Chapter: The light projected on the situation by Mrs. Fisher had the cheerless
distinctness of a winter dawn. It outlined the facts with a cold
precision unmodified by shade or colour, and refracted, as it were, from
the blank walls of the surrounding limitations: she had opened windows
from which no sky was ever visible. But the idealist subdued to vulgar
necessities must employ vulgar minds to draw the inferences to which he
cannot stoop; and it was easier for Lily to let Mrs. Fisher formulate her
case than to put it plainly to herself. Once confronted with it, however,
she went the full length of its consequences; and these had never been
more clearly present to her than when, the next afternoon, she set out
for a walk with Rosedale.

It was one of those still November days when the air is haunted with the
light of summer, and something in the lines of the landscape, and in the
golden haze which bathed them, recalled to Miss Bart the September
afternoon when she had climbed the slopes of Bellomont with Selden. The
importunate memory was kept before her by its ironic contrast to her
present situation, since her walk with Selden had represented an
irresistible flight from just such a climax as the present excursion was
designed to bring about. But other memories importuned her also; the
recollection of similar situations, as skillfully led up to, but through
some malice of fortune, or her own unsteadiness of purpose, always
failing of the intended result. Well, her purpose was steady enough now.
She saw that the whole weary work of rehabilitation must begin again, and
against far greater odds, if Bertha Dorset should succeed in breaking up
her friendship with the Gormers; and her longing for shelter and security
was intensified by the passionate desire to triumph over Bertha, as only
wealth and predominance could triumph over her. As the wife of
Rosedale--the Rosedale she felt it in her power to create--she would at
least present an invulnerable front to her enemy.

She had to draw upon this thought, as upon some fiery stimulant, to keep
up her part in the scene toward which Rosedale was too frankly tending.
As she walked beside him, shrinking in every nerve from the way in which
his look and tone made free of her, yet telling herself that this
momentary endurance of his mood was the price she must pay for her
ultimate power over him, she tried to calculate the exact point at which
concession must turn to resistance, and the price HE would have to pay be
made equally clear to him. But his dapper self-confidence seemed
impenetrable to such hints, and she had a sense of something hard and
self-contained behind the superficial warmth of his manner.

They had been seated for some time in the seclusion of a rocky glen above
the lake, when she suddenly cut short the culmination of an impassioned
period by turning upon him the grave loveliness of her gaze.

"I DO believe what you say, Mr. Rosedale," she said quietly; "and I am
ready to marry you whenever you wish."

Rosedale, reddening to the roots of his glossy hair, received this
announcement with a recoil which carried him to his feet, where he halted
before her in an attitude of almost comic discomfiture.

"For I suppose that is what you do wish," she continued, in the same
quiet tone. "And, though I was unable to consent when you spoke to me in
this way before, I am ready, now that I know you so much better, to trust
my happiness to your hands."

She spoke with the noble directness which she could command on such
occasions, and which was like a large steady light thrown across the
tortuous darkness of the situation. In its inconvenient brightness
Rosedale seemed to waver a moment, as though conscious that every avenue
of escape was unpleasantly illuminated.

Then he gave a short laugh, and drew out a gold cigarette-case, in which,
with plump jewelled fingers, he groped for a gold-tipped cigarette.
Selecting one, he paused to contemplate it a moment before saying: "My
dear Miss Lily, I'm sorry if there's been any little misapprehension
between us-but you made me feel my suit was so hopeless that I had really
no intention of renewing it."

Lily's blood tingled with the grossness of the rebuff; but she checked
the first leap of her anger, and said in a tone of gentle dignity: "I
have no one but myself to blame if I gave you the impression that my
decision was final."

Her word-play was always too quick for him, and this reply held him in
puzzled silence while she extended her hand and added, with the faintest
inflection of sadness in her voice: "Before we bid each other goodbye, I
want at least to thank you for having once thought of me as you did."

The touch of her hand, the moving softness of her look, thrilled a
vulnerable fibre in Rosedale. It was her exquisite inaccessibleness, the
sense of distance she could convey without a hint of disdain, that made
it most difficult for him to give her up.

"Why do you talk of saying goodbye? Ain't we going to be good friends all
the same?" he urged, without releasing her hand.

She drew it away quietly. "What is your idea of being good friends?" she
returned with a slight smile. "Making love to me without asking me to
marry you?" Rosedale laughed with a recovered sense of ease.

"Well, that's about the size of it, I suppose. I can't help making love
to you--I don't see how any man could; but I don't mean to ask you to
marry me as long as I can keep out of it."

She continued to smile. "I like your frankness; but I am afraid our
friendship can hardly continue on those terms." She turned away, as
though to mark that its final term had in fact been reached, and he
followed her for a few steps with a baffled sense of her having after all
kept the game in her own hands.

"Miss Lily----" he began impulsively; but she walked on without seeming
to hear him.

He overtook her in a few quick strides, and laid an entreating hand on
her arm. "Miss Lily--don't hurry away like that. You're beastly hard on a
fellow; but if you don't mind speaking the truth I don't see why you
shouldn't allow me to do the same."

