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CHAPTER 6
As became persons of their rising consequence, the Gormers were engaged in
building a country-house on Long Island; and it was a part of Miss Bart's duty to
attend her hostess on frequent visits of inspection to the new estate.
There, while Mrs. Gormer plunged into problems of lighting and sanitation, Lily
had leisure to wander, in the bright autumn air, along the tree-fringed bay to which
the land declined.
Little as she was addicted to solitude, there had come to be moments when it seemed
a welcome escape from the empty noises of her life.
She was weary of being swept passively along a current of pleasure and business in
which she had no share; weary of seeing other people pursue amusement and squander
money, while she felt herself of no more
account among them than an expensive toy in the hands of a spoiled child.
It was in this frame of mind that, striking back from the shore one morning into the
windings of an unfamiliar lane, she came suddenly upon the figure of George Dorset.
The Dorset place was in the immediate neighbourhood of the Gormers' newly-
acquired estate, and in her motor-flights thither with Mrs. Gormer, Lily had caught
one or two passing glimpses of the couple;
but they moved in so different an orbit that she had not considered the possibility
of a direct encounter.
Dorset, swinging along with bent head, in moody abstraction, did not see Miss Bart
till he was close upon her; but the sight, instead of bringing him to a halt, as she
had half-expected, sent him toward her with
an eagerness which found expression in his opening words.
"Miss Bart!--You'll shake hands, won't you? I've been hoping to meet you--I should have
written to you if I'd dared."
His face, with its tossed red hair and straggling moustache, had a driven uneasy
look, as though life had become an unceasing race between himself and the
thoughts at his heels.
The look drew a word of compassionate greeting from Lily, and he pressed on, as
if encouraged by her tone: "I wanted to apologize--to ask you to forgive me for the
miserable part I played----"
She checked him with a quick gesture. "Don't let us speak of it: I was very sorry
for you," she said, with a tinge of disdain which, as she instantly perceived, was not
lost on him.
He flushed to his haggard eyes, flushed so cruelly that she repented the thrust.
"You might well be; you don't know--you must let me explain.
I was deceived: abominably deceived----"
"I am still more sorry for you, then," she interposed, without irony; "but you must
see that I am not exactly the person with whom the subject can be discussed."
He met this with a look of genuine wonder.
"Why not? Isn't it to you, of all people, that I owe
an explanation----" "No explanation is necessary: the situation
was perfectly clear to me."
"Ah----" he murmured, his head drooping again, and his irresolute hand switching at
the underbrush along the lane.
But as Lily made a movement to pass on, he broke out with fresh vehemence: "Miss Bart,
for God's sake don't turn from me!
We used to be good friends--you were always kind to me--and you don't know how I need a
friend now." The lamentable weakness of the words roused
a motion of pity in Lily's breast.
She too needed friends--she had tasted the pang of loneliness; and her resentment of
Bertha Dorset's cruelty softened her heart to the poor wretch who was after all the
chief of Bertha's victims.
"I still wish to be kind; I feel no ill- will toward you," she said.
"But you must understand that after what has happened we can't be friends again--we
can't see each other."
"Ah, you ARE kind--you're merciful--you always were!"
He fixed his miserable gaze on her. "But why can't we be friends--why not, when
I've repented in dust and ashes?
Isn't it hard that you should condemn me to suffer for the falseness, the treachery of
others? I was punished enough at the time--is there
to be no respite for me?"
"I should have thought you had found complete respite in the reconciliation
which was effected at my expense," Lily began, with renewed impatience; but he
broke in imploringly: "Don't put it in that
way--when that's been the worst of my punishment.
My God! what could I do--wasn't I powerless?
You were singled out as a sacrifice: any word I might have said would have been
turned against you----"
"I have told you I don't blame you; all I ask you to understand is that, after the
use Bertha chose to make of me--after all that her behaviour has since implied--it's
impossible that you and I should meet."
He continued to stand before her, in his dogged weakness.
"Is it--need it be?
Mightn't there be circumstances----?" he checked himself, slashing at the wayside
weeds in a wider radius. Then he began again: "Miss Bart, listen--
give me a minute.
If we're not to meet again, at least let me have a hearing now.
You say we can't be friends after--after what has happened.
But can't I at least appeal to your pity?
Can't I move you if I ask you to think of me as a prisoner--a prisoner you alone can
set free?"
Lily's inward start betrayed itself in a quick blush: was it possible that this was
really the sense of Carry Fisher's adumbrations?
"I can't see how I can possibly be of any help to you," she murmured, drawing back a
little from the mounting excitement of his look.
Her tone seemed to sober him, as it had so often done in his stormiest moments.
The stubborn lines of his face relaxed, and he said, with an abrupt drop to docility:
"You WOULD see, if you'd be as merciful as you used to be: and heaven knows I've never
needed it more!"
She paused a moment, moved in spite of herself by this reminder of her influence
over him.
Her fibres had been softened by suffering, and the sudden glimpse into his mocked and
broken life disarmed her contempt for his weakness.
"I am very sorry for you--I would help you willingly; but you must have other friends,
other advisers." "I never had a friend like you," he
answered simply.
"And besides--can't you see?--you're the only person"--his voice dropped to a
whisper--"the only person who knows."
Again she felt her colour change; again her heart rose in precipitate throbs to meet
what she felt was coming. He lifted his eyes to her entreatingly.
"You do see, don't you?
You understand? I'm desperate--I'm at the end of my tether.
I want to be free, and you can free me. I know you can.
You don't want to keep me bound fast in hell, do you?
You can't want to take such a vengeance as that.
You were always kind--your eyes are kind now.
You say you're sorry for me.
Well, it rests with you to show it; and heaven knows there's nothing to keep you
back.
You understand, of course--there wouldn't be a hint of publicity--not a sound or a
syllable to connect you with the thing.
It would never come to that, you know: all I need is to be able to say definitely: 'I
know this--and this--and this'--and the fight would drop, and the way be cleared,
and the whole abominable business swept out of sight in a second."
He spoke pantingly, like a tired runner, with breaks of exhaustion between his
words; and through the breaks she caught, as through the shifting rents of a fog,
great golden vistas of peace and safety.
For there was no mistaking the definite intention behind his vague appeal; she
could have filled up the blanks without the help of Mrs. Fisher's insinuations.
Here was a man who turned to her in the extremity of his loneliness and his
humiliation: if she came to him at such a moment he would be hers with all the force
of his deluded faith.
And the power to make him so lay in her hand--lay there in a completeness he could
not even remotely conjecture.
Revenge and rehabilitation might be hers at a stroke--there was something dazzling in
the completeness of the opportunity. She stood silent, gazing away from him down
the autumnal stretch of the deserted lane.
And suddenly fear possessed her--fear of herself, and of the terrible force of the
temptation.
All her past weaknesses were like so many eager accomplices drawing her toward the
path their feet had already smoothed. She turned quickly, and held out her hand
to Dorset.
"Goodbye--I'm sorry; there's nothing in the world that I can do."
"Nothing? Ah, don't say that," he cried; "say what's
true: that you abandon me like the others.
You, the only creature who could have saved me!"
"Goodbye--goodbye," she repeated hurriedly; and as she moved away she heard him cry out
on a last note of entreaty: "At least you'll let me see you once more?"
Lily, on regaining the Gormer grounds, struck rapidly across the lawn toward the
unfinished house, where she fancied that her hostess might be speculating, not too
resignedly, on the cause of her delay; for,
like many unpunctual persons, Mrs. Gormer disliked to be kept waiting.
As Miss Bart reached the avenue, however, she saw a smart phaeton with a high-
stepping pair disappear behind the shrubbery in the direction of the gate; and
on the doorstep stood Mrs. Gormer, with a
glow of retrospective pleasure on her open countenance.
At sight of Lily the glow deepened to an embarrassed red, and she said with a slight
laugh: "Did you see my visitor?
Oh, I thought you came back by the avenue. It was Mrs. George Dorset--she said she'd
dropped in to make a neighbourly call."
Lily met the announcement with her usual composure, though her experience of
Bertha's idiosyncrasies would not have led her to include the neighbourly instinct
among them; and Mrs. Gormer, relieved to
see that she gave no sign of surprise, went on with a deprecating laugh: "Of course
what really brought her was curiosity--she made me take her all over the house.
But no one could have been nicer--no airs, you know, and so good-natured: I can quite
see why people think her so fascinating."
This surprising event, coinciding too completely with her meeting with Dorset to
be regarded as contingent upon it, had yet immediately struck Lily with a vague sense
of foreboding.
It was not in Bertha's habits to be neighbourly, much less to make advances to
any one outside the immediate circle of her affinities.
She had always consistently ignored the world of outer aspirants, or had recognized
its individual members only when prompted by motives of self-interest; and the very
capriciousness of her condescensions had,
as Lily was aware, given them special value in the eyes of the persons she
distinguished.
Lily saw this now in Mrs. Gormer's unconcealable complacency, and in the happy
irrelevance with which, for the next day or two, she quoted Bertha's opinions and
speculated on the origin of her gown.
All the secret ambitions which Mrs. Gormer's native indolence, and the attitude
of her companions, kept in habitual abeyance, were now germinating afresh in
the glow of Bertha's advances; and whatever
the cause of the latter, Lily saw that, if they were followed up, they were likely to
have a disturbing effect upon her own future.
She had arranged to break the length of her stay with her new friends by one or two
visits to other acquaintances as recent; and on her return from this somewhat
depressing excursion she was immediately
conscious that Mrs. Dorset's influence was still in the air.
There had been another exchange of visits, a tea at a country-club, an encounter at a
hunt ball; there was even a rumour of an approaching dinner, which Mattie Gormer,
with an unnatural effort at discretion,
tried to smuggle out of the conversation whenever Miss Bart took part in it.
The latter had already planned to return to town after a farewell Sunday with her
friends; and, with Gerty Farish's aid, had discovered a small private hotel where she
might establish herself for the winter.
