Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
CHAPTER 1
Selden paused in surprise. In the afternoon rush of the Grand Central
Station his eyes had been refreshed by the sight of Miss Lily Bart.
It was a Monday in early September, and he was returning to his work from a hurried
dip into the country; but what was Miss Bart doing in town at that season?
If she had appeared to be catching a train, he might have inferred that he had come on
her in the act of transition between one and another of the country-houses which
disputed her presence after the close of
the Newport season; but her desultory air perplexed him.
She stood apart from the crowd, letting it drift by her to the platform or the street,
and wearing an air of irresolution which might, as he surmised, be the mask of a
very definite purpose.
It struck him at once that she was waiting for some one, but he hardly knew why the
idea arrested him.
There was nothing new about Lily Bart, yet he could never see her without a faint
movement of interest: it was characteristic of her that she always roused speculation,
that her simplest acts seemed the result of far-reaching intentions.
An impulse of curiosity made him turn out of his direct line to the door, and stroll
past her.
He knew that if she did not wish to be seen she would contrive to elude him; and it
amused him to think of putting her skill to the test.
"Mr. Selden--what good luck!"
She came forward smiling, eager almost, in her resolve to intercept him.
One or two persons, in brushing past them, lingered to look; for Miss Bart was a
figure to arrest even the suburban traveller rushing to his last train.
Selden had never seen her more radiant.
Her vivid head, relieved against the dull tints of the crowd, made her more
conspicuous than in a ball-room, and under her dark hat and veil she regained the
girlish smoothness, the purity of tint,
that she was beginning to lose after eleven years of late hours and indefatigable
dancing.
Was it really eleven years, Selden found himself wondering, and had she indeed
reached the nine-and-twentieth birthday with which her rivals credited her?
"What luck!" she repeated.
"How nice of you to come to my rescue!" He responded joyfully that to do so was his
mission in life, and asked what form the rescue was to take.
"Oh, almost any--even to sitting on a bench and talking to me.
One sits out a cotillion--why not sit out a train?
It isn't a bit hotter here than in Mrs. Van Osburgh's conservatory--and some of the
women are not a bit uglier."
She broke off, laughing, to explain that she had come up to town from Tuxedo, on her
way to the Gus Trenors' at Bellomont, and had missed the three-fifteen train to
Rhinebeck.
"And there isn't another till half-past five."
She consulted the little jewelled watch among her laces.
"Just two hours to wait.
And I don't know what to do with myself.
My maid came up this morning to do some shopping for me, and was to go on to
Bellomont at one o'clock, and my aunt's house is closed, and I don't know a soul in
town."
She glanced plaintively about the station. "It IS hotter than Mrs. Van Osburgh's,
after all. If you can spare the time, do take me
somewhere for a breath of air."
He declared himself entirely at her disposal: the adventure struck him as
diverting.
As a spectator, he had always enjoyed Lily Bart; and his course lay so far out of her
orbit that it amused him to be drawn for a moment into the sudden intimacy which her
proposal implied.
"Shall we go over to Sherry's for a cup of tea?"
She smiled assentingly, and then made a slight grimace.
"So many people come up to town on a Monday--one is sure to meet a lot of bores.
I'm as old as the hills, of course, and it ought not to make any difference; but if
I'M old enough, you're not," she objected gaily.
"I'm dying for tea--but isn't there a quieter place?"
He answered her smile, which rested on him vividly.
Her discretions interested him almost as much as her imprudences: he was so sure
that both were part of the same carefully- elaborated plan.
In judging Miss Bart, he had always made use of the "argument from design."
"The resources of New York are rather meagre," he said; "but I'll find a hansom
first, and then we'll invent something."
He led her through the throng of returning holiday-makers, past sallow-faced girls in
preposterous hats, and flat-chested women struggling with paper bundles and palm-leaf
fans.
Was it possible that she belonged to the same race?
The dinginess, the crudity of this average section of womanhood made him feel how
highly specialized she was.
A rapid shower had cooled the air, and clouds still hung refreshingly over the
moist street. "How delicious!
Let us walk a little," she said as they emerged from the station.
They turned into Madison Avenue and began to stroll northward.
As she moved beside him, with her long light step, Selden was conscious of taking
a luxurious pleasure in her nearness: in the modelling of her little ear, the crisp
upward wave of her hair--was it ever so
slightly brightened by art?--and the thick planting of her straight black lashes.
Everything about her was at once vigorous and exquisite, at once strong and fine.
He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great
many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to
produce her.
He was aware that the qualities distinguishing her from the herd of her sex
were chiefly external: as though a fine glaze of beauty and fastidiousness had been
applied to vulgar clay.
Yet the analogy left him unsatisfied, for a coarse texture will not take a high finish;
and was it not possible that the material was fine, but that circumstance had
fashioned it into a futile shape?
As he reached this point in his speculations the sun came out, and her
lifted parasol cut off his enjoyment. A moment or two later she paused with a
sigh.
"Oh, dear, I'm so hot and thirsty--and what a hideous place New York is!"
She looked despairingly up and down the dreary thoroughfare.
"Other cities put on their best clothes in summer, but New York seems to sit in its
shirtsleeves." Her eyes wandered down one of the side-
streets.
"Someone has had the humanity to plant a few trees over there.
Let us go into the shade."
"I am glad my street meets with your approval," said Selden as they turned the
corner. "Your street?
Do you live here?"
She glanced with interest along the new brick and limestone house-fronts,
fantastically varied in obedience to the American craving for novelty, but fresh and
inviting with their awnings and flower- boxes.
"Ah, yes--to be sure: THE BENEDICK. What a nice-looking building!
I don't think I've ever seen it before."
She looked across at the flat-house with its marble porch and pseudo-Georgian
facade. "Which are your windows?
Those with the awnings down?"
"On the top floor--yes." "And that nice little balcony is yours?
How cool it looks up there!" He paused a moment.
"Come up and see," he suggested.
"I can give you a cup of tea in no time-- and you won't meet any bores."
Her colour deepened--she still had the art of blushing at the right time--but she took
the suggestion as lightly as it was made.
"Why not? It's too tempting--I'll take the risk," she
declared. "Oh, I'm not dangerous," he said in the
same key.
In truth, he had never liked her as well as at that moment.
He knew she had accepted without afterthought: he could never be a factor in
her calculations, and there was a surprise, a refreshment almost, in the spontaneity of
her consent.
On the threshold he paused a moment, feeling for his latchkey.
"There's no one here; but I have a servant who is supposed to come in the mornings,
and it's just possible he may have put out the tea-things and provided some cake."
He ushered her into a slip of a hall hung with old prints.
She noticed the letters and notes heaped on the table among his gloves and sticks; then
she found herself in a small library, dark but cheerful, with its walls of books, a
pleasantly faded Turkey rug, a littered
desk and, as he had foretold, a tea-tray on a low table near the window.
A breeze had sprung up, swaying inward the muslin curtains, and bringing a fresh scent
of mignonette and petunias from the flower- box on the balcony.
Lily sank with a sigh into one of the shabby leather chairs.
"How delicious to have a place like this all to one's self!
What a miserable thing it is to be a woman."
She leaned back in a luxury of discontent. Selden was rummaging in a cupboard for the
cake.
"Even women," he said, "have been known to enjoy the privileges of a flat."
"Oh, governesses--or widows. But not girls--not poor, miserable,
marriageable girls!"
"I even know a girl who lives in a flat." She sat up in surprise.
"You do?" "I do," he assured her, emerging from the
cupboard with the sought-for cake.
"Oh, I know--you mean Gerty Farish." She smiled a little unkindly.
"But I said MARRIAGEABLE--and besides, she has a horrid little place, and no maid, and
such *** things to eat.
Her cook does the washing and the food tastes of soap.
I should hate that, you know." "You shouldn't dine with her on wash-days,"
said Selden, cutting the cake.
They both laughed, and he knelt by the table to light the lamp under the kettle,
while she measured out the tea into a little tea-pot of green glaze.
As he watched her hand, polished as a bit of old ivory, with its slender pink nails,
and the sapphire bracelet slipping over her wrist, he was struck with the irony of
suggesting to her such a life as his cousin Gertrude Farish had chosen.
She was so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that
the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.
She seemed to read his thought.
"It was horrid of me to say that of Gerty," she said with charming compunction.
"I forgot she was your cousin. But we're so different, you know: she likes
being good, and I like being happy.
And besides, she is free and I am not. If I were, I daresay I could manage to be
happy even in her flat.
It must be pure bliss to arrange the furniture just as one likes, and give all
the horrors to the ash-man. If I could only do over my aunt's drawing-
room I know I should be a better woman."
"Is it so very bad?" he asked sympathetically.
She smiled at him across the tea-pot which she was holding up to be filled.
"That shows how seldom you come there.
Why don't you come oftener?" "When I do come, it's not to look at Mrs.
Peniston's furniture." "Nonsense," she said.
"You don't come at all--and yet we get on so well when we meet."
"Perhaps that's the reason," he answered promptly.
"I'm afraid I haven't any cream, you know-- shall you mind a slice of lemon instead?"
"I shall like it better." She waited while he cut the lemon and
dropped a thin disk into her cup.
"But that is not the reason," she insisted. "The reason for what?"
"For your never coming." She leaned forward with a shade of
perplexity in her charming eyes.
"I wish I knew--I wish I could make you out.
Of course I know there are men who don't like me--one can tell that at a glance.
And there are others who are afraid of me: they think I want to marry them."
She smiled up at him frankly. "But I don't think you dislike me--and you
can't possibly think I want to marry you."
"No--I absolve you of that," he agreed. "Well, then----?"
He had carried his cup to the fireplace, and stood leaning against the chimney-piece
and looking down on her with an air of indolent amusement.
The provocation in her eyes increased his amusement--he had not supposed she would
waste her powder on such small game; but perhaps she was only keeping her hand in;
or perhaps a girl of her type had no conversation but of the personal kind.
At any rate, she was amazingly pretty, and he had asked her to tea and must live up to
his obligations.
"Well, then," he said with a plunge, "perhaps THAT'S the reason."
"What?" "The fact that you don't want to marry me.
Perhaps I don't regard it as such a strong inducement to go and see you."
He felt a slight shiver down his spine as he ventured this, but her laugh reassured
him.
"Dear Mr. Selden, that wasn't worthy of you.
It's stupid of you to make love to me, and it isn't like you to be stupid."
She leaned back, sipping her tea with an air so enchantingly judicial that, if they
had been in her aunt's drawing-room, he might almost have tried to disprove her
deduction.
"Don't you see," she continued, "that there are men enough to say pleasant things to
me, and that what I want is a friend who won't be afraid to say disagreeable ones
when I need them?
Sometimes I have fancied you might be that friend--I don't know why, except that you
are neither a *** nor a bounder, and that I shouldn't have to pretend with you or be
on my guard against you."
Her voice had dropped to a note of seriousness, and she sat gazing up at him
with the troubled gravity of a child. "You don't know how much I need such a
friend," she said.
"My aunt is full of copy-book axioms, but they were all meant to apply to conduct in
the early fifties.
I always feel that to live up to them would include wearing book-muslin with gigot
sleeves.
