Chapter: As became persons of their rising consequence, the Gormers were engaged
in building a country-house on Long Island; and it was a part of Miss
Bart's duty to attend her hostess on frequent visits of inspection to the
new estate. There, while Mrs. Gormer plunged into problems of lighting
and sanitation, Lily had leisure to wander, in the bright autumn air,
along the tree-fringed bay to which the land declined.  Little as she was
addicted to solitude, there had come to be moments when it seemed a
welcome escape from the empty noises of her life. She was weary of being
swept passively along a current of pleasure and business in which she had
no share; weary of seeing other people pursue amusement and squander
money, while she felt herself of no more account among them than an
expensive toy in the hands of a spoiled child.

It was in this frame of mind that, striking back from the shore one
morning into the windings of an unfamiliar lane, she came suddenly upon
the figure of George Dorset. The Dorset place was in the immediate
neighbourhood of the Gormers' newly-acquired estate, and in her
motor-flights thither with Mrs. Gormer, Lily had caught one or two
passing glimpses of the couple; but they moved in so different an orbit
that she had not considered the possibility of a direct encounter.

Dorset, swinging along with bent head, in moody abstraction, did not see
Miss Bart till he was close upon her; but the sight, instead of bringing
him to a halt, as she had half-expected, sent him toward her with an
eagerness which found expression in his opening words.

"Miss Bart!--You'll shake hands, won't you? I've been hoping to meet
you--I should have written to you if I'd dared." His face, with its
tossed red hair and straggling moustache, had a driven uneasy look, as
though life had become an unceasing race between himself and the thoughts
at his heels.

The look drew a word of compassionate greeting from Lily, and he pressed
on, as if encouraged by her tone: "I wanted to apologize--to ask you to
forgive me for the miserable part I played----"

She checked him with a quick gesture. "Don't let us speak of it: I was
very sorry for you," she said, with a tinge of disdain which, as she
instantly perceived, was not lost on him.

He flushed to his haggard eyes, flushed so cruelly that she repented the
thrust. "You might well be; you don't know--you must let me explain. I
was deceived: abominably deceived----"

"I am still more sorry for you, then," she interposed, without irony;
"but you must see that I am not exactly the person with whom the subject
can be discussed."

He met this with a look of genuine wonder. "Why not? Isn't it to you, of
all people, that I owe an explanation----"

"No explanation is necessary: the situation was perfectly clear to me."

"Ah----" he murmured, his head drooping again, and his irresolute hand
switching at the underbrush along the lane. But as Lily made a movement
to pass on, he broke out with fresh vehemence: "Miss Bart, for God's sake
don't turn from me! We used to be good friends--you were always kind to
me--and you don't know how I need a friend now."

The lamentable weakness of the words roused a motion of pity in Lily's
breast. She too needed friends--she had tasted the pang of loneliness;
and her resentment of Bertha Dorset's cruelty softened her heart to the
poor wretch who was after all the chief of Bertha's victims.

"I still wish to be kind; I feel no ill-will toward you," she said.  "But
you must understand that after what has happened we can't be friends
again--we can't see each other."

"Ah, you ARE kind--you're merciful--you always were!" He fixed his
miserable gaze on her. "But why can't we be friends--why not, when I've
repented in dust and ashes? Isn't it hard that you should condemn me to
suffer for the falseness, the treachery of others? I was punished enough
at the time--is there to be no respite for me?"

"I should have thought you had found complete respite in the
reconciliation which was effected at my expense," Lily began, with
renewed impatience; but he broke in imploringly: "Don't put it in that
way--when that's been the worst of my punishment. My God! what could I
do--wasn't I powerless? You were singled out as a sacrifice: any word I
might have said would have been turned against you----"

"I have told you I don't blame you; all I ask you to understand is that,
after the use Bertha chose to make of me--after all that her behaviour
has since implied--it's impossible that you and I should meet."

He continued to stand before her, in his dogged weakness. "Is it--need it
be? Mightn't there be circumstances----?" he checked himself, slashing at
the wayside weeds in a wider radius. Then he began again: "Miss Bart,
listen--give me a minute. If we're not to meet again, at least let me
have a hearing now. You say we can't be friends after--after what has
happened. But can't I at least appeal to your pity? Can't I move you if I
ask you to think of me as a prisoner--a prisoner you alone can set free?"

Lily's inward start betrayed itself in a quick blush: was it possible
that this was really the sense of Carry Fisher's adumbrations?

"I can't see how I can possibly be of any help to you," she murmured,
drawing back a little from the mounting excitement of his look.