She had paused a moment with raised brows, drawing away instinctively
from his touch, though she made no effort to evade his words.

"I was under the impression," she rejoined, "that you had done so without
waiting for my permission."

"Well--why shouldn't you hear my reasons for doing it, then?  We're
neither of us such new hands that a little plain speaking is going to
hurt us. I'm all broken up on you: there's nothing new in that. I'm more
in love with you than I was this time last year; but I've got to face the
fact that the situation is changed."

She continued to confront him with the same air of ironic composure.
"You mean to say that I'm not as desirable a match as you thought me?"

"Yes; that's what I do mean," he answered resolutely. "I won't go into
what's happened. I don't believe the stories about you--I don't WANT to
believe them. But they're there, and my not believing them ain't going to
alter the situation."

She flushed to her temples, but the extremity of her need checked the
retort on her lip and she continued to face him composedly.  "If they are
not true," she said, "doesn't THAT alter the situation?"

He met this with a steady gaze of his small stock-taking eyes, which made
her feel herself no more than some superfine human merchandise. "I
believe it does in novels; but I'm certain it don't in real life. You
know that as well as I do: if we're speaking the truth, let's speak the
whole truth. Last year I was wild to marry you, and you wouldn't look at
me: this year--well, you appear to be willing. Now, what has changed in
the interval?  Your situation, that's all. Then you thought you could do
better; now----"

"You think you can?" broke from her ironically.

"Why, yes, I do: in one way, that is." He stood before her, his hands in
his pockets, his chest sturdily expanded under its vivid waistcoat.
"It's this way, you see: I've had a pretty steady grind of it these last
years, working up my social position.  Think it's funny I should say
that? Why should I mind saying I want to get into society? A man ain't
ashamed to say he wants to own a racing stable or a picture gallery.
Well, a taste for society's just another kind of hobby.  Perhaps I want
to get even with some of the people who cold-shouldered me last year--put
it that way if it sounds better. Anyhow, I want to have the run of the
best houses; and I'm getting it too, little by little. But I know the
quickest way to queer yourself with the right people is to be seen with
the wrong ones; and that's the reason I want to avoid mistakes."

Miss Bart continued to stand before him in a silence that might have
expressed either mockery or a half-reluctant respect for his candour, and
after a moment's pause he went on: "There it is, you see. I'm more in
love with you than ever, but if I married you now I'd queer myself for
good and all, and everything I've worked for all these years would be
wasted."

She received this with a look from which all tinge of resentment had
faded. After the tissue of social falsehoods in which she had so long
moved it was refreshing to step into the open daylight of an avowed
expediency.

"I understand you," she said. "A year ago I should have been of use to
you, and now I should be an encumbrance; and I like you for telling me so
quite honestly." She extended her hand with a smile.

Again the gesture had a disturbing effect upon Mr. Rosedale's
self-command. "By George, you're a dead game sport, you are!" he
exclaimed; and as she began once more to move away, he broke out
suddenly--"Miss Lily--stop. You know I don't believe those stories--I
believe they were all got up by a woman who didn't hesitate to sacrifice
you to her own convenience----"

Lily drew away with a movement of quick disdain: it was easier to endure
his insolence than his commiseration.

"You are very kind; but I don't think we need discuss the matter farther."

But Rosedale's natural imperviousness to hints made it easy for him to
brush such resistance aside. "I don't want to discuss anything; I just
want to put a plain case before you," he persisted.

She paused in spite of herself, held by the note of a new purpose in his
look and tone; and he went on, keeping his eyes firmly upon her: "The
wonder to me is that you've waited so long to get square with that woman,
when you've had the power in your hands." She continued silent under the
rush of astonishment that his words produced, and he moved a step closer
to ask with low-toned directness: "Why don't you use those letters of
hers you bought last year?"

Lily stood speechless under the shock of the interrogation. In the words
preceding it she had conjectured, at most, an allusion to her supposed
influence over George Dorset; nor did the astonishing indelicacy of the
reference diminish the likelihood of Rosedale's resorting to it. But now
she saw how far short of the mark she had fallen; and the surprise of
learning that he had discovered the secret of the letters left her, for
the moment, unconscious of the special use to which he was in the act of
putting his knowledge.

Her temporary loss of self-possession gave him time to press his point;
and he went on quickly, as though to secure completer control of the
situation: "You see I know where you stand--I know how completely she's
in your power. That sounds like stage-talk, don't it?--but there's a lot
of truth in some of those old gags; and I don't suppose you bought those
letters simply because you're collecting autographs."

She continued to look at him with a deepening bewilderment: her only
clear impression resolved itself into a scared sense of his power.