And the other women--my best friends--well, they use me or abuse me; but they don't
care a straw what happens to me.
I've been about too long--people are getting tired of me; they are beginning to
say I ought to marry."
There was a moment's pause, during which Selden meditated one or two replies
calculated to add a momentary zest to the situation; but he rejected them in favour
of the simple question: "Well, why don't you?"
She coloured and laughed.
"Ah, I see you ARE a friend after all, and that is one of the disagreeable things I
was asking for." "It wasn't meant to be disagreeable," he
returned amicably.
"Isn't marriage your vocation? Isn't it what you're all brought up for?"
She sighed. "I suppose so.
What else is there?"
"Exactly. And so why not take the plunge and have it
over?" She shrugged her shoulders.
"You speak as if I ought to marry the first man who came along."
"I didn't mean to imply that you are as hard put to it as that.
But there must be some one with the requisite qualifications."
She shook her head wearily.
"I threw away one or two good chances when I first came out--I suppose every girl
does; and you know I am horribly poor--and very expensive.
I must have a great deal of money."
Selden had turned to reach for a cigarette- box on the mantelpiece.
"What's become of Dillworth?" he asked.
"Oh, his mother was frightened--she was afraid I should have all the family jewels
reset. And she wanted me to promise that I
wouldn't do over the drawing-room."
"The very thing you are marrying for!" "Exactly.
So she packed him off to India." "Hard luck--but you can do better than
Dillworth."
He offered the box, and she took out three or four cigarettes, putting one between her
lips and slipping the others into a little gold case attached to her long pearl chain.
"Have I time?
Just a whiff, then." She leaned forward, holding the tip of her
cigarette to his.
As she did so, he noted, with a purely impersonal enjoyment, how evenly the black
lashes were set in her smooth white lids, and how the purplish shade beneath them
melted into the pure pallour of the cheek.
She began to saunter about the room, examining the bookshelves between the puffs
of her cigarette-smoke.
Some of the volumes had the ripe tints of good tooling and old morocco, and her eyes
lingered on them caressingly, not with the appreciation of the expert, but with the
pleasure in agreeable tones and textures
that was one of her inmost susceptibilities.
Suddenly her expression changed from desultory enjoyment to active conjecture,
and she turned to Selden with a question.
"You collect, don't you--you know about first editions and things?"
"As much as a man may who has no money to spend.
Now and then I pick up something in the rubbish heap; and I go and look on at the
big sales."
She had again addressed herself to the shelves, but her eyes now swept them
inattentively, and he saw that she was preoccupied with a new idea.
"And Americana--do you collect Americana?"
Selden stared and laughed. "No, that's rather out of my line.
I'm not really a collector, you see; I simply like to have good editions of the
books I am fond of."
She made a slight grimace. "And Americana are horribly dull, I
suppose?" "I should fancy so--except to the
historian.
But your real collector values a thing for its rarity.
I don't suppose the buyers of Americana sit up reading them all night--old Jefferson
Gryce certainly didn't."
She was listening with keen attention. "And yet they fetch fabulous prices, don't
they?
It seems so odd to want to pay a lot for an ugly badly-printed book that one is never
going to read! And I suppose most of the owners of
Americana are not historians either?"
"No; very few of the historians can afford to buy them.
They have to use those in the public libraries or in private collections.
It seems to be the mere rarity that attracts the average collector."
He had seated himself on an arm of the chair near which she was standing, and she
continued to question him, asking which were the rarest volumes, whether the
Jefferson Gryce collection was really
considered the finest in the world, and what was the largest price ever fetched by
a single volume.
It was so pleasant to sit there looking up at her, as she lifted now one book and then
another from the shelves, fluttering the pages between her fingers, while her
drooping profile was outlined against the
warm background of old bindings, that he talked on without pausing to wonder at her
sudden interest in so unsuggestive a subject.
But he could never be long with her without trying to find a reason for what she was
doing, and as she replaced his first edition of La Bruyere and turned away from
the bookcases, he began to ask himself what she had been driving at.
Her next question was not of a nature to enlighten him.
She paused before him with a smile which seemed at once designed to admit him to her
familiarity, and to remind him of the restrictions it imposed.
"Don't you ever mind," she asked suddenly, "not being rich enough to buy all the books
you want?" He followed her glance about the room, with
its worn furniture and shabby walls.
"Don't I just? Do you take me for a saint on a pillar?"
"And having to work--do you mind that?" "Oh, the work itself is not so bad--I'm
rather fond of the law."
"No; but the being tied down: the routine-- don't you ever want to get away, to see new
places and people?" "Horribly--especially when I see all my
friends rushing to the steamer."
She drew a sympathetic breath. "But do you mind enough--to marry to get
out of it?" Selden broke into a laugh.
"God forbid!" he declared.
She rose with a sigh, tossing her cigarette into the grate.
"Ah, there's the difference--a girl must, a man may if he chooses."
She surveyed him critically.
"Your coat's a little shabby--but who cares?
It doesn't keep people from asking you to dine.
If I were shabby no one would have me: a woman is asked out as much for her clothes
as for herself.
The clothes are the background, the frame, if you like: they don't make success, but
they are a part of it. Who wants a dingy woman?
We are expected to be pretty and well- dressed till we drop--and if we can't keep
it up alone, we have to go into partnership."
Selden glanced at her with amusement: it was impossible, even with her lovely eyes
imploring him, to take a sentimental view of her case.
"Ah, well, there must be plenty of capital on the look-out for such an investment.
Perhaps you'll meet your fate tonight at the Trenors'."
She returned his look interrogatively.
"I thought you might be going there--oh, not in that capacity!
But there are to be a lot of your set--Gwen Van Osburgh, the Wetheralls, Lady Cressida
Raith--and the George Dorsets."
She paused a moment before the last name, and shot a query through her lashes; but he
remained imperturbable.
"Mrs. Trenor asked me; but I can't get away till the end of the week; and those big
parties bore me." "Ah, so they do me," she exclaimed.
"Then why go?"
"It's part of the business--you forget! And besides, if I didn't, I should be
playing bezique with my aunt at Richfield Springs."
"That's almost as bad as marrying Dillworth," he agreed, and they both
laughed for pure pleasure in their sudden intimacy.
She glanced at the clock.
"Dear me! I must be off.
It's after five."
She paused before the mantelpiece, studying herself in the mirror while she adjusted
her veil.
The attitude revealed the long slope of her slender sides, which gave a kind of wild-
wood grace to her outline--as though she were a captured dryad subdued to the
conventions of the drawing-room; and Selden
reflected that it was the same streak of sylvan freedom in her nature that lent such
savour to her artificiality.
He followed her across the room to the entrance-hall; but on the threshold she
held out her hand with a gesture of leave- taking.
"It's been delightful; and now you will have to return my visit."
"But don't you want me to see you to the station?"
"No; good bye here, please."
She let her hand lie in his a moment, smiling up at him adorably.
"Good bye, then--and good luck at Bellomont!" he said, opening the door for
her.
On the landing she paused to look about her.
There were a thousand chances to one against her meeting anybody, but one could
never tell, and she always paid for her rare indiscretions by a violent reaction of
prudence.
There was no one in sight, however, but a char-woman who was scrubbing the stairs.
Her own stout person and its surrounding implements took up so much room that Lily,
to pass her, had to gather up her skirts and brush against the wall.
As she did so, the woman paused in her work and looked up curiously, resting her
clenched red fists on the wet cloth she had just drawn from her pail.
She had a broad sallow face, slightly pitted with small-pox, and thin straw-
coloured hair through which her scalp shone unpleasantly.
"I beg your pardon," said Lily, intending by her politeness to convey a criticism of
the other's manner.
The woman, without answering, pushed her pail aside, and continued to stare as Miss
Bart swept by with a murmur of silken linings.
Lily felt herself flushing under the look.
What did the creature suppose? Could one never do the simplest, the most
harmless thing, without subjecting one's self to some odious conjecture?
Half way down the next flight, she smiled to think that a char-woman's stare should
so perturb her. The poor thing was probably dazzled by such
an unwonted apparition.
But WERE such apparitions unwonted on Selden's stairs?
Miss Bart was not familiar with the moral code of bachelors' flat-houses, and her
colour rose again as it occurred to her that the woman's persistent gaze implied a
groping among past associations.
But she put aside the thought with a smile at her own fears, and hastened downward,
wondering if she should find a cab short of Fifth Avenue.
Under the Georgian porch she paused again, scanning the street for a hansom.
None was in sight, but as she reached the sidewalk she ran against a small glossy-
looking man with a gardenia in his coat, who raised his hat with a surprised
exclamation.
"Miss Bart? Well--of all people!
This IS luck," he declared; and she caught a twinkle of amused curiosity between his
screwed-up lids.
"Oh, Mr. Rosedale--how are you?" she said, perceiving that the irrepressible annoyance
on her face was reflected in the sudden intimacy of his smile.
Mr. Rosedale stood scanning her with interest and approval.
He was a plump rosy man of the blond Jewish type, with smart London clothes fitting him
like upholstery, and small sidelong eyes which gave him the air of appraising people
as if they were bric-a-brac.
He glanced up interrogatively at the porch of the Benedick.
"Been up to town for a little shopping, I suppose?" he said, in a tone which had the
familiarity of a touch.
Miss Bart shrank from it slightly, and then flung herself into precipitate
explanations. "Yes--I came up to see my dress-maker.
I am just on my way to catch the train to the Trenors'."
"Ah--your dress-maker; just so," he said blandly.
"I didn't know there were any dress-makers in the Benedick."
"The Benedick?" She looked gently puzzled.
"Is that the name of this building?"
"Yes, that's the name: I believe it's an old word for bachelor, isn't it?
I happen to own the building--that's the way I know."
His smile deepened as he added with increasing assurance: "But you must let me
take you to the station. The Trenors are at Bellomont, of course?
You've barely time to catch the five-forty.
The dress-maker kept you waiting, I suppose."
Lily stiffened under the pleasantry.
"Oh, thanks," she stammered; and at that moment her eye caught a hansom drifting
down Madison Avenue, and she hailed it with a desperate gesture.
"You're very kind; but I couldn't think of troubling you," she said, extending her
hand to Mr. Rosedale; and heedless of his protestations, she sprang into the rescuing
vehicle, and called out a breathless order to the driver.
>
CHAPTER 2
In the hansom she leaned back with a sigh. Why must a girl pay so dearly for her least
escape from routine?
Why could one never do a natural thing without having to screen it behind a
structure of artifice?
She had yielded to a passing impulse in going to Lawrence Selden's rooms, and it
was so seldom that she could allow herself the luxury of an impulse!
This one, at any rate, was going to cost her rather more than she could afford.
She was vexed to see that, in spite of so many years of vigilance, she had blundered
twice within five minutes.
That stupid story about her dress-maker was bad enough--it would have been so simple to
tell Rosedale that she had been taking tea with Selden!
The mere statement of the fact would have rendered it innocuous.
But, after having let herself be surprised in a falsehood, it was doubly stupid to
snub the witness of her discomfiture.
If she had had the presence of mind to let Rosedale drive her to the station, the
concession might have purchased his silence.