The hotel being on the edge of a fashionable neighbourhood, the price of the
few square feet she was to occupy was considerably in excess of her means; but
she found a justification for her dislike
of poorer quarters in the argument that, at this particular juncture, it was of the
utmost importance to keep up a show of prosperity.
In reality, it was impossible for her, while she had the means to pay her way for
a week ahead, to lapse into a form of existence like Gerty Farish's.
She had never been so near the brink of insolvency; but she could at least manage
to meet her weekly hotel bill, and having settled the heaviest of her previous debts
out of the money she had received from
Trenor, she had a still fair margin of credit to go upon.
The situation, however, was not agreeable enough to lull her to complete
unconsciousness of its insecurity.
Her rooms, with their cramped outlook down a sallow vista of brick walls and fire-
escapes, her lonely meals in the dark restaurant with its surcharged ceiling and
haunting smell of coffee--all these
material discomforts, which were yet to be accounted as so many privileges soon to be
withdrawn, kept constantly before her the disadvantages of her state; and her mind
reverted the more insistently to Mrs. Fisher's counsels.
Beat about the question as she would, she knew the outcome of it was that she must
try to marry Rosedale; and in this conviction she was fortified by an
unexpected visit from George Dorset.
She found him, on the first Sunday after her return to town, pacing her narrow
sitting-room to the imminent peril of the few knick-knacks with which she had tried
to disguise its plush exuberances; but the
sight of her seemed to quiet him, and he said meekly that he hadn't come to bother
her--that he asked only to be allowed to sit for half an hour and talk of anything
she liked.
In reality, as she knew, he had but one subject: himself and his wretchedness; and
it was the need of her sympathy that had drawn him back.
But he began with a pretence of questioning her about herself, and as she replied, she
saw that, for the first time, a faint realization of her plight penetrated the
dense surface of his self-absorption.
Was it possible that her old beast of an aunt had actually cut her off?
That she was living alone like this because there was no one else for her to go to, and
that she really hadn't more than enough to keep alive on till the wretched little
legacy was paid?
The fibres of sympathy were nearly atrophied in him, but he was suffering so
intensely that he had a faint glimpse of what other sufferings might mean--and, as
she perceived, an almost simultaneous
perception of the way in which her particular misfortunes might serve him.
When at length she dismissed him, on the pretext that she must dress for dinner, he
lingered entreatingly on the threshold to blurt out: "It's been such a comfort--do
say you'll let me see you again--" But to
this direct appeal it was impossible to give an assent; and she said with friendly
decisiveness: "I'm sorry--but you know why I can't."
He coloured to the eyes, pushed the door shut, and stood before her embarrassed but
insistent.
"I know how you might, if you would--if things were different--and it lies with you
to make them so. It's just a word to say, and you put me out
of my misery!"
Their eyes met, and for a second she trembled again with the nearness of the
temptation.
"You're mistaken; I know nothing; I saw nothing," she exclaimed, striving, by sheer
force of reiteration, to build a barrier between herself and her peril; and as he
turned away, groaning out "You sacrifice us
both," she continued to repeat, as if it were a charm: "I know nothing--absolutely
nothing."
Lily had seen little of Rosedale since her illuminating talk with Mrs. Fisher, but on
the two or three occasions when they had met she was conscious of having distinctly
advanced in his favour.
There could be no doubt that he admired her as much as ever, and she believed it rested
with herself to raise his admiration to the point where it should bear down the
lingering counsels of expediency.
The task was not an easy one; but neither was it easy, in her long sleepless nights,
to face the thought of what George Dorset was so clearly ready to offer.
Baseness for baseness, she hated the other least: there were even moments when a
marriage with Rosedale seemed the only honourable solution of her difficulties.
She did not indeed let her imagination range beyond the day of plighting: after
that everything faded into a haze of material well-being, in which the
personality of her benefactor remained mercifully vague.
She had learned, in her long vigils, that there were certain things not good to think
of, certain midnight images that must at any cost be exorcised--and one of these was
the image of herself as Rosedale's wife.
Carry Fisher, on the strength, as she frankly owned, of the Brys' Newport
success, had taken for the autumn months a small house at Tuxedo; and thither Lily was
bound on the Sunday after Dorset's visit.
Though it was nearly dinner-time when she arrived, her hostess was still out, and the
firelit quiet of the small silent house descended on her spirit with a sense of
peace and familiarity.
It may be doubted if such an emotion had ever before been evoked by Carry Fisher's
surroundings; but, contrasted to the world in which Lily had lately lived, there was
an air of repose and stability in the very
placing of the furniture, and in the quiet competence of the parlour-maid who led her
up to her room.
Mrs. Fisher's unconventionality was, after all, a merely superficial divergence from
an inherited social creed, while the manners of the Gormer circle represented
their first attempt to formulate such a creed for themselves.
It was the first time since her return from Europe that Lily had found herself in a
congenial atmosphere, and the stirring of familiar associations had almost prepared
her, as she descended the stairs before
dinner, to enter upon a group of her old acquaintances.
But this expectation was instantly checked by the reflection that the friends who
remained loyal were precisely those who would be least willing to expose her to
such encounters; and it was hardly with
surprise that she found, instead, Mr. Rosedale kneeling domestically on the
drawing-room hearth before his hostess's little girl.
Rosedale in the paternal role was hardly a figure to soften Lily; yet she could not
but notice a quality of homely goodness in his advances to the child.
They were not, at any rate, the premeditated and perfunctory endearments of
the guest under his hostess's eye, for he and the little girl had the room to
themselves; and something in his attitude
made him seem a simple and kindly being compared to the small critical creature who
endured his homage.
Yes, he would be kind--Lily, from the threshold, had time to feel--kind in his
gross, unscrupulous, rapacious way, the way of the predatory creature with his mate.
She had but a moment in which to consider whether this glimpse of the fireside man
mitigated her repugnance, or gave it, rather, a more concrete and intimate form;
for at sight of her he was immediately on
his feet again, the florid and dominant Rosedale of Mattie Gormer's drawing-room.
It was no surprise to Lily to find that he had been selected as her only fellow-guest.
Though she and her hostess had not met since the latter's tentative discussion of
her future, Lily knew that the acuteness which enabled Mrs. Fisher to lay a safe and
pleasant course through a world of
antagonistic forces was not infrequently exercised for the benefit of her friends.
It was, in fact, characteristic of Carry that, while she actively gleaned her own
stores from the fields of affluence, her real sympathies were on the other side--
with the unlucky, the unpopular, the
unsuccessful, with all her hungry fellow- toilers in the shorn stubble of success.
Mrs. Fisher's experience guarded her against the mistake of exposing Lily, for
the first evening, to the unmitigated impression of Rosedale's personality.
Kate Corby and two or three men dropped in to dinner, and Lily, alive to every detail
of her friend's method, saw that such opportunities as had been contrived for her
were to be deferred till she had, as it
were, gained courage to make effectual use of them.
She had a sense of acquiescing in this plan with the passiveness of a sufferer resigned
to the surgeon's touch; and this feeling of almost lethargic helplessness continued
when, after the departure of the guests, Mrs. Fisher followed her upstairs.
"May I come in and smoke a cigarette over your fire?
If we talk in my room we shall disturb the child."
Mrs. Fisher looked about her with the eye of the solicitous hostess.
"I hope you've managed to make yourself comfortable, dear?
Isn't it a jolly little house? It's such a blessing to have a few quiet
weeks with the baby."
Carry, in her rare moments of prosperity, became so expansively maternal that Miss
Bart sometimes wondered whether, if she could ever get time and money enough, she
would not end by devoting them both to her daughter.
"It's a well-earned rest: I'll say that for myself," she continued, sinking down with a
sigh of content on the pillowed lounge near the fire.
"Louisa Bry is a stern task-master: I often used to wish myself back with the Gormers.
Talk of love making people jealous and suspicious--it's nothing to social
ambition!
Louisa used to lie awake at night wondering whether the women who called on us called
on ME because I was with her, or on HER because she was with me; and she was always
laying traps to find out what I thought.
Of course I had to disown my oldest friends, rather than let her suspect she
owed me the chance of making a single acquaintance--when, all the while, that was
what she had me there for, and what she
wrote me a handsome cheque for when the season was over!"
Mrs. Fisher was not a woman who talked of herself without cause, and the practice of
direct speech, far from precluding in her an occasional resort to circuitous methods,
served rather, at crucial moments, the
purpose of the juggler's chatter while he shifts the contents of his sleeves.
Through the haze of her cigarette smoke she continued to gaze meditatively at Miss
Bart, who, having dismissed her maid, sat before the toilet-table shaking out over
her shoulders the loosened undulations of her hair.
"Your hair's wonderful, Lily. Thinner--?
What does that matter, when it's so light and alive?
So many women's worries seem to go straight to their hair--but yours looks as if there
had never been an anxious thought under it.
I never saw you look better than you did this evening.
Mattie Gormer told me that Morpeth wanted to paint you--why don't you let him?"
Miss Bart's immediate answer was to address a critical glance to the reflection of the
countenance under discussion.
Then she said, with a slight touch of irritation: "I don't care to accept a
portrait from Paul Morpeth." Mrs. Fisher mused.
"N--no.
And just now, especially--well, he can do you after you're married."
She waited a moment, and then went on: "By the way, I had a visit from Mattie the
other day.
She turned up here last Sunday--and with Bertha Dorset, of all people in the world!"
She paused again to measure the effect of this announcement on her hearer, but the
brush in Miss Bart's lifted hand maintained its unwavering stroke from brow to nape.
"I never was more astonished," Mrs. Fisher pursued.
"I don't know two women less predestined to intimacy--from Bertha's standpoint, that
is; for of course poor Mattie thinks it natural enough that she should be singled
out--I've no doubt the rabbit always thinks it is fascinating the anaconda.
Well, you know I've always told you that Mattie secretly longed to bore herself with
the really fashionable; and now that the chance has come, I see that she's capable
of sacrificing all her old friends to it."