"You're wondering how I found out about 'em?" he went on, answering her
look with a note of conscious pride. "Perhaps you've forgotten that I'm
the owner of the Benedick--but never mind about that now. Getting on to
things is a mighty useful accomplishment in business, and I've simply
extended it to my private affairs. For this IS partly my affair, you
see--at least, it depends on you to make it so. Let's look the situation
straight in the eye. Mrs. Dorset, for reasons we needn't go into, did you
a beastly bad turn last spring. Everybody knows what Mrs. Dorset is, and
her best friends wouldn't believe her on oath where their own interests
were concerned; but as long as they're out of the row it's much easier to
follow her lead than to set themselves against it, and you've simply been
sacrificed to their laziness and selfishness. Isn't that a pretty fair
statement of the case?--Well, some people say you've got the neatest kind
of an answer in your hands: that George Dorset would marry you tomorrow,
if you'd tell him all you know, and give him the chance to show the lady
the door. I daresay he would; but you don't seem to care for that
particular form of getting even, and, taking a purely business view of
the question, I think you're right. In a deal like that, nobody comes out
with perfectly clean hands, and the only way for you to start fresh is to
get Bertha Dorset to back you up, instead of trying to fight her."

He paused long enough to draw breath, but not to give her time for the
expression of her gathering resistance; and as he pressed on, expounding
and elucidating his idea with the directness of the man who has no doubts
of his cause, she found the indignation gradually freezing on her lip,
found herself held fast in the grasp of his argument by the mere cold
strength of its presentation. There was no time now to wonder how he had
heard of her obtaining the letters: all her world was dark outside the
monstrous glare of his scheme for using them. And it was not, after the
first moment, the horror of the idea that held her spell-bound, subdued
to his will; it was rather its subtle affinity to her own inmost
cravings. He would marry her tomorrow if she could regain Bertha Dorset's
friendship; and to induce the open resumption of that friendship, and the
tacit retractation of all that had caused its withdrawal, she had only to
put to the lady the latent menace contained in the packet so miraculously
delivered into her hands. Lily saw in a flash the advantage of this
course over that which poor Dorset had pressed upon her. The other plan
depended for its success on the infliction of an open injury, while this
reduced the transaction to a private understanding, of which no third
person need have the remotest hint. Put by Rosedale in terms of
business-like give-and-take, this understanding took on the harmless air
of a mutual accommodation, like a transfer of property or a revision of
boundary lines. It certainly simplified life to view it as a perpetual
adjustment, a play of party politics, in which every concession had its
recognized equivalent: Lily's tired mind was fascinated by this escape
from fluctuating ethical estimates into a region of concrete weights and
measures.

Rosedale, as she listened, seemed to read in her silence not only a
gradual acquiescence in his plan, but a dangerously far-reaching
perception of the chances it offered; for as she continued to stand
before him without speaking, he broke out, with a quick return upon
himself: "You see how simple it is, don't you? Well, don't be carried
away by the idea that it's TOO simple.  It isn't exactly as if you'd
started in with a clean bill of health. Now we're talking let's call
things by their right names, and clear the whole business up. You know
well enough that Bertha Dorset couldn't have touched you if there hadn't
been--well--questions asked before--little points of interrogation, eh?
Bound to happen to a good-looking girl with stingy relatives, I suppose;
anyhow, they DID happen, and she found the ground prepared for her. Do
you see where I'm coming out? You don't want these little questions
cropping up again.  It's one thing to get Bertha Dorset into line--but
what you want is to keep her there. You can frighten her fast enough--but
how are you going to keep her frightened?  By showing her that you're as
powerful as she is. All the letters in the world won't do that for you as
you are now; but with a big backing behind you, you'll keep her just
where you want her to be. That's MY share in the business--that's what
I'm offering you. You can't put the thing through without me--don't run
away with any idea that you can. In six months you'd be back again among
your old worries, or worse ones; and here I am, ready to lift you out of
'em tomorrow if you say so. DO you say so, Miss Lily?" he added, moving
suddenly nearer.

The words, and the movement which accompanied them, combined to startle
Lily out of the state of tranced subservience into which she had
insensibly slipped. Light comes in devious ways to the groping
consciousness, and it came to her now through the disgusted perception
that her would-be accomplice assumed, as a matter of course, the
likelihood of her distrusting him and perhaps trying to cheat him of his
share of the spoils. This glimpse of his inner mind seemed to present the
whole transaction in a new aspect, and she saw that the essential
baseness of the act lay in its freedom from risk.

She drew back with a quick gesture of rejection, saying, in a voice that
was a surprise to her own ears: "You are mistaken--quite mistaken--both
in the facts and in what you infer from them."

Rosedale stared a moment, puzzled by her sudden dash in a direction so
different from that toward which she had appeared to be letting him guide
her.

"Now what on earth does that mean? I thought we understood each other!"
he exclaimed; and to her murmur of "Ah, we do NOW," he retorted with a
sudden burst of violence: "I suppose it's because the letters are to HIM,
then? Well, I'll be damned if I see what thanks you've got from him!"



The autumn days declined to winter. Once more the leisure world was in
transition between country and town, and Fifth Avenue, still deserted at
the week-end, showed from Monday to Friday a broadening stream of
carriages between house-fronts gradually restored to consciousness.