He had his race's accuracy in the appraisal of values, and to be seen walking down the
platform at the crowded afternoon hour in the company of Miss Lily Bart would have
been money in his pocket, as he might himself have phrased it.
He knew, of course, that there would be a large house-party at Bellomont, and the
possibility of being taken for one of Mrs. Trenor's guests was doubtless included in
his calculations.
Mr. Rosedale was still at a stage in his social ascent when it was of importance to
produce such impressions.
The provoking part was that Lily knew all this--knew how easy it would have been to
silence him on the spot, and how difficult it might be to do so afterward.
Mr. Simon Rosedale was a man who made it his business to know everything about every
one, whose idea of showing himself to be at home in society was to display an
inconvenient familiarity with the habits of
those with whom he wished to be thought intimate.
Lily was sure that within twenty-four hours the story of her visiting her dress-maker
at the Benedick would be in active circulation among Mr. Rosedale's
acquaintances.
The worst of it was that she had always snubbed and ignored him.
On his first appearance--when her improvident cousin, Jack Stepney, had
obtained for him (in return for favours too easily guessed) a card to one of the vast
impersonal Van Osburgh "crushes"--Rosedale,
with that mixture of artistic sensibility and business astuteness which characterizes
his race, had instantly gravitated toward Miss Bart.
She understood his motives, for her own course was guided by as nice calculations.
Training and experience had taught her to be hospitable to newcomers, since the most
unpromising might be useful later on, and there were plenty of available OUBLIETTES
to swallow them if they were not.
But some intuitive repugnance, getting the better of years of social discipline, had
made her push Mr. Rosedale into his OUBLIETTE without a trial.
He had left behind only the ripple of amusement which his speedy despatch had
caused among her friends; and though later (to shift the metaphor) he reappeared lower
down the stream, it was only in fleeting glimpses, with long submergences between.
Hitherto Lily had been undisturbed by scruples.
In her little set Mr. Rosedale had been pronounced "impossible," and Jack Stepney
roundly snubbed for his attempt to pay his debts in dinner invitations.
Even Mrs. Trenor, whose taste for variety had led her into some hazardous
experiments, resisted Jack's attempts to disguise Mr. Rosedale as a novelty, and
declared that he was the same little Jew
who had been served up and rejected at the social board a dozen times within her
memory; and while Judy Trenor was obdurate there was small chance of Mr. Rosedale's
penetrating beyond the outer limbo of the Van Osburgh crushes.
Jack gave up the contest with a laughing "You'll see," and, sticking manfully to his
guns, showed himself with Rosedale at the fashionable restaurants, in company with
the personally vivid if socially obscure ladies who are available for such purposes.
But the attempt had hitherto been vain, and as Rosedale undoubtedly paid for the
dinners, the laugh remained with his debtor.
Mr. Rosedale, it will be seen, was thus far not a factor to be feared--unless one put
one's self in his power. And this was precisely what Miss Bart had
done.
Her clumsy fib had let him see that she had something to conceal; and she was sure he
had a score to settle with her. Something in his smile told her he had not
forgotten.
She turned from the thought with a little shiver, but it hung on her all the way to
the station, and dogged her down the platform with the persistency of Mr.
Rosedale himself.
She had just time to take her seat before the train started; but having arranged
herself in her corner with the instinctive feeling for effect which never forsook her,
she glanced about in the hope of seeing some other member of the Trenors' party.
She wanted to get away from herself, and conversation was the only means of escape
that she knew.
Her search was rewarded by the discovery of a very blond young man with a soft reddish
beard, who, at the other end of the carriage, appeared to be dissembling
himself behind an unfolded newspaper.
Lily's eye brightened, and a faint smile relaxed the drawn lines of her mouth.
She had known that Mr. Percy Gryce was to be at Bellomont, but she had not counted on
the luck of having him to herself in the train; and the fact banished all perturbing
thoughts of Mr. Rosedale.
Perhaps, after all, the day was to end more favourably than it had begun.
She began to cut the pages of a novel, tranquilly studying her prey through
downcast lashes while she organized a method of attack.
Something in his attitude of conscious absorption told her that he was aware of
her presence: no one had ever been quite so engrossed in an evening paper!
She guessed that he was too shy to come up to her, and that she would have to devise
some means of approach which should not appear to be an advance on her part.
It amused her to think that any one as rich as Mr. Percy Gryce should be shy; but she
was gifted with treasures of indulgence for such idiosyncrasies, and besides, his
timidity might serve her purpose better than too much assurance.
She had the art of giving self-confidence to the embarrassed, but she was not equally
sure of being able to embarrass the self- confident.
She waited till the train had emerged from the tunnel and was racing between the
ragged edges of the northern suburbs.
Then, as it lowered its speed near Yonkers, she rose from her seat and drifted slowly
down the carriage.
As she passed Mr. Gryce, the train gave a lurch, and he was aware of a slender hand
gripping the back of his chair.
He rose with a start, his ingenuous face looking as though it had been dipped in
crimson: even the reddish tint in his beard seemed to deepen.
The train swayed again, almost flinging Miss Bart into his arms.
She steadied herself with a laugh and drew back; but he was enveloped in the scent of
her dress, and his shoulder had felt her fugitive touch.
"Oh, Mr. Gryce, is it you?
I'm so sorry--I was trying to find the porter and get some tea."
She held out her hand as the train resumed its level rush, and they stood exchanging a
few words in the aisle.
Yes--he was going to Bellomont. He had heard she was to be of the party--he
blushed again as he admitted it. And was he to be there for a whole week?
How delightful!
But at this point one or two belated passengers from the last station forced
their way into the carriage, and Lily had to retreat to her seat.
"The chair next to mine is empty--do take it," she said over her shoulder; and Mr.
Gryce, with considerable embarrassment, succeeded in effecting an exchange which
enabled him to transport himself and his bags to her side.
"Ah--and here is the porter, and perhaps we can have some tea."
She signalled to that official, and in a moment, with the ease that seemed to attend
the fulfilment of all her wishes, a little table had been set up between the seats,
and she had helped Mr. Gryce to bestow his encumbering properties beneath it.
When the tea came he watched her in silent fascination while her hands flitted above
the tray, looking miraculously fine and slender in contrast to the coarse china and
lumpy bread.
It seemed wonderful to him that any one should perform with such careless ease the
difficult task of making tea in public in a lurching train.
He would never have dared to order it for himself, lest he should attract the notice
of his fellow-passengers; but, secure in the shelter of her conspicuousness, he
sipped the inky draught with a delicious sense of exhilaration.
Lily, with the flavour of Selden's caravan tea on her lips, had no great fancy to
drown it in the railway brew which seemed such nectar to her companion; but, rightly
judging that one of the charms of tea is
the fact of drinking it together, she proceeded to give the last touch to Mr.
Gryce's enjoyment by smiling at him across her lifted cup.
"Is it quite right--I haven't made it too strong?" she asked solicitously; and he
replied with conviction that he had never tasted better tea.
"I daresay it is true," she reflected; and her imagination was fired by the thought
that Mr. Gryce, who might have sounded the depths of the most complex self-indulgence,
was perhaps actually taking his first journey alone with a pretty woman.
It struck her as providential that she should be the instrument of his initiation.
Some girls would not have known how to manage him.
They would have over-emphasized the novelty of the adventure, trying to make him feel
in it the zest of an escapade.
But Lily's methods were more delicate.
She remembered that her cousin Jack Stepney had once defined Mr. Gryce as the young man
who had promised his mother never to go out in the rain without his overshoes; and
acting on this hint, she resolved to impart
a gently domestic air to the scene, in the hope that her companion, instead of feeling
that he was doing something reckless or unusual, would merely be led to dwell on
the advantage of always having a companion to make one's tea in the train.
But in spite of her efforts, conversation flagged after the tray had been removed,
and she was driven to take a fresh measurement of Mr. Gryce's limitations.
It was not, after all, opportunity but imagination that he lacked: he had a mental
palate which would never learn to distinguish between railway tea and nectar.
There was, however, one topic she could rely on: one spring that she had only to
touch to set his simple machinery in motion.
She had refrained from touching it because it was a last resource, and she had relied
on other arts to stimulate other sensations; but as a settled look of
dulness began to creep over his candid
features, she saw that extreme measures were necessary.
"And how," she said, leaning forward, "are you getting on with your Americana?"
His eye became a degree less opaque: it was as though an incipient film had been
removed from it, and she felt the pride of a skilful operator.
"I've got a few new things," he said, suffused with pleasure, but lowering his
voice as though he feared his fellow- passengers might be in league to despoil
him.
She returned a sympathetic enquiry, and gradually he was drawn on to talk of his
latest purchases.
It was the one subject which enabled him to forget himself, or allowed him, rather, to
remember himself without constraint, because he was at home in it, and could
assert a superiority that there were few to dispute.
Hardly any of his acquaintances cared for Americana, or knew anything about them; and
the consciousness of this ignorance threw Mr. Gryce's knowledge into agreeable
relief.
The only difficulty was to introduce the topic and to keep it to the front; most
people showed no desire to have their ignorance dispelled, and Mr. Gryce was like
a merchant whose warehouses are crammed with an unmarketable commodity.
But Miss Bart, it appeared, really did want to know about Americana; and moreover, she
was already sufficiently informed to make the task of farther instruction as easy as
it was agreeable.
She questioned him intelligently, she heard him submissively; and, prepared for the
look of lassitude which usually crept over his listeners' faces, he grew eloquent
under her receptive gaze.
The "points" she had had the presence of mind to glean from Selden, in anticipation
of this very contingency, were serving her to such good purpose that she began to
think her visit to him had been the luckiest incident of the day.
She had once more shown her talent for profiting by the unexpected, and dangerous
theories as to the advisability of yielding to impulse were germinating under the
surface of smiling attention which she continued to present to her companion.
Mr. Gryce's sensations, if less definite, were equally agreeable.
He felt the confused titillation with which the lower organisms welcome the
gratification of their needs, and all his senses floundered in a vague well-being,
through which Miss Bart's personality was dimly but pleasantly perceptible.
Mr. Gryce's interest in Americana had not originated with himself: it was impossible
to think of him as evolving any taste of his own.
An uncle had left him a collection already noted among bibliophiles; the existence of
the collection was the only fact that had ever shed glory on the name of Gryce, and
the nephew took as much pride in his
inheritance as though it had been his own work.
Indeed, he gradually came to regard it as such, and to feel a sense of personal
complacency when he chanced on any reference to the Gryce Americana.
Anxious as he was to avoid personal notice, he took, in the printed mention of his
name, a pleasure so exquisite and excessive that it seemed a compensation for his
shrinking from publicity.
To enjoy the sensation as often as possible, he subscribed to all the reviews
dealing with book-collecting in general, and American history in particular, and as
allusions to his library abounded in the
pages of these journals, which formed his only reading, he came to regard himself as
figuring prominently in the public eye, and to enjoy the thought of the interest which
would be excited if the persons he met in
the street, or sat among in travelling, were suddenly to be told that he was the
possessor of the Gryce Americana.
Most timidities have such secret compensations, and Miss Bart was discerning
enough to know that the inner vanity is generally in proportion to the outer self-
depreciation.