Lily laid aside her brush and turned a penetrating glance upon her friend.
"Including ME?" she suggested. "Ah, my dear," murmured Mrs. Fisher, rising
to push back a log from the hearth.
"That's what Bertha means, isn't it?" Miss Bart went on steadily.
"For of course she always means something; and before I left Long Island I saw that
she was beginning to lay her toils for Mattie."
Mrs. Fisher sighed evasively.
"She has her fast now, at any rate. To think of that loud independence of
Mattie's being only a subtler form of snobbishness!
Bertha can already make her believe anything she pleases--and I'm afraid she's
begun, my poor child, by insinuating horrors about you."
Lily flushed under the shadow of her drooping hair.
"The world is too vile," she murmured, averting herself from Mrs. Fisher's anxious
scrutiny.
"It's not a pretty place; and the only way to keep a footing in it is to fight it on
its own terms--and above all, my dear, not alone!"
Mrs. Fisher gathered up her floating implications in a resolute grasp.
"You've told me so little that I can only guess what has been happening; but in the
rush we all live in there's no time to keep on hating any one without a cause, and if
Bertha is still nasty enough to want to
injure you with other people it must be because she's still afraid of you.
From her standpoint there's only one reason for being afraid of you; and my own idea is
that, if you want to punish her, you hold the means in your hand.
I believe you can marry George Dorset tomorrow; but if you don't care for that
particular form of retaliation, the only thing to save you from Bertha is to marry
somebody else."
>
CHAPTER 7
The light projected on the situation by Mrs. Fisher had the cheerless distinctness
of a winter dawn.
It outlined the facts with a cold precision unmodified by shade or colour, and
refracted, as it were, from the blank walls of the surrounding limitations: she had
opened windows from which no sky was ever visible.
But the idealist subdued to vulgar necessities must employ vulgar minds to
draw the inferences to which he cannot stoop; and it was easier for Lily to let
Mrs. Fisher formulate her case than to put it plainly to herself.
Once confronted with it, however, she went the full length of its consequences; and
these had never been more clearly present to her than when, the next afternoon, she
set out for a walk with Rosedale.
It was one of those still November days when the air is haunted with the light of
summer, and something in the lines of the landscape, and in the golden haze which
bathed them, recalled to Miss Bart the
September afternoon when she had climbed the slopes of Bellomont with Selden.
The importunate memory was kept before her by its ironic contrast to her present
situation, since her walk with Selden had represented an irresistible flight from
just such a climax as the present excursion was designed to bring about.
But other memories importuned her also; the recollection of similar situations, as
skillfully led up to, but through some malice of fortune, or her own unsteadiness
of purpose, always failing of the intended result.
Well, her purpose was steady enough now.
She saw that the whole weary work of rehabilitation must begin again, and
against far greater odds, if Bertha Dorset should succeed in breaking up her
friendship with the Gormers; and her
longing for shelter and security was intensified by the passionate desire to
triumph over Bertha, as only wealth and predominance could triumph over her.
As the wife of Rosedale--the Rosedale she felt it in her power to create--she would
at least present an invulnerable front to her enemy.
She had to draw upon this thought, as upon some fiery stimulant, to keep up her part
in the scene toward which Rosedale was too frankly tending.
As she walked beside him, shrinking in every nerve from the way in which his look
and tone made free of her, yet telling herself that this momentary endurance of
his mood was the price she must pay for her
ultimate power over him, she tried to calculate the exact point at which
concession must turn to resistance, and the price HE would have to pay be made equally
clear to him.
But his dapper self-confidence seemed impenetrable to such hints, and she had a
sense of something hard and self-contained behind the superficial warmth of his
manner.
They had been seated for some time in the seclusion of a rocky glen above the lake,
when she suddenly cut short the culmination of an impassioned period by turning upon
him the grave loveliness of her gaze.
"I DO believe what you say, Mr. Rosedale," she said quietly; "and I am ready to marry
you whenever you wish."
Rosedale, reddening to the roots of his glossy hair, received this announcement
with a recoil which carried him to his feet, where he halted before her in an
attitude of almost comic discomfiture.
"For I suppose that is what you do wish," she continued, in the same quiet tone.
"And, though I was unable to consent when you spoke to me in this way before, I am
ready, now that I know you so much better, to trust my happiness to your hands."
She spoke with the noble directness which she could command on such occasions, and
which was like a large steady light thrown across the tortuous darkness of the
situation.
In its inconvenient brightness Rosedale seemed to waver a moment, as though
conscious that every avenue of escape was unpleasantly illuminated.
Then he gave a short laugh, and drew out a gold cigarette-case, in which, with plump
jewelled fingers, he groped for a gold- tipped cigarette.
Selecting one, he paused to contemplate it a moment before saying: "My dear Miss Lily,
I'm sorry if there's been any little misapprehension between us-but you made me
feel my suit was so hopeless that I had really no intention of renewing it."
Lily's blood tingled with the grossness of the rebuff; but she checked the first leap
of her anger, and said in a tone of gentle dignity: "I have no one but myself to blame
if I gave you the impression that my decision was final."
Her word-play was always too quick for him, and this reply held him in puzzled silence
while she extended her hand and added, with the faintest inflection of sadness in her
voice: "Before we bid each other goodbye,
I want at least to thank you for having once thought of me as you did."
The touch of her hand, the moving softness of her look, thrilled a vulnerable fibre in
Rosedale.
It was her exquisite inaccessibleness, the sense of distance she could convey without
a hint of disdain, that made it most difficult for him to give her up.
"Why do you talk of saying goodbye?
Ain't we going to be good friends all the same?" he urged, without releasing her
hand. She drew it away quietly.
"What is your idea of being good friends?" she returned with a slight smile.
"Making love to me without asking me to marry you?"
Rosedale laughed with a recovered sense of ease.
"Well, that's about the size of it, I suppose.
I can't help making love to you--I don't see how any man could; but I don't mean to
ask you to marry me as long as I can keep out of it."
She continued to smile.
"I like your frankness; but I am afraid our friendship can hardly continue on those
terms."
She turned away, as though to mark that its final term had in fact been reached, and he
followed her for a few steps with a baffled sense of her having after all kept the game
in her own hands.
"Miss Lily----" he began impulsively; but she walked on without seeming to hear him.
He overtook her in a few quick strides, and laid an entreating hand on her arm.
"Miss Lily--don't hurry away like that.
You're beastly *** a fellow; but if you don't mind speaking the truth I don't see
why you shouldn't allow me to do the same."
She had paused a moment with raised brows, drawing away instinctively from his touch,
though she made no effort to evade his words.
"I was under the impression," she rejoined, "that you had done so without waiting for
my permission." "Well--why shouldn't you hear my reasons
for doing it, then?
We're neither of us such new hands that a little plain speaking is going to hurt us.
I'm all broken up on you: there's nothing new in that.
I'm more in love with you than I was this time last year; but I've got to face the
fact that the situation is changed." She continued to confront him with the same
air of ironic composure.
"You mean to say that I'm not as desirable a match as you thought me?"
"Yes; that's what I do mean," he answered resolutely.
"I won't go into what's happened.
I don't believe the stories about you--I don't WANT to believe them.
But they're there, and my not believing them ain't going to alter the situation."
She flushed to her temples, but the extremity of her need checked the retort on
her lip and she continued to face him composedly.
"If they are not true," she said, "doesn't THAT alter the situation?"
He met this with a steady gaze of his small stock-taking eyes, which made her feel
herself no more than some superfine human merchandise.
"I believe it does in novels; but I'm certain it don't in real life.
You know that as well as I do: if we're speaking the truth, let's speak the whole
truth.
Last year I was wild to marry you, and you wouldn't look at me: this year--well, you
appear to be willing. Now, what has changed in the interval?
Your situation, that's all.
Then you thought you could do better; now-- --"
"You think you can?" broke from her ironically.
"Why, yes, I do: in one way, that is."
He stood before her, his hands in his pockets, his chest sturdily expanded under
its vivid waistcoat.
"It's this way, you see: I've had a pretty steady grind of it these last years,
working up my social position. Think it's funny I should say that?
Why should I mind saying I want to get into society?
A man ain't ashamed to say he wants to own a racing stable or a picture gallery.
Well, a taste for society's just another kind of hobby.
Perhaps I want to get even with some of the people who cold-shouldered me last year--
put it that way if it sounds better.
Anyhow, I want to have the run of the best houses; and I'm getting it too, little by
little.
But I know the quickest way to *** yourself with the right people is to be
seen with the wrong ones; and that's the reason I want to avoid mistakes."
Miss Bart continued to stand before him in a silence that might have expressed either
mockery or a half-reluctant respect for his candour, and after a moment's pause he went
on: "There it is, you see.
I'm more in love with you than ever, but if I married you now I'd *** myself for good
and all, and everything I've worked for all these years would be wasted."
She received this with a look from which all tinge of resentment had faded.
After the tissue of social falsehoods in which she had so long moved it was
refreshing to step into the open daylight of an avowed expediency.
"I understand you," she said.
"A year ago I should have been of use to you, and now I should be an encumbrance;
and I like you for telling me so quite honestly."
She extended her hand with a smile.
Again the gesture had a disturbing effect upon Mr. Rosedale's self-command.
"By George, you're a dead game sport, you are!" he exclaimed; and as she began once
more to move away, he broke out suddenly-- "Miss Lily--stop.
You know I don't believe those stories--I believe they were all got up by a woman who
didn't hesitate to sacrifice you to her own convenience----"
Lily drew away with a movement of quick disdain: it was easier to endure his
insolence than his commiseration. "You are very kind; but I don't think we
need discuss the matter farther."
But Rosedale's natural imperviousness to hints made it easy for him to brush such
resistance aside.
"I don't want to discuss anything; I just want to put a plain case before you," he
persisted.