The Horse Show, some two weeks earlier, had produced a passing semblance
of reanimation, filling the theatres and restaurants with a human display
of the same costly and high-stepping kind as circled daily about its
ring. In Miss Bart's world the Horse Show, and the public it attracted,
had ostensibly come to be classed among the spectacles disdained of the
elect; but, as the feudal lord might sally forth to join in the dance on
his village green, so society, unofficially and incidentally, still
condescended to look in upon the scene. Mrs. Gormer, among the rest, was
not above seizing such an occasion for the display of herself and her
horses; and Lily was given one or two opportunities of appearing at her
friend's side in the most conspicuous box the house afforded. But this
lingering semblance of intimacy made her only the more conscious of a
change in the relation between Mattie and herself, of a dawning
discrimination, a gradually formed social standard, emerging from Mrs.
Gormer's chaotic view of life. It was inevitable that Lily herself should
constitute the first sacrifice to this new ideal, and she knew that, once
the Gormers were established in town, the whole drift of fashionable life
would facilitate Mattie's detachment from her. She had, in short, failed
to make herself indispensable; or rather, her attempt to do so had been
thwarted by an influence stronger than any she could exert. That
influence, in its last analysis, was simply the power of money: Bertha
Dorset's social credit was based on an impregnable bank-account.

Lily knew that Rosedale had overstated neither the difficulty of her own
position nor the completeness of the vindication he offered: once
Bertha's match in material resources, her superior gifts would make it
easy for her to dominate her adversary. An understanding of what such
domination would mean, and of the disadvantages accruing from her
rejection of it, was brought home to Lily with increasing clearness
during the early weeks of the winter. Hitherto, she had kept up a
semblance of movement outside the main flow of the social current; but
with the return to town, and the concentrating of scattered activities,
the mere fact of not slipping back naturally into her old habits of life
marked her as being unmistakably excluded from them. If one were not a
part of the season's fixed routine, one swung unsphered in a void of
social non-existence. Lily, for all her dissatisfied dreaming, had never
really conceived the possibility of revolving about a different centre:
it was easy enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find
any other habitable region. Her sense of irony never quite deserted her,
and she could still note, with self-directed derision, the abnormal value
suddenly acquired by the most tiresome and insignificant details of her
former life. Its very drudgeries had a charm now that she was
involuntarily released from them: card-leaving, note-writing, enforced
civilities to the dull and elderly, and the smiling endurance of tedious
dinners--how pleasantly such obligations would have filled the emptiness
of her days! She did indeed leave cards in plenty; she kept herself, with
a smiling and valiant persistence, well in the eye of her world; nor did
she suffer any of those gross rebuffs which sometimes produce a wholesome
reaction of contempt in their victim. Society did not turn away from her,
it simply drifted by, preoccupied and inattentive, letting her feel, to
the full measure of her humbled pride, how completely she had been the
creature of its favour.

She had rejected Rosedale's suggestion with a promptness of scorn almost
surprising to herself: she had not lost her capacity for high flashes of
indignation. But she could not breathe long on the heights; there had
been nothing in her training to develop any continuity of moral strength:
what she craved, and really felt herself entitled to, was a situation in
which the noblest attitude should also be the easiest. Hitherto her
intermittent impulses of resistance had sufficed to maintain her
self-respect.  If she slipped she recovered her footing, and it was only
afterward that she was aware of having recovered it each time on a
slightly lower level. She had rejected Rosedale's offer without conscious
effort; her whole being had risen against it; and she did not yet
perceive that, by the mere act of listening to him, she had learned to
live with ideas which would once have been intolerable to her.




To Gerty Farish, keeping watch over her with a tenderer if less
discerning eye than Mrs. Fisher's, the results of the struggle were
already distinctly visible. She did not, indeed, know what hostages Lily
had already given to expediency; but she saw her passionately and
irretrievably pledged to the ruinous policy of "keeping up." Gerty could
smile now at her own early dream of her friend's renovation through
adversity: she understood clearly enough that Lily was not of those to
whom privation teaches the unimportance of what they have lost. But this
very fact, to Gerty, made her friend the more piteously in want of aid,
the more exposed to the claims of a tenderness she was so little
conscious of needing.

Lily, since her return to town, had not often climbed Miss Farish's
stairs. There was something irritating to her in the mute interrogation
of Gerty's sympathy: she felt the real difficulties of her situation to
be incommunicable to any one whose theory of values was so different from
her own, and the restrictions of Gerty's life, which had once had the
charm of contrast, now reminded her too painfully of the limits to which
her own existence was shrinking. When at length, one afternoon, she put
into execution the belated resolve to visit her friend, this sense of
shrunken opportunities possessed her with unusual intensity.  The walk up
Fifth Avenue, unfolding before her, in the brilliance of the hard winter
sunlight, an interminable procession of fastidiously-equipped
carriages--giving her, through the little squares of brougham-windows,
peeps of familiar profiles bent above visiting-lists, of hurried hands
dispensing notes and cards to attendant footmen--this glimpse of the
ever-revolving wheels of the great social machine made Lily more than
ever conscious of the steepness and narrowness of Gerty's stairs, and of
the cramped blind alley of life to which they led.  Dull stairs destined
to be mounted by dull people: how many thousands of insignificant figures
were going up and down such stairs all over the world at that very
moment--figures as shabby and uninteresting as that of the middle-aged
lady in limp black who descended Gerty's flight as Lily climbed to it!

