Chapter: The afternoon was perfect. A deeper stillness possessed the air, and the
glitter of the American autumn was tempered by a haze which diffused the
brightness without dulling it.

In the woody hollows of the park there was already a faint chill; but as
the ground rose the air grew lighter, and ascending the long slopes
beyond the high-road, Lily and her companion reached a zone of lingering
summer. The path wound across a meadow with scattered trees; then it
dipped into a lane plumed with asters and purpling sprays of bramble,
whence, through the light quiver of ash-leaves, the country unrolled
itself in pastoral distances.

Higher up, the lane showed thickening tufts of fern and of the creeping
glossy verdure of shaded slopes; trees began to overhang it, and the
shade deepened to the checkered dusk of a beech-grove. The boles of the
trees stood well apart, with only a light feathering of undergrowth; the
path wound along the edge of the wood, now and then looking out on a
sunlit pasture or on an orchard spangled with fruit.

Lily had no real intimacy with nature, but she had a passion for the
appropriate and could be keenly sensitive to a scene which was the
fitting background of her own sensations. The landscape outspread below
her seemed an enlargement of her present mood, and she found something of
herself in its calmness, its breadth, its long free reaches. On the
nearer slopes the sugar-maples wavered like pyres of light; lower down
was a massing of grey orchards, and here and there the lingering green of
an oak-grove.  Two or three red farm-houses dozed under the apple-trees,
and the white wooden spire of a village church showed beyond the shoulder
of the hill; while far below, in a haze of dust, the high-road ran
between the fields.

"Let us sit here," Selden suggested, as they reached an open ledge of
rock above which the beeches rose steeply between mossy boulders.

Lily dropped down on the rock, glowing with her long climb. She sat
quiet, her lips parted by the stress of the ascent, her eyes wandering
peacefully over the broken ranges of the landscape. Selden stretched
himself on the grass at her feet, tilting his hat against the level
sun-rays, and clasping his hands behind his head, which rested against
the side of the rock.  He had no wish to make her talk; her
quick-breathing silence seemed a part of the general hush and harmony of
things. In his own mind there was only a lazy sense of pleasure, veiling
the sharp edges of sensation as the September haze veiled the scene at
their feet. But Lily, though her attitude was as calm as his, was
throbbing inwardly with a rush of thoughts. There were in her at the
moment two beings, one drawing deep breaths of freedom and exhilaration,
the other gasping for air in a little black prison-house of fears. But
gradually the captive's gasps grew fainter, or the other paid less heed
to them: the horizon expanded, the air grew stronger, and the free spirit
quivered for flight.

She could not herself have explained the sense of buoyancy which seemed
to lift and swing her above the sun-suffused world at her feet. Was it
love, she wondered, or a mere fortuitous combination of happy thoughts
and sensations? How much of it was owing to the spell of the perfect
afternoon, the scent of the fading woods, the thought of the dulness she
had fled from? Lily had no definite experience by which to test the
quality of her feelings.  She had several times been in love with
fortunes or careers, but only once with a man. That was years ago, when
she first came out, and had been smitten with a romantic passion for a
young gentleman named Herbert Melson, who had blue eyes and a little wave
in his hair. Mr. Melson, who was possessed of no other negotiable
securities, had hastened to employ these in capturing the eldest Miss Van
Osburgh: since then he had grown stout and wheezy, and was given to
telling anecdotes about his children. If Lily recalled this early emotion
it was not to compare it with that which now possessed her; the only
point of comparison was the sense of lightness, of emancipation, which
she remembered feeling, in the whirl of a waltz or the seclusion of a
conservatory, during the brief course of her youthful romance.  She had
not known again till today that lightness, that glow of freedom; but now
it was something more than a blind groping of the blood. The peculiar
charm of her feeling for Selden was that she understood it; she could put
her finger on every link of the chain that was drawing them together.
Though his popularity was of the quiet kind, felt rather than actively
expressed among his friends, she had never mistaken his inconspicuousness
for obscurity. His reputed cultivation was generally regarded as a slight
obstacle to easy intercourse, but Lily, who prided herself on her
broad-minded recognition of literature, and always carried an Omar Khayam
in her travelling-bag, was attracted by this attribute, which she felt
would have had its distinction in an older society. It was, moreover, one
of his gifts to look his part; to have a height which lifted his head
above the crowd, and the keenly-modelled dark features which, in a land
of amorphous types, gave him the air of belonging to a more specialized
race, of carrying the impress of a concentrated past. Expansive persons
found him a little dry, and very young girls thought him sarcastic; but
this air of friendly aloofness, as far removed as possible from any
assertion of personal advantage, was the quality which piqued Lily's
interest.  Everything about him accorded with the fastidious element in
her taste, even to the light irony with which he surveyed what seemed to
her most sacred. She admired him most of all, perhaps, for being able to
convey as distinct a sense of superiority as the richest man she had ever
met.