She paused in spite of herself, held by the note of a new purpose in his look and tone;
and he went on, keeping his eyes firmly upon her: "The wonder to me is that you've
waited so long to get square with that
woman, when you've had the power in your hands."
She continued silent under the rush of astonishment that his words produced, and
he moved a step closer to ask with low- toned directness: "Why don't you use those
letters of hers you bought last year?"
Lily stood speechless under the shock of the interrogation.
In the words preceding it she had conjectured, at most, an allusion to her
supposed influence over George Dorset; nor did the astonishing indelicacy of the
reference diminish the likelihood of Rosedale's resorting to it.
But now she saw how far short of the mark she had fallen; and the surprise of
learning that he had discovered the secret of the letters left her, for the moment,
unconscious of the special use to which he was in the act of putting his knowledge.
Her temporary loss of self-possession gave him time to press his point; and he went on
quickly, as though to secure completer control of the situation: "You see I know
where you stand--I know how completely she's in your power.
That sounds like stage-talk, don't it?--but there's a lot of truth in some of those old
gags; and I don't suppose you bought those letters simply because you're collecting
autographs."
She continued to look at him with a deepening bewilderment: her only clear
impression resolved itself into a scared sense of his power.
"You're wondering how I found out about 'em?" he went on, answering her look with a
note of conscious pride.
"Perhaps you've forgotten that I'm the owner of the Benedick-but never mind about
that now.
Getting on to things is a mighty useful accomplishment in business, and I've simply
extended it to my private affairs. For this IS partly my affair, you see--at
least, it depends on you to make it so.
Let's look the situation straight in the eye.
Mrs. Dorset, for reasons we needn't go into, did you a beastly bad turn last
spring.
Everybody knows what Mrs. Dorset is, and her best friends wouldn't believe her on
oath where their own interests were concerned; but as long as they're out of
the row it's much easier to follow her lead
than to set themselves against it, and you've simply been sacrificed to their
laziness and selfishness.
Isn't that a pretty fair statement of the case?--Well, some people say you've got the
neatest kind of an answer in your hands: that George Dorset would marry you
tomorrow, if you'd tell him all you know,
and give him the chance to show the lady the door.
I daresay he would; but you don't seem to care for that particular form of getting
even, and, taking a purely business view of the question, I think you're right.
In a deal like that, nobody comes out with perfectly clean hands, and the only way for
you to start fresh is to get Bertha Dorset to back you up, instead of trying to fight
her."
He paused long enough to draw breath, but not to give her time for the expression of
her gathering resistance; and as he pressed on, expounding and elucidating his idea
with the directness of the man who has no
doubts of his cause, she found the indignation gradually freezing on her lip,
found herself held fast in the grasp of his argument by the mere cold strength of its
presentation.
There was no time now to wonder how he had heard of her obtaining the letters: all her
world was dark outside the monstrous glare of his scheme for using them.
And it was not, after the first moment, the horror of the idea that held her spell-
bound, subdued to his will; it was rather its subtle affinity to her own inmost
cravings.
He would marry her tomorrow if she could regain Bertha Dorset's friendship; and to
induce the open resumption of that friendship, and the tacit retractation of
all that had caused its withdrawal, she had
only to put to the lady the latent menace contained in the packet so miraculously
delivered into her hands.
Lily saw in a flash the advantage of this course over that which poor Dorset had
pressed upon her.
The other plan depended for its success on the infliction of an open injury, while
this reduced the transaction to a private understanding, of which no third person
need have the remotest hint.
Put by Rosedale in terms of business-like give-and-take, this understanding took on
the harmless air of a mutual accommodation, like a transfer of property or a revision
of boundary lines.
It certainly simplified life to view it as a perpetual adjustment, a play of party
politics, in which every concession had its recognized equivalent: Lily's tired mind
was fascinated by this escape from
fluctuating ethical estimates into a region of concrete weights and measures.
Rosedale, as she listened, seemed to read in her silence not only a gradual
acquiescence in his plan, but a dangerously far-reaching perception of the chances it
offered; for as she continued to stand
before him without speaking, he broke out, with a quick return upon himself: "You see
how simple it is, don't you? Well, don't be carried away by the idea
that it's TOO simple.
It isn't exactly as if you'd started in with a clean bill of health.
Now we're talking let's call things by their right names, and clear the whole
business up.
You know well enough that Bertha Dorset couldn't have touched you if there hadn't
been--well--questions asked before--little points of interrogation, eh?
Bound to happen to a good-looking girl with stingy relatives, I suppose; anyhow, they
DID happen, and she found the ground prepared for her.
Do you see where I'm coming out?
You don't want these little questions cropping up again.
It's one thing to get Bertha Dorset into line--but what you want is to keep her
there.
You can frighten her fast enough--but how are you going to keep her frightened?
By showing her that you're as powerful as she is.
All the letters in the world won't do that for you as you are now; but with a big
backing behind you, you'll keep her just where you want her to be.
That's MY share in the business--that's what I'm offering you.
You can't put the thing through without me- -don't run away with any idea that you can.
In six months you'd be back again among your old worries, or worse ones; and here I
am, ready to lift you out of 'em tomorrow if you say so.
DO you say so, Miss Lily?" he added, moving suddenly nearer.
The words, and the movement which accompanied them, combined to startle Lily
out of the state of tranced subservience into which she had insensibly slipped.
Light comes in devious ways to the groping consciousness, and it came to her now
through the disgusted perception that her would-be accomplice assumed, as a matter of
course, the likelihood of her distrusting
him and perhaps trying to cheat him of his share of the spoils.
This glimpse of his inner mind seemed to present the whole transaction in a new
aspect, and she saw that the essential baseness of the act lay in its freedom from
risk.
She drew back with a quick gesture of rejection, saying, in a voice that was a
surprise to her own ears: "You are mistaken--quite mistaken--both in the facts
and in what you infer from them."
Rosedale stared a moment, puzzled by her sudden dash in a direction so different
from that toward which she had appeared to be letting him guide her.
"Now what on earth does that mean?
I thought we understood each other!" he exclaimed; and to her murmur of "Ah, we do
NOW," he retorted with a sudden burst of violence: "I suppose it's because the
letters are to HIM, then?
Well, I'll be damned if I see what thanks you've got from him!"
>
CHAPTER 8
The autumn days declined to winter.
Once more the leisure world was in transition between country and town, and
Fifth Avenue, still deserted at the week- end, showed from Monday to Friday a
broadening stream of carriages between
house-fronts gradually restored to consciousness.
The Horse Show, some two weeks earlier, had produced a passing semblance of
reanimation, filling the theatres and restaurants with a human display of the
same costly and high-stepping kind as circled daily about its ring.
In Miss Bart's world the Horse Show, and the public it attracted, had ostensibly
come to be classed among the spectacles disdained of the elect; but, as the feudal
lord might sally forth to join in the dance
on his village green, so society, unofficially and incidentally, still
condescended to look in upon the scene.
Mrs. Gormer, among the rest, was not above seizing such an occasion for the display of
herself and her horses; and Lily was given one or two opportunities of appearing at
her friend's side in the most conspicuous box the house afforded.
But this lingering semblance of intimacy made her only the more conscious of a
change in the relation between Mattie and herself, of a dawning discrimination, a
gradually formed social standard, emerging from Mrs. Gormer's chaotic view of life.
It was inevitable that Lily herself should constitute the first sacrifice to this new
ideal, and she knew that, once the Gormers were established in town, the whole drift
of fashionable life would facilitate Mattie's detachment from her.
She had, in short, failed to make herself indispensable; or rather, her attempt to do
so had been thwarted by an influence stronger than any she could exert.
That influence, in its last analysis, was simply the power of money: Bertha Dorset's
social credit was based on an impregnable bank-account.
Lily knew that Rosedale had overstated neither the difficulty of her own position
nor the completeness of the vindication he offered: once Bertha's match in material
resources, her superior gifts would make it easy for her to dominate her adversary.
An understanding of what such domination would mean, and of the disadvantages
accruing from her rejection of it, was brought home to Lily with increasing
clearness during the early weeks of the winter.
Hitherto, she had kept up a semblance of movement outside the main flow of the
social current; but with the return to town, and the concentrating of scattered
activities, the mere fact of not slipping
back naturally into her old habits of life marked her as being unmistakably excluded
from them.
If one were not a part of the season's fixed routine, one swung unsphered in a
void of social non-existence.
Lily, for all her dissatisfied dreaming, had never really conceived the possibility
of revolving about a different centre: it was easy enough to despise the world, but
decidedly difficult to find any other habitable region.
Her sense of irony never quite deserted her, and she could still note, with self-
directed derision, the abnormal value suddenly acquired by the most tiresome and
insignificant details of her former life.
Its very drudgeries had a charm now that she was involuntarily released from them:
card-leaving, note-writing, enforced civilities to the dull and elderly, and the
smiling endurance of tedious dinners--how
pleasantly such obligations would have filled the emptiness of her days!
She did indeed leave cards in plenty; she kept herself, with a smiling and valiant
persistence, well in the eye of her world; nor did she suffer any of those gross
rebuffs which sometimes produce a wholesome reaction of contempt in their victim.
Society did not turn away from her, it simply drifted by, preoccupied and
inattentive, letting her feel, to the full measure of her humbled pride, how
completely she had been the creature of its favour.
She had rejected Rosedale's suggestion with a promptness of scorn almost surprising to
herself: she had not lost her capacity for high flashes of indignation.
But she could not breathe long on the heights; there had been nothing in her
training to develop any continuity of moral strength: what she craved, and really felt
herself entitled to, was a situation in
which the noblest attitude should also be the easiest.
Hitherto her intermittent impulses of resistance had sufficed to maintain her
self-respect.
If she slipped she recovered her footing, and it was only afterward that she was
aware of having recovered it each time on a slightly lower level.
She had rejected Rosedale's offer without conscious effort; her whole being had risen
against it; and she did not yet perceive that, by the mere act of listening to him,
she had learned to live with ideas which would once have been intolerable to her.