"That was poor Miss Jane Silverton--she came to talk things over with me:
she and her sister want to do something to support themselves," Gerty
explained, as Lily followed her into the sitting-room.

"To support themselves? Are they so hard up?" Miss Bart asked with a
touch of irritation: she had not come to listen to the woes of other
people.

"I'm afraid they have nothing left: Ned's debts have swallowed up
everything. They had such hopes, you know, when he broke away from Carry
Fisher; they thought Bertha Dorset would be such a good influence,
because she doesn't care for cards, and--well, she talked quite
beautifully to poor Miss Jane about feeling as if Ned were her younger
brother, and wanting to carry him off on the yacht, so that he might have
a chance to drop cards and racing, and take up his literary work again."

Miss Farish paused with a sigh which reflected the perplexity of her
departing visitor. "But that isn't all; it isn't even the worst. It seems
that Ned has quarrelled with the Dorsets; or at least Bertha won't allow
him to see her, and he is so unhappy about it that he has taken to
gambling again, and going about with all sorts of queer people. And
cousin Grace Van Osburgh accuses him of having had a very bad influence
on Freddy, who left Harvard last spring, and has been a great deal with
Ned ever since. She sent for Miss Jane, and made a dreadful scene; and
Jack Stepney and Herbert Melson, who were there too, told Miss Jane that
Freddy was threatening to marry some dreadful woman to whom Ned had
introduced him, and that they could do nothing with him because now he's
of age he has his own money. You can fancy how poor Miss Jane felt--she
came to me at once, and seemed to think that if I could get her something
to do she could earn enough to pay Ned's debts and send him away--I'm
afraid she has no idea how long it would take her to pay for one of his
evenings at bridge. And he was horribly in debt when he came back from
the cruise--I can't see why he should have spent so much more money under
Bertha's influence than Carry's: can you?"

Lily met this query with an impatient gesture. "My dear Gerty, I always
understand how people can spend much more money--never how they can spend
any less!"

She loosened her furs and settled herself in Gerty's easy-chair, while
her friend busied herself with the tea-cups.

"But what can they do--the Miss Silvertons? How do they mean to support
themselves?" she asked, conscious that the note of irritation still
persisted in her voice. It was the very last topic she had meant to
discuss--it really did not interest her in the least--but she was seized
by a sudden perverse curiosity to know how the two colourless shrinking
victims of young Silverton's sentimental experiments meant to cope with
the grim necessity which lurked so close to her own threshold.

"I don't know--I am trying to find something for them. Miss Jane reads
aloud very nicely--but it's so hard to find any one who is willing to be
read to. And Miss Annie paints a little----"

"Oh, I know--apple-blossoms on blotting-paper; just the kind of thing I
shall be doing myself before long!" exclaimed Lily, starting up with a
vehemence of movement that threatened destruction to Miss Farish's
fragile tea-table.

Lily bent over to steady the cups; then she sank back into her seat.
"I'd forgotten there was no room to dash about in--how beautifully one
does have to behave in a small flat! Oh, Gerty, I wasn't meant to be
good," she sighed out incoherently.

Gerty lifted an apprehensive look to her pale face, in which the eyes
shone with a peculiar sleepless lustre.

"You look horribly tired, Lily; take your tea, and let me give you this
cushion to lean against."

Miss Bart accepted the cup of tea, but put back the cushion with an
impatient hand.

"Don't give me that! I don't want to lean back--I shall go to sleep if I
do."

"Well, why not, dear? I'll be as quiet as a mouse," Gerty urged
affectionately.

"No--no; don't be quiet; talk to me--keep me awake! I don't sleep at
night, and in the afternoon a dreadful drowsiness creeps over me."

"You don't sleep at night? Since when?"

"I don't know--I can't remember." She rose and put the empty cup on the
tea-tray. "Another, and stronger, please; if I don't keep awake now I
shall see horrors tonight--perfect horrors!"

"But they'll be worse if you drink too much tea."

"No, no--give it to me; and don't preach, please," Lily returned
imperiously. Her voice had a dangerous edge, and Gerty noticed that her
hand shook as she held it out to receive the second cup.

"But you look so tired: I'm sure you must be ill----"

Miss Bart set down her cup with a start. "Do I look ill? Does my face
show it?" She rose and walked quickly toward the little mirror above the
writing-table. "What a horrid looking-glass--it's all blotched and
discoloured. Any one would look ghastly in it!" She turned back, fixing
her plaintive eyes on Gerty. "You stupid dear, why do you say such odious
things to me? It's enough to make one ill to be told one looks so! And
looking ill means looking ugly." She caught Gerty's wrists, and drew her
close to the window. "After all, I'd rather know the truth.  Look me
straight in the face, Gerty, and tell me: am I perfectly frightful?"

