the purity of tint, that she was beginning to lose after
eleven years of late hours and indefatigable dancing. Was it really
eleven years, Selden found himself wondering, and had she indeed reached
the nine-and-twentieth birthday with which her rivals credited her?

"What luck!" she repeated. "How nice of you to come to my rescue!"

He responded joyfully that to do so was his mission in life, and asked
what form the rescue was to take.

"Oh, almost any--even to sitting on a bench and talking to me.  One sits
out a cotillion--why not sit out a train? It isn't a bit hotter here than
in Mrs. Van Osburgh's conservatory--and some of the women are not a bit
uglier."  She broke off, laughing, to explain that she had come up to
town from Tuxedo, on her way to the Gus Trenors' at Bellomont, and had
missed the three-fifteen train to Rhinebeck.  "And there isn't another
till half-past five." She consulted the little jewelled watch among her
laces.  "Just two hours to wait. And I don't know what to do with myself.
My maid came up this morning to do some shopping for me, and was to go on
to Bellomont at one o'clock, and my aunt's house is closed, and I don't
know a soul in town." She glanced plaintively about the station. "It IS
hotter than Mrs. Van Osburgh's, after all. If you can spare the time, do
take me somewhere for a breath of air."

He declared himself entirely at her disposal: the adventure struck him as
diverting. As a spectator, he had always enjoyed Lily Bart; and his
course lay so far out of her orbit that it amused him to be drawn for a
moment into the sudden intimacy which her proposal implied.

"Shall we go over to Sherry's for a cup of tea?"

She smiled assentingly, and then made a slight grimace.

"So many people come up to town on a Monday--one is sure to meet a lot of
bores. I'm as old as the hills, of course, and it ought not to make any
difference; but if I'M old enough, you're not," she objected gaily.  "I'm
dying for tea--but isn't there a quieter place?"

He answered her smile, which rested on him vividly. Her discretions
interested him almost as much as her imprudences: he was so sure that
both were part of the same carefully-elaborated plan. In judging Miss
Bart, he had always made use of the "argument from design."

"The resources of New York are rather meagre," he said; "but I'll find a
hansom first, and then we'll invent something." He led her through the
throng of returning holiday-makers, past sallow-faced girls in
preposterous hats, and flat-chested women struggling with paper bundles
and palm-leaf fans. Was it possible that she belonged to the same race?
The dinginess, the crudity of this average section of womanhood made him
feel how highly specialized she was.

A rapid shower had cooled the air, and clouds still hung refreshingly
over the moist street.

"How delicious! Let us walk a little," she said as they emerged from the
station.

They turned into Madison Avenue and began to stroll northward. As she
moved beside him, with her long light step, Selden was conscious of
taking a luxurious pleasure in her nearness: in the modelling of her
little ear, the crisp upward wave of her hair--was it ever so slightly
brightened by art?--and the thick planting of her straight black lashes.
Everything about her was at once vigorous and exquisite, at once strong
and fine. He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to
make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious
way, have been sacrificed to produce her. He was aware that the qualities
distinguishing her from the herd of her sex were chiefly external: as
though a fine glaze of beauty and fastidiousness had been applied to
vulgar clay. Yet the analogy left him unsatisfied, for a coarse texture
will not take a high finish; and was it not possible that the material
was fine, but that circumstance had fashioned it into a futile shape?

As he reached this point in his speculations the sun came out, and her
lifted parasol cut off his enjoyment. A moment or two later she paused
with a sigh.

"Oh, dear, I'm so hot and thirsty--and what a hideous place New York is!"
She looked despairingly up and down the dreary thoroughfare.  "Other
cities put on their best clothes in summer, but New York seems to sit in
its shirtsleeves." Her eyes wandered down one of the side-streets.
"Someone has had the humanity to plant a few trees over there. Let us go
into the shade."

"I am glad my street meets with your approval," said Selden as they
turned the corner.

"Your street? Do you live here?"

She glanced with interest along the new brick and limestone house-fronts,
fantastically varied in obedience to the American craving for novelty,
but fresh and inviting with their awnings and flower-boxes.

"Ah, yes--to be sure: THE BENEDICK. What a nice-looking building!  I
don't think I've ever seen it before." She looked across at the
flat-house with its marble porch and pseudo-Georgian facade.  "Which are
your windows? Those with the awnings down?"

"On the top floor--yes."

"And that nice little balcony is yours? How cool it looks up there!"

He paused a moment. "Come up and see," he suggested. "I can give you a
cup of tea in no time--and you won't meet any bores."

Her colour deepened--she still had the art of blushing at the right
time--but she took the suggestion as lightly as it was made.

"Why not? It's too tempting--I'll take the risk," she declared.

"Oh, I'm not dangerous," he said in the same key. In truth, he had never
liked her as well as at that moment. He knew she had accepted without
afterthought: he could never be a factor in her calculations, and there
was a surprise, a refreshment almost, in the spontaneity of her consent.

On the threshold he paused a moment, feeling for his latchkey.

"There's no one here; but I have a servant who is supposed to come in the
mornings, and it's just possible he may have put out the tea-things and
provided some cake."

He ushered her into a slip of a hall hung with old prints. She noticed
the letters and notes heaped on the table among his gloves and sticks;
then she found herself in a small library, dark but cheerful, with its
walls of books, a pleasantly faded Turkey rug, a littered desk and, as he
had foretold, a tea-tray on a low table near the window. A breeze had
sprung up, swaying inward the muslin curtains, and bringing a fresh scent
of mignonette and petunias from the flower-box on the balcony.

Lily sank with a sigh into one of the shabby leather chairs.

"How delicious to have a place like this all to one's self! What a
miserable thing it is to be a woman." She leaned back in a luxury of
discontent.

Selden was rummaging in a cupboard for the cake.

"Even women," he said, "have been known to enjoy the privileges of a
flat."

"Oh, governesses--or widows. But not girls--not poor, miserable,
marriageable girls!"

"I even know a girl who lives in a flat."

She sat up in surprise. "You do?"

"I do," he assured her, emerging from the cupboard with the sought-for
cake.

"Oh, I know--you mean Gerty Farish." She smiled a little unkindly. "But I
said MARRIAGEABLE--and besides, she has a horrid little place, and no
maid, and such queer things to eat. Her cook does the washing and the
food tastes of soap. I should hate that, you know."