To Gerty Farish, keeping watch over her with a tenderer if less discerning eye than
Mrs. Fisher's, the results of the struggle were already distinctly visible.
She did not, indeed, know what hostages Lily had already given to expediency; but
she saw her passionately and irretrievably pledged to the ruinous policy of "keeping
up."
Gerty could smile now at her own early dream of her friend's renovation through
adversity: she understood clearly enough that Lily was not of those to whom
privation teaches the unimportance of what they have lost.
But this very fact, to Gerty, made her friend the more piteously in want of aid,
the more exposed to the claims of a tenderness she was so little conscious of
needing.
Lily, since her return to town, had not often climbed Miss Farish's stairs.
There was something irritating to her in the mute interrogation of Gerty's sympathy:
she felt the real difficulties of her situation to be incommunicable to any one
whose theory of values was so different
from her own, and the restrictions of Gerty's life, which had once had the charm
of contrast, now reminded her too painfully of the limits to which her own existence
was shrinking.
When at length, one afternoon, she put into execution the belated resolve to visit her
friend, this sense of shrunken opportunities possessed her with unusual
intensity.
The walk up Fifth Avenue, unfolding before her, in the brilliance of the hard winter
sunlight, an interminable procession of fastidiously-equipped carriages--giving
her, through the little squares of
brougham-windows, peeps of familiar profiles bent above visiting-lists, of
hurried hands dispensing notes and cards to attendant footmen--this glimpse of the
ever-revolving wheels of the great social
machine made Lily more than ever conscious of the steepness and narrowness of Gerty's
stairs, and of the cramped blind alley of life to which they led.
Dull stairs destined to be mounted by dull people: how many thousands of insignificant
figures were going up and down such stairs all over the world at that very moment--
figures as shabby and uninteresting as that
of the middle-aged lady in limp black who descended Gerty's flight as Lily climbed to
it!
"That was poor Miss Jane Silverton--she came to talk things over with me: she and
her sister want to do something to support themselves," Gerty explained, as Lily
followed her into the sitting-room.
"To support themselves? Are they so hard up?"
Miss Bart asked with a touch of irritation: she had not come to listen to the woes of
other people.
"I'm afraid they have nothing left: Ned's debts have swallowed up everything.
They had such hopes, you know, when he broke away from Carry Fisher; they thought
Bertha Dorset would be such a good influence, because she doesn't care for
cards, and--well, she talked quite
beautifully to poor Miss Jane about feeling as if Ned were her younger brother, and
wanting to carry him off on the yacht, so that he might have a chance to drop cards
and racing, and take up his literary work again."
Miss Farish paused with a sigh which reflected the perplexity of her departing
visitor.
"But that isn't all; it isn't even the worst.
It seems that Ned has quarrelled with the Dorsets; or at least Bertha won't allow him
to see her, and he is so unhappy about it that he has taken to gambling again, and
going about with all sorts of *** people.
And cousin Grace Van Osburgh accuses him of having had a very bad influence on Freddy,
who left Harvard last spring, and has been a great deal with Ned ever since.
She sent for Miss Jane, and made a dreadful scene; and Jack Stepney and Herbert Melson,
who were there too, told Miss Jane that Freddy was threatening to marry some
dreadful woman to whom Ned had introduced
him, and that they could do nothing with him because now he's of age he has his own
money.
You can fancy how poor Miss Jane felt--she came to me at once, and seemed to think
that if I could get her something to do she could earn enough to pay Ned's debts and
send him away--I'm afraid she has no idea
how long it would take her to pay for one of his evenings at bridge.
And he was horribly in debt when he came back from the cruise--I can't see why he
should have spent so much more money under Bertha's influence than Carry's: can you?"
Lily met this query with an impatient gesture.
"My dear Gerty, I always understand how people can spend much more money--never how
they can spend any less!"
She loosened her furs and settled herself in Gerty's easy-chair, while her friend
busied herself with the tea-cups. "But what can they do--the Miss Silvertons?
How do they mean to support themselves?" she asked, conscious that the note of
irritation still persisted in her voice.
It was the very last topic she had meant to discuss--it really did not interest her in
the least--but she was seized by a sudden perverse curiosity to know how the two
colourless shrinking victims of young
Silverton's sentimental experiments meant to cope with the grim necessity which
lurked so close to her own threshold. "I don't know--I am trying to find
something for them.
Miss Jane reads aloud very nicely--but it's so hard to find any one who is willing to
be read to. And Miss Annie paints a little----"
"Oh, I know--apple-blossoms on blotting- paper; just the kind of thing I shall be
doing myself before long!" exclaimed Lily, starting up with a vehemence of movement
that threatened destruction to Miss Farish's fragile tea-table.
Lily bent over to steady the cups; then she sank back into her seat.
"I'd forgotten there was no room to dash about in--how beautifully one does have to
behave in a small flat! Oh, Gerty, I wasn't meant to be good," she
sighed out incoherently.
Gerty lifted an apprehensive look to her pale face, in which the eyes shone with a
peculiar sleepless lustre.
"You look horribly tired, Lily; take your tea, and let me give you this cushion to
lean against." Miss Bart accepted the cup of tea, but put
back the cushion with an impatient hand.
"Don't give me that! I don't want to lean back--I shall go to
sleep if I do." "Well, why not, dear?
I'll be as quiet as a mouse," Gerty urged affectionately.
"No--no; don't be quiet; talk to me--keep me awake!
I don't sleep at night, and in the afternoon a dreadful drowsiness creeps over
me." "You don't sleep at night?
Since when?"
"I don't know--I can't remember." She rose and put the empty cup on the tea-
tray.
"Another, and stronger, please; if I don't keep awake now I shall see horrors tonight-
-perfect horrors!" "But they'll be worse if you drink too much
tea."
"No, no--give it to me; and don't preach, please," Lily returned imperiously.
Her voice had a dangerous edge, and Gerty noticed that her hand shook as she held it
out to receive the second cup.
"But you look so tired: I'm sure you must be ill----"
Miss Bart set down her cup with a start. "Do I look ill?
Does my face show it?"
She rose and walked quickly toward the little mirror above the writing-table.
"What a horrid looking-glass--it's all blotched and discoloured.
Any one would look ghastly in it!"
She turned back, fixing her plaintive eyes on Gerty.
"You stupid dear, why do you say such odious things to me?
It's enough to make one ill to be told one looks so!
And looking ill means looking ugly." She caught Gerty's wrists, and drew her
close to the window.
"After all, I'd rather know the truth. Look me straight in the face, Gerty, and
tell me: am I perfectly frightful?"
"You're perfectly beautiful now, Lily: your eyes are shining, and your cheeks have
grown so pink all of a sudden----" "Ah, they WERE pale, then--ghastly pale,
when I came in?
Why don't you tell me frankly that I'm a wreck?
My eyes are bright now because I'm so nervous--but in the mornings they look like
lead.
And I can see the lines coming in my face-- the lines of worry and disappointment and
failure!
Every sleepless night leaves a new one--and how can I sleep, when I have such dreadful
things to think about?"
"Dreadful things--what things?" asked Gerty, gently detaching her wrists from her
friend's feverish fingers. "What things?
Well, poverty, for one--and I don't know any that's more dreadful."
Lily turned away and sank with sudden weariness into the easy-chair near the tea-
table.
"You asked me just now if I could understand why Ned Silverton spent so much
money. Of course I understand--he spends it on
living with the rich.
You think we live ON the rich, rather than with them: and so we do, in a sense--but
it's a privilege we have to pay for!
We eat their dinners, and drink their wine, and smoke their cigarettes, and use their
carriages and their opera-boxes and their private cars--yes, but there's a tax to pay
on every one of those luxuries.
The man pays it by big tips to the servants, by playing cards beyond his
means, by flowers and presents--and--and-- lots of other things that cost; the girl
pays it by tips and cards too--oh, yes,
I've had to take up bridge again--and by going to the best dress-makers, and having
just the right dress for every occasion, and always keeping herself fresh and
exquisite and amusing!"
She leaned back for a moment, closing her eyes, and as she sat there, her pale lips
slightly parted, and the lids dropped above her *** brilliant gaze, Gerty had a
startled perception of the change in her
face--of the way in which an ashen daylight seemed suddenly to extinguish its
artificial brightness. She looked up, and the vision vanished.
"It doesn't sound very amusing, does it?
And it isn't--I'm sick to death of it! And yet the thought of giving it all up
nearly kills me--it's what keeps me awake at night, and makes me so crazy for your
strong tea.
For I can't go on in this way much longer, you know--I'm nearly at the end of my
tether. And then what can I do--how on earth am I
to keep myself alive?
I see myself reduced to the fate of that poor Silverton woman--slinking about to
employment agencies, and trying to sell painted blotting-pads to Women's Exchanges!
And there are thousands and thousands of women trying to do the same thing already,
and not one of the number who has less idea how to earn a dollar than I have!"
She rose again with a hurried glance at the clock.
"It's late, and I must be off--I have an appointment with Carry Fisher.
Don't look so worried, you dear thing-- don't think too much about the nonsense
I've been talking."
She was before the mirror again, adjusting her hair with a light hand, drawing down
her veil, and giving a dexterous touch to her furs.
"Of course, you know, it hasn't come to the employment agencies and the painted
blotting-pads yet; but I'm rather hard-up just for the moment, and if I could find
something to do--notes to write and
visiting-lists to make up, or that kind of thing--it would tide me over till the
legacy is paid.
And Carry has promised to find somebody who wants a kind of social secretary--you know
she makes a specialty of the helpless rich."
Miss Bart had not revealed to Gerty the full extent of her anxiety.
She was in fact in urgent and immediate need of money: money to meet the vulgar
weekly claims which could neither be deferred nor evaded.
To give up her apartment, and shrink to the obscurity of a boarding-house, or the
provisional hospitality of a bed in Gerty Farish's sitting-room, was an expedient
which could only postpone the problem
confronting her; and it seemed wiser as well as more agreeable to remain where she
was and find some means of earning her living.