Her tone seemed to sober him, as it had so often done in his stormiest
moments. The stubborn lines of his face relaxed, and he said, with an
abrupt drop to docility: "You WOULD see, if you'd be as merciful as you
used to be: and heaven knows I've never needed it more!"

She paused a moment, moved in spite of herself by this reminder of her
influence over him. Her fibres had been softened by suffering, and the
sudden glimpse into his mocked and broken life disarmed her contempt for
his weakness.

"I am very sorry for you--I would help you willingly; but you must have
other friends, other advisers."

"I never had a friend like you," he answered simply. "And besides--can't
you see?--you're the only person"--his voice dropped to a whisper--"the
only person who knows."

Again she felt her colour change; again her heart rose in precipitate
throbs to meet what she felt was coming. He lifted his eyes to her
entreatingly. "You do see, don't you? You understand? I'm desperate--I'm
at the end of my tether. I want to be free, and you can free me. I know
you can. You don't want to keep me bound fast in hell, do you? You can't
want to take such a vengeance as that. You were always kind--your eyes
are kind now. You say you're sorry for me. Well, it rests with you to
show it; and heaven knows there's nothing to keep you back. You
understand, of course--there wouldn't be a hint of publicity--not a sound
or a syllable to connect you with the thing. It would never come to that,
you know: all I need is to be able to say definitely: 'I know this--and
this--and this'--and the fight would drop, and the way be cleared, and
the whole abominable business swept out of sight in a second."

He spoke pantingly, like a tired runner, with breaks of exhaustion
between his words; and through the breaks she caught, as through the
shifting rents of a fog, great golden vistas of peace and safety. For
there was no mistaking the definite intention behind his vague appeal;
she could have filled up the blanks without the help of Mrs. Fisher's
insinuations. Here was a man who turned to her in the extremity of his
loneliness and his humiliation: if she came to him at such a moment he
would be hers with all the force of his deluded faith. And the power to
make him so lay in her hand--lay there in a completeness he could not
even remotely conjecture. Revenge and rehabilitation might be hers at a
stroke--there was something dazzling in the completeness of the
opportunity.

She stood silent, gazing away from him down the autumnal stretch of the
deserted lane. And suddenly fear possessed her--fear of herself, and of
the terrible force of the temptation. All her past weaknesses were like
so many eager accomplices drawing her toward the path their feet had
already smoothed. She turned quickly, and held out her hand to Dorset.

"Goodbye--I'm sorry; there's nothing in the world that I can do."

"Nothing? Ah, don't say that," he cried; "say what's true: that you
abandon me like the others. You, the only creature who could have saved
me!"

"Goodbye--goodbye," she repeated hurriedly; and as she moved away she
heard him cry out on a last note of entreaty: "At least you'll let me see
you once more?"



Lily, on regaining the Gormer grounds, struck rapidly across the lawn
toward the unfinished house, where she fancied that her hostess might be
speculating, not too resignedly, on the cause of her delay; for, like
many unpunctual persons, Mrs. Gormer disliked to be kept waiting.

As Miss Bart reached the avenue, however, she saw a smart phaeton with a
high-stepping pair disappear behind the shrubbery in the direction of the
gate; and on the doorstep stood Mrs. Gormer, with a glow of retrospective
pleasure on her open countenance. At sight of Lily the glow deepened to
an embarrassed red, and she said with a slight laugh: "Did you see my
visitor? Oh, I thought you came back by the avenue. It was Mrs. George
Dorset--she said she'd dropped in to make a neighbourly call."

Lily met the announcement with her usual composure, though her experience
of Bertha's idiosyncrasies would not have led her to include the
neighbourly instinct among them; and Mrs. Gormer, relieved to see that
she gave no sign of surprise, went on with a deprecating laugh: "Of
course what really brought her was curiosity--she made me take her all
over the house. But no one could have been nicer--no airs, you know, and
so good-natured: I can quite see why people think her so fascinating."

This surprising event, coinciding too completely with her meeting with
Dorset to be regarded as contingent upon it, had yet immediately struck
Lily with a vague sense of foreboding. It was not in Bertha's habits to
be neighbourly, much less to make advances to any one outside the
immediate circle of her affinities. She had always consistently ignored
the world of outer aspirants, or had recognized its individual members
only when prompted by motives of self-interest; and the very
capriciousness of her condescensions had, as Lily was aware, given them
special value in the eyes of the persons she distinguished. Lily saw this
now in Mrs. Gormer's unconcealable complacency, and in the happy
irrelevance with which, for the next day or two, she quoted Bertha's
opinions and speculated on the origin of her gown. All the secret
ambitions which Mrs. Gormer's native indolence, and the attitude of her
companions, kept in habitual abeyance, were now germinating afresh in the
glow of Bertha's advances; and whatever the cause of the latter, Lily saw
that, if they were followed up, they were likely to have a disturbing
effect upon her own future.