"You shouldn't dine with her on wash-days," said Selden, cutting the cake.

They both laughed, and he knelt by the table to light the lamp under the
kettle, while she measured out the tea into a little tea-pot of green
glaze. As he watched her hand, polished as a bit of old ivory, with its
slender pink nails, and the sapphire bracelet slipping over her wrist, he
was struck with the irony of suggesting to her such a life as his cousin
Gertrude Farish had chosen. She was so evidently the victim of the
civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet
seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.

She seemed to read his thought. "It was horrid of me to say that of
Gerty," she said with charming compunction. "I forgot she was your
cousin. But we're so different, you know: she likes being good, and I
like being happy. And besides, she is free and I am not. If I were, I
daresay I could manage to be happy even in her flat. It must be pure
bliss to arrange the furniture just as one likes, and give all the
horrors to the ash-man. If I could only do over my aunt's drawing-room I
know I should be a better woman."

"Is it so very bad?" he asked sympathetically.

She smiled at him across the tea-pot which she was holding up to be
filled.

"That shows how seldom you come there. Why don't you come oftener?"

"When I do come, it's not to look at Mrs. Peniston's furniture."

"Nonsense," she said. "You don't come at all--and yet we get on so well
when we meet."

"Perhaps that's the reason," he answered promptly. "I'm afraid I haven't
any cream, you know--shall you mind a slice of lemon instead?"

"I shall like it better." She waited while he cut the lemon and dropped a
thin disk into her cup. "But that is not the reason," she insisted.

"The reason for what?"

"For your never coming." She leaned forward with a shade of perplexity in
her charming eyes. "I wish I knew--I wish I could make you out. Of course
I know there are men who don't like me--one can tell that at a glance.
And there are others who are afraid of me: they think I want to marry
them." She smiled up at him frankly. "But I don't think you dislike
me--and you can't possibly think I want to marry you."

"No--I absolve you of that," he agreed.

"Well, then----?"

He had carried his cup to the fireplace, and stood leaning against the
chimney-piece and looking down on her with an air of indolent amusement.
The provocation in her eyes increased his amusement--he had not supposed
she would waste her powder on such small game; but perhaps she was only
keeping her hand in; or perhaps a girl of her type had no conversation
but of the personal kind. At any rate, she was amazingly pretty, and he
had asked her to tea and must live up to his obligations.

"Well, then," he said with a plunge, "perhaps THAT'S the reason."

"What?"

"The fact that you don't want to marry me. Perhaps I don't regard it as
such a strong inducement to go and see you." He felt a slight shiver down
his spine as he ventured this, but her laugh reassured him.

"Dear Mr. Selden, that wasn't worthy of you. It's stupid of you to make
love to me, and it isn't like you to be stupid." She leaned back, sipping
her tea with an air so enchantingly judicial that, if they had been in
her aunt's drawing-room, he might almost have tried to disprove her
deduction.

"Don't you see," she continued, "that there are men enough to say
pleasant things to me, and that what I want is a friend who won't be
afraid to say disagreeable ones when I need them? Sometimes I have
fancied you might be that friend--I don't know why, except that you are
neither a prig nor a bounder, and that I shouldn't have to pretend with
you or be on my guard against you." Her voice had dropped to a note of
seriousness, and she sat gazing up at him with the troubled gravity of a
child.

"You don't know how much I need such a friend," she said. "My aunt is
full of copy-book axioms, but they were all meant to apply to conduct in
the early fifties. I always feel that to live up to them would include
wearing book-muslin with gigot sleeves.  And the other women--my best
friends--well, they use me or abuse me; but they don't care a straw what
happens to me. I've been about too long--people are getting tired of me;
they are beginning to say I ought to marry."

There was a moment's pause, during which Selden meditated one or two
replies calculated to add a momentary zest to the situation; but he
rejected them in favour of the simple question: "Well, why don't you?"

She coloured and laughed. "Ah, I see you ARE a friend after all, and that
is one of the disagreeable things I was asking for."

"It wasn't meant to be disagreeable," he returned amicably.  "Isn't
marriage your vocation? Isn't it what you're all brought up for?"

She sighed. "I suppose so. What else is there?"

"Exactly. And so why not take the plunge and have it over?"

She shrugged her shoulders. "You speak as if I ought to marry the first
man who came along."

"I didn't mean to imply that you are as hard put to it as that. But there
must be some one with the requisite qualifications."

She shook her head wearily. "I threw away one or two good chances when I
first came out--I suppose every girl does; and you know I am horribly
poor--and very expensive. I must have a great deal of money."

Selden had turned to reach for a cigarette-box on the mantelpiece.

"What's become of Dillworth?" he asked.

"Oh, his mother was frightened--she was afraid I should have all the
family jewels reset. And she wanted me to promise that I wouldn't do over
the drawing-room."

"The very thing you are marrying for!"

"Exactly. So she packed him off to India."

"Hard luck--but you can do better than Dillworth."

He offered the box, and she took out three or four cigarettes, putting
one between her lips and slipping the others into a little gold case
attached to her long pearl chain.

"Have I time? Just a whiff, then." She leaned forward, holding the tip of
her cigarette to his. As she did so, he noted, with a purely impersonal
enjoyment, how evenly the black lashes were set in her smooth white lids,
and how the purplish shade beneath them melted into the pure pallour of
the cheek.

She began to saunter about the room, examining the bookshelves between
the puffs of her cigarette-smoke. Some of the volumes had the ripe tints
of good tooling and old morocco, and her eyes lingered on them
caressingly, not with the appreciation of the expert, but with the
pleasure in agreeable tones and textures that was one of her inmost
susceptibilities. Suddenly her expression changed from desultory
enjoyment to active conjecture, and she turned to Selden with a question.

"You collect, don't you--you know about first editions and things?"

"As much as a man may who has no money to spend. Now and then I pick up
something in the rubbish heap; and I go and look on at the big sales."

She had again addressed herself to the shelves, but her eyes now swept
them inattentively, and he saw that she was preoccupied with a new idea.

"And Americana--do you collect Americana?"

Selden stared and laughed.

"No, that's rather out of my line. I'm not really a collector, you see; I
simply like to have good editions of the books I am fond of."

She made a slight grimace. "And Americana are horribly dull, I suppose?"