The possibility of having to do this was one which she had never before seriously
considered, and the discovery that, as a bread-winner, she was likely to prove as
helpless and ineffectual as poor Miss
Silverton, was a severe shock to her self- confidence.
Having been accustomed to take herself at the popular valuation, as a person of
energy and resource, naturally fitted to dominate any situation in which she found
herself, she vaguely imagined that such
gifts would be of value to seekers after social guidance; but there was
unfortunately no specific head under which the art of saying and doing the right thing
could be offered in the market, and even
Mrs. Fisher's resourcefulness failed before the difficulty of discovering a workable
vein in the vague wealth of Lily's graces.
Mrs. Fisher was full of indirect expedients for enabling her friends to earn a living,
and could conscientiously assert that she had put several opportunities of this kind
before Lily; but more legitimate methods of
bread-winning were as much out of her line as they were beyond the capacity of the
sufferers she was generally called upon to assist.
Lily's failure to profit by the chances already afforded her might, moreover, have
justified the abandonment of farther effort on her behalf; but Mrs. Fisher's
inexhaustible good-nature made her an adept
at creating artificial demands in response to an actual supply.
In the pursuance of this end she at once started on a voyage of discovery in Miss
Bart's behalf; and as the result of her explorations she now summoned the latter
with the announcement that she had "found something."
Left to herself, Gerty mused distressfully upon her friend's plight, and her own
inability to relieve it.
It was clear to her that Lily, for the present, had no wish for the kind of help
she could give.
Miss Farish could see no hope for her friend but in a life completely reorganized
and detached from its old associations; whereas all Lily's energies were centred in
the determined effort to hold fast to those
associations, to keep herself visibly identified with them, as long as the
illusion could be maintained.
Pitiable as such an attitude seemed to Gerty, she could not judge it as harshly as
Selden, for instance, might have done.
She had not forgotten the night of emotion when she and Lily had lain in each other's
arms, and she had seemed to feel her very heart's blood passing into her friend.
The sacrifice she had made had seemed unavailing enough; no trace remained in
Lily of the subduing influences of that hour; but Gerty's tenderness, disciplined
by long years of contact with obscure and
inarticulate suffering, could wait on its object with a silent forbearance which took
no account of time.
She could not, however, deny herself the solace of taking anxious counsel with
Lawrence Selden, with whom, since his return from Europe, she had renewed her old
relation of cousinly confidence.
Selden himself had never been aware of any change in their relation.
He found Gerty as he had left her, simple, undemanding and devoted, but with a
quickened intelligence of the heart which he recognized without seeking to explain
it.
To Gerty herself it would once have seemed impossible that she should ever again talk
freely with him of Lily Bart; but what had passed in the secrecy of her own breast
seemed to resolve itself, when the mist of
the struggle cleared, into a breaking down of the bounds of self, a deflecting of the
wasted personal emotion into the general current of human understanding.
It was not till some two weeks after her visit from Lily that Gerty had the
opportunity of communicating her fears to Selden.
The latter, having presented himself on a Sunday afternoon, had lingered on through
the dowdy animation of his cousin's tea- hour, conscious of something in her voice
and eye which solicited a word apart; and
as soon as the last visitor was gone Gerty opened her case by asking how lately he had
seen Miss Bart. Selden's perceptible pause gave her time
for a slight stir of surprise.
"I haven't seen her at all--I've perpetually missed seeing her since she
came back."
This unexpected admission made Gerty pause too; and she was still hesitating on the
brink of her subject when he relieved her by adding: "I've wanted to see her--but she
seems to have been absorbed by the Gormer set since her return from Europe."
"That's all the more reason: she's been very unhappy."
"Unhappy at being with the Gormers?"
"Oh, I don't defend her intimacy with the Gormers; but that too is at an end now, I
think. You know people have been very unkind since
Bertha Dorset quarrelled with her."
"Ah----" Selden exclaimed, rising abruptly to walk to the window, where he remained
with his eyes on the darkening street while his cousin continued to explain: "Judy
Trenor and her own family have deserted her
too--and all because Bertha Dorset has said such horrible things.
And she is very poor--you know Mrs. Peniston cut her off with a small legacy,
after giving her to understand that she was to have everything."
"Yes--I know," Selden assented curtly, turning back into the room, but only to
stir about with restless steps in the circumscribed space between door and
window.
"Yes--she's been abominably treated; but it's unfortunately the precise thing that a
man who wants to show his sympathy can't say to her."
His words caused Gerty a slight chill of disappointment.
"There would be other ways of showing your sympathy," she suggested.
Selden, with a slight laugh, sat down beside her on the little sofa which
projected from the hearth. "What are you thinking of, you incorrigible
missionary?" he asked.
Gerty's colour rose, and her blush was for a moment her only answer.
Then she made it more explicit by saying: "I am thinking of the fact that you and she
used to be great friends--that she used to care immensely for what you thought of her-
-and that, if she takes your staying away
as a sign of what you think now, I can imagine its adding a great deal to her
unhappiness."
"My dear child, don't add to it still more- -at least to your conception of it--by
attributing to her all sorts of susceptibilities of your own."
Selden, for his life, could not keep a note of dryness out of his voice; but he met
Gerty's look of perplexity by saying more mildly: "But, though you immensely
exaggerate the importance of anything I
could do for Miss Bart, you can't exaggerate my readiness to do it--if you
ask me to."
He laid his hand for a moment on hers, and there passed between them, on the current
of the rare contact, one of those exchanges of meaning which fill the hidden reservoirs
of affection.
Gerty had the feeling that he measured the cost of her request as plainly as she read
the significance of his reply; and the sense of all that was suddenly clear
between them made her next words easier to find.
"I do ask you, then; I ask you because she once told me that you had been a help to
her, and because she needs help now as she has never needed it before.
You know how dependent she has always been on ease and luxury--how she has hated what
was shabby and ugly and uncomfortable.
She can't help it--she was brought up with those ideas, and has never been able to
find her way out of them.
But now all the things she cared for have been taken from her, and the people who
taught her to care for them have abandoned her too; and it seems to me that if some
one could reach out a hand and show her the
other side--show her how much is left in life and in herself----" Gerty broke off,
abashed at the sound of her own eloquence, and impeded by the difficulty of giving
precise expression to her vague yearning for her friend's retrieval.
"I can't help her myself: she's passed out of my reach," she continued.
"I think she's afraid of being a burden to me.
When she was last here, two weeks ago, she seemed dreadfully worried about her future:
she said Carry Fisher was trying to find something for her to do.
A few days later she wrote me that she had taken a position as private secretary, and
that I was not to be anxious, for everything was all right, and she would
come in and tell me about it when she had
time; but she has never come, and I don't like to go to her, because I am afraid of
forcing myself on her when I'm not wanted.
Once, when we were children, and I had rushed up after a long separation, and
thrown my arms about her, she said: 'Please don't kiss me unless I ask you to, Gerty'--
and she DID ask me, a minute later; but since then I've always waited to be asked."
Selden had listened in silence, with the concentrated look which his thin dark face
could assume when he wished to guard it against any involuntary change of
expression.
When his cousin ended, he said with a slight smile: "Since you've learned the
wisdom of waiting, I don't see why you urge me to rush in--" but the troubled appeal of
her eyes made him add, as he rose to take
leave: "Still, I'll do what you wish, and not hold you responsible for my failure."
Selden's avoidance of Miss Bart had not been as unintentional as he had allowed his
cousin to think.
At first, indeed, while the memory of their last hour at Monte Carlo still held the
full heat of his indignation, he had anxiously watched for her return; but she
had disappointed him by lingering in
England, and when she finally reappeared it happened that business had called him to
the West, whence he came back only to learn that she was starting for Alaska with the
Gormers.
The revelation of this suddenly-established intimacy effectually chilled his desire to
see her.
If, at a moment when her whole life seemed to be breaking up, she could cheerfully
commit its reconstruction to the Gormers, there was no reason why such accidents
should ever strike her as irreparable.
Every step she took seemed in fact to carry her farther from the region where, once or
twice, he and she had met for an illumined moment; and the recognition of this fact,
when its first pang had been surmounted, produced in him a sense of negative relief.
It was much simpler for him to judge Miss Bart by her habitual conduct than by the
rare deviations from it which had thrown her so disturbingly in his way; and every
act of hers which made the recurrence of
such deviations more unlikely, confirmed the sense of relief with which he returned
to the conventional view of her.
But Gerty Farish's words had sufficed to make him see how little this view was
really his, and how impossible it was for him to live quietly with the thought of
Lily Bart.
To hear that she was in need of help--even such vague help as he could offer--was to
be at once repossessed by that thought; and by the time he reached the street he had
sufficiently convinced himself of the
urgency of his cousin's appeal to turn his steps directly toward Lily's hotel.
There his zeal met a check in the unforeseen news that Miss Bart had moved
away; but, on his pressing his enquiries, the clerk remembered that she had left an
address, for which he presently began to search through his books.
It was certainly strange that she should have taken this step without letting Gerty
Farish know of her decision; and Selden waited with a vague sense of uneasiness
while the address was sought for.
The process lasted long enough for uneasiness to turn to apprehension; but
when at length a slip of paper was handed him, and he read on it: "Care of Mrs. Norma
Hatch, Emporium Hotel," his apprehension
passed into an incredulous stare, and this into the gesture of disgust with which he
tore the paper in two, and turned to walk quickly homeward.
>
CHAPTER 9
When Lily woke on the morning after her translation to the Emporium Hotel, her
first feeling was one of purely physical satisfaction.
The force of contrast gave an added keenness to the luxury of lying once more
in a soft-pillowed bed, and looking across a spacious sunlit room at a breakfast-table
set invitingly near the fire.
Analysis and introspection might come later; but for the moment she was not even
troubled by the excesses of the upholstery or the restless convolutions of the
furniture.
