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 next morning, on her breakfast tray, Miss Bart found a note from her
hostess.

"Dearest Lily," it ran, "if it is not too much of a bore to be down by
ten, will you come to my sitting-room to help me with some tiresome
things?"

Lily tossed aside the note and subsided on her pillows with a sigh. It
WAS a bore to be down by ten--an hour regarded at Bellomont as vaguely
synchronous with sunrise--and she knew too well the nature of the
tiresome things in question. Miss Pragg, the secretary, had been called
away, and there would be notes and dinner-cards to write, lost addresses
to hunt up, and other social drudgery to perform. It was understood that
Miss Bart should fill the gap in such emergencies, and she usually
recognized the obligation without a murmur.

Today, however, it renewed the sense of servitude which the previous
night's review of her cheque-book had produced.  Everything in her
surroundings ministered to feelings of ease and amenity. The windows
stood open to the sparkling freshness of the September morning, and
between the yellow boughs she caught a perspective of hedges and
parterres leading by degrees of lessening formality to the free
undulations of the park. Her maid had kindled a little fire on the
hearth, and it contended cheerfully with the sunlight which slanted
across the moss-green carpet and caressed the curved sides of an old
marquetry desk.  Near the bed stood a table holding her breakfast tray,
with its harmonious porcelain and silver, a handful of violets in a
slender glass, and the morning paper folded beneath her letters.  There
was nothing new to Lily in these tokens of a studied luxury; but, though
they formed a part of her atmosphere, she never lost her sensitiveness to
their charm. Mere display left her with a sense of superior distinction;
but she felt an affinity to all the subtler manifestations of wealth.

Mrs. Trenor's summons, however, suddenly recalled her state of
dependence, and she rose and dressed in a mood of irritability that she
was usually too prudent to indulge. She knew that such emotions leave
lines on the face as well as in the character, and she had meant to take
warning by the little creases which her midnight survey had revealed.

The matter-of-course tone of Mrs. Trenor's greeting deepened her
irritation. If one did drag one's self out of bed at such an hour, and
come down fresh and radiant to the monotony of note-writing, some special
recognition of the sacrifice seemed fitting. But Mrs. Trenor's tone
showed no consciousness of the fact.

"Oh, Lily, that's nice of you," she merely sighed across the chaos of
letters, bills and other domestic documents which gave an incongruously
commercial touch to the slender elegance of her writing-table.

"There are such lots of horrors this morning," she added, clearing a
space in the centre of the confusion and rising to yield her seat to Miss
Bart.

Mrs. Trenor was a tall fair woman, whose height just saved her from
redundancy. Her rosy blondness had survived some forty years of futile
activity without showing much trace of ill-usage except in a diminished
play of feature. It was difficult to define her beyond saying that she
seemed to exist only as a hostess, not so much from any exaggerated
instinct of hospitality as because she could not sustain life except in a
crowd. The collective nature of her interests exempted her from the
ordinary rivalries of her sex, and she knew no more personal emotion than
that of hatred for the woman who presumed to give bigger dinners or have
more amusing house-parties than herself. As her social talents, backed by
Mr. Trenor's bank-account, almost always assured her ultimate triumph in
such competitions, success had developed in her an unscrupulous good
nature toward the rest of her sex, and in Miss Bart's utilitarian
classification of her friends, Mrs. Trenor ranked as the woman who was
least likely to "go back" on her.

"It was simply inhuman of Pragg to go off now," Mrs. Trenor declared, as
her friend seated herself at the desk. "She says her sister is going to
have a baby--as if that were anything to having a house-party! I'm sure I
shall get most horribly mixed up and there will be some awful rows. When
I was down at Tuxedo I asked a lot of people for next week, and I've
mislaid the list and can't remember who is coming. And this week is going
to be a horrid failure too--and Gwen Van Osburgh will go back and tell
her mother how bored people were. I did mean to ask the Wetheralls--that
was a blunder of Gus's. They disapprove of Carry Fisher, you know. As if
one could help having Carry Fisher! It WAS foolish of her to get that
second divorce--Carry always overdoes things--but she said the only way
to get a penny out of Fisher was to divorce him and make him pay alimony.
And poor Carry has to consider every dollar. It's really absurd of Alice
Wetherall to make such a fuss about meeting her, when one thinks of what
society is coming to. Some one said the other day that there was a
divorce and a case of appendicitis in every family one knows. Besides,
Carry is the only person who can keep Gus in a good humour when we have
bores in the house. Have you noticed that ALL the husbands like her? All,
I mean, except her own. It's rather clever of her to have made a
specialty of devoting herself to dull people--the field is such a large
one, and she has it practically to herself. She finds compensations, no
doubt--I know she borrows money of Gus--but then I'd PAY her to keep him
in a good humour, so I can't complain, after all."

Mrs. Trenor paused to enjoy the spectacle of Miss Bart's efforts to
unravel her tangled correspondence.

"But it is only the Wetheralls and Carry," she resumed, with a fresh note
of lament. "The truth is, I'm awfully disappointed in Lady Cressida
Raith."

"Disappointed? Had you known her before?"

"Mercy, no--never saw her till yesterday. Lady Skiddaw sent her over with
letters to the Van Osburghs, and I heard that Maria Van Osburgh was
asking a big party to meet her this week, so I thought it would be fun to
get her away, and Jack Stepney, who knew her in India, managed it for me.
Maria was furious, and actually had the impudence to make Gwen invite
herself here, so that they shouldn't be QUITE out of it--if I'd known
what Lady Cressida was like, they could have had her and welcome! But I
thought any friend of the Skiddaws' was sure to be amusing. You remember
what fun Lady Skiddaw was? There were times when I simply had to send the
girls out of the room. Besides, Lady Cressida is the Duchess of
Beltshire's sister, and I naturally supposed she was the same sort; but
you never can tell in those English families. They are so big that
there's room for all kinds, and it turns out that Lady Cressida is the
moral one--married a clergy-man and does missionary work in the East End.
Think of my taking such a lot of trouble about a clergyman's wife, who
wears Indian jewelry and botanizes! She made Gus take her all through the
glass-houses yesterday, and bothered him to death by asking him the names
of the plants. Fancy treating Gus as if he were the gardener!"