She had arranged to break the length of her stay with her new friends by
one or two visits to other acquaintances as recent; and on her return
from this somewhat depressing excursion she was immediately conscious
that Mrs. Dorset's influence was still in the air. There had been another
exchange of visits, a tea at a country-club, an encounter at a hunt ball;
there was even a rumour of an approaching dinner, which Mattie Gormer,
with an unnatural effort at discretion, tried to smuggle out of the
conversation whenever Miss Bart took part in it.

The latter had already planned to return to town after a farewell Sunday
with her friends; and, with Gerty Farish's aid, had discovered a small
private hotel where she might establish herself for the winter.  The
hotel being on the edge of a fashionable neighbourhood, the price of the
few square feet she was to occupy was considerably in excess of her
means; but she found a justification for her dislike of poorer quarters
in the argument that, at this particular juncture, it was of the utmost
importance to keep up a show of prosperity. In reality, it was impossible
for her, while she had the means to pay her way for a week ahead, to
lapse into a form of existence like Gerty Farish's. She had never been so
near the brink of insolvency; but she could at least manage to meet her
weekly hotel bill, and having settled the heaviest of her previous debts
out of the money she had received from Trenor, she had a still fair
margin of credit to go upon. The situation, however, was not agreeable
enough to lull her to complete unconsciousness of its insecurity.  Her
rooms, with their cramped outlook down a sallow vista of brick walls and
fire-escapes, her lonely meals in the dark restaurant with its surcharged
ceiling and haunting smell of coffee--all these material discomforts,
which were yet to be accounted as so many privileges soon to be
withdrawn, kept constantly before her the disadvantages of her state; and
her mind reverted the more insistently to Mrs. Fisher's counsels.  Beat
about the question as she would, she knew the outcome of it was that she
must try to marry Rosedale; and in this conviction she was fortified by
an unexpected visit from George Dorset.

She found him, on the first Sunday after her return to town, pacing her
narrow sitting-room to the imminent peril of the few knick-knacks with
which she had tried to disguise its plush exuberances; but the sight of
her seemed to quiet him, and he said meekly that he hadn't come to bother
her--that he asked only to be allowed to sit for half an hour and talk of
anything she liked. In reality, as she knew, he had but one subject:
himself and his wretchedness; and it was the need of her sympathy that
had drawn him back. But he began with a pretence of questioning her about
herself, and as she replied, she saw that, for the first time, a faint
realization of her plight penetrated the dense surface of his
self-absorption. Was it possible that her old beast of an aunt had
actually cut her off? That she was living alone like this because there
was no one else for her to go to, and that she really hadn't more than
enough to keep alive on till the wretched little legacy was paid? The
fibres of sympathy were nearly atrophied in him, but he was suffering so
intensely that he had a faint glimpse of what other sufferings might
mean--and, as she perceived, an almost simultaneous perception of the way
in which her particular misfortunes might serve him.

When at length she dismissed him, on the pretext that she must dress for
dinner, he lingered entreatingly on the threshold to blurt out: "It's
been such a comfort--do say you'll let me see you again--" But to this
direct appeal it was impossible to give an assent; and she said with
friendly decisiveness: "I'm sorry--but you know why I can't."

He coloured to the eyes, pushed the door shut, and stood before her
embarrassed but insistent. "I know how you might, if you would--if things
were different--and it lies with you to make them so. It's just a word to
say, and you put me out of my misery!"

Their eyes met, and for a second she trembled again with the nearness of
the temptation. "You're mistaken; I know nothing; I saw nothing," she
exclaimed, striving, by sheer force of reiteration, to build a barrier
between herself and her peril; and as he turned away, groaning out "You
sacrifice us both," she continued to repeat, as if it were a charm: "I
know nothing--absolutely nothing."



Lily had seen little of Rosedale since her illuminating talk with Mrs.
Fisher, but on the two or three occasions when they had met she was
conscious of having distinctly advanced in his favour.  There could be no
doubt that he admired her as much as ever, and she believed it rested
with herself to raise his admiration to the point where it should bear
down the lingering counsels of expediency. The task was not an easy one;
but neither was it easy, in her long sleepless nights, to face the
thought of what George Dorset was so clearly ready to offer.  Baseness
for baseness, she hated the other least: there were even moments when a
marriage with Rosedale seemed the only honourable solution of her
difficulties. She did not indeed let her imagination range beyond the day
of plighting: after that everything faded into a haze of material
well-being, in which the personality of her benefactor remained
mercifully vague. She had learned, in her long vigils, that there were
certain things not good to think of, certain midnight images that must at
any cost be exorcised--and one of these was the image of herself as
Rosedale's wife.