"You're perfectly beautiful now, Lily: your eyes are shining, and your
cheeks have grown so pink all of a sudden----"

"Ah, they WERE pale, then--ghastly pale, when I came in? Why don't you
tell me frankly that I'm a wreck? My eyes are bright now because I'm so
nervous--but in the mornings they look like lead. And I can see the lines
coming in my face--the lines of worry and disappointment and failure!
Every sleepless night leaves a new one--and how can I sleep, when I have
such dreadful things to think about?"

"Dreadful things--what things?" asked Gerty, gently detaching her wrists
from her friend's feverish fingers.

"What things? Well, poverty, for one--and I don't know any that's more
dreadful." Lily turned away and sank with sudden weariness into the
easy-chair near the tea-table. "You asked me just now if I could
understand why Ned Silverton spent so much money. Of course I
understand--he spends it on living with the rich. You think we live ON
the rich, rather than with them: and so we do, in a sense--but it's a
privilege we have to pay for! We eat their dinners, and drink their wine,
and smoke their cigarettes, and use their carriages and their opera-boxes
and their private cars--yes, but there's a tax to pay on every one of
those luxuries. The man pays it by big tips to the servants, by playing
cards beyond his means, by flowers and presents--and--and--lots of other
things that cost; the girl pays it by tips and cards too--oh, yes, I've
had to take up bridge again--and by going to the best dress-makers, and
having just the right dress for every occasion, and always keeping
herself fresh and exquisite and amusing!"

She leaned back for a moment, closing her eyes, and as she sat there, her
pale lips slightly parted, and the lids dropped above her fagged
brilliant gaze, Gerty had a startled perception of the change in her
face--of the way in which an ashen daylight seemed suddenly to extinguish
its artificial brightness. She looked up, and the vision vanished.

"It doesn't sound very amusing, does it? And it isn't--I'm sick to death
of it! And yet the thought of giving it all up nearly kills me--it's what
keeps me awake at night, and makes me so crazy for your strong tea. For I
can't go on in this way much longer, you know--I'm nearly at the end of
my tether. And then what can I do--how on earth am I to keep myself
alive? I see myself reduced to the fate of that poor Silverton
woman--slinking about to employment agencies, and trying to sell painted
blotting-pads to Women's Exchanges! And there are thousands and thousands
of women trying to do the same thing already, and not one of the number
who has less idea how to earn a dollar than I have!"

She rose again with a hurried glance at the clock. "It's late, and I must
be off--I have an appointment with Carry Fisher. Don't look so worried,
you dear thing--don't think too much about the nonsense I've been
talking." She was before the mirror again, adjusting her hair with a
light hand, drawing down her veil, and giving a dexterous touch to her
furs. "Of course, you know, it hasn't come to the employment agencies and
the painted blotting-pads yet; but I'm rather hard-up just for the
moment, and if I could find something to do--notes to write and
visiting-lists to make up, or that kind of thing--it would tide me over
till the legacy is paid. And Carry has promised to find somebody who
wants a kind of social secretary--you know she makes a specialty of the
helpless rich."




Miss Bart had not revealed to Gerty the full extent of her anxiety. She
was in fact in urgent and immediate need of money: money to meet the
vulgar weekly claims which could neither be deferred nor evaded. To give
up her apartment, and shrink to the obscurity of a boarding-house, or the
provisional hospitality of a bed in Gerty Farish's sitting-room, was an
expedient which could only postpone the problem confronting her; and it
seemed wiser as well as more agreeable to remain where she was and find
some means of earning her living. The possibility of having to do this
was one which she had never before seriously considered, and the
discovery that, as a bread-winner, she was likely to prove as helpless
and ineffectual as poor Miss Silverton, was a severe shock to her
self-confidence.

Having been accustomed to take herself at the popular valuation, as a
person of energy and resource, naturally fitted to dominate any situation
in which she found herself, she vaguely imagined that such gifts would be
of value to seekers after social guidance; but there was unfortunately no
specific head under which the art of saying and doing the right thing
could be offered in the market, and even Mrs. Fisher's resourcefulness
failed before the difficulty of discovering a workable vein in the vague
wealth of Lily's graces. Mrs. Fisher was full of indirect expedients for
enabling her friends to earn a living, and could conscientiously assert
that she had put several opportunities of this kind before Lily; but more
legitimate methods of bread-winning were as much out of her line as they
were beyond the capacity of the sufferers she was generally called upon
to assist. Lily's failure to profit by the chances already afforded her
might, moreover, have justified the abandonment of farther effort on her
behalf; but Mrs. Fisher's inexhaustible good-nature made her an adept at
creating artificial demands in response to an actual supply. In the
pursuance of this end she at once started on a voyage of discovery in
Miss Bart's behalf; and as the result of her explorations she now
summoned the latter with the announcement that she had "found something."