With a more confident person she would not have dared to dwell so long on one topic,
or to show such exaggerated interest in it; but she had rightly guessed that Mr.
Gryce's egoism was a thirsty soil, requiring constant nurture from without.
Miss Bart had the gift of following an undercurrent of thought while she appeared
to be sailing on the surface of conversation; and in this case her mental
excursion took the form of a rapid survey
of Mr. Percy Gryce's future as combined with her own.
The Gryces were from Albany, and but lately introduced to the metropolis, where the
mother and son had come, after old Jefferson Gryce's death, to take possession
of his house in Madison Avenue--an
appalling house, all brown stone without and black walnut within, with the Gryce
library in a fire-proof annex that looked like a mausoleum.
Lily, however, knew all about them: young Mr. Gryce's arrival had fluttered the
maternal *** of New York, and when a girl has no mother to palpitate for her she
must needs be on the alert for herself.
Lily, therefore, had not only contrived to put herself in the young man's way, but had
made the acquaintance of Mrs. Gryce, a monumental woman with the voice of a pulpit
orator and a mind preoccupied with the
iniquities of her servants, who came sometimes to sit with Mrs. Peniston and
learn from that lady how she managed to prevent the kitchen-maid's smuggling
groceries out of the house.
Mrs. Gryce had a kind of impersonal benevolence: cases of individual need she
regarded with suspicion, but she subscribed to Institutions when their annual reports
showed an impressive surplus.
Her domestic duties were manifold, for they extended from furtive inspections of the
servants' bedrooms to unannounced descents to the cellar; but she had never allowed
herself many pleasures.
Once, however, she had had a special edition of the Sarum Rule printed in rubric
and presented to every clergyman in the diocese; and the gilt album in which their
letters of thanks were pasted formed the chief ornament of her drawing-room table.
Percy had been brought up in the principles which so excellent a woman was sure to
inculcate.
Every form of prudence and suspicion had been grafted on a nature originally
reluctant and cautious, with the result that it would have seemed hardly needful
for Mrs. Gryce to extract his promise about
the overshoes, so little likely was he to hazard himself abroad in the rain.
After attaining his majority, and coming into the fortune which the late Mr. Gryce
had made out of a patent device for excluding fresh air from hotels, the young
man continued to live with his mother in
Albany; but on Jefferson Gryce's death, when another large property passed into her
son's hands, Mrs. Gryce thought that what she called his "interests" demanded his
presence in New York.
She accordingly installed herself in the Madison Avenue house, and Percy, whose
sense of duty was not inferior to his mother's, spent all his week days in the
handsome Broad Street office where a batch
of pale men on small salaries had grown grey in the management of the Gryce estate,
and where he was initiated with becoming reverence into every detail of the art of
accumulation.
As far as Lily could learn, this had hitherto been Mr. Gryce's only occupation,
and she might have been pardoned for thinking it not too hard a task to interest
a young man who had been kept on such low diet.
At any rate, she felt herself so completely in command of the situation that she
yielded to a sense of security in which all fear of Mr. Rosedale, and of the
difficulties on which that fear was
contingent, vanished beyond the edge of thought.
The stopping of the train at Garrisons would not have distracted her from these
thoughts, had she not caught a sudden look of distress in her companion's eye.
His seat faced toward the door, and she guessed that he had been perturbed by the
approach of an acquaintance; a fact confirmed by the turning of heads and
general sense of commotion which her own
entrance into a railway-carriage was apt to produce.
She knew the symptoms at once, and was not surprised to be hailed by the high notes of
a pretty woman, who entered the train accompanied by a maid, a bull-terrier, and
a footman staggering under a load of bags and dressing-cases.
"Oh, Lily--are you going to Bellomont? Then you can't let me have your seat, I
suppose?
But I MUST have a seat in this carriage-- porter, you must find me a place at once.
Can't some one be put somewhere else? I want to be with my friends.
Oh, how do you do, Mr. Gryce?
Do please make him understand that I must have a seat next to you and Lily."
Mrs. George Dorset, regardless of the mild efforts of a traveller with a carpet-bag,
who was doing his best to make room for her by getting out of the train, stood in the
middle of the aisle, diffusing about her
that general sense of exasperation which a pretty woman on her travels not
infrequently creates.
She was smaller and thinner than Lily Bart, with a restless pliability of pose, as if
she could have been crumpled up and run through a ring, like the sinuous draperies
she affected.
Her small pale face seemed the mere setting of a pair of dark exaggerated eyes, of
which the visionary gaze contrasted curiously with her self-assertive tone and
gestures; so that, as one of her friends
observed, she was like a disembodied spirit who took up a great deal of room.
Having finally discovered that the seat adjoining Miss Bart's was at her disposal,
she possessed herself of it with a farther displacement of her surroundings,
explaining meanwhile that she had come
across from Mount Kisco in her motor-car that morning, and had been kicking her
heels for an hour at Garrisons, without even the alleviation of a cigarette, her
brute of a husband having neglected to
replenish her case before they parted that morning.
"And at this hour of the day I don't suppose you've a single one left, have you,
Lily?" she plaintively concluded.
Miss Bart caught the startled glance of Mr. Percy Gryce, whose own lips were never
defiled by tobacco.
"What an absurd question, Bertha!" she exclaimed, blushing at the thought of the
store she had laid in at Lawrence Selden's. "Why, don't you smoke?
Since when have you given it up?
What--you never---- And you don't either, Mr. Gryce?
Ah, of course--how stupid of me--I understand."
And Mrs. Dorset leaned back against her travelling cushions with a smile which made
Lily wish there had been no vacant seat beside her own.
>
CHAPTER 3
Bridge at Bellomont usually lasted till the small hours; and when Lily went to bed that
night she had played too long for her own good.
Feeling no desire for the self-communion which awaited her in her room, she lingered
on the broad stairway, looking down into the hall below, where the last card-players
were grouped about the tray of tall glasses
and silver-collared decanters which the butler had just placed on a low table near
the fire. The hall was arcaded, with a gallery
supported on columns of pale yellow marble.
Tall clumps of flowering plants were grouped against a background of dark
foliage in the angles of the walls.
On the crimson carpet a deer-hound and two or three spaniels dozed luxuriously before
the fire, and the light from the great central lantern overhead shed a brightness
on the women's hair and struck sparks from their jewels as they moved.
There were moments when such scenes delighted Lily, when they gratified her
sense of beauty and her craving for the external finish of life; there were others
when they gave a sharper edge to the meagreness of her own opportunities.
This was one of the moments when the sense of contrast was uppermost, and she turned
away impatiently as Mrs. George Dorset, glittering in serpentine spangles, drew
Percy Gryce in her wake to a confidential nook beneath the gallery.
It was not that Miss Bart was afraid of losing her newly-acquired hold over Mr.
Gryce.
Mrs. Dorset might startle or dazzle him, but she had neither the skill nor the
patience to effect his capture.
She was too self-engrossed to penetrate the recesses of his shyness, and besides, why
should she care to give herself the trouble?
At most it might amuse her to make sport of his simplicity for an evening--after that
he would be merely a burden to her, and knowing this, she was far too experienced
to encourage him.
But the mere thought of that other woman, who could take a man up and toss him aside
as she willed, without having to regard him as a possible factor in her plans, filled
Lily Bart with envy.
She had been bored all the afternoon by Percy Gryce--the mere thought seemed to
waken an echo of his droning voice--but she could not ignore him on the morrow, she
must follow up her success, must submit to
more boredom, must be ready with fresh compliances and adaptabilities, and all on
the bare chance that he might ultimately decide to do her the honour of boring her
for life.
It was a hateful fate--but how escape from it?
What choice had she? To be herself, or a Gerty Farish.
As she entered her bedroom, with its softly-shaded lights, her lace dressing-
gown lying across the silken bedspread, her little embroidered slippers before the
fire, a vase of carnations filling the air
with perfume, and the last novels and magazines lying uncut on a table beside the
reading-lamp, she had a vision of Miss Farish's cramped flat, with its cheap
conveniences and hideous wall-papers.
No; she was not made for mean and shabby surroundings, for the squalid compromises
of poverty.
Her whole being dilated in an atmosphere of luxury; it was the background she required,
the only climate she could breathe in. But the luxury of others was not what she
wanted.
A few years ago it had sufficed her: she had taken her daily meed of pleasure
without caring who provided it.
Now she was beginning to chafe at the obligations it imposed, to feel herself a
mere pensioner on the splendour which had once seemed to belong to her.
There were even moments when she was conscious of having to pay her way.
For a long time she had refused to play bridge.
She knew she could not afford it, and she was afraid of acquiring so expensive a
taste.
She had seen the danger exemplified in more than one of her associates--in young Ned
Silverton, for instance, the charming fair boy now seated in abject rapture at the
elbow of Mrs. Fisher, a striking divorcee
with eyes and gowns as emphatic as the head-lines of her "case."
Lily could remember when young Silverton had stumbled into their circle, with the
air of a strayed Arcadian who has published chamung [Updater's note: charming?] sonnets
in his college journal.
Since then he had developed a taste for Mrs. Fisher and bridge, and the latter at
least had involved him in expenses from which he had been more than once rescued by
harassed maiden sisters, who treasured the
sonnets, and went without sugar in their tea to keep their darling afloat.
Ned's case was familiar to Lily: she had seen his charming eyes--which had a good
deal more poetry in them than the sonnets-- change from surprise to amusement, and from
amusement to anxiety, as he passed under
the spell of the terrible god of chance; and she was afraid of discovering the same
symptoms in her own case.
For in the last year she had found that her hostesses expected her to take a place at
the card-table.
It was one of the taxes she had to pay for their prolonged hospitality, and for the
dresses and trinkets which occasionally replenished her insufficient wardrobe.
And since she had played regularly the passion had grown on her.
Once or twice of late she had won a large sum, and instead of keeping it against
future losses, had spent it in dress or jewelry; and the desire to atone for this
imprudence, combined with the increasing
exhilaration of the game, drove her to risk higher stakes at each fresh venture.
She tried to excuse herself on the plea that, in the Trenor set, if one played at
all one must either play high or be set down as priggish or stingy; but she knew
that the gambling passion was upon her, and
that in her present surroundings there was small hope of resisting it.
Tonight the luck had been persistently bad, and the little gold purse which hung among
her trinkets was almost empty when she returned to her room.
She unlocked the wardrobe, and taking out her jewel-case, looked under the tray for
the roll of bills from which she had replenished the purse before going down to
dinner.
Only twenty dollars were left: the discovery was so startling that for a
moment she fancied she must have been robbed.
Then she took paper and pencil, and seating herself at the writing-table, tried to
reckon up what she had spent during the day.
Her head was throbbing with fatigue, and she had to go over the figures again and
again; but at last it became clear to her that she had lost three hundred dollars at
cards.
She took out her cheque-book to see if her balance was larger than she remembered, but
found she had erred in the other direction.
Then she returned to her calculations; but figure as she would, she could not conjure
back the vanished three hundred dollars.
It was the sum she had set aside to pacify her dress-maker--unless she should decide
to use it as a sop to the jeweller.