The sense of being once more lapped and folded in ease, as in some dense mild
medium impenetrable to discomfort, effectually stilled the faintest note of
criticism.
When, the afternoon before, she had presented herself to the lady to whom Carry
Fisher had directed her, she had been conscious of entering a new world.
Carry's vague presentment of Mrs. Norma Hatch (whose reversion to her Christian
name was explained as the result of her latest divorce), left her under the
implication of coming "from the West," with
the not unusual extenuation of having brought a great deal of money with her.
She was, in short, rich, helpless, unplaced: the very subject for Lily's hand.
Mrs. Fisher had not specified the line her friend was to take; she owned herself
unacquainted with Mrs. Hatch, whom she "knew about" through Melville Stancy, a
lawyer in his leisure moments, and the
Falstaff of a certain section of festive dub life.
Socially, Mr. Stancy might have been said to form a connecting link between the
Gormer world and the more dimly-lit region on which Miss Bart now found herself
entering.
It was, however, only figuratively that the illumination of Mrs. Hatch's world could be
described as dim: in actual fact, Lily found her seated in a blaze of electric
light, impartially projected from various
ornamental excrescences on a vast concavity of pink damask and gilding, from which she
rose like Venus from her shell.
The analogy was justified by the appearance of the lady, whose large-eyed prettiness
had the fixity of something impaled and shown under glass.
This did not preclude the immediate discovery that she was some years younger
than her visitor, and that under her showiness, her ease, the aggression of her
dress and voice, there persisted that
ineradicable innocence which, in ladies of her nationality, so curiously coexists with
startling extremes of experience. The environment in which Lily found herself
was as strange to her as its inhabitants.
She was unacquainted with the world of the fashionable New York hotel--a world over-
heated, over-upholstered, and over-fitted with mechanical appliances for the
gratification of fantastic requirements,
while the comforts of a civilized life were as unattainable as in a desert.
Through this atmosphere of torrid splendour moved wan beings as richly upholstered as
the furniture, beings without definite pursuits or permanent relations, who
drifted on a languid tide of curiosity from
restaurant to concert-hall, from palm- garden to music-room, from "art exhibit" to
dress-maker's opening.
High-stepping horses or elaborately equipped motors waited to carry these
ladies into vague metropolitan distances, whence they returned, still more wan from
the weight of their sables, to be sucked
back into the stifling inertia of the hotel routine.
Somewhere behind them, in the background of their lives, there was doubtless a real
past, peopled by real human activities: they themselves were probably the product
of strong ambitions, persistent energies,
diversified contacts with the wholesome roughness of life; yet they had no more
real existence than the poet's shades in limbo.
Lily had not been long in this pallid world without discovering that Mrs. Hatch was its
most substantial figure.
That lady, though still floating in the void, showed faint symptoms of developing
an outline; and in this endeavour she was actively seconded by Mr. Melville Stancy.
It was Mr. Stancy, a man of large resounding presence, suggestive of
convivial occasions and of a chivalry finding expression in "first-night" boxes
and thousand dollar bonbonnieres, who had
transplanted Mrs. Hatch from the scene of her first development to the higher stage
of hotel life in the metropolis.
It was he who had selected the horses with which she had taken the blue ribbon at the
Show, had introduced her to the photographer whose portraits of her formed
the recurring ornament of "Sunday
Supplements," and had got together the group which constituted her social world.
It was a small group still, with heterogeneous figures suspended in large
unpeopled spaces; but Lily did not take long to learn that its regulation was no
longer in Mr. Stancy's hands.
As often happens, the pupil had outstripped the teacher, and Mrs. Hatch was already
aware of heights of elegance as well as depths of luxury beyond the world of the
Emporium.
This discovery at once produced in her a craving for higher guidance, for the adroit
feminine hand which should give the right turn to her correspondence, the right
"look" to her hats, the right succession to the items of her MENUS.
It was, in short, as the regulator of a germinating social life that Miss Bart's
guidance was required; her ostensible duties as secretary being restricted by the
fact that Mrs. Hatch, as yet, knew hardly any one to write to.
The daily details of Mrs. Hatch's existence were as strange to Lily as its general
tenor.
The lady's habits were marked by an Oriental indolence and disorder peculiarly
trying to her companion.
Mrs. Hatch and her friends seemed to float together outside the bounds of time and
space.
No definite hours were kept; no fixed obligations existed: night and day flowed
into one another in a blur of confused and retarded engagements, so that one had the
impression of lunching at the tea-hour,
while dinner was often merged in the noisy after-theatre supper which prolonged Mrs.
Hatch's vigil till daylight.
Through this jumble of futile activities came and went a strange throng of hangers-
on--manicures, beauty-doctors, hair- dressers, teachers of bridge, of French, of
"physical development": figures sometimes
indistinguishable, by their appearance, or by Mrs. Hatch's relation to them, from the
visitors constituting her recognized society.
But strangest of all to Lily was the encounter, in this latter group, of several
of her acquaintances.
She had supposed, and not without relief, that she was passing, for the moment,
completely out of her own circle; but she found that Mr. Stancy, one side of whose
sprawling existence overlapped the edge of
Mrs. Fisher's world, had drawn several of its brightest ornaments into the circle of
the Emporium.
To find Ned Silverton among the habitual frequenters of Mrs. Hatch's drawing-room
was one of Lily's first astonishments; but she soon discovered that he was not Mr.
Stancy's most important recruit.
It was on little Freddy Van Osburgh, the small slim heir of the Van Osburgh
millions, that the attention of Mrs. Hatch's group was centred.
Freddy, barely out of college, had risen above the horizon since Lily's eclipse, and
she now saw with surprise what an effulgence he shed on the outer twilight of
Mrs. Hatch's existence.
This, then, was one of the things that young men "went in" for when released from
the official social routine; this was the kind of "previous engagement" that so
frequently caused them to disappoint the hopes of anxious hostesses.
Lily had an odd sense of being behind the social tapestry, on the side where the
threads were knotted and the loose ends hung.
For a moment she found a certain amusement in the show, and in her own share of it:
the situation had an ease and unconventionality distinctly refreshing
after her experience of the irony of conventions.
But these flashes of amusement were but brief reactions from the long disgust of
her days.
Compared with the vast gilded void of Mrs. Hatch's existence, the life of Lily's
former friends seemed packed with ordered activities.
Even the most irresponsible pretty woman of her acquaintance had her inherited
obligations, her conventional benevolences, her share in the working of the great civic
machine; and all hung together in the solidarity of these traditional functions.
The performance of specific duties would have simplified Miss Bart's position; but
the vague attendance on Mrs. Hatch was not without its perplexities.
It was not her employer who created these perplexities.
Mrs. Hatch showed from the first an almost touching desire for Lily's approval.
Far from asserting the superiority of wealth, her beautiful eyes seemed to urge
the plea of inexperience: she wanted to do what was "nice," to be taught how to be
"lovely."
The difficulty was to find any point of contact between her ideals and Lily's.
Mrs. Hatch swam in a haze of indeterminate enthusiasms, of aspirations culled from the
stage, the newspapers, the fashion journals, and a gaudy world of sport still
more completely beyond her companion's ken.
To separate from these confused conceptions those most likely to advance the lady on
her way, was Lily's obvious duty; but its performance was hampered by rapidly-growing
doubts.
Lily was in fact becoming more and more aware of a certain ambiguity in her
situation.
It was not that she had, in the conventional sense, any doubt of Mrs.
Hatch's irreproachableness.
The lady's offences were always against taste rather than conduct; her divorce
record seemed due to geographical rather than ethical conditions; and her worst
laxities were likely to proceed from a wandering and extravagant good-nature.
But if Lily did not mind her detaining her manicure for luncheon, or offering the
"Beauty-Doctor" a seat in Freddy Van Osburgh's box at the play, she was not
equally at ease in regard to some less apparent lapses from convention.
Ned Silverton's relation to Stancy seemed, for instance, closer and less clear than
any natural affinities would warrant; and both appeared united in the effort to
cultivate Freddy Van Osburgh's growing taste for Mrs. Hatch.
There was as yet nothing definable in the situation, which might well resolve itself
into a huge joke on the part of the other two; but Lily had a vague sense that the
subject of their experiment was too young, too rich and too credulous.
Her embarrassment was increased by the fact that Freddy seemed to regard her as
cooperating with himself in the social development of Mrs. Hatch: a view that
suggested, on his part, a permanent interest in the lady's future.
There were moments when Lily found an ironic amusement in this aspect of the
case.
The thought of launching such a missile as Mrs. Hatch at the perfidious *** of
society was not without its charm: Miss Bart had even beguiled her leisure with
visions of the fair Norma introduced for
the first time to a family banquet at the Van Osburghs'.
But the thought of being personally connected with the transaction was less
agreeable; and her momentary flashes of amusement were followed by increasing
periods of doubt.
The sense of these doubts was uppermost when, late one afternoon, she was surprised
by a visit from Lawrence Selden.
He found her alone in the wilderness of pink damask, for in Mrs. Hatch's world the
tea-hour was not dedicated to social rites, and the lady was in the hands of her
masseuse.
Selden's entrance had caused Lily an inward start of embarrassment; but his air of
constraint had the effect of restoring her self-possession, and she took at once the
tone of surprise and pleasure, wondering
frankly that he should have traced her to so unlikely a place, and asking what had
inspired him to make the search.
Selden met this with an unusual seriousness: she had never seen him so
little master of the situation, so plainly at the mercy of any obstructions she might
put in his way.
"I wanted to see you," he said; and she could not resist observing in reply that he
had kept his wishes under remarkable control.
She had in truth felt his long absence as one of the chief bitternesses of the last
months: his desertion had wounded sensibilities far below the surface of her
pride.
Selden met the challenge with directness. "Why should I have come, unless I thought I
could be of use to you? It is my only excuse for imagining you
could want me."
This struck her as a clumsy evasion, and the thought gave a flash of keenness to her
answer. "Then you have come now because you think
you can be of use to me?"