Left to herself, Gerty mused distressfully upon her friend's plight, and
her own inability to relieve it. It was clear to her that Lily, for the
present, had no wish for the kind of help she could give. Miss Farish
could see no hope for her friend but in a life completely reorganized and
detached from its old associations; whereas all Lily's energies were
centred in the determined effort to hold fast to those associations, to
keep herself visibly identified with them, as long as the illusion could
be maintained. Pitiable as such an attitude seemed to Gerty, she could
not judge it as harshly as Selden, for instance, might have done. She had
not forgotten the night of emotion when she and Lily had lain in each
other's arms, and she had seemed to feel her very heart's blood passing
into her friend. The sacrifice she had made had seemed unavailing enough;
no trace remained in Lily of the subduing influences of that hour; but
Gerty's tenderness, disciplined by long years of contact with obscure and
inarticulate suffering, could wait on its object with a silent
forbearance which took no account of time. She could not, however, deny
herself the solace of taking anxious counsel with Lawrence Selden, with
whom, since his return from Europe, she had renewed her old relation of
cousinly confidence.

Selden himself had never been aware of any change in their relation. He
found Gerty as he had left her, simple, undemanding and devoted, but with
a quickened intelligence of the heart which he recognized without seeking
to explain it. To Gerty herself it would once have seemed impossible that
she should ever again talk freely with him of Lily Bart; but what had
passed in the secrecy of her own breast seemed to resolve itself, when
the mist of the struggle cleared, into a breaking down of the bounds of
self, a deflecting of the wasted personal emotion into the general
current of human understanding.

It was not till some two weeks after her visit from Lily that Gerty had
the opportunity of communicating her fears to Selden.  The latter, having
presented himself on a Sunday afternoon, had lingered on through the
dowdy animation of his cousin's tea-hour, conscious of something in her
voice and eye which solicited a word apart; and as soon as the last
visitor was gone Gerty opened her case by asking how lately he had seen
Miss Bart.

Selden's perceptible pause gave her time for a slight stir of surprise.

"I haven't seen her at all--I've perpetually missed seeing her since she
came back."

This unexpected admission made Gerty pause too; and she was still
hesitating on the brink of her subject when he relieved her by adding:
"I've wanted to see her--but she seems to have been absorbed by the
Gormer set since her return from Europe."

"That's all the more reason: she's been very unhappy."

"Unhappy at being with the Gormers?"

"Oh, I don't defend her intimacy with the Gormers; but that too is at an
end now, I think. You know people have been very unkind since Bertha
Dorset quarrelled with her."

"Ah----" Selden exclaimed, rising abruptly to walk to the window, where
he remained with his eyes on the darkening street while his cousin
continued to explain: "Judy Trenor and her own family have deserted her
too--and all because Bertha Dorset has said such horrible things. And she
is very poor--you know Mrs. Peniston cut her off with a small legacy,
after giving her to understand that she was to have everything."

"Yes--I know," Selden assented curtly, turning back into the room, but
only to stir about with restless steps in the circumscribed space between
door and window. "Yes--she's been abominably treated; but it's
unfortunately the precise thing that a man who wants to show his sympathy
can't say to her."

His words caused Gerty a slight chill of disappointment. "There would be
other ways of showing your sympathy," she suggested.

Selden, with a slight laugh, sat down beside her on the little sofa which
projected from the hearth. "What are you thinking of, you incorrigible
missionary?" he asked.

Gerty's colour rose, and her blush was for a moment her only answer.
Then she made it more explicit by saying: "I am thinking of the fact that
you and she used to be great friends--that she used to care immensely for
what you thought of her--and that, if she takes your staying away as a
sign of what you think now, I can imagine its adding a great deal to her
unhappiness."

"My dear child, don't add to it still more--at least to your conception
of it--by attributing to her all sorts of susceptibilities of your own."
Selden, for his life, could not keep a note of dryness out of his voice;
but he met Gerty's look of perplexity by saying more mildly: "But, though
you immensely exaggerate the importance of anything I could do for Miss
Bart, you can't exaggerate my readiness to do it--if you ask me to." He
laid his hand for a moment on hers, and there passed between them, on the
current of the rare contact, one of those exchanges of meaning which fill
the hidden reservoirs of affection.  Gerty had the feeling that he
measured the cost of her request as plainly as she read the significance
of his reply; and the sense of all that was suddenly clear between them
made her next words easier to find.

"I do ask you, then; I ask you because she once told me that you had been
a help to her, and because she needs help now as she has never needed it
before. You know how dependent she has always been on ease and
luxury--how she has hated what was shabby and ugly and uncomfortable. She
can't help it--she was brought up with those ideas, and has never been
able to find her way out of them. But now all the things she cared for
have been taken from her, and the people who taught her to care for them
have abandoned her too; and it seems to me that if some one could reach
out a hand and show her the other side--show her how much is left in life
and in herself----" Gerty broke off, abashed at the sound of her own
eloquence, and impeded by the difficulty of giving precise expression to
her vague yearning for her friend's retrieval. "I can't help her myself:
she's passed out of my reach," she continued. "I think she's afraid of
being a burden to me.  When she was last here, two weeks ago, she seemed
dreadfully worried about her future: she said Carry Fisher was trying to
find something for her to do. A few days later she wrote me that she had
taken a position as private secretary, and that I was not to be anxious,
for everything was all right, and she would come in and tell me about it
when she had time; but she has never come, and I don't like to go to her,
because I am afraid of forcing myself on her when I'm not wanted.  Once,
when we were children, and I had rushed up after a long separation, and
thrown my arms about her, she said: 'Please don't kiss me unless I ask
you to, Gerty'--and she DID ask me, a minute later; but since then I've
always waited to be asked."