Mrs. Trenor brought this out in a CRESCENDO of indignation.

"Oh, well, perhaps Lady Cressida will reconcile the Wetheralls to meeting
Carry Fisher," said Miss Bart pacifically.

"I'm sure I hope so! But she is boring all the men horribly, and if she
takes to distributing tracts, as I hear she does, it will be too
depressing. The worst of it is that she would have been so useful at the
right time. You know we have to have the Bishop once a year, and she
would have given just the right tone to things. I always have horrid luck
about the Bishop's visits," added Mrs. Trenor, whose present misery was
being fed by a rapidly rising tide of reminiscence; "last year, when he
came, Gus forgot all about his being here, and brought home the Ned
Wintons and the Farleys--five divorces and six sets of children between
them!"

"When is Lady Cressida going?" Lily enquired.

Mrs. Trenor cast up her eyes in despair. "My dear, if one only knew! I
was in such a hurry to get her away from Maria that I actually forgot to
name a date, and Gus says she told some one she meant to stop here all
winter."

"To stop here? In this house?"

"Don't be silly--in America. But if no one else asks her--you know they
NEVER go to hotels."

"Perhaps Gus only said it to frighten you."

"No--I heard her tell Bertha Dorset that she had six months to put in
while her husband was taking the cure in the Engadine. You should have
seen Bertha look vacant! But it's no joke, you know--if she stays here
all the autumn she'll spoil everything, and Maria Van Osburgh will simply
exult."

At this affecting vision Mrs. Trenor's voice trembled with self-pity.

"Oh, Judy--as if any one were ever bored at Bellomont!" Miss Bart
tactfully protested. "You know perfectly well that, if Mrs. Van Osburgh
were to get all the right people and leave you with all the wrong ones,
you'd manage to make things go off, and she wouldn't."

Such an assurance would usually have restored Mrs. Trenor's complacency;
but on this occasion it did not chase the cloud from her brow.

"It isn't only Lady Cressida," she lamented. "Everything has gone wrong
this week. I can see that Bertha Dorset is furious with me."

"Furious with you? Why?"

"Because I told her that Lawrence Selden was coming; but he wouldn't,
after all, and she's quite unreasonable enough to think it's my fault."

Miss Bart put down her pen and sat absently gazing at the note she had
begun.

"I thought that was all over," she said.

"So it is, on his side. And of course Bertha has been idle since.  But I
fancy she's out of a job just at present--and some one gave me a hint
that I had better ask Lawrence. Well, I DID ask him--but I couldn't make
him come; and now I suppose she'll take it out of me by being perfectly
nasty to every one else."

"Oh, she may take it out of HIM by being perfectly charming--to some one
else."

Mrs. Trenor shook her head dolefully. "She knows he wouldn't mind. And
who else is there? Alice Wetherall won't let Lucius out of her sight.
Ned Silverton can't take his eyes off Carry Fisher--poor boy! Gus is
bored by Bertha, Jack Stepney knows her too well--and--well, to be sure,
there's Percy Gryce!"

She sat up smiling at the thought.

Miss Bart's countenance did not reflect the smile.

"Oh, she and Mr. Gryce would not be likely to hit it off."

"You mean that she'd shock him and he'd bore her? Well, that's not such a
bad beginning, you know. But I hope she won't take it into her head to be
nice to him, for I asked him here on purpose for you."

Lily laughed. "MERCI DU COMPLIMENT! I should certainly have no show
against Bertha."

"Do you think I am uncomplimentary? I'm not really, you know.  Every one
knows you're a thousand times handsomer and cleverer than Bertha; but
then you're not nasty. And for always getting what she wants in the long
run, commend me to a nasty woman."

Miss Bart stared in affected reproval. "I thought you were so fond of
Bertha."

"Oh, I am--it's much safer to be fond of dangerous people. But she IS
dangerous--and if I ever saw her up to mischief it's now.  I can tell by
poor George's manner. That man is a perfect barometer--he always knows
when Bertha is going to----"

"To fall?" Miss Bart suggested.

"Don't be shocking! You know he believes in her still. And of course I
don't say there's any real harm in Bertha. Only she delights in making
people miserable, and especially poor George."

"Well, he seems cut out for the part--I don't wonder she likes more
cheerful companionship."

"Oh, George is not as dismal as you think. If Bertha did worry him he
would be quite different. Or if she'd leave him alone, and let him
arrange his life as he pleases. But she doesn't dare lose her hold of him
on account of the money, and so when HE isn't jealous she pretends to be."

Miss Bart went on writing in silence, and her hostess sat following her
train of thought with frowning intensity.

"Do you know," she exclaimed after a long pause, "I believe I'll call up
Lawrence on the telephone and tell him he simply MUST come?"

"Oh, don't," said Lily, with a quick suffusion of colour. The blush
surprised her almost as much as it did her hostess, who, though not
commonly observant of facial changes, sat staring at her with puzzled
eyes.

"Good gracious, Lily, how handsome you are! Why? Do you dislike him so
much?"

"Not at all; I like him. But if you are actuated by the benevolent
intention of protecting me from Bertha--I don't think I need your
protection."

Mrs. Trenor sat up with an exclamation. "Lily!----PERCY? Do you mean to
say you've actually done it?"

Miss Bart smiled. "I only mean to say that Mr. Gryce and I are getting to
be very good friends."

"H'm--I see." Mrs. Trenor fixed a rapt eye upon her. "You know they say
he has eight hundred thousand a year--and spends nothing, except on some
rubbishy old books. And his mother has heart-disease and will leave him a
lot more. OH, LILY, DO GO SLOWLY," her friend adjured her.