It was the unconscious prolongation of this thought which led her to say
presently, with a laugh: "I have broken two engagements for you today.
How many have you broken for me?"

"None," said Selden calmly. "My only engagement at Bellomont was with
you."

She glanced down at him, faintly smiling.

"Did you really come to Bellomont to see me?"

"Of course I did."

Her look deepened meditatively. "Why?" she murmured, with an accent which
took all tinge of coquetry from the question.

"Because you're such a wonderful spectacle: I always like to see what you
are doing."

"How do you know what I should be doing if you were not here?"

Selden smiled. "I don't flatter myself that my coming has deflected your
course of action by a hair's breadth."

"That's absurd--since, if you were not here, I could obviously not be
taking a walk with you."

"No; but your taking a walk with me is only another way of making use of
your material. You are an artist and I happen to be the bit of colour you
are using today. It's a part of your cleverness to be able to produce
premeditated effects extemporaneously."

Lily smiled also: his words were too acute not to strike her sense of
humour. It was true that she meant to use the accident of his presence as
part of a very definite effect; or that, at least, was the secret pretext
she had found for breaking her promise to walk with Mr. Gryce.  She had
sometimes been accused of being too eager--even Judy Trenor had warned
her to go slowly.  Well, she would not be too eager in this case; she
would give her suitor a longer taste of suspense. Where duty and
inclination jumped together, it was not in Lily's nature to hold them
asunder. She had excused herself from the walk on the plea of a headache:
the horrid headache which, in the morning, had prevented her venturing to
church. Her appearance at luncheon justified the excuse.  She looked
languid, full of a suffering sweetness; she carried a scent-bottle in her
hand. Mr. Gryce was new to such manifestations; he wondered rather
nervously if she were delicate, having far-reaching fears about the
future of his progeny. But sympathy won the day, and he besought her not
to expose herself: he always connected the outer air with ideas of
exposure.

Lily had received his sympathy with languid gratitude, urging him, since
she should be such poor company, to join the rest of the party who, after
luncheon, were starting in automobiles on a visit to the Van Osburghs at
Peekskill. Mr. Gryce was touched by her disinterestedness, and, to escape
from the threatened vacuity of the afternoon, had taken her advice and
departed mournfully, in a dust-hood and goggles: as the motor-car plunged
down the avenue she smiled at his resemblance to a baffled beetle. Selden
had watched her manoeuvres with lazy amusement.  She had made no reply to
his suggestion that they should spend the afternoon together, but as her
plan unfolded itself he felt fairly confident of being included in it.
The house was empty when at length he heard her step on the stair and
strolled out of the billiard-room to join her.

She had on a hat and walking-dress, and the dogs were bounding at her
feet.

"I thought, after all, the air might do me good," she explained; and he
agreed that so simple a remedy was worth trying.

The excursionists would be gone at least four hours; Lily and Selden had
the whole afternoon before them, and the sense of leisure and safety gave
the last touch of lightness to her spirit. With so much time to talk, and
no definite object to be led up to, she could taste the rare joys of
mental vagrancy.

She felt so free from ulterior motives that she took up his charge with a
touch of resentment.

"I don't know," she said, "why you are always accusing me of
premeditation."

"I thought you confessed to it: you told me the other day that you had to
follow a certain line--and if one does a thing at all it is a merit to do
it thoroughly."

"If you mean that a girl who has no one to think for her is obliged to
think for herself, I am quite willing to accept the imputation. But you
must find me a dismal kind of person if you suppose that I never yield to
an impulse."

"Ah, but I don't suppose that: haven't I told you that your genius lies
in converting impulses into intentions?"

"My genius?" she echoed with a sudden note of weariness. "Is there any
final test of genius but success? And I certainly haven't succeeded."

Selden pushed his hat back and took a side-glance at her.  "Success--what
is success? I shall be interested to have your definition."

"Success?" She hesitated. "Why, to get as much as one can out of life, I
suppose. It's a relative quality, after all. Isn't that your idea of it?"

"My idea of it? God forbid!" He sat up with sudden energy, resting his
elbows on his knees and staring out upon the mellow fields. "My idea of
success," he said, "is personal freedom."

"Freedom? Freedom from worries?"

