Chapter: It came vividly to Selden on the Casino steps that Monte Carlo had, more
than any other place he knew, the gift of accommodating itself to each
man's humour. His own, at the moment, lent it a festive readiness of
welcome that might well, in a disenchanted eye, have turned to paint and
facility. So frank an appeal for participation--so outspoken a
recognition of the holiday vein in human nature--struck refreshingly on a
mind jaded by prolonged hard work in surroundings made for the discipline
of the senses.  As he surveyed the white square set in an exotic coquetry
of architecture, the studied tropicality of the gardens, the groups
loitering in the foreground against mauve mountains which suggested a
sublime stage-setting forgotten in a hurried shifting of scenes--as he
took in the whole outspread effect of light and leisure, he felt a
movement of revulsion from the last few months of his life.

The New York winter had presented an interminable perspective of
snow-burdened days, reaching toward a spring of raw sunshine and furious
air, when the ugliness of things rasped the eye as the gritty wind ground
into the skin. Selden, immersed in his work, had told himself that
external conditions did not matter to a man in his state, and that cold
and ugliness were a good tonic for relaxed sensibilities.  When an urgent
case summoned him abroad to confer with a client in Paris, he broke
reluctantly with the routine of the office; and it was only now that,
having despatched his business, and slipped away for a week in the south,
he began to feel the renewed zest of spectatorship that is the solace of
those who take an objective interest in life.

The multiplicity of its appeals--the perpetual surprise of its contrasts
and resemblances! All these tricks and turns of the show were upon him
with a spring as he descended the Casino steps and paused on the pavement
at its doors. He had not been abroad for seven years--and what changes
the renewed contact produced!  If the central depths were untouched,
hardly a pin-point of surface remained the same. And this was the very
place to bring out the completeness of the renewal. The sublimities, the
perpetuities, might have left him as he was: but this tent pitched for a
day's revelry spread a roof of oblivion between himself and his fixed sky.

It was mid-April, and one felt that the revelry had reached its climax
and that the desultory groups in the square and gardens would soon
dissolve and re-form in other scenes. Meanwhile the last moments of the
performance seemed to gain an added brightness from the hovering threat
of the curtain. The quality of the air, the exuberance of the flowers,
the blue intensity of sea and sky, produced the effect of a closing
TABLEAU, when all the lights are turned on at once. This impression was
presently heightened by the way in which a consciously conspicuous group
of people advanced to the middle front, and stood before Selden with the
air of the chief performers gathered together by the exigencies of the
final effect. Their appearance confirmed the impression that the show had
been staged regardless of expense, and emphasized its resemblance to one
of those "costume-plays" in which the protagonists walk through the
passions without displacing a drapery.  The ladies stood in unrelated
attitudes calculated to isolate their effects, and the men hung about
them as irrelevantly as stage heroes whose tailors are named in the
programme. It was Selden himself who unwittingly fused the group by
arresting the attention of one of its members.

"Why, Mr. Selden!" Mrs. Fisher exclaimed in surprise; and with a gesture
toward Mrs. Jack Stepney and Mrs. Wellington Bry, she added plaintively:
"We're starving to death because we can't decide where to lunch."

Welcomed into their group, and made the confidant of their difficulty,
Selden learned with amusement that there were several places where one
might miss something by not lunching, or forfeit something by lunching;
so that eating actually became a minor consideration on the very spot
consecrated to its rites.

"Of course one gets the best things at the TERRASSE--but that looks as if
one hadn't any other reason for being there: the Americans who don't know
any one always rush for the best food.  And the Duchess of Beltshire has
taken up Becassin's lately," Mrs. Bry earnestly summed up.

Mrs. Bry, to Mrs. Fisher's despair, had not progressed beyond the point
of weighing her social alternatives in public. She could not acquire the
air of doing things because she wanted to, and making her choice the
final seal of their fitness.

Mr. Bry, a short pale man, with a business face and leisure clothes, met
the dilemma hilariously.

"I guess the Duchess goes where it's cheapest, unless she can get her
meal paid for. If you offered to blow her off at the TERRASSE she'd turn
up fast enough."

But Mrs. Jack Stepney interposed. "The Grand Dukes go to that little
place at the Condamine. Lord Hubert says it's the only restaurant in
Europe where they can cook peas."

Lord Hubert Dacey, a slender shabby-looking man, with a charming worn
smile, and the air of having spent his best years in piloting the wealthy
to the right restaurant, assented with gentle emphasis: "It's quite that."