Miss Bart continued to smile without annoyance. "I shouldn't, for
instance," she remarked, "be in any haste to tell him that he had a lot
of rubbishy old books."

"No, of course not; I know you're wonderful about getting up people's
subjects. But he's horribly shy, and easily shocked, and--and----"

"Why don't you say it, Judy? I have the reputation of being on the hunt
for a rich husband?"

"Oh, I don't mean that; he wouldn't believe it of you--at first," said
Mrs. Trenor, with candid shrewdness. "But you know things are rather
lively here at times--I must give Jack and Gus a hint--and if he thought
you were what his mother would call fast--oh, well, you know what I mean.
Don't wear your scarlet CREPE-DE-CHINE for dinner, and don't smoke if you
can help it, Lily dear!"

Lily pushed aside her finished work with a dry smile. "You're very kind,
Judy: I'll lock up my cigarettes and wear that last year's dress you sent
me this morning. And if you are really interested in my career, perhaps
you'll be kind enough not to ask me to play bridge again this evening."

"Bridge? Does he mind bridge, too? Oh, Lily, what an awful life you'll
lead! But of course I won't--why didn't you give me a hint last night?
There's nothing I wouldn't do, you poor duck, to see you happy!"

And Mrs. Trenor, glowing with her sex's eagerness to smooth the course of
true love, enveloped Lily in a long embrace.

"You're quite sure," she added solicitously, as the latter extricated
herself, "that you wouldn't like me to telephone for Lawrence Selden?"

"Quite sure," said Lily.



The next three days demonstrated to her own complete satisfaction Miss
Bart's ability to manage her affairs without extraneous aid.

As she sat, on the Saturday afternoon, on the terrace at Bellomont, she
smiled at Mrs. Trenor's fear that she might go too fast. If such a
warning had ever been needful, the years had taught her a salutary
lesson, and she flattered herself that she now knew how to adapt her pace
to the object of pursuit. In the case of Mr. Gryce she had found it well
to flutter ahead, losing herself elusively and luring him on from depth
to depth of unconscious intimacy. The surrounding atmosphere was
propitious to this scheme of courtship. Mrs. Trenor, true to her word,
had shown no signs of expecting Lily at the bridge-table, and had even
hinted to the other card-players that they were to betray no surprise at
her unwonted defection. In consequence of this hint, Lily found herself
the centre of that feminine solicitude which envelops a young woman in
the mating season. A solitude was tacitly created for her in the crowded
existence of Bellomont, and her friends could not have shown a greater
readiness for self-effacement had her wooing been adorned with all the
attributes of romance. In Lily's set this conduct implied a sympathetic
comprehension of her motives, and Mr. Gryce rose in her esteem as she saw
the consideration he inspired.

The terrace at Bellomont on a September afternoon was a spot propitious
to sentimental musings, and as Miss Bart stood leaning against the
balustrade above the sunken garden, at a little distance from the
animated group about the tea-table, she might have been lost in the mazes
of an inarticulate happiness. In reality, her thoughts were finding
definite utterance in the tranquil recapitulation of the blessings in
store for her. From where she stood she could see them embodied in the
form of Mr. Gryce, who, in a light overcoat and muffler, sat somewhat
nervously on the edge of his chair, while Carry Fisher, with all the
energy of eye and gesture with which nature and art had combined to endow
her, pressed on him the duty of taking part in the task of municipal
reform.

Mrs. Fisher's latest hobby was municipal reform. It had been preceded by
an equal zeal for socialism, which had in turn replaced an energetic
advocacy of Christian Science. Mrs. Fisher was small, fiery and dramatic;
and her hands and eyes were admirable instruments in the service of
whatever causes she happened to espouse. She had, however, the fault
common to enthusiasts of ignoring any slackness of response on the part
of her hearers, and Lily was amused by her unconsciousness of the
resistance displayed in every angle of Mr. Gryce's attitude.  Lily
herself knew that his mind was divided between the dread of catching cold
if he remained out of doors too long at that hour, and the fear that, if
he retreated to the house, Mrs. Fisher might follow him up with a paper
to be signed. Mr. Gryce had a constitutional dislike to what he called
"committing himself," and tenderly as he cherished his health, he
evidently concluded that it was safer to stay out of reach of pen and ink
till chance released him from Mrs. Fisher's toils. Meanwhile he cast
agonized glances in the direction of Miss Bart, whose only response was
to sink into an attitude of more graceful abstraction. She had learned
the value of contrast in throwing her charms into relief, and was fully
aware of the extent to which Mrs. Fisher's volubility was enhancing her
own repose.

She was roused from her musings by the approach of her cousin Jack
Stepney who, at Gwen Van Osburgh's side, was returning across the garden
from the tennis court.

The couple in question were engaged in the same kind of romance in which
Lily figured, and the latter felt a certain annoyance in contemplating
what seemed to her a caricature of her own situation.  Miss Van Osburgh
was a large girl with flat surfaces and no high lights: Jack Stepney had
once said of her that she was as reliable as roast mutton. His own taste
was in the line of less solid and more highly-seasoned diet; but hunger
makes any fare palatable, and there had been times when Mr. Stepney had
been reduced to a crust.

Lily considered with interest the expression of their faces: the girl's
turned toward her companion's like an empty plate held up to be filled,
while the man lounging at her side already betrayed the encroaching
boredom which would presently crack the thin veneer of his smile.

"How impatient men are!" Lily reflected. "All Jack has to do to get
everything he wants is to keep quiet and let that girl marry him; whereas
I have to calculate and contrive, and retreat and advance, as if I were
going through an intricate dance, where one misstep would throw me
hopelessly out of time."