"From everything--from money, from poverty, from ease and anxiety, from
all the material accidents. To keep a kind of republic of the
spirit--that's what I call success."

She leaned forward with a responsive flash. "I know--I know--it's
strange; but that's just what I've been feeling today."

He met her eyes with the latent sweetness of his. "Is the feeling so rare
with you?" he said.

She blushed a little under his gaze. "You think me horribly sordid, don't
you? But perhaps it's rather that I never had any choice. There was no
one, I mean, to tell me about the republic of the spirit."

"There never is--it's a country one has to find the way to one's self."

"But I should never have found my way there if you hadn't told me."

"Ah, there are sign-posts--but one has to know how to read them."

"Well, I have known, I have known!" she cried with a glow of eagerness.
"Whenever I see you, I find myself spelling out a letter of the sign--and
yesterday--last evening at dinner--I suddenly saw a little way into your
republic."

Selden was still looking at her, but with a changed eye. Hitherto he had
found, in her presence and her talk, the aesthetic amusement which a
reflective man is apt to seek in desultory intercourse with pretty women.
His attitude had been one of admiring spectatorship, and he would have
been almost sorry to detect in her any emotional weakness which should
interfere with the fulfilment of her aims. But now the hint of this
weakness had become the most interesting thing about her.  He had come on
her that morning in a moment of disarray; her face had been pale and
altered, and the diminution of her beauty had lent her a poignant charm.
THAT IS HOW SHE LOOKS WHEN SHE IS ALONE! had been his first thought; and
the second was to note in her the change which his coming produced. It
was the danger-point of their intercourse that he could not doubt the
spontaneity of her liking. From whatever angle he viewed their dawning
intimacy, he could not see it as part of her scheme of life; and to be
the unforeseen element in a career so accurately planned was stimulating
even to a man who had renounced sentimental experiments.

"Well," he said, "did it make you want to see more? Are you going to
become one of us?"

He had drawn out his cigarettes as he spoke, and she reached her hand
toward the case.

"Oh, do give me one--I haven't smoked for days!"

"Why such unnatural abstinence? Everybody smokes at Bellomont."

"Yes--but it is not considered becoming in a JEUNE FILLE A MARIER; and at
the present moment I am a JEUNE FILLE A MARIER."

"Ah, then I'm afraid we can't let you into the republic."

"Why not? Is it a celibate order?"

"Not in the least, though I'm bound to say there are not many married
people in it. But you will marry some one very rich, and it's as hard for
rich people to get into as the kingdom of heaven."

"That's unjust, I think, because, as I understand it, one of the
conditions of citizenship is not to think too much about money, and the
only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it."

"You might as well say that the only way not to think about air is to
have enough to breathe. That is true enough in a sense; but your lungs
are thinking about the air, if you are not. And so it is with your rich
people--they may not be thinking of money, but they're breathing it all
the while; take them into another element and see how they squirm and
gasp!"

Lily sat gazing absently through the blue rings of her cigarette-smoke.

"It seems to me," she said at length, "that you spend a good deal of your
time in the element you disapprove of."

Selden received this thrust without discomposure. "Yes; but I have tried
to remain amphibious: it's all right as long as one's lungs can work in
another air. The real alchemy consists in being able to turn gold back
again into something else; and that's the secret that most of your
friends have lost."

Lily mused. "Don't you think," she rejoined after a moment, "that the
people who find fault with society are too apt to regard it as an end and
not a means, just as the people who despise money speak as if its only
use were to be kept in bags and gloated over? Isn't it fairer to look at
them both as opportunities, which may be used either stupidly or
intelligently, according to the capacity of the user?"

"That is certainly the sane view; but the queer thing about society is
that the people who regard it as an end are those who are in it, and not
the critics on the fence. It's just the other way with most shows--the
audience may be under the illusion, but the actors know that real life is
on the other side of the footlights. The people who take society as an
escape from work are putting it to its proper use; but when it becomes
the thing worked for it distorts all the relations of life." Selden
raised himself on his elbow. "Good heavens!" he went on, "I don't
underrate the decorative side of life. It seems to me the sense of
splendour has justified itself by what it has produced. The worst of it
is that so much human nature is used up in the process. If we're all the
raw stuff of the cosmic effects, one would rather be the fire that
tempers a sword than the fish that dyes a purple cloak. And a society
like ours wastes such good material in producing its little patch of
purple! Look at a boy like Ned Silverton--he's really too good to be used
to refurbish anybody's social shabbiness. There's a lad just setting out
to discover the universe: isn't it a pity he should end by finding it in
Mrs. Fisher's drawing-room?"