"PEAS?" said Mr. Bry contemptuously. "Can they cook terrapin? It just
shows," he continued, "what these European markets are, when a fellow can
make a reputation cooking peas!"

Jack Stepney intervened with authority. "I don't know that I quite agree
with Dacey: there's a little hole in Paris, off the Quai Voltaire--but in
any case, I can't advise the Condamine GARGOTE; at least not with ladies."

Stepney, since his marriage, had thickened and grown prudish, as the Van
Osburgh husbands were apt to do; but his wife, to his surprise and
discomfiture, had developed an earth-shaking fastness of gait which left
him trailing breathlessly in her wake.

"That's where we'll go then!" she declared, with a heavy toss of her
plumage. "I'm so tired of the TERRASSE: it's as dull as one of mother's
dinners. And Lord Hubert has promised to tell us who all the awful people
are at the other place--hasn't he, Carry?  Now, Jack, don't look so
solemn!"

"Well," said Mrs. Bry, "all I want to know is who their dress-makers are."

"No doubt Dacey can tell you that too," remarked Stepney, with an ironic
intention which the other received with the light murmur, "I can at least
FIND OUT, my dear fellow"; and Mrs. Bry having declared that she couldn't
walk another step, the party hailed two or three of the light phaetons
which hover attentively on the confines of the gardens, and rattled off
in procession toward the Condamine.

Their destination was one of the little restaurants overhanging the
boulevard which dips steeply down from Monte Carlo to the low
intermediate quarter along the quay. From the window in which they
presently found themselves installed, they overlooked the intense blue
curve of the harbour, set between the verdure of twin promontories: to
the right, the cliff of Monaco, topped by the mediaeval silhouette of its
church and castle, to the left the terraces and pinnacles of the
gambling-house. Between the two, the waters of the bay were furrowed by a
light coming and going of pleasure-craft, through which, just at the
culminating moment of luncheon, the majestic advance of a great
steam-yacht drew the company's attention from the peas.

"By Jove, I believe that's the Dorsets back!" Stepney exclaimed; and Lord
Hubert, dropping his single eye-glass, corroborated: "It's the
Sabrina--yes."

"So soon? They were to spend a month in Sicily," Mrs. Fisher observed.

"I guess they feel as if they had: there's only one up-to-date hotel in
the whole place," said Mr. Bry disparagingly.

"It was Ned Silverton's idea--but poor Dorset and Lily Bart must have
been horribly bored." Mrs. Fisher added in an undertone to Selden: "I do
hope there hasn't been a row."

"It's most awfully jolly having Miss Bart back," said Lord Hubert, in his
mild deliberate voice; and Mrs. Bry added ingenuously: "I daresay the
Duchess will dine with us, now that Lily's here."

"The Duchess admires her immensely: I'm sure she'd be charmed to have it
arranged," Lord Hubert agreed, with the professional promptness of the
man accustomed to draw his profit from facilitating social contacts:
Selden was struck by the businesslike change in his manner.

"Lily has been a tremendous success here," Mrs. Fisher continued, still
addressing herself confidentially to Selden. "She looks ten years
younger--I never saw her so handsome. Lady Skiddaw took her everywhere in
Cannes, and the Crown Princess of Macedonia had her to stop for a week at
Cimiez. People say that was one reason why Bertha whisked the yacht off
to Sicily: the Crown Princess didn't take much notice of her, and she
couldn't bear to look on at Lily's triumph."

Selden made no reply. He was vaguely aware that Miss Bart was cruising in
the Mediterranean with the Dorsets, but it had not occurred to him that
there was any chance of running across her on the Riviera, where the
season was virtually at an end. As he leaned back, silently contemplating
his filigree cup of Turkish coffee, he was trying to put some order in
his thoughts, to tell himself how the news of her nearness was really
affecting him. He had a personal detachment enabling him, even in moments
of emotional high-pressure, to get a fairly clear view of his feelings,
and he was sincerely surprised by the disturbance which the sight of the
Sabrina had produced in him. He had reason to think that his three months
of engrossing professional work, following on the sharp shock of his
disillusionment, had cleared his mind of its sentimental vapours. The
feeling he had nourished and given prominence to was one of thankfulness
for his escape: he was like a traveller so grateful for rescue from a
dangerous accident that at first he is hardly conscious of his bruises.
Now he suddenly felt the latent ache, and realized that after all he had
not come off unhurt.