As they drew nearer she was whimsically struck by a kind of family
likeness between Miss Van Osburgh and Percy Gryce. There was no
resemblance of feature. Gryce was handsome in a didactic way--he looked
like a clever pupil's drawing from a plaster-cast--while Gwen's
countenance had no more modelling than a face painted on a toy balloon.
But the deeper affinity was unmistakable: the two had the same prejudices
and ideals, and the same quality of making other standards non-existent
by ignoring them. This attribute was common to most of Lily's set: they
had a force of negation which eliminated everything beyond their own
range of perception. Gryce and Miss Van Osburgh were, in short, made for
each other by every law of moral and physical correspondence----"Yet they
wouldn't look at each other," Lily mused, "they never do. Each of them
wants a creature of a different race, of Jack's race and mine, with all
sorts of intuitions, sensations and perceptions that they don't even
guess the existence of. And they always get what they want."

She stood talking with her cousin and Miss Van Osburgh, till a slight
cloud on the latter's brow advised her that even cousinly amenities were
subject to suspicion, and Miss Bart, mindful of the necessity of not
exciting enmities at this crucial point of her career, dropped aside
while the happy couple proceeded toward the tea-table.

Seating herself on the upper step of the terrace, Lily leaned her head
against the honeysuckles wreathing the balustrade. The fragrance of the
late blossoms seemed an emanation of the tranquil scene, a landscape
tutored to the last degree of rural elegance. In the foreground glowed
the warm tints of the gardens.  Beyond the lawn, with its pyramidal
pale-gold maples and velvety firs, sloped pastures dotted with cattle;
and through a long glade the river widened like a lake under the silver
light of September. Lily did not want to join the circle about the
tea-table. They represented the future she had chosen, and she was
content with it, but in no haste to anticipate its joys. The certainty
that she could marry Percy Gryce when she pleased had lifted a heavy load
from her mind, and her money troubles were too recent for their removal
not to leave a sense of relief which a less discerning intelligence might
have taken for happiness. Her vulgar cares were at an end. She would be
able to arrange her life as she pleased, to soar into that empyrean of
security where creditors cannot penetrate. She would have smarter gowns
than Judy Trenor, and far, far more jewels than Bertha Dorset. She would
be free forever from the shifts, the expedients, the humiliations of the
relatively poor. Instead of having to flatter, she would be flattered;
instead of being grateful, she would receive thanks. There were old
scores she could pay off as well as old benefits she could return. And
she had no doubts as to the extent of her power. She knew that Mr. Gryce
was of the small chary type most inaccessible to impulses and emotions.
He had the kind of character in which prudence is a vice, and good advice
the most dangerous nourishment. But Lily had known the species before:
she was aware that such a guarded nature must find one huge outlet of
egoism, and she determined to be to him what his Americana had hitherto
been: the one possession in which he took sufficient pride to spend money
on it. She knew that this generosity to self is one of the forms of
meanness, and she resolved so to identify herself with her husband's
vanity that to gratify her wishes would be to him the most exquisite form
of self-indulgence. The system might at first necessitate a resort to
some of the very shifts and expedients from which she intended it should
free her; but she felt sure that in a short time she would be able to
play the game in her own way. How should she have distrusted her powers?
Her beauty itself was not the mere ephemeral possession it might have
been in the hands of inexperience: her skill in enhancing it, the care
she took of it, the use she made of it, seemed to give it a kind of
permanence. She felt she could trust it to carry her through to the end.

And the end, on the whole, was worthwhile. Life was not the mockery she
had thought it three days ago. There was room for her, after all, in this
crowded selfish world of pleasure whence, so short a time since, her
poverty had seemed to exclude her.  These people whom she had ridiculed
and yet envied were glad to make a place for her in the charmed circle
about which all her desires revolved. They were not as brutal and
self-engrossed as she had fancied--or rather, since it would no longer be
necessary to flatter and humour them, that side of their nature became
less conspicuous. Society is a revolving body which is apt to be judged
according to its place in each man's heaven; and at present it was
turning its illuminated face to Lily.

In the rosy glow it diffused her companions seemed full of amiable
qualities. She liked their elegance, their lightness, their lack of
emphasis: even the self-assurance which at times was so like obtuseness
now seemed the natural sign of social ascendency. They were lords of the
only world she cared for, and they were ready to admit her to their ranks
and let her lord it with them. Already she felt within her a stealing
allegiance to their standards, an acceptance of their limitations, a
disbelief in the things they did not believe in, a contemptuous pity for
the people who were not able to live as they lived.

The early sunset was slanting across the park. Through the boughs of the
long avenue beyond the gardens she caught the flash of wheels, and
divined that more visitors were approaching. There was a movement behind
her, a scattering of steps and voices: it was evident that the party
about the tea-table was breaking up.  Presently she heard a tread behind
her on the terrace. She supposed that Mr. Gryce had at last found means
to escape from his predicament, and she smiled at the significance of his
coming to join her instead of beating an instant retreat to the fire-side.

She turned to give him the welcome which such gallantry deserved; but her
greeting wavered into a blush of wonder, for the man who had approached
her was Lawrence Selden.

"You see I came after all," he said; but before she had time to answer,
Mrs. Dorset, breaking away from a lifeless colloquy with her host, had
stepped between them with a little gesture of appropriation.



The observance of Sunday at Bellomont was chiefly marked by the punctual
appearance of the smart omnibus destined to convey the household to the
little church at the gates. Whether any one got into the omnibus or not
was a matter of secondary importance, since by standing there it not only
bore witness to the orthodox intentions of the family, but made Mrs.
Trenor feel, when she finally heard it drive away, that she had somehow
vicariously made use of it.

It was Mrs. Trenor's theory that her daughters actually did go to church
every Sunday; but their French governess's convictions calling her to the
rival fane, and the fatigues of the week keeping their mother in her room
till luncheon, there was seldom any one present to verify the fact. Now
and then, in a spasmodic burst of virtue--when the house had been too
uproarious over night--Gus Trenor forced his genial bulk into a tight
frock-coat and routed his daughters from their slumbers; but habitually,
as Lily explained to Mr. Gryce, this parental duty was forgotten till the
church bells were ringing across the park, and the omnibus had driven
away empty.