At any rate, she had so many uses for it that its very insufficiency had caused her
to play high in the hope of doubling it.
But of course she had lost--she who needed every penny, while Bertha Dorset, whose
husband showered money on her, must have pocketed at least five hundred, and Judy
Trenor, who could have afforded to lose a
thousand a night, had left the table clutching such a heap of bills that she had
been unable to shake hands with her guests when they bade her good night.
A world in which such things could be seemed a miserable place to Lily Bart; but
then she had never been able to understand the laws of a universe which was so ready
to leave her out of its calculations.
She began to undress without ringing for her maid, whom she had sent to bed.
She had been long enough in bondage to other people's pleasure to be considerate
of those who depended on hers, and in her bitter moods it sometimes struck her that
she and her maid were in the same position,
except that the latter received her wages more regularly.
As she sat before the mirror brushing her hair, her face looked hollow and pale, and
she was frightened by two little lines near her mouth, faint flaws in the smooth curve
of the cheek.
"Oh, I must stop worrying!" she exclaimed. "Unless it's the electric light----" she
reflected, springing up from her seat and lighting the candles on the dressing-table.
She turned out the wall-lights, and peered at herself between the candle-flames.
The white oval of her face swam out waveringly from a background of shadows,
the uncertain light blurring it like a haze; but the two lines about the mouth
remained.
Lily rose and undressed in haste.
"It is only because I am tired and have such odious things to think about," she
kept repeating; and it seemed an added injustice that petty cares should leave a
trace on the beauty which was her only defence against them.
But the odious things were there, and remained with her.
She returned wearily to the thought of Percy Gryce, as a wayfarer picks up a heavy
load and toils on after a brief rest.
She was almost sure she had "landed" him: a few days' work and she would win her
reward.
But the reward itself seemed unpalatable just then: she could get no zest from the
thought of victory.
It would be a rest from worry, no more--and how little that would have seemed to her a
few years earlier! Her ambitions had shrunk gradually in the
desiccating air of failure.
But why had she failed? Was it her own fault or that of destiny?
She remembered how her mother, after they had lost their money, used to say to her
with a kind of fierce vindictiveness: "But you'll get it all back--you'll get it all
back, with your face."...The remembrance
roused a whole train of association, and she lay in the darkness reconstructing the
past out of which her present had grown.
A house in which no one ever dined at home unless there was "company"; a door-bell
perpetually ringing; a hall-table showered with square envelopes which were opened in
haste, and oblong envelopes which were
allowed to gather dust in the depths of a bronze jar; a series of French and English
maids giving warning amid a chaos of hurriedly-ransacked wardrobes and dress-
closets; an equally changing dynasty of
nurses and footmen; quarrels in the pantry, the kitchen and the drawing-room;
precipitate trips to Europe, and returns with gorged trunks and days of interminable
unpacking; semi-annual discussions as to
where the summer should be spent, grey interludes of economy and brilliant
reactions of expense--such was the setting of Lily Bart's first memories.
Ruling the turbulent element called home was the vigorous and determined figure of a
mother still young enough to dance her ball-dresses to rags, while the hazy
outline of a neutral-tinted father filled
an intermediate space between the butler and the man who came to wind the clocks.
Even to the eyes of infancy, Mrs. Hudson Bart had appeared young; but Lily could not
recall the time when her father had not been bald and slightly stooping, with
streaks of grey in his hair, and a tired walk.
It was a shock to her to learn afterward that he was but two years older than her
mother.
Lily seldom saw her father by daylight. All day he was "down town"; and in winter
it was long after nightfall when she heard his *** step on the stairs and his hand
on the school-room door.
He would kiss her in silence, and ask one or two questions of the nurse or the
governess; then Mrs. Bart's maid would come to remind him that he was dining out, and
he would hurry away with a nod to Lily.
In summer, when he joined them for a Sunday at Newport or Southampton, he was even more
effaced and silent than in winter.
It seemed to tire him to rest, and he would sit for hours staring at the sea-line from
a quiet corner of the verandah, while the clatter of his wife's existence went on
unheeded a few feet off.
Generally, however, Mrs. Bart and Lily went to Europe for the summer, and before the
steamer was half way over Mr. Bart had dipped below the horizon.
Sometimes his daughter heard him denounced for having neglected to forward Mrs. Bart's
remittances; but for the most part he was never mentioned or thought of till his
patient stooping figure presented itself on
the New York dock as a buffer between the magnitude of his wife's luggage and the
restrictions of the American custom-house.
In this desultory yet agitated fashion life went on through Lily's teens: a zig-zag
broken course down which the family craft glided on a rapid current of amusement,
tugged at by the underflow of a perpetual need--the need of more money.
Lily could not recall the time when there had been money enough, and in some vague
way her father seemed always to blame for the deficiency.
It could certainly not be the fault of Mrs. Bart, who was spoken of by her friends as a
"wonderful manager."
Mrs. Bart was famous for the unlimited effect she produced on limited means; and
to the lady and her acquaintances there was something heroic in living as though one
were much richer than one's bank-book denoted.
Lily was naturally proud of her mother's aptitude in this line: she had been brought
up in the faith that, whatever it cost, one must have a good cook, and be what Mrs.
Bart called "decently dressed."
Mrs. Bart's worst reproach to her husband was to ask him if he expected her to "live
like a pig"; and his replying in the negative was always regarded as a
justification for cabling to Paris for an
extra dress or two, and telephoning to the jeweller that he might, after all, send
home the turquoise bracelet which Mrs. Bart had looked at that morning.
Lily knew people who "lived like pigs," and their appearance and surroundings justified
her mother's repugnance to that form of existence.
They were mostly cousins, who inhabited dingy houses with engravings from Cole's
Voyage of Life on the drawing-room walls, and slatternly parlour-maids who said "I'll
go and see" to visitors calling at an hour
when all right-minded persons are conventionally if not actually out.
The disgusting part of it was that many of these cousins were rich, so that Lily
imbibed the idea that if people lived like pigs it was from choice, and through the
lack of any proper standard of conduct.
This gave her a sense of reflected superiority, and she did not need Mrs.
Bart's comments on the family frumps and misers to foster her naturally lively taste
for splendour.
Lily was nineteen when circumstances caused her to revise her view of the universe.
The previous year she had made a dazzling debut fringed by a heavy thunder-cloud of
bills.
The light of the debut still lingered on the horizon, but the cloud had thickened;
and suddenly it broke.
The suddenness added to the horror; and there were still times when Lily relived
with painful vividness every detail of the day on which the blow fell.
She and her mother had been seated at the luncheon-table, over the CHAUFROIX and cold
salmon of the previous night's dinner: it was one of Mrs. Bart's few economies to
consume in private the expensive remnants of her hospitality.
Lily was feeling the pleasant languor which is youth's penalty for dancing till dawn;
but her mother, in spite of a few lines about the mouth, and under the yellow waves
on her temples, was as alert, determined
and high in colour as if she had risen from an untroubled sleep.
In the centre of the table, between the melting MARRONS GLACES and candied
cherries, a pyramid of American Beauties lifted their vigorous stems; they held
their heads as high as Mrs. Bart, but their
rose-colour had turned to a dissipated purple, and Lily's sense of fitness was
disturbed by their reappearance on the luncheon-table.
"I really think, mother," she said reproachfully, "we might afford a few fresh
flowers for luncheon. Just some jonquils or lilies-of-the-valley-
-"
Mrs. Bart stared. Her own fastidiousness had its eye fixed on
the world, and she did not care how the luncheon-table looked when there was no one
present at it but the family.
But she smiled at her daughter's innocence. "Lilies-of-the-valley," she said calmly,
"cost two dollars a dozen at this season." Lily was not impressed.
She knew very little of the value of money.
"It would not take more than six dozen to fill that bowl," she argued.
"Six dozen what?" asked her father's voice in the doorway.
The two women looked up in surprise; though it was a Saturday, the sight of Mr. Bart at
luncheon was an unwonted one.
But neither his wife nor his daughter was sufficiently interested to ask an
explanation.
Mr. Bart dropped into a chair, and sat gazing absently at the fragment of jellied
salmon which the butler had placed before him.
"I was only saying," Lily began, "that I hate to see faded flowers at luncheon; and
mother says a bunch of lilies-of-the-valley would not cost more than twelve dollars.
Mayn't I tell the florist to send a few every day?"
She leaned confidently toward her father: he seldom refused her anything, and Mrs.
Bart had taught her to plead with him when her own entreaties failed.
Mr. Bart sat motionless, his gaze still fixed on the salmon, and his lower jaw
dropped; he looked even paler than usual, and his thin hair lay in untidy streaks on
his forehead.
Suddenly he looked at his daughter and laughed.
The laugh was so strange that Lily coloured under it: she disliked being ridiculed, and
her father seemed to see something ridiculous in the request.
Perhaps he thought it foolish that she should trouble him about such a trifle.
"Twelve dollars--twelve dollars a day for flowers?
Oh, certainly, my dear--give him an order for twelve hundred."
He continued to laugh. Mrs. Bart gave him a quick glance.
"You needn't wait, Poleworth--I will ring for you," she said to the butler.
The butler withdrew with an air of silent disapproval, leaving the remains of the
CHAUFROIX on the sideboard.
"What is the matter, Hudson? Are you ill?" said Mrs. Bart severely.
She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making, and it was odious to
her that her husband should make a show of himself before the servants.
"Are you ill?" she repeated.
"Ill?---- No, I'm ruined," he said. Lily made a frightened sound, and Mrs. Bart
rose to her feet.
"Ruined----?" she cried; but controlling herself instantly, she turned a calm face
to Lily. "Shut the pantry door," she said.
Lily obeyed, and when she turned back into the room her father was sitting with both
elbows on the table, the plate of salmon between them, and his head bowed on his
hands.
Mrs. Bart stood over him with a white face which made her hair unnaturally yellow.
She looked at Lily as the latter approached: her look was terrible, but her
voice was modulated to a ghastly cheerfulness.
"Your father is not well--he doesn't know what he is saying.
It is nothing--but you had better go upstairs; and don't talk to the servants,"
she added.
Lily obeyed; she always obeyed when her mother spoke in that voice.
She had not been deceived by Mrs. Bart's words: she knew at once that they were
ruined.
In the dark hours which followed, that awful fact overshadowed even her father's
slow and difficult dying.
To his wife he no longer counted: he had become extinct when he ceased to fulfil his
purpose, and she sat at his side with the provisional air of a traveller who waits
for a belated train to start.
Lily's feelings were softer: she pitied him in a frightened ineffectual way.
But the fact that he was for the most part unconscious, and that his attention, when
she stole into the room, drifted away from her after a moment, made him even more of a
stranger than in the nursery days when he had never come home till after dark.
She seemed always to have seen him through a blur--first of sleepiness, then of
distance and indifference--and now the fog had thickened till he was almost
indistinguishable.
If she could have performed any little services for him, or have exchanged with
him a few of those affecting words which an extensive perusal of fiction had led her to
connect with such occasions, the filial
instinct might have stirred in her; but her pity, finding no active expression,
remained in a state of spectatorship, overshadowed by her mother's grim
unflagging resentment.