Selden had listened in silence, with the concentrated look which his thin
dark face could assume when he wished to guard it against any involuntary
change of expression. When his cousin ended, he said with a slight smile:
"Since you've learned the wisdom of waiting, I don't see why you urge me
to rush in--" but the troubled appeal of her eyes made him add, as he
rose to take leave: "Still, I'll do what you wish, and not hold you
responsible for my failure."

Selden's avoidance of Miss Bart had not been as unintentional as he had
allowed his cousin to think. At first, indeed, while the memory of their
last hour at Monte Carlo still held the full heat of his indignation, he
had anxiously watched for her return; but she had disappointed him by
lingering in England, and when she finally reappeared it happened that
business had called him to the West, whence he came back only to learn
that she was starting for Alaska with the Gormers. The revelation of this
suddenly-established intimacy effectually chilled his desire to see her.
If, at a moment when her whole life seemed to be breaking up, she could
cheerfully commit its reconstruction to the Gormers, there was no reason
why such accidents should ever strike her as irreparable.  Every step she
took seemed in fact to carry her farther from the region where, once or
twice, he and she had met for an illumined moment; and the recognition of
this fact, when its first pang had been surmounted, produced in him a
sense of negative relief. It was much simpler for him to judge Miss Bart
by her habitual conduct than by the rare deviations from it which had
thrown her so disturbingly in his way; and every act of hers which made
the recurrence of such deviations more unlikely, confirmed the sense of
relief with which he returned to the conventional view of her.

But Gerty Farish's words had sufficed to make him see how little this
view was really his, and how impossible it was for him to live quietly
with the thought of Lily Bart. To hear that she was in need of help--even
such vague help as he could offer--was to be at once repossessed by that
thought; and by the time he reached the street he had sufficiently
convinced himself of the urgency of his cousin's appeal to turn his steps
directly toward Lily's hotel.

There his zeal met a check in the unforeseen news that Miss Bart had
moved away; but, on his pressing his enquiries, the clerk remembered that
she had left an address, for which he presently began to search through
his books.

It was certainly strange that she should have taken this step without
letting Gerty Farish know of her decision; and Selden waited with a vague
sense of uneasiness while the address was sought for. The process lasted
long enough for uneasiness to turn to apprehension; but when at length a
slip of paper was handed him, and he read on it: "Care of Mrs. Norma
Hatch, Emporium Hotel," his apprehension passed into an incredulous
stare, and this into the gesture of disgust with which he tore the paper
in two, and turned to walk quickly homeward.

 While still visiting with Carry, Lily goes for a walk with Rosedale. Lily considers her past experiences of setting up courtships that never reach their fulfillment in engagement. She steels herself to not ruin her current opportunity with Rosedale. She tells Rosedale that she will marry him, despite the fact that he has not repeated his proposal. He reveals that he had no intention of repeating the proposal, and she responds that she never meant her initial refusal to seem as if it were a final decision. Rosedale admits his love for Lily, but also confesses that he does not wish to be associated with the scandal surrounding Lily and Dorset. He tells her that he does not believe the stories that he has heard about the affair, but that if he marries her while she is still surrounded with scandal, he will dash all hopes of societal acceptance. Rosedale asks Lily why she hasn't attempted to get even with Bertha, and reveals that he knows she possesses the love letters that Bertha had written to Selden. He suggests that she use the letters to blackmail Bertha into backing Lily's aspirations. Such an action would put Bertha and Lily back on equal footing, and would enable Rosedale to marry Lily. Once they are married, Rosedale reasons, his wealth will protect her further from Bertha's scheming. Lily rejects Rosedale's plan, and he guesses that Lily is attempting to protect Selden, the recipient of the letters. Rosedale reminds Lily that Selden hasn't been much of a friend to her since the incident in France. As Chapter VIII opens, Lily's fears that Bertha is undermining Lily's position with the Gormers are realized. Lily makes an infrequent visit to Gerty, who tells Lily that Silverton has once again taken up gambling and living far beyond his means. He also has been cast away from the Dorsets. Lily confides to Gerty that she hasn't been sleeping well, a condition she attributes to an impoverishment brought on by living with the wealthy. Later, it is revealed that Carry has lined up another position for Lily. Gerty visits Selden and tells him about Lily's predicament. She asks Selden to assist Lily and he consents. He pays a visit to Lily's hotel only to find that she has moved to the posh Emporium Hotel, where she is now working as a secretary for Mrs. Norma Hatch.