"I should fancy so--except to the historian. But your real collector
values a thing for its rarity. I don't suppose the buyers of Americana
sit up reading them all night--old Jefferson Gryce certainly didn't."

She was listening with keen attention. "And yet they fetch fabulous
prices, don't they? It seems so odd to want to pay a lot for an ugly
badly-printed book that one is never going to read!  And I suppose most
of the owners of Americana are not historians either?"

"No; very few of the historians can afford to buy them. They have to use
those in the public libraries or in private collections.  It seems to be
the mere rarity that attracts the average collector."

He had seated himself on an arm of the chair near which she was standing,
and she continued to question him, asking which were the rarest volumes,
whether the Jefferson Gryce collection was really considered the finest
in the world, and what was the largest price ever fetched by a single
volume.

It was so pleasant to sit there looking up at her, as she lifted now one
book and then another from the shelves, fluttering the pages between her
fingers, while her drooping profile was outlined against the warm
background of old bindings, that he talked on without pausing to wonder
at her sudden interest in so unsuggestive a subject. But he could never
be long with her without trying to find a reason for what she was doing,
and as she replaced his first edition of La Bruyere and turned away from
the bookcases, he began to ask himself what she had been driving at. Her
next question was not of a nature to enlighten him. She paused before him
with a smile which seemed at once designed to admit him to her
familiarity, and to remind him of the restrictions it imposed.

"Don't you ever mind," she asked suddenly, "not being rich enough to buy
all the books you want?"

He followed her glance about the room, with its worn furniture and shabby
walls.

"Don't I just? Do you take me for a saint on a pillar?"

"And having to work--do you mind that?"

"Oh, the work itself is not so bad--I'm rather fond of the law."

"No; but the being tied down: the routine--don't you ever want to get
away, to see new places and people?"

"Horribly--especially when I see all my friends rushing to the steamer."

She drew a sympathetic breath. "But do you mind enough--to marry to get
out of it?"

Selden broke into a laugh. "God forbid!" he declared.

She rose with a sigh, tossing her cigarette into the grate.

"Ah, there's the difference--a girl must, a man may if he chooses." She
surveyed him critically. "Your coat's a little shabby--but who cares?  It
doesn't keep people from asking you to dine. If I were shabby no one
would have me: a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for
herself. The clothes are the background, the frame, if you like: they
don't make success, but they are a part of it. Who wants a dingy woman?
We are expected to be pretty and well-dressed till we drop--and if we
can't keep it up alone, we have to go into partnership."

Selden glanced at her with amusement: it was impossible, even with her
lovely eyes imploring him, to take a sentimental view of her case.

"Ah, well, there must be plenty of capital on the look-out for such an
investment. Perhaps you'll meet your fate tonight at the Trenors'."

She returned his look interrogatively.

"I thought you might be going there--oh, not in that capacity!  But there
are to be a lot of your set--Gwen Van Osburgh, the Wetheralls, Lady
Cressida Raith--and the George Dorsets."

She paused a moment before the last name, and shot a query through her
lashes; but he remained imperturbable.

"Mrs. Trenor asked me; but I can't get away till the end of the week; and
those big parties bore me."

"Ah, so they do me," she exclaimed.

"Then why go?"

"It's part of the business--you forget! And besides, if I didn't, I
should be playing bezique with my aunt at Richfield Springs."

"That's almost as bad as marrying Dillworth," he agreed, and they both
laughed for pure pleasure in their sudden intimacy.

She glanced at the clock.

"Dear me! I must be off. It's after five."

She paused before the mantelpiece, studying herself in the mirror while
she adjusted her veil. The attitude revealed the long slope of her
slender sides, which gave a kind of wild-wood grace to her outline--as
though she were a captured dryad subdued to the conventions of the
drawing-room; and Selden reflected that it was the same streak of sylvan
freedom in her nature that lent such savour to her artificiality.

He followed her across the room to the entrance-hall; but on the
threshold she held out her hand with a gesture of leave-taking.

"It's been delightful; and now you will have to return my visit."

"But don't you want me to see you to the station?"

"No; good bye here, please."

She let her hand lie in his a moment, smiling up at him adorably.

"Good bye, then--and good luck at Bellomont!" he said, opening the door
for her.

On the landing she paused to look about her. There were a thousand
chances to one against her meeting anybody, but one could never tell, and
she always paid for her rare indiscretions by a violent reaction of
prudence. There was no one in sight, however, but a char-woman who was
scrubbing the stairs. Her own stout person and its surrounding implements
took up so much room that Lily, to pass her, had to gather up her skirts
and brush against the wall. As she did so, the woman paused in her work
and looked up curiously, resting her clenched red fists on the wet cloth
she had just drawn from her pail. She had a broad sallow face, slightly
pitted with small-pox, and thin straw-coloured hair through which her
scalp shone unpleasantly.

"I beg your pardon," said Lily, intending by her politeness to convey a
criticism of the other's manner.

The woman, without answering, pushed her pail aside, and continued to
stare as Miss Bart swept by with a murmur of silken linings. Lily felt
herself flushing under the look. What did the creature suppose? Could one
never do the simplest, the most harmless thing, without subjecting one's
self to some odious conjecture? Half way down the next flight, she smiled
to think that a char-woman's stare should so perturb her.  The poor thing
was probably dazzled by such an unwonted apparition. But WERE such
apparitions unwonted on Selden's stairs? Miss Bart was not familiar with
the moral code of bachelors' flat-houses, and her colour rose again as it
occurred to her that the woman's persistent gaze implied a groping among
past associations. But she put aside the thought with a smile at her own
fears, and hastened downward, wondering if she should find a cab short of
Fifth Avenue.

Under the Georgian porch she paused again, scanning the street for a
hansom. None was in sight, but as she reached the sidewalk she ran
against a small glossy-looking man with a gardenia in his coat, who
raised his hat with a surprised exclamation.

"Miss Bart? Well--of all people! This IS luck," he declared; and she
caught a twinkle of amused curiosity between his screwed-up lids.

"Oh, Mr. Rosedale--how are you?" she said, perceiving that the
irrepressible annoyance on her face was reflected in the sudden intimacy
of his smile.

Mr. Rosedale stood scanning her with interest and approval. He was a
plump rosy man of the blond Jewish type, with smart London clothes
fitting him like upholstery, and small sidelong eyes which gave him the
air of appraising people as if they were bric-a-brac. He glanced up
interrogatively at the porch of the Benedick.