An hour later, at Mrs. Fisher's side in the Casino gardens, he was trying
to find fresh reasons for forgetting the injury received in the
contemplation of the peril avoided. The party had dispersed with the
loitering indecision characteristic of social movements at Monte Carlo,
where the whole place, and the long gilded hours of the day, seem to
offer an infinity of ways of being idle. Lord Hubert Dacey had finally
gone off in quest of the Duchess of Beltshire, charged by Mrs. Bry with
the delicate negotiation of securing that lady's presence at dinner, the
Stepneys had left for Nice in their motor-car, and Mr. Bry had departed
to take his place in the pigeon shooting match which was at the moment
engaging his highest faculties.

Mrs. Bry, who had a tendency to grow red and stertorous after luncheon,
had been judiciously prevailed upon by Carry Fisher to withdraw to her
hotel for an hour's repose; and Selden and his companion were thus left
to a stroll propitious to confidences. The stroll soon resolved itself
into a tranquil session on a bench overhung with laurel and Banksian
roses, from which they caught a dazzle of blue sea between marble
balusters, and the fiery shafts of cactus-blossoms shooting meteor-like
from the rock. The soft shade of their niche, and the adjacent glitter of
the air, were conducive to an easy lounging mood, and to the smoking of
many cigarettes; and Selden, yielding to these influences, suffered Mrs.
Fisher to unfold to him the history of her recent experiences. She had
come abroad with the Welly Brys at the moment when fashion flees the
inclemency of the New York spring. The Brys, intoxicated by their first
success, already thirsted for new kingdoms, and Mrs. Fisher, viewing the
Riviera as an easy introduction to London society, had guided their
course thither. She had affiliations of her own in every capital, and a
facility for picking them up again after long absences; and the carefully
disseminated rumour of the Brys' wealth had at once gathered about them a
group of cosmopolitan pleasure-seekers.

"But things are not going as well as I expected," Mrs. Fisher frankly
admitted. "It's all very well to say that every body with money can get
into society; but it would be truer to say that NEARLY everybody can.
And the London market is so glutted with new Americans that, to succeed
there now, they must be either very clever or awfully queer. The Brys are
neither. HE would get on well enough if she'd let him alone; they like
his slang and his brag and his blunders. But Louisa spoils it all by
trying to repress him and put herself forward. If she'd be natural
herself--fat and vulgar and bouncing--it would be all right; but as soon
as she meets anybody smart she tries to be slender and queenly.  She
tried it with the Duchess of Beltshire and Lady Skiddaw, and they fled.
I've done my best to make her see her mistake--I've said to her again and
again: 'Just let yourself go, Louisa'; but she keeps up the humbug even
with me--I believe she keeps on being queenly in her own room, with the
door shut.

"The worst of it is," Mrs. Fisher went on, "that she thinks it's all MY
fault. When the Dorsets turned up here six weeks ago, and everybody began
to make a fuss about Lily Bart, I could see Louisa thought that if she'd
had Lily in tow instead of me she would have been hob-nobbing with all
the royalties by this time. She doesn't realize that it's Lily's beauty
that does it: Lord Hubert tells me Lily is thought even handsomer than
when he knew her at Aix ten years ago. It seems she was tremendously
admired there. An Italian Prince, rich and the real thing, wanted to
marry her; but just at the critical moment a good-looking step-son turned
up, and Lily was silly enough to flirt with him while her
marriage-settlements with the step-father were being drawn up. Some
people said the young man did it on purpose. You can fancy the scandal:
there was an awful row between the men, and people began to look at Lily
so queerly that Mrs. Peniston had to pack up and finish her cure
elsewhere. Not that SHE ever understood: to this day she thinks that Aix
didn't suit her, and mentions her having been sent there as proof of the
incompetence of French doctors. That's Lily all over, you know: she works
like a slave preparing the ground and sowing her seed; but the day she
ought to be reaping the harvest she over-sleeps herself or goes off on a
picnic."

Mrs. Fisher paused and looked reflectively at the deep shimmer of sea
between the cactus-flowers. "Sometimes," she added, "I think it's just
flightiness--and sometimes I think it's because, at heart, she despises
the things she's trying for. And it's the difficulty of deciding that
makes her such an interesting study." She glanced tentatively at Selden's
motionless profile, and resumed with a slight sigh: "Well, all I can say
is, I wish she'd give ME some of her discarded opportunities.  I wish we
could change places now, for instance. She could make a very good thing
out of the Brys if she managed them properly, and I should know just how
to look after George Dorset while Bertha is reading Verlaine with Neddy
Silverton."

