Chapter: 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.

 After an evening of playing bridge at the Trenors', Lily retires to her room. She stops on the stairs to take in the opulent Trenor house, and notices Bertha engaging Gryce in conversation. She envies the married Bertha for her ability to talk to men and discard them with no regard. Because Lily and Gryce are both marriageable, Lily knows she cannot treat him in the same fashion. When she enters her room, Lily compares her lot in life to that of Gerty Farish. She does not believe that she has been equipped to cope with the inconveniences of Gerty's life, which she believes includes garish wallpaper and the "squalid compromises of poverty." Lily feels that she requires a luxury that is her own, a recent change in attitude from the previous comfort she felt in relying on the hospitality of others. She has come to the realization that the hospitality of others has come at a personal cost, and that she has been required to "pay her way" by participating in card games that she cannot afford. Wharton reveals that Lily has developed a weakness for bridge, a card game for which she has neither talent nor luck. Although she has won substantial amounts in the past, the monies she won were never banked against future losses, but spent imprudently on jewelry and fine clothing. On this particular evening, Lily has lost all but twenty dollars that she has brought with her, in contrast to Judy and Bertha, who both have won large amounts of money. Lily dresses for bed without notifying her maid that she is doing so, a rudeness she rationalizes as fitting due to the fact that she has been "long enough in bondage to other people's pleasure to be considerate of those who depended on hers." Lily contemplates that she and her maid are in the same circumstances with the exception of one major difference: The maid is paid on a regular basis. Lily observes lines developing on her face, which she first blames as an anomaly of the electric light in her bedroom; the lines, however, remain in candlelight. She then blames the lines on her monetary and marital worries. She wonders if her worries were caused by her own actions or if they were her destiny, and recalls the circumstances of her upbringing, which Wharton depicts as a consistent pattern of living beyond the family's limited means. Lily recalls her social debut at the age of nineteen, which was an extravagant affair. The reader learns that the nineteen-year-old Lily knew nothing about the value of money when she berates her mother for not supplying fresh flowers for luncheon. She repeats her request to her father, who sarcastically laughs at her and tells her that she should order twelve hundred fresh flowers each day. During this exchange, Mr. Bart reveals that he is financially ruined. Her father's bankruptcy and death prompts Lily and her mother to pay extended visits to wealthier relatives. It also gives Lily the resolve to marry into wealth by cultivating her beauty as well as the social tact necessary to attract wealthy and eligible men. Lily, however, is not as mercenary as her mother. Lily considers her physical attractiveness 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 dreams of marrying into European nobility by wont of her beauty and her refined tastes. After her mother's death, Lily is taken in by her father's wealthy and widowed sister, Mrs. Peniston. It is revealed that she is not the wealthiest of Mr. Bart's relatives, and that her motivations are not necessarily selfless. The narrator tells the reader that "It would have been impossible for Mrs. Peniston to be heroic on a desert island," which can be interpreted to mean that her motivation is simply to appear charitable to impress others. The companionship of the two women is a convenience for Lily until she finds a husband, but Lily considers her aunt to be financially well off but miserly when it comes to her niece. Mrs. Peniston refuses to give Lily a regular allowance, and instead chooses to grant her irregular monetary sums. Lily's resolve to marry wealth is cemented by her realizing that she cannot live on the sporadic payments she receives from Mrs. Peniston. Such monies will not pay her dressmaker's bills and gambling debts.