Lily had hinted to Mr. Gryce that this neglect of religious observances
was repugnant to her early traditions, and that during her visits to
Bellomont she regularly accompanied Muriel and Hilda to church. This
tallied with the assurance, also confidentially imparted, that, never
having played bridge before, she had been "dragged into it" on the night
of her arrival, and had lost an appalling amount of money in consequence
of her ignorance of the game and of the rules of betting.  Mr. Gryce was
undoubtedly enjoying Bellomont. He liked the ease and glitter of the
life, and the lustre conferred on him by being a member of this group of
rich and conspicuous people.  But he thought it a very materialistic
society; there were times when he was frightened by the talk of the men
and the looks of the ladies, and he was glad to find that Miss Bart, for
all her ease and self-possession, was not at home in so ambiguous an
atmosphere. For this reason he had been especially pleased to learn that
she would, as usual, attend the young Trenors to church on Sunday
morning; and as he paced the gravel sweep before the door, his light
overcoat on his arm and his prayer-book in one carefully-gloved hand, he
reflected agreeably on the strength of character which kept her true to
her early training in surroundings so subversive to religious principles.

For a long time Mr. Gryce and the omnibus had the gravel sweep to
themselves; but, far from regretting this deplorable indifference on the
part of the other guests, he found himself nourishing the hope that Miss
Bart might be unaccompanied. The precious minutes were flying, however;
the big chestnuts pawed the ground and flecked their impatient sides with
foam; the coachman seemed to be slowly petrifying on the box, and the
groom on the doorstep; and still the lady did not come.  Suddenly,
however, there was a sound of voices and a rustle of skirts in the
doorway, and Mr. Gryce, restoring his watch to his pocket, turned with a
nervous start; but it was only to find himself handing Mrs. Wetherall
into the carriage.

The Wetheralls always went to church. They belonged to the vast group of
human automata who go through life without neglecting to perform a single
one of the gestures executed by the surrounding puppets. It is true that
the Bellomont puppets did not go to church; but others equally important
did--and Mr. and Mrs. Wetherall's circle was so large that God was
included in their visiting-list. They appeared, therefore, punctual and
resigned, with the air of people bound for a dull "At Home," and after
them Hilda and Muriel straggled, yawning and pinning each other's veils
and ribbons as they came. They had promised Lily to go to church with
her, they declared, and Lily was such a dear old duck that they didn't
mind doing it to please her, though they couldn't fancy what had put the
idea in her head, and though for their own part they would much rather
have played lawn tennis with Jack and Gwen, if she hadn't told them she
was coming. The Misses Trenor were followed by Lady Cressida Raith, a
weather-beaten person in Liberty silk and ethnological trinkets, who, on
seeing the omnibus, expressed her surprise that they were not to walk
across the park; but at Mrs. Wetherall's horrified protest that the
church was a mile away, her ladyship, after a glance at the height of the
other's heels, acquiesced in the necessity of driving, and poor Mr. Gryce
found himself rolling off between four ladies for whose spiritual welfare
he felt not the least concern.

It might have afforded him some consolation could he have known that Miss
Bart had really meant to go to church. She had even risen earlier than
usual in the execution of her purpose. She had an idea that the sight of
her in a grey gown of devotional cut, with her famous lashes drooped
above a prayer-book, would put the finishing touch to Mr. Gryce's
subjugation, and render inevitable a certain incident which she had
resolved should form a part of the walk they were to take together after
luncheon. Her intentions in short had never been more definite; but poor
Lily, for all the hard glaze of her exterior, was inwardly as malleable
as wax. Her faculty for adapting herself, for entering into other
people's feelings, if it served her now and then in small contingencies,
hampered her in the decisive moments of life. She was like a water-plant
in the flux of the tides, and today the whole current of her mood was
carrying her toward Lawrence Selden. Why had he come? Was it to see
herself or Bertha Dorset?  It was the last question which, at that
moment, should have engaged her. She might better have contented herself
with thinking that he had simply responded to the despairing summons of
his hostess, anxious to interpose him between herself and the ill-humour
of Mrs. Dorset. But Lily had not rested till she learned from Mrs. Trenor
that Selden had come of his own accord.  "He didn't even wire me--he just
happened to find the trap at the station. Perhaps it's not over with
Bertha after all," Mrs. Trenor musingly concluded; and went away to
arrange her dinner-cards accordingly.

Perhaps it was not, Lily reflected; but it should be soon, unless she had
lost her cunning. If Selden had come at Mrs. Dorset's call, it was at her
own that he would stay. So much the previous evening had told her. Mrs.
Trenor, true to her simple principle of making her married friends happy,
had placed Selden and Mrs. Dorset next to each other at dinner; but, in
obedience to the time-honoured traditions of the match-maker, she had
separated Lily and Mr. Gryce, sending in the former with George Dorset,
while Mr. Gryce was coupled with Gwen Van Osburgh.

George Dorset's talk did not interfere with the range of his neighbour's
thoughts. He was a mournful dyspeptic, intent on finding out the
deleterious ingredients of every dish and diverted from this care only by
the sound of his wife's voice. On this occasion, however, Mrs. Dorset
took no part in the general conversation. She sat talking in low murmurs
with Selden, and turning a contemptuous and denuded shoulder toward her
host, who, far from resenting his exclusion, plunged into the excesses of
the MENU with the joyous irresponsibility of a free man. To Mr. Dorset,
however, his wife's attitude was a subject of such evident concern that,
when he was not scraping the sauce from his fish, or scooping the moist
bread-crumbs from the interior of his roll, he sat straining his thin
neck for a glimpse of her between the lights.