Carry Fisher, on the strength, as she frankly owned, of the Brys' Newport
success, had taken for the autumn months a small house at Tuxedo; and
thither Lily was bound on the Sunday after Dorset's visit.  Though it was
nearly dinner-time when she arrived, her hostess was still out, and the
firelit quiet of the small silent house descended on her spirit with a
sense of peace and familiarity. It may be doubted if such an emotion had
ever before been evoked by Carry Fisher's surroundings; but, contrasted
to the world in which Lily had lately lived, there was an air of repose
and stability in the very placing of the furniture, and in the quiet
competence of the parlour-maid who led her up to her room. Mrs. Fisher's
unconventionality was, after all, a merely superficial divergence from an
inherited social creed, while the manners of the Gormer circle
represented their first attempt to formulate such a creed for themselves.

It was the first time since her return from Europe that Lily had found
herself in a congenial atmosphere, and the stirring of familiar
associations had almost prepared her, as she descended the stairs before
dinner, to enter upon a group of her old acquaintances. But this
expectation was instantly checked by the reflection that the friends who
remained loyal were precisely those who would be least willing to expose
her to such encounters; and it was hardly with surprise that she found,
instead, Mr. Rosedale kneeling domestically on the drawing-room hearth
before his hostess's little girl.

Rosedale in the paternal role was hardly a figure to soften Lily; yet she
could not but notice a quality of homely goodness in his advances to the
child. They were not, at any rate, the premeditated and perfunctory
endearments of the guest under his hostess's eye, for he and the little
girl had the room to themselves; and something in his attitude made him
seem a simple and kindly being compared to the small critical creature
who endured his homage. Yes, he would be kind--Lily, from the threshold,
had time to feel--kind in his gross, unscrupulous, rapacious way, the way
of the predatory creature with his mate.  She had but a moment in which
to consider whether this glimpse of the fireside man mitigated her
repugnance, or gave it, rather, a more concrete and intimate form; for at
sight of her he was immediately on his feet again, the florid and
dominant Rosedale of Mattie Gormer's drawing-room.

It was no surprise to Lily to find that he had been selected as her only
fellow-guest. Though she and her hostess had not met since the latter's
tentative discussion of her future, Lily knew that the acuteness which
enabled Mrs. Fisher to lay a safe and pleasant course through a world of
antagonistic forces was not infrequently exercised for the benefit of her
friends. It was, in fact, characteristic of Carry that, while she
actively gleaned her own stores from the fields of affluence, her real
sympathies were on the other side--with the unlucky, the unpopular, the
unsuccessful, with all her hungry fellow-toilers in the shorn stubble of
success.

Mrs. Fisher's experience guarded her against the mistake of exposing
Lily, for the first evening, to the unmitigated impression of Rosedale's
personality. Kate Corby and two or three men dropped in to dinner, and
Lily, alive to every detail of her friend's method, saw that such
opportunities as had been contrived for her were to be deferred till she
had, as it were, gained courage to make effectual use of them. She had a
sense of acquiescing in this plan with the passiveness of a sufferer
resigned to the surgeon's touch; and this feeling of almost lethargic
helplessness continued when, after the departure of the guests, Mrs.
Fisher followed her upstairs.

"May I come in and smoke a cigarette over your fire? If we talk in my
room we shall disturb the child." Mrs. Fisher looked about her with the
eye of the solicitous hostess. "I hope you've managed to make yourself
comfortable, dear? Isn't it a jolly little house? It's such a blessing to
have a few quiet weeks with the baby."

Carry, in her rare moments of prosperity, became so expansively maternal
that Miss Bart sometimes wondered whether, if she could ever get time and
money enough, she would not end by devoting them both to her daughter.

"It's a well-earned rest: I'll say that for myself," she continued,
sinking down with a sigh of content on the pillowed lounge near the fire.
"Louisa Bry is a stern task-master: I often used to wish myself back with
the Gormers. Talk of love making people jealous and suspicious--it's
nothing to social ambition!  Louisa used to lie awake at night wondering
whether the women who called on us called on ME because I was with her,
or on HER because she was with me; and she was always laying traps to
find out what I thought. Of course I had to disown my oldest friends,
rather than let her suspect she owed me the chance of making a single
acquaintance--when, all the while, that was what she had me there for,
and what she wrote me a handsome cheque for when the season was over!"