She met Selden's sound of protest with a sharp derisive glance.  "Well,
what's the use of mincing matters? We all know that's what Bertha brought
her abroad for. When Bertha wants to have a good time she has to provide
occupation for George. At first I thought Lily was going to play her
cards well THIS time, but there are rumours that Bertha is jealous of her
success here and at Cannes, and I shouldn't be surprised if there were a
break any day. Lily's only safeguard is that Bertha needs her badly--oh,
very badly. The Silverton affair is in the acute stage: it's necessary
that George's attention should be pretty continuously distracted. And I'm
bound to say Lily DOES distract it: I believe he'd marry her tomorrow if
he found out there was anything wrong with Bertha. But you know him--he's
as blind as he's jealous; and of course Lily's present business is to
keep him blind. A clever woman might know just the right moment to tear
off the bandage: but Lily isn't clever in that way, and when George does
open his eyes she'll probably contrive not to be in his line of vision."

Selden tossed away his cigarette. "By Jove--it's time for my train," he
exclaimed, with a glance at his watch; adding, in reply to Mrs. Fisher's
surprised comment--"Why, I thought of course you were at Monte!"--a
murmured word to the effect that he was making Nice his head-quarters.

"The worst of it is, she snubs the Brys now," he heard irrelevantly flung
after him.

Ten minutes later, in the high-perched bedroom of an hotel overlooking
the Casino, he was tossing his effects into a couple of gaping
portmanteaux, while the porter waited outside to transport them to the
cab at the door. It took but a brief plunge down the steep white road to
the station to land him safely in the afternoon express for Nice; and not
till he was installed in the corner of an empty carriage, did he exclaim
to himself, with a reaction of self-contempt: "What the deuce am I
running away from?"

The pertinence of the question checked Selden's fugitive impulse before
the train had started. It was ridiculous to be flying like an emotional
coward from an infatuation his reason had conquered.  He had instructed
his bankers to forward some important business letters to Nice, and at
Nice he would quietly await them. He was already annoyed with himself for
having left Monte Carlo, where he had intended to pass the week which
remained to him before sailing; but it would now be difficult to return
on his steps without an appearance of inconsistency from which his pride
recoiled. In his inmost heart he was not sorry to put himself beyond the
probability of meeting Miss Bart. Completely as he had detached himself
from her, he could not yet regard her merely as a social instance; and
viewed in a more personal ways she was not likely to be a reassuring
object of study. Chance encounters, or even the repeated mention of her
name, would send his thoughts back into grooves from which he had
resolutely detached them; whereas, if she could be entirely excluded from
his life, the pressure of new and varied impressions, with which no
thought of her was connected, would soon complete the work of separation.
Mrs. Fisher's conversation had, indeed, operated to that end; but the
treatment was too painful to be voluntarily chosen while milder remedies
were untried; and Selden thought he could trust himself to return
gradually to a reasonable view of Miss Bart, if only he did not see her.

Having reached the station early, he had arrived at this point in his
reflections before the increasing throng on the platform warned him that
he could not hope to preserve his privacy; the next moment there was a
hand on the door, and he turned to confront the very face he was fleeing.

Miss Bart, glowing with the haste of a precipitate descent upon the
train, headed a group composed of the Dorsets, young Silverton and Lord
Hubert Dacey, who had barely time to spring into the carriage, and
envelop Selden in ejaculations of surprise and welcome, before the
whistle of departure sounded. The party, it appeared, were hastening to
Nice in response to a sudden summons to dine with the Duchess of
Beltshire and to see the water-fete in the bay; a plan evidently
improvised--in spite of Lord Hubert's protesting "Oh, I say, you
know,"--for the express purpose of defeating Mrs. Bry's endeavour to
capture the Duchess.

During the laughing relation of this manoeuvre, Selden had time for a
rapid impression of Miss Bart, who had seated herself opposite to him in
the golden afternoon light. Scarcely three months had elapsed since he
had parted from her on the threshold of the Brys' conservatory; but a
subtle change had passed over the quality of her beauty. Then it had had
a transparency through which the fluctuations of the spirit were
sometimes tragically visible; now its impenetrable surface suggested a
process of crystallization which had fused her whole being into one hard
brilliant substance. The change had struck Mrs. Fisher as a rejuvenation:
to Selden it seemed like that moment of pause and arrest when the warm
fluidity of youth is chilled into its final shape.