Mrs. Trenor, as it chanced, had placed the husband and wife on opposite
sides of the table, and Lily was therefore able to observe Mrs. Dorset
also, and by carrying her glance a few feet farther, to set up a rapid
comparison between Lawrence Selden and Mr. Gryce. It was that comparison
which was her undoing. Why else had she suddenly grown interested in
Selden? She had known him for eight years or more: ever since her return
to America he had formed a part of her background. She had always been
glad to sit next to him at dinner, had found him more agreeable than most
men, and had vaguely wished that he possessed the other qualities needful
to fix her attention; but till now she had been too busy with her own
affairs to regard him as more than one of the pleasant accessories of
life. Miss Bart was a keen reader of her own heart, and she saw that her
sudden preoccupation with Selden was due to the fact that his presence
shed a new light on her surroundings. Not that he was notably brilliant
or exceptional; in his own profession he was surpassed by more than one
man who had bored Lily through many a weary dinner. It was rather that he
had preserved a certain social detachment, a happy air of viewing the
show objectively, of having points of contact outside the great gilt cage
in which they were all huddled for the mob to gape at. How alluring the
world outside the cage appeared to Lily, as she heard its door clang on
her! In reality, as she knew, the door never clanged: it stood always
open; but most of the captives were like flies in a bottle, and having
once flown in, could never regain their freedom. It was Selden's
distinction that he had never forgotten the way out.

That was the secret of his way of readjusting her vision. Lily, turning
her eyes from him, found herself scanning her little world through his
retina: it was as though the pink lamps had been shut off and the dusty
daylight let in. She looked down the long table, studying its occupants
one by one, from Gus Trenor, with his heavy carnivorous head sunk between
his shoulders, as he preyed on a jellied plover, to his wife, at the
opposite end of the long bank of orchids, suggestive, with her glaring
good-looks, of a jeweller's window lit by electricity. And between the
two, what a long stretch of vacuity! How dreary and trivial these people
were! Lily reviewed them with a scornful impatience: Carry Fisher, with
her shoulders, her eyes, her divorces, her general air of embodying a
"spicy paragraph"; young Silverton, who had meant to live on
proof-reading and write an epic, and who now lived on his friends and had
become critical of truffles; Alice Wetherall, an animated visiting-list,
whose most fervid convictions turned on the wording of invitations and
the engraving of dinner-cards; Wetherall, with his perpetual nervous nod
of acquiescence, his air of agreeing with people before he knew what they
were saying; Jack Stepney, with his confident smile and anxious eyes,
half way between the sheriff and an heiress; Gwen Van Osburgh, with all
the guileless confidence of a young girl who has always been told that
there is no one richer than her father.

Lily smiled at her classification of her friends. How different they had
seemed to her a few hours ago! Then they had symbolized what she was
gaining, now they stood for what she was giving up.  That very afternoon
they had seemed full of brilliant qualities; now she saw that they were
merely dull in a loud way. Under the glitter of their opportunities she
saw the poverty of their achievement. It was not that she wanted them to
be more disinterested; but she would have liked them to be more
picturesque. And she had a shamed recollection of the way in which, a few
hours since, she had felt the centripetal force of their standards. She
closed her eyes an instant, and the vacuous routine of the life she had
chosen stretched before her like a long white road without dip or
turning: it was true she was to roll over it in a carriage instead of
trudging it on foot, but sometimes the pedestrian enjoys the diversion of
a short cut which is denied to those on wheels.

She was roused by a chuckle which Mr. Dorset seemed to eject from the
depths of his lean throat.

"I say, do look at her," he exclaimed, turning to Miss Bart with
lugubrious merriment--"I beg your pardon, but do just look at my wife
making a fool of that poor devil over there! One would really suppose she
was gone on him--and it's all the other way round, I assure you."

Thus adjured, Lily turned her eyes on the spectacle which was affording
Mr. Dorset such legitimate mirth. It certainly appeared, as he said, that
Mrs. Dorset was the more active participant in the scene: her neighbour
seemed to receive her advances with a temperate zest which did not
distract him from his dinner. The sight restored Lily's good humour, and
knowing the peculiar disguise which Mr. Dorset's marital fears assumed,
she asked gaily: "Aren't you horribly jealous of her?"

Dorset greeted the sally with delight. "Oh, abominably--you've just hit
it--keeps me awake at night. The doctors tell me that's what has knocked
my digestion out--being so infernally jealous of her.--I can't eat a
mouthful of this stuff, you know," he added suddenly, pushing back his
plate with a clouded countenance; and Lily, unfailingly adaptable,
accorded her radiant attention to his prolonged denunciation of other
people's cooks, with a supplementary tirade on the toxic qualities of
melted butter.

It was not often that he found so ready an ear; and, being a man as well
as a dyspeptic, it may be that as he poured his grievances into it he was
not insensible to its rosy symmetry. At any rate he engaged Lily so long
that the sweets were being handed when she caught a phrase on her other
side, where Miss Corby, the comic woman of the company, was bantering
Jack Stepney on his approaching engagement. Miss Corby's role was
jocularity: she always entered the conversation with a handspring.

"And of course you'll have Sim Rosedale as best man!" Lily heard her
fling out as the climax of her prognostications; and Stepney responded,
as if struck: "Jove, that's an idea. What a thumping present I'd get out
of him!"

SIM ROSEDALE! The name, made more odious by its diminutive, obtruded
itself on Lily's thoughts like a leer. It stood for one of the many hated
possibilities hovering on the edge of life. If she did not marry Percy
Gryce, the day might come when she would have to be civil to such men as
Rosedale. IF SHE DID NOT MARRY HIM? But she meant to marry him--she was
sure of him and sure of herself. She drew back with a shiver from the
pleasant paths in which her thoughts had been straying, and set her feet
once more in the middle of the long white road....  When she went
upstairs that night she found that the late post had brought her a fresh
batch of bills. Mrs. Peniston, who was a conscientious woman, had
forwarded them all to Bellomont.

Miss Bart, accordingly, rose the next morning with the most earnest
conviction that it was her duty to go to church. She tore herself betimes
from the lingering enjoyment of her breakfast-tray, rang to have her grey
gown laid out, and despatched her maid to borrow a prayer-book from Mrs.
Trenor.