Mrs. Fisher was not a woman who talked of herself without cause, and the
practice of direct speech, far from precluding in her an occasional
resort to circuitous methods, served rather, at crucial moments, the
purpose of the juggler's chatter while he shifts the contents of his
sleeves. Through the haze of her cigarette smoke she continued to gaze
meditatively at Miss Bart, who, having dismissed her maid, sat before the
toilet-table shaking out over her shoulders the loosened undulations of
her hair.

"Your hair's wonderful, Lily. Thinner--? What does that matter, when it's
so light and alive? So many women's worries seem to go straight to their
hair--but yours looks as if there had never been an anxious thought under
it. I never saw you look better than you did this evening. Mattie Gormer
told me that Morpeth wanted to paint you--why don't you let him?"

Miss Bart's immediate answer was to address a critical glance to the
reflection of the countenance under discussion. Then she said, with a
slight touch of irritation: "I don't care to accept a portrait from Paul
Morpeth."

Mrs. Fisher mused. "N--no. And just now, especially--well, he can do you
after you're married." She waited a moment, and then went on: "By the
way, I had a visit from Mattie the other day.  She turned up here last
Sunday--and with Bertha Dorset, of all people in the world!"

She paused again to measure the effect of this announcement on her
hearer, but the brush in Miss Bart's lifted hand maintained its
unwavering stroke from brow to nape.

"I never was more astonished," Mrs. Fisher pursued. "I don't know two
women less predestined to intimacy--from Bertha's standpoint, that is;
for of course poor Mattie thinks it natural enough that she should be
singled out--I've no doubt the rabbit always thinks it is fascinating the
anaconda. Well, you know I've always told you that Mattie secretly longed
to bore herself with the really fashionable; and now that the chance has
come, I see that she's capable of sacrificing all her old friends to it."

Lily laid aside her brush and turned a penetrating glance upon her
friend. "Including ME?" she suggested.

"Ah, my dear," murmured Mrs. Fisher, rising to push back a log from the
hearth.

"That's what Bertha means, isn't it?" Miss Bart went on steadily.  "For
of course she always means something; and before I left Long Island I saw
that she was beginning to lay her toils for Mattie."

Mrs. Fisher sighed evasively. "She has her fast now, at any rate.  To
think of that loud independence of Mattie's being only a subtler form of
snobbishness! Bertha can already make her believe anything she
pleases--and I'm afraid she's begun, my poor child, by insinuating
horrors about you."

Lily flushed under the shadow of her drooping hair. "The world is too
vile," she murmured, averting herself from Mrs. Fisher's anxious scrutiny.

"It's not a pretty place; and the only way to keep a footing in it is to
fight it on its own terms--and above all, my dear, not alone!" Mrs.
Fisher gathered up her floating implications in a resolute grasp.
"You've told me so little that I can only guess what has been happening;
but in the rush we all live in there's no time to keep on hating any one
without a cause, and if Bertha is still nasty enough to want to injure
you with other people it must be because she's still afraid of you. From
her standpoint there's only one reason for being afraid of you; and my
own idea is that, if you want to punish her, you hold the means in your
hand. I believe you can marry George Dorset tomorrow; but if you don't
care for that particular form of retaliation, the only thing to save you
from Bertha is to marry somebody else."

 While visiting the Gormers' country-house on Long Island, Lily goes on a long stroll by herself and bumps into George Dorset. Lily wants nothing to do with George; she says it's inappropriate for them to meet under any circumstances because of the rumors. George tries to apologize for what happened in Monte Carlo, claiming that he, too, was deceived. Lily says she's sorry for whatever happened to him, but, considering that she was sacrificed to save his marriage, she'd rather not jeopardize it now. George explains that he's a prisoner in his own marriage and that only Lily can set him free. He begs her to tell him the truth about Bertha - to testify firmly that she did indeed have an affair. He wants to end their marriage, but he can't until someone reveals with certainty that Bertha cheated on him. Lily is suddenly struck by how great this temptation is . But she refuses to help George. When Lily returns to the house from her walk, Mrs. Gormer reveals that Bertha Dorset stopped by to say hello. This is very odd. Bertha Dorset, the social elite herself, would never stoop to making friends with a person of a lower social standing like Mrs. Gormer unless she had some other agenda. Lily realizes that, if Mrs. Gormer becomes friends with Bertha, she'll have to drop Lily like a hot potato. Lily returns to the city and finds a small hotel to stay in for the winter season. With her finances severely strained, she realizes she has to marry Rosedale - and soon. George Dorset pays Lily another visit, this time in her room at the hotel. He again begs for her to help him escape his marriage, but she again insists that she "know nothing" about Bertha and Ned.