"Been up to town for a little shopping, I suppose?" he said, in a tone
which had the familiarity of a touch.

Miss Bart shrank from it slightly, and then flung herself into
precipitate explanations.

"Yes--I came up to see my dress-maker. I am just on my way to catch the
train to the Trenors'."

"Ah--your dress-maker; just so," he said blandly. "I didn't know there
were any dress-makers in the Benedick."

"The Benedick?" She looked gently puzzled. "Is that the name of this
building?"

"Yes, that's the name: I believe it's an old word for bachelor, isn't it?
I happen to own the building--that's the way I know." His smile deepened
as he added with increasing assurance: "But you must let me take you to
the station. The Trenors are at Bellomont, of course?  You've barely time
to catch the five-forty.  The dress-maker kept you waiting, I suppose."

Lily stiffened under the pleasantry.

"Oh, thanks," she stammered; and at that moment her eye caught a hansom
drifting down Madison Avenue, and she hailed it with a desperate gesture.

"You're very kind; but I couldn't think of troubling you," she said,
extending her hand to Mr. Rosedale; and heedless of his protestations,
she sprang into the rescuing vehicle, and called out a breathless order
to the driver.



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.



Bridge at Bellomont usually lasted till the small hours; and when Lily
went to bed that night she had played too long for her own good.

Feeling no desire for the self-communion which awaited her in her room,
she lingered on the broad stairway, looking down into the hall below,
where the last card-players were grouped about the tray of tall glasses
and silver-collared decanters which the butler had just placed on a low
table near the fire.

The hall was arcaded, with a gallery supported on columns of pale yellow
marble. Tall clumps of flowering plants were grouped against a background
of dark foliage in the angles of the walls.  On the crimson carpet a
deer-hound and two or three spaniels dozed luxuriously before the fire,
and the light from the great central lantern overhead shed a brightness
on the women's hair and struck sparks from their jewels as they moved.

There were moments when such scenes delighted Lily, when they gratified
her sense of beauty and her craving for the external finish of life;
there were others when they gave a sharper edge to the meagreness of her
own opportunities. This was one of the moments when the sense of contrast
was uppermost, and she turned away impatiently as Mrs. George Dorset,
glittering in serpentine spangles, drew Percy Gryce in her wake to a
confidential nook beneath the gallery.

It was not that Miss Bart was afraid of losing her newly-acquired hold
over Mr. Gryce. Mrs. Dorset might startle or dazzle him, but she had
neither the skill nor the patience to effect his capture.  She was too
self-engrossed to penetrate the recesses of his shyness, and besides, why
should she care to give herself the trouble? At most it might amuse her
to make sport of his simplicity for an evening--after that he would be
merely a burden to her, and knowing this, she was far too experienced to
encourage him. But the mere thought of that other woman, who could take a
man up and toss him aside as she willed, without having to regard him as
a possible factor in her plans, filled Lily Bart with envy. She had been
bored all the afternoon by Percy Gryce--the mere thought seemed to waken
an echo of his droning voice--but she could not ignore him on the morrow,
she must follow up her success, must submit to more boredom, must be
ready with fresh compliances and adaptabilities, and all on the bare
chance that he might ultimately decide to do her the honour of boring her
for life.

It was a hateful fate--but how escape from it? What choice had she? To be
herself, or a Gerty Farish. As she entered her bedroom, with its
softly-shaded lights, her lace dressing-gown lying across the silken
bedspread, her little embroidered slippers before the fire, a vase of
carnations filling the air with perfume, and the last novels and
magazines lying uncut on a table beside the reading-lamp, she had a
vision of Miss Farish's cramped flat, with its cheap conveniences and
hideous wall-papers. No; she was not made for mean and shabby
surroundings, for the squalid compromises of poverty. Her whole being
dilated in an atmosphere of luxury; it was the background she required,
the only climate she could breathe in. But the luxury of others was not
what she wanted. A few years ago it had sufficed her: she had taken her
daily meed of pleasure without caring who provided it. Now she was
beginning to chafe at the obligations it imposed, to feel herself a mere
pensioner on the splendour which had once seemed to belong to her.  There
were even moments when she was conscious of having to pay her way.

For a long time she had refused to play bridge. She knew she could not
afford it, and she was afraid of acquiring so expensive a taste. She had
seen the danger exemplified in more than one of her associates--in young
Ned Silverton, for instance, the charming fair boy now seated in abject
rapture at the elbow of Mrs. Fisher, a striking divorcee with eyes and
gowns as emphatic as the head-lines of her "case." Lily could remember
when young Silverton had stumbled into their circle, with the air of a
strayed Arcadian who has published charming sonnets in his college journal.
Since then he had developed a taste for Mrs. Fisher and bridge, and the
latter at least had involved him in expenses from which he had been more
than once rescued by harassed maiden sisters, who treasured the sonnets,
and went without sugar in their tea to keep their darling afloat. Ned's
case was familiar to Lily: she had seen his charming eyes--which had a
good deal more poetry in them than the sonnets--change from surprise to
amusement, and from amusement to anxiety, as he passed under the spell
of the terrible god of chance; and she was afraid of discovering the
same symptoms in her own case.

For in the last year she had found that her hostesses expected her to
take a place at the card-table. It was one of the taxes she had to pay
for their prolonged hospitality, and for the dresses and trinkets which
occasionally replenished her insufficient wardrobe. And since she had
played regularly the passion had grown on her. Once or twice of late she
had won a large sum, and instead of keeping it against future losses, had
spent it in dress or jewelry; and the desire to atone for this
imprudence, combined with the increasing exhilaration of the game, drove
her to risk higher stakes at each fresh venture. She tried to excuse
herself on the plea that, in the Trenor set, if one played at all one
must either play high or be set down as priggish or stingy; but she knew
that the gambling passion was upon her, and that in her present
surroundings there was small hope of resisting it.