"Ned is a dear boy, and I hope he will keep his illusions long enough to
write some nice poetry about them; but do you think it is only in society
that he is likely to lose them?"

Selden answered her with a shrug. "Why do we call all our generous ideas
illusions, and the mean ones truths? Isn't it a sufficient condemnation
of society to find one's self accepting such phraseology?  I very nearly
acquired the jargon at Silverton's age, and I know how names can alter
the colour of beliefs."

She had never heard him speak with such energy of affirmation.  His
habitual touch was that of the eclectic, who lightly turns over and
compares; and she was moved by this sudden glimpse into the laboratory
where his faiths were formed.

"Ah, you are as bad as the other sectarians," she exclaimed; "why do you
call your republic a republic? It is a closed corporation, and you create
arbitrary objections in order to keep people out."

"It is not MY republic; if it were, I should have a COUP D'ETAT and seat
you on the throne."

"Whereas, in reality, you think I can never even get my foot across the
threshold? Oh, I understand what you mean. You despise my ambitions--you
think them unworthy of me!"

Selden smiled, but not ironically. "Well, isn't that a tribute? I think
them quite worthy of most of the people who live by them."

She had turned to gaze on him gravely. "But isn't it possible that, if I
had the opportunities of these people, I might make a better use of them?
Money stands for all kinds of things--its purchasing quality isn't
limited to diamonds and motor-cars."


"Not in the least: you might expiate your enjoyment of them by founding a
hospital."

"But if you think they are what I should really enjoy, you must think my
ambitions are good enough for me."

Selden met this appeal with a laugh. "Ah, my dear Miss Bart, I am not
divine Providence, to guarantee your enjoying the things you are trying
to get!"

"Then the best you can say for me is, that after struggling to get them I
probably shan't like them?" She drew a deep breath.  "What a miserable
future you foresee for me!"

"Well--have you never foreseen it for yourself?" The slow colour rose to
her cheek, not a blush of excitement but drawn from the deep wells of
feeling; it was as if the effort of her spirit had produced it.

"Often and often," she said. "But it looks so much darker when you show
it to me!"

He made no answer to this exclamation, and for a while they sat silent,
while something throbbed between them in the wide quiet of the air.

But suddenly she turned on him with a kind of vehemence. "Why do you do
this to me?" she cried. "Why do you make the things I have chosen seem
hateful to me, if you have nothing to give me instead?"

The words roused Selden from the musing fit into which he had fallen.  He
himself did not know why he had led their talk along such lines; it was
the last use he would have imagined himself making of an afternoon's
solitude with Miss Bart. But it was one of those moments when neither
seemed to speak deliberately, when an indwelling voice in each called to
the other across unsounded depths of feeling.

"No, I have nothing to give you instead," he said, sitting up and turning
so that he faced her. "If I had, it should be yours, you know."

She received this abrupt declaration in a way even stranger than the
manner of its making: she dropped her face on her hands and he saw that
for a moment she wept.

It was for a moment only, however; for when he leaned nearer and drew
down her hands with a gesture less passionate than grave, she turned on
him a face softened but not disfigured by emotion, and he said to
himself, somewhat cruelly, that even her weeping was an art.

The reflection steadied his voice as he asked, between pity and irony:
"Isn't it natural that I should try to belittle all the things I can't
offer you?"

Her face brightened at this, but she drew her hand away, not with a
gesture of coquetry, but as though renouncing something to which she had
no claim.

"But you belittle ME, don't you," she returned gently, "in being so sure
they are the only things I care for?"

Selden felt an inner start; but it was only the last quiver of his
egoism. Almost at once he answered quite simply: "But you do care for
them, don't you? And no wishing of mine can alter that."

He had so completely ceased to consider how far this might carry him,
that he had a distinct sense of disappointment when she turned on him a
face sparkling with derision.

"Ah," she cried, "for all your fine phrases you're really as great a
coward as I am, for you wouldn't have made one of them if you hadn't been
so sure of my answer."

The shock of this retort had the effect of crystallizing Selden's
wavering intentions.

"I am not so sure of your answer," he said quietly. "And I do you the
justice to believe that you are not either."

It was her turn to look at him with surprise; and after a moment--"Do you
want to marry me?" she asked.

He broke into a laugh. "No, I don't want to--but perhaps I should if you
did!"

"That's what I told you--you're so sure of me that you can amuse yourself
with experiments." She drew back the hand he had regained, and sat
looking down on him sadly.

"I am not making experiments," he returned. "Or if I am, it is not on you
but on myself. I don't know what effect they are going to have on me--but
if marrying you is one of them, I will take the risk."