But her course was too purely reasonable not to contain the germs of
rebellion. No sooner were her preparations made than they roused a
smothered sense of resistance. A small spark was enough to kindle Lily's
imagination, and the sight of the grey dress and the borrowed prayer-book
flashed a long light down the years. She would have to go to church with
Percy Gryce every Sunday. They would have a front pew in the most
expensive church in New York, and his name would figure handsomely in the
list of parish charities. In a few years, when he grew stouter, he would
be made a warden. Once in the winter the rector would come to dine, and
her husband would beg her to go over the list and see that no DIVORCEES
were included, except those who had showed signs of penitence by being
re-married to the very wealthy. There was nothing especially arduous in
this round of religious obligations; but it stood for a fraction of that
great bulk of boredom which loomed across her path. And who could consent
to be bored on such a morning?  Lily had slept well, and her bath had
filled her with a pleasant glow, which was becomingly reflected in the
clear curve of her cheek. No lines were visible this morning, or else the
glass was at a happier angle.

And the day was the accomplice of her mood: it was a day for impulse and
truancy. The light air seemed full of powdered gold; below the dewy bloom
of the lawns the woodlands blushed and smouldered, and the hills across
the river swam in molten blue.  Every drop of blood in Lily's veins
invited her to happiness.

The sound of wheels roused her from these musings, and leaning behind her
shutters she saw the omnibus take up its freight. She was too late,
then--but the fact did not alarm her. A glimpse of Mr. Gryce's
crestfallen face even suggested that she had done wisely in absenting
herself, since the disappointment he so candidly betrayed would surely
whet his appetite for the afternoon walk. That walk she did not mean to
miss; one glance at the bills on her writing-table was enough to recall
its necessity. But meanwhile she had the morning to herself, and could
muse pleasantly on the disposal of its hours. She was familiar enough
with the habits of Bellomont to know that she was likely to have a free
field till luncheon. She had seen the Wetheralls, the Trenor girls and
Lady Cressida packed safely into the omnibus; Judy Trenor was sure to be
having her hair shampooed; Carry Fisher had doubtless carried off her
host for a drive; Ned Silverton was probably smoking the cigarette of
young despair in his bedroom; and Kate Corby was certain to be playing
tennis with Jack Stepney and Miss Van Osburgh. Of the ladies, this left
only Mrs. Dorset unaccounted for, and Mrs. Dorset never came down till
luncheon: her doctors, she averred, had forbidden her to expose herself
to the crude air of the morning.

To the remaining members of the party Lily gave no special thought;
wherever they were, they were not likely to interfere with her plans.
These, for the moment, took the shape of assuming a dress somewhat more
rustic and summerlike in style than the garment she had first selected,
and rustling downstairs, sunshade in hand, with the disengaged air of a
lady in quest of exercise. The great hall was empty but for the knot of
dogs by the fire, who, taking in at a glance the outdoor aspect of Miss
Bart, were upon her at once with lavish offers of companionship.  She put
aside the ramming paws which conveyed these offers, and assuring the
joyous volunteers that she might presently have a use for their company,
sauntered on through the empty drawing-room to the library at the end of
the house. The library was almost the only surviving portion of the old
manor-house of Bellomont: a long spacious room, revealing the traditions
of the mother-country in its classically-cased doors, the Dutch tiles of
the chimney, and the elaborate hob-grate with its shining brass urns. A
few family portraits of lantern-jawed gentlemen in tie-wigs, and ladies
with large head-dresses and small bodies, hung between the shelves lined
with pleasantly-shabby books: books mostly contemporaneous with the
ancestors in question, and to which the subsequent Trenors had made no
perceptible additions. The library at Bellomont was in fact never used
for reading, though it had a certain popularity as a smoking-room or a
quiet retreat for flirtation. It had occurred to Lily, however, that it
might on this occasion have been resorted to by the only member of the
party in the least likely to put it to its original use. She advanced
noiselessly over the dense old rug scattered with easy-chairs, and before
she reached the middle of the room she saw that she had not been
mistaken. Lawrence Selden was in fact seated at its farther end; but
though a book lay on his knee, his attention was not engaged with it, but
directed to a lady whose lace-clad figure, as she leaned back in an
adjoining chair, detached itself with exaggerated slimness against the
dusky leather upholstery.

Lily paused as she caught sight of the group; for a moment she seemed
about to withdraw, but thinking better of this, she announced her
approach by a slight shake of her skirts which made the couple raise
their heads, Mrs. Dorset with a look of frank displeasure, and Selden
with his usual quiet smile. The sight of his composure had a disturbing
effect on Lily; but to be disturbed was in her case to make a more
brilliant effort at self-possession.

"Dear me, am I late?" she asked, putting a hand in his as he advanced to
greet her.

"Late for what?" enquired Mrs. Dorset tartly. "Not for luncheon,
certainly--but perhaps you had an earlier engagement?"

"Yes, I had," said Lily confidingly.

"Really? Perhaps I am in the way, then? But Mr. Selden is entirely at
your disposal." Mrs. Dorset was pale with temper, and her antagonist felt
a certain pleasure in prolonging her distress.

"Oh, dear, no--do stay," she said good-humouredly. "I don't in the least
want to drive you away."

"You're awfully good, dear, but I never interfere with Mr. Selden's
engagements."

The remark was uttered with a little air of proprietorship not lost on
its object, who concealed a faint blush of annoyance by stooping to pick
up the book he had dropped at Lily's approach.  The latter's eyes widened
charmingly and she broke into a light laugh.

"But I have no engagement with Mr. Selden! My engagement was to go to
church; and I'm afraid the omnibus has started without me.  HAS it
started, do you know?"

She turned to Selden, who replied that he had heard it drive away some
time since.

"Ah, then I shall have to walk; I promised Hilda and Muriel to go to
church with them. It's too late to walk there, you say? Well, I shall
have the credit of trying, at any rate--and the advantage of escaping
part of the service. I'm not so sorry for myself, after all!"