Tonight the luck had been persistently bad, and the little gold purse
which hung among her trinkets was almost empty when she returned to her
room. She unlocked the wardrobe, and taking out her jewel-case, looked
under the tray for the roll of bills from which she had replenished the
purse before going down to dinner.  Only twenty dollars were left: the
discovery was so startling that for a moment she fancied she must have
been robbed. Then she took paper and pencil, and seating herself at the
writing-table, tried to reckon up what she had spent during the day.  Her
head was throbbing with fatigue, and she had to go over the figures again
and again; but at last it became clear to her that she had lost three
hundred dollars at cards. She took out her cheque-book to see if her
balance was larger than she remembered, but found she had erred in the
other direction. Then she returned to her calculations; but figure as she
would, she could not conjure back the vanished three hundred dollars. It
was the sum she had set aside to pacify her dress-maker--unless she
should decide to use it as a sop to the jeweller. At any rate, she had so
many uses for it that its very insufficiency had caused her to play high
in the hope of doubling it.  But of course she had lost--she who needed
every penny, while Bertha Dorset, whose husband showered money on her,
must have pocketed at least five hundred, and Judy Trenor, who could have
afforded to lose a thousand a night, had left the table clutching such a
heap of bills that she had been unable to shake hands with her guests
when they bade her good night.

A world in which such things could be seemed a miserable place to Lily
Bart; but then she had never been able to understand the laws of a
universe which was so ready to leave her out of its calculations.

She began to undress without ringing for her maid, whom she had sent to
bed. She had been long enough in bondage to other people's pleasure to be
considerate of those who depended on hers, and in her bitter moods it
sometimes struck her that she and her maid were in the same position,
except that the latter received her wages more regularly.

As she sat before the mirror brushing her hair, her face looked hollow
and pale, and she was frightened by two little lines near her mouth,
faint flaws in the smooth curve of the cheek.

"Oh, I must stop worrying!" she exclaimed. "Unless it's the electric
light----" she reflected, springing up from her seat and lighting the
candles on the dressing-table.

She turned out the wall-lights, and peered at herself between the
candle-flames. The white oval of her face swam out waveringly from a
background of shadows, the uncertain light blurring it like a haze; but
the two lines about the mouth remained.

Lily rose and undressed in haste.

"It is only because I am tired and have such odious things to think
about," she kept repeating; and it seemed an added injustice that petty
cares should leave a trace on the beauty which was her only defence
against them.

But the odious things were there, and remained with her. She returned
wearily to the thought of Percy Gryce, as a wayfarer picks up a heavy
load and toils on after a brief rest. She was almost sure she had
"landed" him: a few days' work and she would win her reward. But the
reward itself seemed unpalatable just then: she could get no zest from
the thought of victory. It would be a rest from worry, no more--and how
little that would have seemed to her a few years earlier! Her ambitions
had shrunk gradually in the desiccating air of failure. But why had she
failed? Was it her own fault or that of destiny?

She remembered how her mother, after they had lost their money, used to
say to her with a kind of fierce vindictiveness: "But you'll get it all
back--you'll get it all back, with your face." . . . The remembrance
roused a whole train of association, and she lay in the darkness
reconstructing the past out of which her present had grown.

A house in which no one ever dined at home unless there was "company"; a
door-bell perpetually ringing; a hall-table showered with square
envelopes which were opened in haste, and oblong envelopes which were
allowed to gather dust in the depths of a bronze jar; a series of French
and English maids giving warning amid a chaos of hurriedly-ransacked
wardrobes and dress-closets; an equally changing dynasty of nurses and
footmen; quarrels in the pantry, the kitchen and the drawing-room;
precipitate trips to Europe, and returns with gorged trunks and days of
interminable unpacking; semi-annual discussions as to where the summer
should be spent, grey interludes of economy and brilliant reactions of
expense--such was the setting of Lily Bart's first memories.

Ruling the turbulent element called home was the vigorous and determined
figure of a mother still young enough to dance her ball-dresses to rags,
while the hazy outline of a neutral-tinted father filled an intermediate
space between the butler and the man who came to wind the clocks. Even to
the eyes of infancy, Mrs. Hudson Bart had appeared young; but Lily could
not recall the time when her father had not been bald and slightly
stooping, with streaks of grey in his hair, and a tired walk. It was a
shock to her to learn afterward that he was but two years older than her
mother.

Lily seldom saw her father by daylight. All day he was "down town"; and
in winter it was long after nightfall when she heard his fagged step on
the stairs and his hand on the school-room door. He would kiss her in
silence, and ask one or two questions of the nurse or the governess; then
Mrs. Bart's maid would come to remind him that he was dining out, and he
would hurry away with a nod to Lily. In summer, when he joined them for a
Sunday at Newport or Southampton, he was even more effaced and silent
than in winter. It seemed to tire him to rest, and he would sit for hours
staring at the sea-line from a quiet corner of the verandah, while the
clatter of his wife's existence went on unheeded a few feet off.
Generally, however, Mrs. Bart and Lily went to Europe for the summer, and
before the steamer was half way over Mr. Bart had dipped below the
horizon. Sometimes his daughter heard him denounced for having neglected
to forward Mrs. Bart's remittances; but for the most part he was never
mentioned or thought of till his patient stooping figure presented itself
on the New York dock as a buffer between the magnitude of his wife's
luggage and the restrictions of the American custom-house.

In this desultory yet agitated fashion life went on through Lily's teens:
a zig-zag broken course down which the family craft glided on a rapid
current of amusement, tugged at by the underflow of a perpetual need--the
need of more money. Lily could not recall the time when there had been
money enough, and in some vague way her father seemed always to blame for
the deficiency.  It could certainly not be the fault of Mrs. Bart, who
was spoken of by her friends as a "wonderful manager." Mrs. Bart was
famous for the unlimited effect she produced on limited means; and to the
lady and her acquaintances there was something heroic in living as though
one were much richer than one's bank-book denoted.

Lily was naturally proud of her mother's aptitude in this line: she had
been brought up in the faith that, whatever it cost, one must have a good
cook, and be what Mrs. Bart called "decently dressed." Mrs. Bart's worst
reproach to her husband was to ask him if he expected her to "live like a
pig"; and his replying in the negative was always regarded as a
justification for cabling to Paris for an extra dress or two, and
telephoning to the jeweller that he might, after all, send home the
turquoise bracelet which Mrs. Bart had looked at that morning.