He felt it in the way she smiled on him, and in the readiness and
competence with which, flung unexpectedly into his presence, she took up
the thread of their intercourse as though that thread had not been
snapped with a violence from which he still reeled. Such facility
sickened him--but he told himself that it was with the pang which
precedes recovery. Now he would really get well--would eject the last
drop of poison from his blood. Already he felt himself calmer in her
presence than he had learned to be in the thought of her. Her assumptions
and elisions, her short-cuts and long DETOURS, the skill with which she
contrived to meet him at a point from which no inconvenient glimpses of
the past were visible, suggested what opportunities she had had for
practising such arts since their last meeting. He felt that she had at
last arrived at an understanding with herself: had made a pact with her
rebellious impulses, and achieved a uniform system of self-government,
under which all vagrant tendencies were either held captive or forced
into the service of the state.

And he saw other things too in her manner: saw how it had adjusted itself
to the hidden intricacies of a situation in which, even after Mrs.
Fisher's elucidating flashes, he still felt himself agrope. Surely Mrs.
Fisher could no longer charge Miss Bart with neglecting her
opportunities! To Selden's exasperated observation she was only too
completely alive to them. She was "perfect" to every one: subservient to
Bertha's anxious predominance, good-naturedly watchful of Dorset's moods,
brightly companionable to Silverton and Dacey, the latter of whom met her
on an evident footing of old admiration, while young Silverton,
portentously self-absorbed, seemed conscious of her only as of something
vaguely obstructive. And suddenly, as Selden noted the fine shades of
manner by which she harmonized herself with her surroundings, it flashed
on him that, to need such adroit handling, the situation must indeed be
desperate. She was on the edge of something--that was the impression left
with him.  He seemed to see her poised on the brink of a chasm, with one
graceful foot advanced to assert her unconsciousness that the ground was
failing her.

On the Promenade des Anglais, where Ned Silverton hung on him for the
half hour before dinner, he received a deeper impression of the general
insecurity. Silverton was in a mood of Titanic pessimism. How any one
could come to such a damned hole as the Riviera--any one with a grain of
imagination--with the whole Mediterranean to choose from: but then, if
one's estimate of a place depended on the way they broiled a spring
chicken! Gad!  what a study might be made of the tyranny of the
stomach--the way a sluggish liver or insufficient gastric juices might
affect the whole course of the universe, overshadow everything in
reach--chronic dyspepsia ought to be among the "statutory causes"; a
woman's life might be ruined by a man's inability to digest fresh bread.
Grotesque? Yes--and tragic--like most absurdities. There's nothing
grimmer than the tragedy that wears a comic mask.... Where was he?
Oh--the reason they chucked Sicily and rushed back? Well--partly, no
doubt, Miss Bart's desire to get back to bridge and smartness. Dead as a
stone to art and poetry--the light never WAS on sea or land for her! And
of course she persuaded Dorset that the Italian food was bad for him. Oh,
she could make him believe anything--ANYTHING! Mrs. Dorset was aware of
it--oh, perfectly: nothing SHE didn't see! But she could hold her
tongue--she'd had to, often enough. Miss Bart was an intimate friend--she
wouldn't hear a word against her. Only it hurts a woman's pride--there
are some things one doesn't get used to . . . All this in confidence, of
course? Ah--and there were the ladies signalling from the balcony of the
hotel.... He plunged across the Promenade, leaving Selden to a meditative
cigar.

The conclusions it led him to were fortified, later in the evening, by
some of those faint corroborative hints that generate a light of their
own in the dusk of a doubting mind. Selden, stumbling on a chance
acquaintance, had dined with him, and adjourned, still in his company, to
the brightly lit Promenade, where a line of crowded stands commanded the
glittering darkness of the waters. The night was soft and persuasive.
Overhead hung a summer sky furrowed with the rush of rockets; and from
the east a late moon, pushing up beyond the lofty bend of the coast, sent
across the bay a shaft of brightness which paled to ashes in the red
glitter of the illuminated boats. Down the lantern-hung Promenade,
snatches of band-music floated above the hum of the crowd and the soft
tossing of boughs in dusky gardens; and between these gardens and the
backs of the stands there flowed a stream of people in whom the
vociferous carnival mood seemed tempered by the growing languor of the
season.