And with a bright nod to the couple on whom she had intruded, Miss Bart
strolled through the glass doors and carried her rustling grace down the
long perspective of the garden walk.

She was taking her way churchward, but at no very quick pace; a fact not
lost on one of her observers, who stood in the doorway looking after her
with an air of puzzled amusement. The truth is that she was conscious of
a somewhat keen shock of disappointment. All her plans for the day had
been built on the assumption that it was to see her that Selden had come
to Bellomont. She had expected, when she came downstairs, to find him on
the watch for her; and she had found him, instead, in a situation which
might well denote that he had been on the watch for another lady. Was it
possible, after all, that he had come for Bertha Dorset? The latter had
acted on the assumption to the extent of appearing at an hour when she
never showed herself to ordinary mortals, and Lily, for the moment, saw
no way of putting her in the wrong. It did not occur to her that Selden
might have been actuated merely by the desire to spend a Sunday out of
town: women never learn to dispense with the sentimental motive in their
judgments of men. But Lily was not easily disconcerted; competition put
her on her mettle, and she reflected that Selden's coming, if it did not
declare him to be still in Mrs. Dorset's toils, showed him to be so
completely free from them that he was not afraid of her proximity.

These thoughts so engaged her that she fell into a gait hardly likely to
carry her to church before the sermon, and at length, having passed from
the gardens to the wood-path beyond, so far forgot her intention as to
sink into a rustic seat at a bend of the walk. The spot was charming, and
Lily was not insensible to the charm, or to the fact that her presence
enhanced it; but she was not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude
except in company, and the combination of a handsome girl and a romantic
scene struck her as too good to be wasted. No one, however, appeared to
profit by the opportunity; and after a half hour of fruitless waiting she
rose and wandered on. She felt a stealing sense of fatigue as she walked;
the sparkle had died out of her, and the taste of life was stale on her
lips. She hardly knew what she had been seeking, or why the failure to
find it had so blotted the light from her sky: she was only aware of a
vague sense of failure, of an inner isolation deeper than the loneliness
about her.

Her footsteps flagged, and she stood gazing listlessly ahead, digging the
ferny edge of the path with the tip of her sunshade.  As she did so a
step sounded behind her, and she saw Selden at her side.

"How fast you walk!" he remarked. "I thought I should never catch up with
you."

She answered gaily: "You must be quite breathless! I've been sitting
under that tree for an hour."

"Waiting for me, I hope?" he rejoined; and she said with a vague laugh:

"Well--waiting to see if you would come."

"I seize the distinction, but I don't mind it, since doing the one
involved doing the other. But weren't you sure that I should come?"

"If I waited long enough--but you see I had only a limited time to give
to the experiment."

"Why limited? Limited by luncheon?"

"No; by my other engagement."

"Your engagement to go to church with Muriel and Hilda?"

"No; but to come home from church with another person."

"Ah, I see; I might have known you were fully provided with alternatives.
And is the other person coming home this way?"

Lily laughed again. "That's just what I don't know; and to find out, it
is my business to get to church before the service is over."

"Exactly; and it is my business to prevent your doing so; in which case
the other person, piqued by your absence, will form the desperate resolve
of driving back in the omnibus."

Lily received this with fresh appreciation; his nonsense was like the
bubbling of her inner mood. "Is that what you would do in such an
emergency?" she enquired.

Selden looked at her with solemnity. "I am here to prove to you," he
cried, "what I am capable of doing in an emergency!"

"Walking a mile in an hour--you must own that the omnibus would be
quicker!"

"Ah--but will he find you in the end? That's the only test of success."

They looked at each other with the same luxury of enjoyment that they had
felt in exchanging absurdities over his tea-table; but suddenly Lily's
face changed, and she said: "Well, if it is, he has succeeded."

Selden, following her glance, perceived a party of people advancing
toward them from the farther bend of the path. Lady Cressida had
evidently insisted on walking home, and the rest of the church-goers had
thought it their duty to accompany her. Lily's companion looked rapidly
from one to the other of the two men of the party; Wetherall walking
respectfully at Lady Cressida's side with his little sidelong look of
nervous attention, and Percy Gryce bringing up the rear with Mrs.
Wetherall and the Trenors.

"Ah--now I see why you were getting up your Americana!" Selden exclaimed
with a note of the freest admiration but the blush with which the sally
was received checked whatever amplifications he had meant to give it.

That Lily Bart should object to being bantered about her suitors, or even
about her means of attracting them, was so new to Selden that he had a
momentary flash of surprise, which lit up a number of possibilities; but
she rose gallantly to the defence of her confusion, by saying, as its
object approached: "That was why I was waiting for you--to thank you for
having given me so many points!"

"Ah, you can hardly do justice to the subject in such a short time," said
Selden, as the Trenor girls caught sight of Miss Bart; and while she
signalled a response to their boisterous greeting, he added quickly:
"Won't you devote your afternoon to it? You know I must be off tomorrow
morning. We'll take a walk, and you can thank me at your leisure."

 Book I, Chapter 1 Selden, a young bachelor, spots Lily Bart at the train station and wonders what she is doing there. He starts to walk past her and she greets him. After exchanging greetings, he agrees to take a walk with her and keep her company until her train arrives. They end up on the street where he lives and he invites Miss Bart up for tea. In Selden's apartment they share their tea and discuss the various rules of etiquette for young women in the upper-class New York society. Lily points out that young women cannot live alone unless they have no plans to marry. She then starts questioning him about his book collection, and specifically focuses on Americana. He is curious about her sudden interest, but time soon runs out and she leaves him to head back to the train station. While leaving his apartment building she runs into a Mr. Rosedale. Lily foolishly makes up an excuse that she was just coming from her dressmaker, but Rosedale points out that The Benedick, the name of the building she just came out of, does not have any dressmakers in residence. He knows this because he happens to own the building. Lily, ashamed by being caught in her lie, quickly grabs a cab and leaves him.