Every look and act of Mrs. Bart's seemed to say: "You are sorry for him now--but you
will feel differently when you see what he has done to us."
It was a relief to Lily when her father died.
Then a long winter set in.
There was a little money left, but to Mrs. Bart it seemed worse than nothing--the mere
mockery of what she was entitled to. What was the use of living if one had to
live like a pig?
She sank into a kind of furious apathy, a state of inert anger against fate.
Her faculty for "managing" deserted her, or she no longer took sufficient pride in it
to exert it.
It was well enough to "manage" when by so doing one could keep one's own carriage;
but when one's best contrivance did not conceal the fact that one had to go on
foot, the effort was no longer worth making.
Lily and her mother wandered from place to place, now paying long visits to relations
whose house-keeping Mrs. Bart criticized, and who deplored the fact that she let Lily
breakfast in bed when the girl had no
prospects before her, and now vegetating in cheap continental refuges, where Mrs. Bart
held herself fiercely aloof from the frugal tea-tables of her companions in misfortune.
She was especially careful to avoid her old friends and the scenes of her former
successes.
To be poor seemed to her such a confession of failure that it amounted to disgrace;
and she detected a note of condescension in the friendliest advances.
Only one thought consoled her, and that was the contemplation of Lily's beauty.
She studied it with a kind of passion, as though it were some weapon she had slowly
fashioned for her vengeance.
It was the last asset in their fortunes, the nucleus around which their life was to
be rebuilt.
She watched it jealously, as though it were her own property and Lily its mere
custodian; and she tried to instil into the latter a sense of the responsibility that
such a charge involved.
She followed in imagination the career of other beauties, pointing out to her
daughter what might be achieved through such a gift, and dwelling on the awful
warning of those who, in spite of it, had
failed to get what they wanted: to Mrs. Bart, only stupidity could explain the
lamentable denouement of some of her examples.
She was not above the inconsistency of charging fate, rather than herself, with
her own misfortunes; but she inveighed so acrimoniously against love-matches that
Lily would have fancied her own marriage
had been of that nature, had not Mrs. Bart frequently assured her that she had been
"talked into it"--by whom, she never made clear.
Lily was duly impressed by the magnitude of her opportunities.
The dinginess of her present life threw into enchanting relief the existence to
which she felt herself entitled.
To a less illuminated intelligence Mrs. Bart's counsels might have been dangerous;
but Lily understood that beauty is only the raw material of conquest, and that to
convert it into success other arts are required.
She knew that to betray any sense of superiority was a subtler form of the
stupidity her mother denounced, and it did not take her long to learn that a beauty
needs more tact than the possessor of an average set of features.
Her ambitions were not as crude as Mrs. Bart's.
It had been among that lady's grievances that her husband--in the early days, before
he was too tired--had wasted his evenings in what she vaguely described as "reading
poetry"; and among the effects packed off
to auction after his death were a score or two of dingy volumes which had struggled
for existence among the boots and medicine bottles of his dressing-room shelves.
There was in Lily a vein of sentiment, perhaps transmitted from this source, which
gave an idealizing touch to her most prosaic purposes.
She liked to think of her beauty as a power for good, as giving her the opportunity to
attain a position where she should make her influence felt in the vague diffusion of
refinement and good taste.
She was fond of pictures and flowers, and of sentimental fiction, and she could not
help thinking that the possession of such tastes ennobled her desire for worldly
advantages.
She would not indeed have cared to marry a man who was merely rich: she was secretly
ashamed of her mother's crude passion for money.
Lily's preference would have been for an English nobleman with political ambitions
and vast estates; or, for second choice, an Italian prince with a castle in the
Apennines and an hereditary office in the Vatican.
Lost causes had a romantic charm for her, and she liked to picture herself as
standing aloof from the vulgar press of the Quirinal, and sacrificing her pleasure to
the claims of an immemorial tradition....
How long ago and how far off it all seemed! Those ambitions were hardly more futile and
childish than the earlier ones which had centred about the possession of a French
jointed doll with real hair.
Was it only ten years since she had wavered in imagination between the English earl and
the Italian prince? Relentlessly her mind travelled on over the
dreary interval....
After two years of hungry roaming Mrs. Bart had died----died of a deep disgust.
She had hated dinginess, and it was her fate to be dingy.
Her visions of a brilliant marriage for Lily had faded after the first year.
"People can't marry you if they don't see you--and how can they see you in these
holes where we're stuck?"
That was the burden of her lament; and her last adjuration to her daughter was to
escape from dinginess if she could. "Don't let it creep up on you and drag you
down.
Fight your way out of it somehow--you're young and can do it," she insisted.
She had died during one of their brief visits to New York, and there Lily at once
became the centre of a family council composed of the wealthy relatives whom she
had been taught to despise for living like pigs.
It may be that they had an inkling of the sentiments in which she had been brought
up, for none of them manifested a very lively desire for her company; indeed, the
question threatened to remain unsolved till
Mrs. Peniston with a sigh announced: "I'll try her for a year."
Every one was surprised, but one and all concealed their surprise, lest Mrs.
Peniston should be alarmed by it into reconsidering her decision.
Mrs. Peniston was Mr. Bart's widowed sister, and if she was by no means the
richest of the family group, its other members nevertheless abounded in reasons
why she was clearly destined by Providence to assume the charge of Lily.
In the first place she was alone, and it would be charming for her to have a young
companion.
Then she sometimes travelled, and Lily's familiarity with foreign customs--deplored
as a misfortune by her more conservative relatives--would at least enable her to act
as a kind of courier.
But as a matter of fact Mrs. Peniston had not been affected by these considerations.
She had taken the girl simply because no one else would have her, and because she
had the kind of moral MAUVAISE HONTE which makes the public display of selfishness
difficult, though it does not interfere with its private indulgence.
It would have been impossible for Mrs. Peniston to be heroic on a desert island,
but with the eyes of her little world upon her she took a certain pleasure in her act.
She reaped the reward to which disinterestedness is entitled, and found an
agreeable companion in her niece.
She had expected to find Lily headstrong, critical and "foreign"--for even Mrs.
Peniston, though she occasionally went abroad, had the family dread of
foreignness--but the girl showed a pliancy,
which, to a more penetrating mind than her aunt's, might have been less reassuring
than the open selfishness of youth.
Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is
less easy to break than a stiff one. Mrs. Peniston, however, did not suffer from
her niece's adaptability.
Lily had no intention of taking advantage of her aunt's good nature.
She was in truth grateful for the refuge offered her: Mrs. Peniston's opulent
interior was at least not externally dingy.
But dinginess is a quality which assumes all manner of disguises; and Lily soon
found that it was as latent in the expensive routine of her aunt's life as in
the makeshift existence of a continental pension.
Mrs. Peniston was one of the episodical persons who form the padding of life.
It was impossible to believe that she had herself ever been a focus of activities.
The most vivid thing about her was the fact that her grandmother had been a Van
Alstyne.
This connection with the well-fed and industrious stock of early New York
revealed itself in the glacial neatness of Mrs. Peniston's drawing-room and in the
excellence of her cuisine.
She belonged to the class of old New Yorkers who have always lived well, dressed
expensively, and done little else; and to these inherited obligations Mrs. Peniston
faithfully conformed.
She had always been a looker-on at life, and her mind resembled one of those little
mirrors which her Dutch ancestors were accustomed to affix to their upper windows,
so that from the depths of an impenetrable
domesticity they might see what was happening in the street.
Mrs. Peniston was the owner of a country- place in New Jersey, but she had never
lived there since her husband's death--a remote event, which appeared to dwell in
her memory chiefly as a dividing point in
the personal reminiscences that formed the staple of her conversation.
She was a woman who remembered dates with intensity, and could tell at a moment's
notice whether the drawing-room curtains had been renewed before or after Mr.
Peniston's last illness.
Mrs. Peniston thought the country lonely and trees damp, and cherished a vague fear
of meeting a bull.
To guard against such contingencies she frequented the more populous watering-
places, where she installed herself impersonally in a hired house and looked on
at life through the matting screen of her verandah.
In the care of such a guardian, it soon became clear to Lily that she was to enjoy
only the material advantages of good food and expensive clothing; and, though far
from underrating these, she would gladly
have exchanged them for what Mrs. Bart had taught her to regard as opportunities.
She sighed to think what her mother's fierce energies would have accomplished,
had they been coupled with Mrs. Peniston's resources.
Lily had abundant energy of her own, but it was restricted by the necessity of adapting
herself to her aunt's habits.
She saw that at all costs she must keep Mrs. Peniston's favour till, as Mrs. Bart
would have phrased it, she could stand on her own legs.
Lily had no mind for the vagabond life of the poor relation, and to adapt herself to
Mrs. Peniston she had, to some degree, to assume that lady's passive attitude.
She had fancied at first that it would be easy to draw her aunt into the whirl of her
own activities, but there was a static force in Mrs. Peniston against which her
niece's efforts spent themselves in vain.
To attempt to bring her into active relation with life was like tugging at a
piece of furniture which has been screwed to the floor.
She did not, indeed, expect Lily to remain equally immovable: she had all the American
guardian's indulgence for the volatility of youth.
She had indulgence also for certain other habits of her niece's.
It seemed to her natural that Lily should spend all her money on dress, and she
supplemented the girl's scanty income by occasional "handsome presents" meant to be
applied to the same purpose.
Lily, who was intensely practical, would have preferred a fixed allowance; but Mrs.
Peniston liked the periodical recurrence of gratitude evoked by unexpected cheques, and
was perhaps shrewd enough to perceive that
such a method of giving kept alive in her niece a salutary sense of dependence.
Beyond this, Mrs. Peniston had not felt called upon to do anything for her charge:
she had simply stood aside and let her take the field.
Lily had taken it, at first with the confidence of assured possessorship, then
with gradually narrowing demands, till now she found herself actually struggling for a
foothold on the broad space which had once seemed her own for the asking.
How it happened she did not yet know.
Sometimes she thought it was because Mrs. Peniston had been too passive, and again
she feared it was because she herself had not been passive enough.
Had she shown an undue eagerness for victory?
Had she lacked patience, pliancy and dissimulation?
Whether she charged herself with these faults or absolved herself from them, made
no difference in the sum-total of her failure.
Younger and plainer girls had been married off by dozens, and she was nine-and-twenty,
and still Miss Bart.
She was beginning to have fits of angry rebellion against fate, when she longed to
drop out of the race and make an independent life for herself.
But what manner of life would it be?
She had barely enough money to pay her dress-makers' bills and her gambling debts;
and none of the desultory interests which she dignified with the name of tastes was
pronounced enough to enable her to live contentedly in obscurity.
Ah, no--she was too intelligent not to be honest with herself.
She knew that she hated dinginess as much as her mother had hated it, and to her last
breath she meant to fight against it, dragging herself up again and again above
its flood till she gained the bright
pinnacles of success which presented such a slippery surface to her clutch.
>
CHAPTER 4
The next morning, on her breakfast tray, Miss Bart found a note from her hostess.
"Dearest Lily," it ran, "if it is not too much of a bore to be down by ten, will you
come to my sitting-room to help me with some tiresome things?"