Lily knew people who "lived like pigs," and their appearance and
surroundings justified her mother's repugnance to that form of existence.
They were mostly cousins, who inhabited dingy houses with engravings from
Cole's Voyage of Life on the drawing-room walls, and slatternly
parlour-maids who said "I'll go and see" to visitors calling at an hour
when all right-minded persons are conventionally if not actually out. The
disgusting part of it was that many of these cousins were rich, so that
Lily imbibed the idea that if people lived like pigs it was from choice,
and through the lack of any proper standard of conduct.  This gave her a
sense of reflected superiority, and she did not need Mrs. Bart's comments
on the family frumps and misers to foster her naturally lively taste for
splendour.

Lily was nineteen when circumstances caused her to revise her view of the
universe.

The previous year she had made a dazzling debut fringed by a heavy
thunder-cloud of bills. The light of the debut still lingered on the
horizon, but the cloud had thickened; and suddenly it broke. The
suddenness added to the horror; and there were still times when Lily
relived with painful vividness every detail of the day on which the blow
fell. She and her mother had been seated at the luncheon-table, over the
CHAUFROIX and cold salmon of the previous night's dinner: it was one of
Mrs. Bart's few economies to consume in private the expensive remnants of
her hospitality. Lily was feeling the pleasant languor which is youth's
penalty for dancing till dawn; but her mother, in spite of a few lines
about the mouth, and under the yellow waves on her temples, was as alert,
determined and high in colour as if she had risen from an untroubled
sleep.

In the centre of the table, between the melting MARRONS GLACES and
candied cherries, a pyramid of American Beauties lifted their vigorous
stems; they held their heads as high as Mrs. Bart, but their rose-colour
had turned to a dissipated purple, and Lily's sense of fitness was
disturbed by their reappearance on the luncheon-table.

"I really think, mother," she said reproachfully, "we might afford a few
fresh flowers for luncheon. Just some jonquils or lilies-of-the-valley--"

Mrs. Bart stared. Her own fastidiousness had its eye fixed on the world,
and she did not care how the luncheon-table looked when there was no one
present at it but the family. But she smiled at her daughter's innocence.

"Lilies-of-the-valley," she said calmly, "cost two dollars a dozen at
this season."

Lily was not impressed. She knew very little of the value of money.

"It would not take more than six dozen to fill that bowl," she argued.

"Six dozen what?" asked her father's voice in the doorway.

The two women looked up in surprise; though it was a Saturday, the sight
of Mr. Bart at luncheon was an unwonted one. But neither his wife nor his
daughter was sufficiently interested to ask an explanation.

Mr. Bart dropped into a chair, and sat gazing absently at the fragment of
jellied salmon which the butler had placed before him.

"I was only saying," Lily began, "that I hate to see faded flowers at
luncheon; and mother says a bunch of lilies-of-the-valley would not cost
more than twelve dollars. Mayn't I tell the florist to send a few every
day?"

She leaned confidently toward her father: he seldom refused her anything,
and Mrs. Bart had taught her to plead with him when her own entreaties
failed.

Mr. Bart sat motionless, his gaze still fixed on the salmon, and his
lower jaw dropped; he looked even paler than usual, and his thin hair lay
in untidy streaks on his forehead. Suddenly he looked at his daughter and
laughed. The laugh was so strange that Lily coloured under it: she
disliked being ridiculed, and her father seemed to see something
ridiculous in the request. Perhaps he thought it foolish that she should
trouble him about such a trifle.

"Twelve dollars--twelve dollars a day for flowers? Oh, certainly, my
dear--give him an order for twelve hundred." He continued to laugh.

Mrs. Bart gave him a quick glance.

"You needn't wait, Poleworth--I will ring for you," she said to the
butler.

The butler withdrew with an air of silent disapproval, leaving the
remains of the CHAUFROIX on the sideboard.

"What is the matter, Hudson? Are you ill?" said Mrs. Bart severely.

She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making, and it
was odious to her that her husband should make a show of himself before
the servants.

"Are you ill?" she repeated.

"Ill?---- No, I'm ruined," he said.

Lily made a frightened sound, and Mrs. Bart rose to her feet.

"Ruined----?" she cried; but controlling herself instantly, she turned a
calm face to Lily.

"Shut the pantry door," she said.

Lily obeyed, and when she turned back into the room her father was
sitting with both elbows on the table, the plate of salmon between them,
and his head bowed on his hands.

Mrs. Bart stood over him with a white face which made her hair
unnaturally yellow. She looked at Lily as the latter approached: her look
was terrible, but her voice was modulated to a ghastly cheerfulness.

"Your father is not well--he doesn't know what he is saying. It is
nothing--but you had better go upstairs; and don't talk to the servants,"
she added.

Lily obeyed; she always obeyed when her mother spoke in that voice. She
had not been deceived by Mrs. Bart's words: she knew at once that they
were ruined. In the dark hours which followed, that awful fact
overshadowed even her father's slow and difficult dying. To his wife he
no longer counted: he had become extinct when he ceased to fulfil his
purpose, and she sat at his side with the provisional air of a traveller
who waits for a belated train to start. Lily's feelings were softer: she
pitied him in a frightened ineffectual way. But the fact that he was for
the most part unconscious, and that his attention, when she stole into
the room, drifted away from her after a moment, made him even more of a
stranger than in the nursery days when he had never come home till after
dark. She seemed always to have seen him through a blur--first of
sleepiness, then of distance and indifference--and now the fog had
thickened till he was almost indistinguishable. If she could have
performed any little services for him, or have exchanged with him a few
of those affecting words which an extensive perusal of fiction had led
her to connect with such occasions, the filial instinct might have
stirred in her; but her pity, finding no active expression, remained in a
state of spectatorship, overshadowed by her mother's grim unflagging
resentment. Every look and act of Mrs. Bart's seemed to say: "You are
sorry for him now--but you will feel differently when you see what he has
done to us."

It was a relief to Lily when her father died.

Then a long winter set in. There was a little money left, but to Mrs.
Bart it seemed worse than nothing--the mere mockery of what she was
entitled to. What was the use of living if one had to live like a pig?
She sank into a kind of furious apathy, a state of inert anger against
fate. Her faculty for "managing" deserted her, or she no longer took
sufficient pride in it to exert it. It was well enough to "manage" when
by so doing one could keep one's own carriage; but when one's best
contrivance did not conceal the fact that one had to go on foot, the
effort was no longer worth making.

