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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes, I had," said Lily confidingly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Why limited? Limited by luncheon?"

"No; by my other engagement."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 It's Sunday at Bellomont. As per routine, a little omnibus comes around and picks up the church-goers to bring them down the road for the service a mile away. Lily decides this is the morning to officially seal the deal with Gryce. She's been playing the part of the wholesome little angel, and she figures that when Percy sees her head bent reverently towards her prayer book he'll just be overcome with the desire to propose. After church, they'll take a walk together around the estate, and he'll pop the question. But, when the omnibus comes around, Percy waits anxiously for Miss Bart to join them; she never shows. He departs without her. So...what happened? As it turns out, Lily meant to go to church. And it's likely that all would have gone as planned if Selden had not so inconveniently shown up. Mrs. Trenor assured Lily that she didn't call Selden; he came on his own. She wonders if his thing with Bertha Dorset is still going on, and he actually came to see her. This angers Lily. Even if Selden did come to see Bertha, Lily will make sure she can steal the show. At dinner the Saturday night before, Lily was given the opportunity to directly compare Selden and Gryce. Bad idea. Lily starts wondering why she is suddenly so interested in Selden when she's known him for eight years and has never wanted him before. She decides that what she likes his detachment; Selden is removed from the gilded cage of society, which reminds her that there's a world outside it. She starts viewing her own little world through his eyes. Suddenly, all these rich people look trivial and boring. Mr. Dorset is sitting next to Lily, and down the other end of the table Mrs. Dorset is by Selden. Mr. Dorset is jealous of his wife making a spectacle of herself by being all over Selden, so he makes a joke about it to Lily to cover his insecurities. Then, he chews her ear off all night. Meanwhile, Jack is discussing his upcoming engagement to Gwen Van Osburgh. He jokes about having Simon Rosedale as the best man. Lily freaks out a bit when she hears Rosedale's name. She realizes if, for some reason, she doesn't marry Percy, she may some day have to marry a man like Rosedale. OK, so that was Saturday night. Now, we return to Sunday, the morning Lily was supposed to go to church but didn't. Lily gets up early and was just about ready to go until she realizes that, if she marries Percy, she's going to have to go to church with him every Sunday. So she passes on church. But she does spy out the window and notices that Percy looks very, very disappointed at her absence, so she figures maybe it was a tactical ploy anyway. After all, she's still planning to walk with him later, and maybe he will have missed her so much at church that he'll be even more inspired pop the question. She runs through all the guests at Bellomont and decides that everyone is away and occupied, except Mrs. Dorset, which means she can do whatever she wants for the next few hours. Lily heads for the library. There she finds... Selden and Mrs. Dorset. Of course. Bertha is furious that Lily interrupted their tete-a-tete. Lily first gets Mrs. Dorset to offer to leave Lily alone with Selden, then refuses the offer on the grounds that she's going to walk to church. Which, she does, alone. All the way there, she fumes over what seems to be the inevitable conclusion: Selden came to Bellomont to see Mrs. Dorset, not to see Lily. On the way to church, Lily stops at a scenic little bend in the path, mostly because it's a beautiful location and she feels beautiful, and she figures that if she sits around looking picturesque for half an hour or so, someone will pass by and be struck by the loveliness of it all. But no one comes by, and the opportunity to witness such beauty is lost to the world. Lily continues to church. Shortly after, Selden catches up with her, having walked from Bellomont himself. And we make with the banter. Flirt, flirt; wink, wink; loaded triple entendres - you get the picture. The crowd that actually did go to church now approaches, walking back towards Bellomont now that the service is over. Selden spots Percy and realizes that he is Lily's target. "Now I see why you were getting up your Americana!" he remarks. Just as the church crowd approaches, Selden asks Lily to accompany him on a long afternoon walk.