Lily tossed aside the note and subsided on her pillows with a sigh.
It WAS a bore to be down by ten--an hour regarded at Bellomont as vaguely
synchronous with sunrise--and she knew too well the nature of the tiresome things in
question.
Miss Pragg, the secretary, had been called away, and there would be notes and dinner-
cards to write, lost addresses to hunt up, and other social drudgery to perform.
It was understood that Miss Bart should fill the gap in such emergencies, and she
usually recognized the obligation without a murmur.
Today, however, it renewed the sense of servitude which the previous night's review
of her cheque-book had produced. Everything in her surroundings ministered
to feelings of ease and amenity.
The windows stood open to the sparkling freshness of the September morning, and
between the yellow boughs she caught a perspective of hedges and parterres leading
by degrees of lessening formality to the free undulations of the park.
Her maid had kindled a little fire on the hearth, and it contended cheerfully with
the sunlight which slanted across the moss- green carpet and caressed the curved sides
of an old marquetry desk.
Near the bed stood a table holding her breakfast tray, with its harmonious
porcelain and silver, a handful of violets in a slender glass, and the morning paper
folded beneath her letters.
There was nothing new to Lily in these tokens of a studied luxury; but, though
they formed a part of her atmosphere, she never lost her sensitiveness to their
charm.
Mere display left her with a sense of superior distinction; but she felt an
affinity to all the subtler manifestations of wealth.
Mrs. Trenor's summons, however, suddenly recalled her state of dependence, and she
rose and dressed in a mood of irritability that she was usually too prudent to
indulge.
She knew that such emotions leave lines on the face as well as in the character, and
she had meant to take warning by the little creases which her midnight survey had
revealed.
The matter-of-course tone of Mrs. Trenor's greeting deepened her irritation.
If one did drag one's self out of bed at such an hour, and come down fresh and
radiant to the monotony of note-writing, some special recognition of the sacrifice
seemed fitting.
But Mrs. Trenor's tone showed no consciousness of the fact.
"Oh, Lily, that's nice of you," she merely sighed across the chaos of letters, bills
and other domestic documents which gave an incongruously commercial touch to the
slender elegance of her writing-table.
"There are such lots of horrors this morning," she added, clearing a space in
the centre of the confusion and rising to yield her seat to Miss Bart.
Mrs. Trenor was a tall fair woman, whose height just saved her from redundancy.
Her rosy blondness had survived some forty years of futile activity without showing
much trace of ill-usage except in a diminished play of feature.
It was difficult to define her beyond saying that she seemed to exist only as a
hostess, not so much from any exaggerated instinct of hospitality as because she
could not sustain life except in a crowd.
The collective nature of her interests exempted her from the ordinary rivalries of
her sex, and she knew no more personal emotion than that of hatred for the woman
who presumed to give bigger dinners or have more amusing house-parties than herself.
As her social talents, backed by Mr. Trenor's bank-account, almost always
assured her ultimate triumph in such competitions, success had developed in her
an unscrupulous good nature toward the rest
of her sex, and in Miss Bart's utilitarian classification of her friends, Mrs. Trenor
ranked as the woman who was least likely to "go back" on her.
"It was simply inhuman of Pragg to go off now," Mrs. Trenor declared, as her friend
seated herself at the desk.
"She says her sister is going to have a baby--as if that were anything to having a
house-party! I'm sure I shall get most horribly mixed up
and there will be some awful rows.
When I was down at Tuxedo I asked a lot of people for next week, and I've mislaid the
list and can't remember who is coming.
And this week is going to be a horrid failure too--and Gwen Van Osburgh will go
back and tell her mother how bored people were.
I did mean to ask the Wetheralls--that was a blunder of Gus's.
They disapprove of Carry Fisher, you know. As if one could help having Carry Fisher!
It WAS foolish of her to get that second divorce--Carry always overdoes things--but
she said the only way to get a penny out of Fisher was to divorce him and make him pay
alimony.
And poor Carry has to consider every dollar.
It's really absurd of Alice Wetherall to make such a fuss about meeting her, when
one thinks of what society is coming to.
Some one said the other day that there was a divorce and a case of appendicitis in
every family one knows.
Besides, Carry is the only person who can keep Gus in a good humour when we have
bores in the house. Have you noticed that ALL the husbands like
her?
All, I mean, except her own. It's rather clever of her to have made a
specialty of devoting herself to dull people--the field is such a large one, and
she has it practically to herself.
She finds compensations, no doubt--I know she borrows money of Gus--but then I'd PAY
her to keep him in a good humour, so I can't complain, after all."
Mrs. Trenor paused to enjoy the spectacle of Miss Bart's efforts to unravel her
tangled correspondence. "But it is only the Wetheralls and Carry,"
she resumed, with a fresh note of lament.
"The truth is, I'm awfully disappointed in Lady Cressida Raith."
"Disappointed? Had you known her before?"
"Mercy, no--never saw her till yesterday.
Lady Skiddaw sent her over with letters to the Van Osburghs, and I heard that Maria
Van Osburgh was asking a big party to meet her this week, so I thought it would be fun
to get her away, and Jack Stepney, who knew her in India, managed it for me.
Maria was furious, and actually had the impudence to make Gwen invite herself here,
so that they shouldn't be QUITE out of it-- if I'd known what Lady Cressida was like,
they could have had her and welcome!
But I thought any friend of the Skiddaws' was sure to be amusing.
You remember what fun Lady Skiddaw was? There were times when I simply had to send
the girls out of the room.
Besides, Lady Cressida is the Duchess of Beltshire's sister, and I naturally
supposed she was the same sort; but you never can tell in those English families.
They are so big that there's room for all kinds, and it turns out that Lady Cressida
is the moral one--married a clergy-man and does missionary work in the East End.
Think of my taking such a lot of trouble about a clergyman's wife, who wears Indian
jewelry and botanizes!
She made Gus take her all through the glass-houses yesterday, and bothered him to
death by asking him the names of the plants.
Fancy treating Gus as if he were the gardener!"
Mrs. Trenor brought this out in a CRESCENDO of indignation.
"Oh, well, perhaps Lady Cressida will reconcile the Wetheralls to meeting Carry
Fisher," said Miss Bart pacifically. "I'm sure I hope so!
But she is boring all the men horribly, and if she takes to distributing tracts, as I
hear she does, it will be too depressing. The worst of it is that she would have been
so useful at the right time.
You know we have to have the Bishop once a year, and she would have given just the
right tone to things.
I always have horrid luck about the Bishop's visits," added Mrs. Trenor, whose
present misery was being fed by a rapidly rising tide of reminiscence; "last year,
when he came, Gus forgot all about his
being here, and brought home the Ned Wintons and the Farleys--five divorces and
six sets of children between them!" "When is Lady Cressida going?"
Lily enquired.
Mrs. Trenor cast up her eyes in despair. "My dear, if one only knew!
I was in such a hurry to get her away from Maria that I actually forgot to name a
date, and Gus says she told some one she meant to stop here all winter."
"To stop here?
In this house?" "Don't be silly--in America.
But if no one else asks her--you know they NEVER go to hotels."
"Perhaps Gus only said it to frighten you."
"No--I heard her tell Bertha Dorset that she had six months to put in while her
husband was taking the cure in the Engadine.
You should have seen Bertha look vacant!
But it's no joke, you know--if she stays here all the autumn she'll spoil
everything, and Maria Van Osburgh will simply exult."
At this affecting vision Mrs. Trenor's voice trembled with self-pity.
"Oh, Judy--as if any one were ever bored at Bellomont!"
Miss Bart tactfully protested.
"You know perfectly well that, if Mrs. Van Osburgh were to get all the right people
and leave you with all the wrong ones, you'd manage to make things go off, and she
wouldn't."
Such an assurance would usually have restored Mrs. Trenor's complacency; but on
this occasion it did not chase the cloud from her brow.
"It isn't only Lady Cressida," she lamented.
"Everything has gone wrong this week. I can see that Bertha Dorset is furious
with me."
"Furious with you? Why?"
"Because I told her that Lawrence Selden was coming; but he wouldn't, after all, and
she's quite unreasonable enough to think it's my fault."
Miss Bart put down her pen and sat absently gazing at the note she had begun.
"I thought that was all over," she said. "So it is, on his side.
And of course Bertha has been idle since.
But I fancy she's out of a job just at present--and some one gave me a hint that I
had better ask Lawrence.
Well, I DID ask him--but I couldn't make him come; and now I suppose she'll take it
out of me by being perfectly nasty to every one else."
"Oh, she may take it out of HIM by being perfectly charming--to some one else."
Mrs. Trenor shook her head dolefully. "She knows he wouldn't mind.
And who else is there?
Alice Wetherall won't let Lucius out of her sight.
Ned Silverton can't take his eyes off Carry Fisher--poor boy!
Gus is bored by Bertha, Jack Stepney knows her too well--and--well, to be sure,
there's Percy Gryce!" She sat up smiling at the thought.
Miss Bart's countenance did not reflect the smile.
"Oh, she and Mr. Gryce would not be likely to hit it off."
"You mean that she'd shock him and he'd bore her?
Well, that's not such a bad beginning, you know.
But I hope she won't take it into her head to be nice to him, for I asked him here on
purpose for you." Lily laughed.
"MERCI DU COMPLIMENT!
I should certainly have no show against Bertha."
"Do you think I am uncomplimentary? I'm not really, you know.
Every one knows you're a thousand times handsomer and cleverer than Bertha; but
then you're not nasty. And for always getting what she wants in
the long run, commend me to a nasty woman."
Miss Bart stared in affected reproval. "I thought you were so fond of Bertha."
"Oh, I am--it's much safer to be fond of dangerous people.
But she IS dangerous--and if I ever saw her up to mischief it's now.
I can tell by poor George's manner. That man is a perfect barometer--he always
knows when Bertha is going to----"
"To fall?" Miss Bart suggested.
"Don't be shocking! You know he believes in her still.
And of course I don't say there's any real harm in Bertha.
Only she delights in making people miserable, and especially poor George."
"Well, he seems cut out for the part--I don't wonder she likes more cheerful
companionship." "Oh, George is not as dismal as you think.
If Bertha did worry him he would be quite different.
Or if she'd leave him alone, and let him arrange his life as he pleases.
But she doesn't dare lose her hold of him on account of the money, and so when HE
isn't jealous she pretends to be."
Miss Bart went on writing in silence, and her hostess sat following her train of
thought with frowning intensity.
"Do you know," she exclaimed after a long pause, "I believe I'll call up Lawrence on
the telephone and tell him he simply MUST come?"
"Oh, don't," said Lily, with a quick suffusion of colour.
The blush surprised her almost as much as it did her hostess, who, though not
commonly observant of facial changes, sat staring at her with puzzled eyes.
"Good gracious, Lily, how handsome you are!
Why? Do you dislike him so much?"
"Not at all; I like him.
But if you are actuated by the benevolent intention of protecting me from Bertha--I
don't think I need your protection." Mrs. Trenor sat up with an exclamation.
"Lily!----PERCY?
Do you mean to say you've actually done it?"
Miss Bart smiled. "I only mean to say that Mr. Gryce and I
are getting to be very good friends."