Lily and her mother wandered from place to place, now paying long visits
to relations whose house-keeping Mrs. Bart criticized, and who deplored
the fact that she let Lily breakfast in bed when the girl had no
prospects before her, and now vegetating in cheap continental refuges,
where Mrs. Bart held herself fiercely aloof from the frugal tea-tables of
her companions in misfortune. She was especially careful to avoid her old
friends and the scenes of her former successes. To be poor seemed to her
such a confession of failure that it amounted to disgrace; and she
detected a note of condescension in the friendliest advances.

Only one thought consoled her, and that was the contemplation of Lily's
beauty. She studied it with a kind of passion, as though it were some
weapon she had slowly fashioned for her vengeance.  It was the last asset
in their fortunes, the nucleus around which their life was to be rebuilt.
She watched it jealously, as though it were her own property and Lily its
mere custodian; and she tried to instil into the latter a sense of the
responsibility that such a charge involved. She followed in imagination
the career of other beauties, pointing out to her daughter what might be
achieved through such a gift, and dwelling on the awful warning of those
who, in spite of it, had failed to get what they wanted: to Mrs. Bart,
only stupidity could explain the lamentable denouement of some of her
examples. She was not above the inconsistency of charging fate, rather
than herself, with her own misfortunes; but she inveighed so
acrimoniously against love-matches that Lily would have fancied her own
marriage had been of that nature, had not Mrs. Bart frequently assured
her that she had been "talked into it"--by whom, she never made clear.

Lily was duly impressed by the magnitude of her opportunities.  The
dinginess of her present life threw into enchanting relief the existence
to which she felt herself entitled. To a less illuminated intelligence
Mrs. Bart's counsels might have been dangerous; but Lily understood that
beauty is only the raw material of conquest, and that to convert it into
success other arts are required. She knew that to betray any sense of
superiority was a subtler form of the stupidity her mother denounced, and
it did not take her long to learn that a beauty needs more tact than the
possessor of an average set of features.

Her ambitions were not as crude as Mrs. Bart's. It had been among that
lady's grievances that her husband--in the early days, before he was too
tired--had wasted his evenings in what she vaguely described as "reading
poetry"; and among the effects packed off to auction after his death were
a score or two of dingy volumes which had struggled for existence among
the boots and medicine bottles of his dressing-room shelves. There was in
Lily a vein of sentiment, perhaps transmitted from this source, which
gave an idealizing touch to her most prosaic purposes. She liked to think
of her beauty as a power for good, as giving her the opportunity to
attain a position where she should make her influence felt in the vague
diffusion of refinement and good taste.  She was fond of pictures and
flowers, and of sentimental fiction, and she could not help thinking that
the possession of such tastes ennobled her desire for worldly advantages.
She would not indeed have cared to marry a man who was merely rich: she
was secretly ashamed of her mother's crude passion for money.  Lily's
preference would have been for an English nobleman with political
ambitions and vast estates; or, for second choice, an Italian prince with
a castle in the Apennines and an hereditary office in the Vatican. Lost
causes had a romantic charm for her, and she liked to picture herself as
standing aloof from the vulgar press of the Quirinal, and sacrificing her
pleasure to the claims of an immemorial tradition. . . .

How long ago and how far off it all seemed! Those ambitions were hardly
more futile and childish than the earlier ones which had centred about
the possession of a French jointed doll with real hair. Was it only ten
years since she had wavered in imagination between the English earl and
the Italian prince? Relentlessly her mind travelled on over the dreary
interval. . . .

After two years of hungry roaming Mrs. Bart had died----died of a deep
disgust. She had hated dinginess, and it was her fate to be dingy. Her
visions of a brilliant marriage for Lily had faded after the first year.

"People can't marry you if they don't see you--and how can they see you
in these holes where we're stuck?" That was the burden of her lament; and
her last adjuration to her daughter was to escape from dinginess if she
could.

"Don't let it creep up on you and drag you down. Fight your way out of it
somehow--you're young and can do it," she insisted.

She had died during one of their brief visits to New York, and there Lily
at once became the centre of a family council composed of the wealthy
relatives whom she had been taught to despise for living like pigs. It
may be that they had an inkling of the sentiments in which she had been
brought up, for none of them manifested a very lively desire for her
company; indeed, the question threatened to remain unsolved till Mrs.
Peniston with a sigh announced: "I'll try her for a year."

Every one was surprised, but one and all concealed their surprise, lest
Mrs. Peniston should be alarmed by it into reconsidering her decision.

Mrs. Peniston was Mr. Bart's widowed sister, and if she was by no means
the richest of the family group, its other members nevertheless abounded
in reasons why she was clearly destined by Providence to assume the
charge of Lily. In the first place she was alone, and it would be
charming for her to have a young companion. Then she sometimes travelled,
and Lily's familiarity with foreign customs--deplored as a misfortune by
her more conservative relatives--would at least enable her to act as a
kind of courier. But as a matter of fact Mrs. Peniston had not been
affected by these considerations. She had taken the girl simply because
no one else would have her, and because she had the kind of moral
MAUVAISE HONTE which makes the public display of selfishness difficult,
though it does not interfere with its private indulgence. It would have
been impossible for Mrs. Peniston to be heroic on a desert island, but
with the eyes of her little world upon her she took a certain pleasure in
her act.

She reaped the reward to which disinterestedness is entitled, and found
an agreeable companion in her niece. She had expected to find Lily
headstrong, critical and "foreign"--for even Mrs. Peniston, though she
occasionally went abroad, had the family dread of foreignness--but the
girl showed a pliancy, which, to a more penetrating mind than her aunt's,
might have been less reassuring than the open selfishness of youth.
Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable
substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.

Mrs. Peniston, however, did not suffer from her niece's adaptability.
Lily had no intention of taking advantage of her aunt's good nature.  She
was in truth grateful for the refuge offered her: Mrs. Peniston's opulent
interior was at least not externally dingy. But dinginess is a quality
which assumes all manner of disguises; and Lily soon found that it was as
latent in the expensive routine of her aunt's life as in the makeshift
existence of a continental pension.

Mrs. Peniston was one of the episodical persons who form the padding of
life. It was impossible to believe that she had herself ever been a focus
of activities. The most vivid thing about her was the fact that her
grandmother had been a Van Alstyne. This connection with the well-fed and
industrious stock of early New York revealed itself in the glacial
neatness of Mrs. Peniston's drawing-room and in the excellence of her
cuisine. She belonged to the class of old New Yorkers who have always
lived well, dressed expensively, and done little else; and to these
inherited obligations Mrs. Peniston faithfully conformed.  She had always
been a looker-on at life, and her mind resembled one of those little
mirrors which her Dutch ancestors were accustomed to affix to their upper
windows, so that from the depths of an impenetrable domesticity they
might see what was happening in the street.