Selden and his companion, unable to get seats on one of the stands facing
the bay, had wandered for a while with the throng, and then found a point
of vantage on a high garden-parapet above the Promenade.  Thence they
caught but a triangular glimpse of the water, and of the flashing play of
boats across its surface; but the crowd in the street was under their
immediate view, and seemed to Selden, on the whole, of more interest than
the show itself. After a while, however, he wearied of his perch and,
dropping alone to the pavement, pushed his way to the first corner and
turned into the moonlit silence of a side street. Long garden-walls
overhung by trees made a dark boundary to the pavement; an empty cab
trailed along the deserted thoroughfare, and presently Selden saw two
persons emerge from the opposite shadows, signal to the cab, and drive
off in it toward the centre of the town. The moonlight touched them as
they paused to enter the carriage, and he recognized Mrs. Dorset and
young Silverton.

Beneath the nearest lamp-post he glanced at his watch and saw that the
time was close on eleven. He took another cross street, and without
breasting the throng on the Promenade, made his way to the fashionable
club which overlooks that thoroughfare. Here, amid the blaze of crowded
baccarat tables, he caught sight of Lord Hubert Dacey, seated with his
habitual worn smile behind a rapidly dwindling heap of gold. The heap
being in due course wiped out, Lord Hubert rose with a shrug, and joining
Selden, adjourned with him to the deserted terrace of the club.  It was
now past midnight, and the throng on the stands was dispersing, while the
long trails of red-lit boats scattered and faded beneath a sky
repossessed by the tranquil splendour of the moon.

Lord Hubert looked at his watch. "By Jove, I promised to join the Duchess
for supper at the LONDON HOUSE; but it's past twelve, and I suppose
they've all scattered. The fact is, I lost them in the crowd soon after
dinner, and took refuge here, for my sins. They had seats on one of the
stands, but of course they couldn't stop quiet: the Duchess never can.
She and Miss Bart went off in quest of what they call adventures--gad, it
ain't their fault if they don't have some queer ones!" He added
tentatively, after pausing to grope for a cigarette: "Miss Bart's an old
friend of yours, I believe? So she told me.--Ah, thanks--I don't seem to
have one left." He lit Selden's proffered cigarette, and continued, in
his high-pitched drawling tone: "None of my business, of course, but I
didn't introduce her to the Duchess.  Charming woman, the Duchess, you
understand; and a very good friend of mine; but RATHER a liberal
education."

Selden received this in silence, and after a few puffs Lord Hubert broke
out again: "Sort of thing one can't communicate to the young lady--though
young ladies nowadays are so competent to judge for themselves; but in
this case--I'm an old friend too, you know . . . and there seemed no one
else to speak to. The whole situation's a little mixed, as I see it--but
there used to be an aunt somewhere, a diffuse and innocent person, who
was great at bridging over chasms she didn't see . . . Ah, in New York,
is she? Pity New York's such a long way off!"

 The chapter opens with Selden in Monte Carlo. He is accompanying the Stepneys, the Brys, Lord Hubert Dacey, and Carry. Selden is informed that Lily is also in Europe, where she is vacationing with the Dorsets, and that she has been causing a mild sensation. Carry tells Selden that Lily appears 10 years younger, and that she has become a favorite companion of the Crown Princess of Macedonia. These revelations awaken Selden's hurt feelings over Lily, which surprises him as he believed he had recovered from his feelings of unrequited affection. Carry and Selden go for a walk together, and she tells Selden that Lily once had prospects to marry a rich Italian prince during a visit to Europe five years earlier. She reveals that marriage documents were being prepared between the prince and Mrs. Peniston when Lily began flirting with the prince's stepson. Carry further gossips that Lily's current visit to Europe was prompted by Bertha's desire to have Lily distract Dorset while Bertha carried on a flirtation with Ned Silverton. Shocked and dismayed by the candid nature of the conversation, Selden excuses himself. Upon catching the train back to Nice, Selden reemphasizes his resolve to avoid contact with Lily. As he boards the train, however, he is confronted by Lily, who is accompanying the Dorsets, Silverton, and Dacey to Nice in order to dine with the Duchess of Beltshire. He notices that Carry's assessment that Lily's beauty had blossomed while in Europe is correct. In Nice, Silverton tells Selden that the trip to Nice was prompted by Lily's manipulation of Dorset. This manipulation, he tells Selden, was performed in open view of Bertha, who refused to hear any ill words against Lily. Silverton confides to Selden, however, that such actions could not help but injure Bertha's pride. In the meantime, Bertha's flirtation with Silverton reaches its apex when Selden observes the pair hailing a carriage for what the reader can assume will be a romantic tryst.