"H'm--I see." Mrs. Trenor fixed a rapt eye upon her.
"You know they say he has eight hundred thousand a year--and spends nothing, except
on some rubbishy old books.
And his mother has heart-disease and will leave him a lot more.
OH, LILY, DO GO SLOWLY," her friend adjured her.
Miss Bart continued to smile without annoyance.
"I shouldn't, for instance," she remarked, "be in any haste to tell him that he had a
lot of rubbishy old books."
"No, of course not; I know you're wonderful about getting up people's subjects.
But he's horribly shy, and easily shocked, and--and----"
"Why don't you say it, Judy?
I have the reputation of being on the hunt for a rich husband?"
"Oh, I don't mean that; he wouldn't believe it of you--at first," said Mrs. Trenor,
with candid shrewdness.
"But you know things are rather lively here at times--I must give Jack and Gus a hint--
and if he thought you were what his mother would call fast--oh, well, you know what I
mean.
Don't wear your scarlet CREPE-DE-CHINE for dinner, and don't smoke if you can help it,
Lily dear!" Lily pushed aside her finished work with a
dry smile.
"You're very kind, Judy: I'll lock up my cigarettes and wear that last year's dress
you sent me this morning.
And if you are really interested in my career, perhaps you'll be kind enough not
to ask me to play bridge again this evening."
"Bridge?
Does he mind bridge, too? Oh, Lily, what an awful life you'll lead!
But of course I won't--why didn't you give me a hint last night?
There's nothing I wouldn't do, you poor duck, to see you happy!"
And Mrs. Trenor, glowing with her sex's eagerness to smooth the course of true
love, enveloped Lily in a long embrace.
"You're quite sure," she added solicitously, as the latter extricated
herself, "that you wouldn't like me to telephone for Lawrence Selden?"
"Quite sure," said Lily.
The next three days demonstrated to her own complete satisfaction Miss Bart's ability
to manage her affairs without extraneous aid.
As she sat, on the Saturday afternoon, on the terrace at Bellomont, she smiled at
Mrs. Trenor's fear that she might go too fast.
If such a warning had ever been needful, the years had taught her a salutary lesson,
and she flattered herself that she now knew how to adapt her pace to the object of
pursuit.
In the case of Mr. Gryce she had found it well to flutter ahead, losing herself
elusively and luring him on from depth to depth of unconscious intimacy.
The surrounding atmosphere was propitious to this scheme of courtship.
Mrs. Trenor, true to her word, had shown no signs of expecting Lily at the bridge-
table, and had even hinted to the other card-players that they were to betray no
surprise at her unwonted defection.
In consequence of this hint, Lily found herself the centre of that feminine
solicitude which envelops a young woman in the mating season.
A solitude was tacitly created for her in the crowded existence of Bellomont, and her
friends could not have shown a greater readiness for self-effacement had her
wooing been adorned with all the attributes of romance.
In Lily's set this conduct implied a sympathetic comprehension of her motives,
and Mr. Gryce rose in her esteem as she saw the consideration he inspired.
The terrace at Bellomont on a September afternoon was a spot propitious to
sentimental musings, and as Miss Bart stood leaning against the balustrade above the
sunken garden, at a little distance from
the animated group about the tea-table, she might have been lost in the mazes of an
inarticulate happiness.
In reality, her thoughts were finding definite utterance in the tranquil
recapitulation of the blessings in store for her.
From where she stood she could see them embodied in the form of Mr. Gryce, who, in
a light overcoat and muffler, sat somewhat nervously on the edge of his chair, while
Carry Fisher, with all the energy of eye
and gesture with which nature and art had combined to endow her, pressed on him the
duty of taking part in the task of municipal reform.
Mrs. Fisher's latest hobby was municipal reform.
It had been preceded by an equal zeal for socialism, which had in turn replaced an
energetic advocacy of Christian Science.
Mrs. Fisher was small, fiery and dramatic; and her hands and eyes were admirable
instruments in the service of whatever causes he happened to espouse.
She had, however, the fault common to enthusiasts of ignoring any slackness of
response on the part of her hearers, and Lily was amused by her unconsciousness of
the resistance displayed in every angle of Mr. Gryce's attitude.
Lily herself knew that his mind was divided between the dread of catching cold if he
remained out of doors too long at that hour, and the fear that, if he retreated to
the house, Mrs. Fisher might follow him up with a paper to be signed.
Mr. Gryce had a constitutional dislike to what he called "committing himself," and
tenderly as he cherished his health, he evidently concluded that it was safer to
stay out of reach of pen and ink till
chance released him from Mrs. Fisher's toils.
Meanwhile he cast agonized glances in the direction of Miss Bart, whose only response
was to sink into an attitude of more graceful abstraction.
She had learned the value of contrast in throwing her charms into relief, and was
fully aware of the extent to which Mrs. Fisher's volubility was enhancing her own
repose.
She was roused from her musings by the approach of her cousin Jack Stepney who, at
Gwen Van Osburgh's side, was returning across the garden from the tennis court.
The couple in question were engaged in the same kind of romance in which Lily figured,
and the latter felt a certain annoyance in contemplating what seemed to her a
caricature of her own situation.
Miss Van Osburgh was a large girl with flat surfaces and no high lights: Jack Stepney
had once said of her that she was as reliable as roast mutton.
His own taste was in the line of less solid and more highly-seasoned diet; but hunger
makes any fare palatable, and there had been times when Mr. Stepney had been
reduced to a crust.
Lily considered with interest the expression of their faces: the girl's
turned toward her companion's like an empty plate held up to be filled, while the man
lounging at her side already betrayed the
encroaching boredom which would presently crack the thin veneer of his smile.
"How impatient men are!" Lily reflected.
"All Jack has to do to get everything he wants is to keep quiet and let that girl
marry him; whereas I have to calculate and contrive, and retreat and advance, as if I
were going through an intricate dance,
where one misstep would throw me hopelessly out of time."
As they drew nearer she was whimsically struck by a kind of family likeness between
Miss Van Osburgh and Percy Gryce.
There was no resemblance of feature.
Gryce was handsome in a didactic way--he looked like a clever pupil's drawing from a
plaster-cast--while Gwen's countenance had no more modelling than a face painted on a
toy balloon.
But the deeper affinity was unmistakable: the two had the same prejudices and ideals,
and the same quality of making other standards non-existent by ignoring them.
This attribute was common to most of Lily's set: they had a force of negation which
eliminated everything beyond their own range of perception.
Gryce and Miss Van Osburgh were, in short, made for each other by every law of moral
and physical correspondence----"Yet they wouldn't look at each other," Lily mused,
"they never do.
Each of them wants a creature of a different race, of Jack's race and mine,
with all sorts of intuitions, sensations and perceptions that they don't even guess
the existence of.
And they always get what they want."
She stood talking with her cousin and Miss Van Osburgh, till a slight cloud on the
latter's brow advised her that even cousinly amenities were subject to
suspicion, and Miss Bart, mindful of the
necessity of not exciting enmities at this crucial point of her career, dropped aside
while the happy couple proceeded toward the tea-table.
Seating herself on the upper step of the terrace, Lily leaned her head against the
honeysuckles wreathing the balustrade.
The fragrance of the late blossoms seemed an emanation of the tranquil scene, a
landscape tutored to the last degree of rural elegance.
In the foreground glowed the warm tints of the gardens.
Beyond the lawn, with its pyramidal pale- gold maples and velvety firs, sloped
pastures dotted with cattle; and through a long glade the river widened like a lake
under the silver light of September.
Lily did not want to join the circle about the tea-table.
They represented the future she had chosen, and she was content with it, but in no
haste to anticipate its joys.
The certainty that she could marry Percy Gryce when she pleased had lifted a heavy
load from her mind, and her money troubles were too recent for their removal not to
leave a sense of relief which a less
discerning intelligence might have taken for happiness.
Her vulgar cares were at an end.
She would be able to arrange her life as she pleased, to soar into that empyrean of
security where creditors cannot penetrate.
She would have smarter gowns than Judy Trenor, and far, far more jewels than
Bertha Dorset.
She would be free forever from the shifts, the expedients, the humiliations of the
relatively poor.
Instead of having to flatter, she would be flattered; instead of being grateful, she
would receive thanks. There were old scores she could pay off as
well as old benefits she could return.
And she had no doubts as to the extent of her power.
She knew that Mr. Gryce was of the small chary type most inaccessible to impulses
and emotions.
He had the kind of character in which prudence is a vice, and good advice the
most dangerous nourishment.
But Lily had known the species before: she was aware that such a guarded nature must
find one huge outlet of egoism, and she determined to be to him what his Americana
had hitherto been: the one possession in
which he took sufficient pride to spend money on it.
She knew that this generosity to self is one of the forms of meanness, and she
resolved so to identify herself with her husband's vanity that to gratify her wishes
would be to him the most exquisite form of self-indulgence.
The system might at first necessitate a resort to some of the very shifts and
expedients from which she intended it should free her; but she felt sure that in
a short time she would be able to play the game in her own way.
How should she have distrusted her powers?
Her beauty itself was not the mere ephemeral possession it might have been in
the hands of inexperience: her skill in enhancing it, the care she took of it, the
use she made of it, seemed to give it a kind of permanence.
She felt she could trust it to carry her through to the end.
And the end, on the whole, was worthwhile.
Life was not the mockery she had thought it three days ago.
There was room for her, after all, in this crowded selfish world of pleasure whence,
so short a time since, her poverty had seemed to exclude her.
These people whom she had ridiculed and yet envied were glad to make a place for her in
the charmed circle about which all her desires revolved.
They were not as brutal and self-engrossed as she had fancied--or rather, since it
would no longer be necessary to flatter and humour them, that side of their nature
became less conspicuous.
Society is a revolving body which is apt to be judged according to its place in each
man's heaven; and at present it was turning its illuminated face to Lily.
In the rosy glow it diffused her companions seemed full of amiable qualities.
She liked their elegance, their lightness, their lack of emphasis: even the self-
assurance which at times was so like obtuseness now seemed the natural sign of
social ascendency.
They were lords of the only world she cared for, and they were ready to admit her to
their ranks and let her lord it with them.
Already she felt within her a stealing allegiance to their standards, an
acceptance of their limitations, a disbelief in the things they did not
believe in, a contemptuous pity for the
people who were not able to live as they lived.
The early sunset was slanting across the park.
Through the boughs of the long avenue beyond the gardens she caught the flash of
wheels, and divined that more visitors were approaching.
There was a movement behind her, a scattering of steps and voices: it was
evident that the party about the tea-table was breaking up.
Presently she heard a tread behind her on the terrace.
She supposed that Mr. Gryce had at last found means to escape from his predicament,
and she smiled at the significance of his coming to join her instead of beating an
instant retreat to the fire-side.
She turned to give him the welcome which such gallantry deserved; but her greeting
wavered into a blush of wonder, for the man who had approached her was Lawrence Selden.
"You see I came after all," he said; but before she had time to answer, Mrs. Dorset,
breaking away from a lifeless colloquy with her host, had stepped between them with a
little gesture of appropriation.
>
CHAPTER 5
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."
>