Mrs. Peniston was the owner of a country-place in New Jersey, but she had
never lived there since her husband's death--a remote event, which
appeared to dwell in her memory chiefly as a dividing point in the
personal reminiscences that formed the staple of her conversation. She
was a woman who remembered dates with intensity, and could tell at a
moment's notice whether the drawing-room curtains had been renewed before
or after Mr. Peniston's last illness.

Mrs. Peniston thought the country lonely and trees damp, and cherished a
vague fear of meeting a bull. To guard against such contingencies she
frequented the more populous watering-places, where she installed herself
impersonally in a hired house and looked on at life through the matting
screen of her verandah. In the care of such a guardian, it soon became
clear to Lily that she was to enjoy only the material advantages of good
food and expensive clothing; and, though far from underrating these, she
would gladly have exchanged them for what Mrs. Bart had taught her to
regard as opportunities. She sighed to think what her mother's fierce
energies would have accomplished, had they been coupled with Mrs.
Peniston's resources. Lily had abundant energy of her own, but it was
restricted by the necessity of adapting herself to her aunt's habits. She
saw that at all costs she must keep Mrs. Peniston's favour till, as Mrs.
Bart would have phrased it, she could stand on her own legs. Lily had no
mind for the vagabond life of the poor relation, and to adapt herself to
Mrs. Peniston she had, to some degree, to assume that lady's passive
attitude. She had fancied at first that it would be easy to draw her aunt
into the whirl of her own activities, but there was a static force in
Mrs. Peniston against which her niece's efforts spent themselves in vain.
To attempt to bring her into active relation with life was like tugging
at a piece of furniture which has been screwed to the floor. She did not,
indeed, expect Lily to remain equally immovable: she had all the American
guardian's indulgence for the volatility of youth.

She had indulgence also for certain other habits of her niece's.  It
seemed to her natural that Lily should spend all her money on dress, and
she supplemented the girl's scanty income by occasional "handsome
presents" meant to be applied to the same purpose. Lily, who was
intensely practical, would have preferred a fixed allowance; but Mrs.
Peniston liked the periodical recurrence of gratitude evoked by
unexpected cheques, and was perhaps shrewd enough to perceive that such a
method of giving kept alive in her niece a salutary sense of dependence.

Beyond this, Mrs. Peniston had not felt called upon to do anything for
her charge: she had simply stood aside and let her take the field. Lily
had taken it, at first with the confidence of assured possessorship, then
with gradually narrowing demands, till now she found herself actually
struggling for a foothold on the broad space which had once seemed her
own for the asking. How it happened she did not yet know.  Sometimes she
thought it was because Mrs. Peniston had been too passive, and again she
feared it was because she herself had not been passive enough. Had she
shown an undue eagerness for victory? Had she lacked patience, pliancy
and dissimulation? Whether she charged herself with these faults or
absolved herself from them, made no difference in the sum-total of her
failure. Younger and plainer girls had been married off by dozens, and
she was nine-and-twenty, and still Miss Bart.

She was beginning to have fits of angry rebellion against fate, when she
longed to drop out of the race and make an independent life for herself.
But what manner of life would it be? She had barely enough money to pay
her dress-makers' bills and her gambling debts; and none of the desultory
interests which she dignified with the name of tastes was pronounced
enough to enable her to live contentedly in obscurity.  Ah, no--she was
too intelligent not to be honest with herself. She knew that she hated
dinginess as much as her mother had hated it, and to her last breath she
meant to fight against it, dragging herself up again and again above its
flood till she gained the bright pinnacles of success which presented
such a slippery surface to her clutch.

 The novel opens in Grand Central Station, where the protagonist, Lily Bart, is waiting for a train to Bellomont, the home of Gus Trenor and his wife, Judy Trenor. As she waits, she is spotted by her friend Lawrence Selden. He invites her to have tea with him at his flat, the Benedick. Over tea they discuss a number of issues, including the roles of men and women in society and marriage, two of the larger issues with which the novel concerns itself. We learn that Selden is not particularly rich and that he has an interest in collecting Americana, or American books, although his limited financial resources prevent him from building as large a library as he would like. Lily leaves Selden to catch her train to Bellomont, but as she leaves the building she encounters an acquaintance, Simon Rosedale, who we learn is a social climber. Rosedale asks why Lily was at the Benedick, and, not wanting him to suspect any courtship between herself and Selden, she lies to him, telling him that she was visiting a dressmaker in the building--which he knows to be false. Later, on the train, she realizes that she should have told him the truth that she was having tea with a friend, but because of her lie, Rosedale now suspects that Lily may be trying to cover up something. On the train, Lily finds an acquaintance, Percy Gryce, an eligible young bachelor also on his way to the Bellomont. Lily sits next to him and begins a conversation. We learn that Gryce is also interested in book-collecting, although he is apparently more wealthy than Selden. He is described as a well-mannered young man. Their conversation is interrupted by the arrival of Bertha Dorset, an obnoxious gossip also on her way to Bellomont. She sits down with Lily and Gryce, although Lily obviously does not care for her company. At the Bellomont, we are introduced to an array of characters, all of whom are in the upper-crust New York social elite. The main social activity is gambling money on games of bridge. Lily gambles for a while, but stops when she realizes that she has almost run out of money, calculating that she lost $300 just that evening. We learn that she is not very wealthy compared to some of the other guests, who can afford to lose large sums gambling. The issue of money makes Lily think back to childhood memories. Her mother raised her, teaching her to make the most from few financial resources. Her father was out of the picture for much of her youth; her only real memory of him is of the day he came home from work and announced to the family that he was financially ruined. Her mother tried to conceal their lack of money from Lily, and she blamed her husband for ruining the family even after he died. After Lily's mother died too, Lily's aunt, Mrs. Peniston, took care of Lily when no one else would, taking her to live in New Jersey and treating her very kindly. Nevertheless, Lily's childhood experiences with her mother left her with a hatred for "dinginess," or lack of wealth, which she may have to face if she continues to lose money gambling.