She smiled faintly. "It would be a great risk, certainly--I have never
concealed from you how great."

"Ah, it's you who are the coward!" he exclaimed.

She had risen, and he stood facing her with his eyes on hers. The soft
isolation of the falling day enveloped them: they seemed lifted into a
finer air. All the exquisite influences of the hour trembled in their
veins, and drew them to each other as the loosened leaves were drawn to
the earth.

"It's you who are the coward," he repeated, catching her hands in his.

She leaned on him for a moment, as if with a drop of tired wings: he felt
as though her heart were beating rather with the stress of a long flight
than the thrill of new distances. Then, drawing back with a little smile
of warning--"I shall look hideous in dowdy clothes; but I can trim my own
hats," she declared.

They stood silent for a while after this, smiling at each other like
adventurous children who have climbed to a forbidden height from which
they discover a new world. The actual world at their feet was veiling
itself in dimness, and across the valley a clear moon rose in the denser
blue.

Suddenly they heard a remote sound, like the hum of a giant insect, and
following the high-road, which wound whiter through the surrounding
twilight, a black object rushed across their vision.

Lily started from her attitude of absorption; her smile faded and she
began to move toward the lane.

"I had no idea it was so late! We shall not be back till after dark," she
said, almost impatiently.

Selden was looking at her with surprise: it took him a moment to regain
his usual view of her; then he said, with an uncontrollable note of
dryness: "That was not one of our party; the motor was going the other
way."

"I know--I know----" She paused, and he saw her redden through the
twilight. "But I told them I was not well--that I should not go out.  Let
us go down!" she murmured.

Selden continued to look at her; then he drew his cigarette-case from his
pocket and slowly lit a cigarette. It seemed to him necessary, at that
moment, to proclaim, by some habitual gesture of this sort, his recovered
hold on the actual: he had an almost puerile wish to let his companion
see that, their flight over, he had landed on his feet.

She waited while the spark flickered under his curved palm; then he held
out the cigarettes to her.

She took one with an unsteady hand, and putting it to her lips, leaned
forward to draw her light from his. In the indistinctness the little red
gleam lit up the lower part of her face, and he saw her mouth tremble
into a smile.

"Were you serious?" she asked, with an odd thrill of gaiety which she
might have caught up, in haste, from a heap of stock inflections, without
having time to select the just note.  Selden's voice was under better
control. "Why not?" he returned.  "You see I took no risks in being so."
And as she continued to stand before him, a little pale under the retort,
he added quickly: "Let us go down."

 Lily is taking a walk around Bellomont with Selden. Lily is conflicted; she feels excited at "escaping" the gilded cage of society with Selden, but she also feels scared at the risk of losing Percy. She wonders briefly if she feels love for Selden. She's only been in love once before, with a man named Herbert Melson, who ended up marrying one of the Van Osburgh daughters. Lily muses on what it is about Selden she likes so much. She believes he acts as though he's part of a superior race - even more so than the richest men she knows. Selden admits to Lily that he came to Bellomont to see her, not Mrs. Dorset. He says Lily is a "wonderful spectacle" and he wanted to see what she was up to. He also calls Lily out on her manipulative abilities. He thinks she's probably using him somehow to get to Percy - not that it bothers him. Lily admits to herself that this is about right - she doesn't want to seem over-eager with Percy, anyway. They banter some more, this time about the definition of success. Lily says it is to get as much out of life as one can. Selden disagrees; he thinks success is personal freedom. Lily admits she only knows personal freedom around Selden. This lament hits home for Selden; he realizes that Lily has a weakness, and that makes her more interesting to him . Selden tells Lily that she'll have a hard time finding personal freedom after she marries a rich man. Lily counters that Selden sure spends a lot of time hanging around the socialite people he claims to despise. This is true, he says, but he considers himself amphibious - he can live in her world, but he can breathe in another environment as well. After they talk some more about marriage and society, Lily concludes that her future is rather miserable, and that it looks even worse when she sees it through Selden's eyes. She particularly resents that he condemns her life choices without offering her any alternatives. Selden admits that, no, he has nothing to offer her as an alternative - but if he did, he would give it to her. Lily cries a bit and he tries to comfort her. She asks if he wants to marry her; he says no, but if she did, then he would. Then, they go back and forth calling each other cowards. Basically, they both know that if Lily did marry Selden she couldn't maintain her current lifestyle. Lily says that she would look hideous in the "dowdy clothes" she would have to wear as a woman of limited means, but that at least she knows how to trim her own hats. This light note effectively ends the conversation, and the couple heads back to the house.