He hesitated again. "Yes: in the modest capacity of a person to
talk things over with."
For a clever man it was certainly a stupid beginning; and the idea that his
awkwardness was due to the fear of her attaching a personal significance to his
visit, chilled her pleasure in seeing him.
Even under the most adverse conditions, that pleasure always made itself felt: she
might hate him, but she had never been able to wish him out of the room.
She was very near hating him now; yet the sound of his voice, the way the light fell
on his thin dark hair, the way he sat and moved and wore his clothes--she was
conscious that even these trivial things were inwoven with her deepest life.
In his presence a sudden stillness came upon her, and the turmoil of her spirit
ceased; but an impulse of resistance to this stealing influence now prompted her to
say: "It's very good of you to present
yourself in that capacity; but what makes you think I have anything particular to
talk about?"
Though she kept the even tone of light intercourse, the question was framed in a
way to remind him that his good offices were unsought; and for a moment Selden was
checked by it.
The situation between them was one which could have been cleared up only by a sudden
explosion of feeling; and their whole training and habit of mind were against the
chances of such an explosion.
Selden's calmness seemed rather to harden into resistance, and Miss Bart's into a
surface of glittering irony, as they faced each other from the opposite corners of one
of Mrs. Hatch's elephantine sofas.
The sofa in question, and the apartment peopled by its monstrous mates, served at
length to suggest the turn of Selden's reply.
"Gerty told me that you were acting as Mrs. Hatch's secretary; and I knew she was
anxious to hear how you were getting on." Miss Bart received this explanation without
perceptible softening.
"Why didn't she look me up herself, then?" she asked.
"Because, as you didn't send her your address, she was afraid of being
importunate."
Selden continued with a smile: "You see no such scruples restrained me; but then I
haven't as much to risk if I incur your displeasure."
Lily answered his smile.
"You haven't incurred it as yet; but I have an idea that you are going to."
"That rests with you, doesn't it? You see my initiative doesn't go beyond
putting myself at your disposal."
"But in what capacity? What am I to do with you?" she asked in the
same light tone.
Selden again glanced about Mrs. Hatch's drawing-room; then he said, with a decision
which he seemed to have gathered from this final inspection: "You are to let me take
you away from here."
Lily flushed at the suddenness of the attack; then she stiffened under it and
said coldly: "And may I ask where you mean me to go?"
"Back to Gerty in the first place, if you will; the essential thing is that it should
be away from here."
The unusual harshness of his tone might have shown her how much the words cost him;
but she was in no state to measure his feelings while her own were in a flame of
revolt.
To neglect her, perhaps even to avoid her, at a time when she had most need of her
friends, and then suddenly and unwarrantably to break into her life with
this strange assumption of authority, was
to rouse in her every instinct of pride and self-defence.
"I am very much obliged to you," she said, "for taking such an interest in my plans;
but I am quite contented where I am, and have no intention of leaving."
Selden had risen, and was standing before her in an attitude of uncontrollable
expectancy. "That simply means that you don't know
where you are!" he exclaimed.
Lily rose also, with a quick flash of anger.
"If you have come here to say disagreeable things about Mrs. Hatch----"
"It is only with your relation to Mrs. Hatch that I am concerned."
"My relation to Mrs. Hatch is one I have no reason to be ashamed of.
She has helped me to earn a living when my old friends were quite resigned to seeing
me starve." "Nonsense!
Starvation is not the only alternative.
You know you can always find a home with Gerty till you are independent again."
"You show such an intimate acquaintance with my affairs that I suppose you mean--
till my aunt's legacy is paid?"
"I do mean that; Gerty told me of it," Selden acknowledged without embarrassment.
He was too much in earnest now to feel any false constraint in speaking his mind.
"But Gerty does not happen to know," Miss Bart rejoined, "that I owe every penny of
that legacy." "Good God!"
Selden exclaimed, startled out of his composure by the abruptness of the
statement.
"Every penny of it, and more too," Lily repeated; "and you now perhaps see why I
prefer to remain with Mrs. Hatch rather than take advantage of Gerty's kindness.
I have no money left, except my small income, and I must earn something more to
keep myself alive."
Selden hesitated a moment; then he rejoined in a quieter tone: "But with your income
and Gerty's--since you allow me to go so far into the details of the situation--you
and she could surely contrive a life
together which would put you beyond the need of having to support yourself.
Gerty, I know, is eager to make such an arrangement, and would be quite happy in
it----"
"But I should not," Miss Bart interposed. "There are many reasons why it would be
neither kind to Gerty nor wise for myself."
She paused a moment, and as he seemed to await a farther explanation, added with a
quick lift of her head: "You will perhaps excuse me from giving you these reasons."
"I have no claim to know them," Selden answered, ignoring her tone; "no claim to
offer any comment or suggestion beyond the one I have already made.
And my right to make that is simply the universal right of a man to enlighten a
woman when he sees her unconsciously placed in a false position."
Lily smiled.
"I suppose," she rejoined, "that by a false position you mean one outside of what we
call society; but you must remember that I had been excluded from those sacred
precincts long before I met Mrs. Hatch.
As far as I can see, there is very little real difference in being inside or out, and
I remember your once telling me that it was only those inside who took the difference
seriously."
She had not been without intention in making this allusion to their memorable
talk at Bellomont, and she waited with an odd tremor of the nerves to see what
response it would bring; but the result of the experiment was disappointing.
Selden did not allow the allusion to deflect him from his point; he merely said
with completer fulness of emphasis: "The question of being inside or out is, as you
say, a small one, and it happens to have
nothing to do with the case, except in so far as Mrs. Hatch's desire to be inside may
put you in the position I call false."
In spite of the moderation of his tone, each word he spoke had the effect of
confirming Lily's resistance.
The very apprehensions he aroused hardened her against him: she had been on the alert
for the note of personal sympathy, for any sign of recovered power over him; and his
attitude of sober impartiality, the absence
of all response to her appeal, turned her hurt pride to blind resentment of his
interference.
The conviction that he had been sent by Gerty, and that, whatever straits he
conceived her to be in, he would never voluntarily have come to her aid,
strengthened her resolve not to admit him a hair's breadth farther into her confidence.
However doubtful she might feel her situation to be, she would rather persist
in darkness than owe her enlightenment to Selden.
"I don't know," she said, when he had ceased to speak, "why you imagine me to be
situated as you describe; but as you have always told me that the sole object of a
bringing-up like mine was to teach a girl
to get what she wants, why not assume that that is precisely what I am doing?"
The smile with which she summed up her case was like a clear barrier raised against
farther confidences: its brightness held him at such a distance that he had a sense
of being almost out of hearing as he
rejoined: "I am not sure that I have ever called you a successful example of that
kind of bringing-up."
Her colour rose a little at the implication, but she steeled herself with a
light laugh. "Ah, wait a little longer--give me a little
more time before you decide!"
And as he wavered before her, still watching for a break in the impenetrable
front she presented: "Don't give me up; I may still do credit to my training!" she
affirmed.
>
CHAPTER 10
"Look at those spangles, Miss Bart--every one of 'em sewed on crooked."
The tall forewoman, a pinched perpendicular figure, dropped the condemned structure of
wire and net on the table at Lily's side, and passed on to the next figure in the
line.
There were twenty of them in the work-room, their *** profiles, under exaggerated
hair, bowed in the harsh north light above the utensils of their art; for it was
something more than an industry, surely,
this creation of ever-varied settings for the face of fortunate womanhood.
Their own faces were sallow with the unwholesomeness of hot air and sedentary
toil, rather than with any actual signs of want: they were employed in a fashionable
millinery establishment, and were fairly
well clothed and well paid; but the youngest among them was as dull and
colourless as the middle-aged.
In the whole work-room there was only one skin beneath which the blood still visibly
played; and that now burned with vexation as Miss Bart, under the lash of the
forewoman's comment, began to strip the hat-frame of its over-lapping spangles.
To Gerty Farish's hopeful spirit a solution appeared to have been reached when she
remembered how beautifully Lily could trim hats.
Instances of young lady-milliners establishing themselves under fashionable
patronage, and imparting to their "creations" that indefinable touch which
the professional hand can never give, had
flattered Gerty's visions of the future, and convinced even Lily that her separation
from Mrs. Norma Hatch need not reduce her to dependence on her friends.
The parting had occurred a few weeks after Selden's visit, and would have taken place
sooner had it not been for the resistance set up in Lily by his ill-starred offer of
advice.
The sense of being involved in a transaction she would not have cared to
examine too closely had soon afterward defined itself in the light of a hint from
Mr. Stancy that, if she "saw them through," she would have no reason to be sorry.
The implication that such loyalty would meet with a direct reward had hastened her
flight, and flung her back, ashamed and penitent, on the broad *** of Gerty's
sympathy.
She did not, however, propose to lie there prone, and Gerty's inspiration about the
hats at once revived her hopes of profitable activity.
Here was, after all, something that her charming listless hands could really do;
she had no doubt of their capacity for knotting a ribbon or placing a flower to
advantage.
And of course only these finishing touches would be expected of her: subordinate
fingers, blunt, grey, needle-pricked fingers, would prepare the shapes and
stitch the linings, while she presided over
the charming little front shop--a shop all white panels, mirrors, and moss-green
hangings--where her finished creations, hats, wreaths, aigrettes and the rest,
perched on their stands like birds just poising for flight.
But at the very outset of Gerty's campaign this vision of the green-and-white shop had
been dispelled.
Other young ladies of fashion had been thus "set-up," selling their hats by the mere
attraction of a name and the reputed knack of tying a bow; but these privileged beings
could command a faith in their powers
materially expressed by the readiness to pay their shop-rent and advance a handsome
sum for current expenses. Where was Lily to find such support?
And even could it have been found, how were the ladies on whose approval she depended
to be induced to give her their patronage?
Gerty learned that whatever sympathy her friend's case might have excited a few
months since had been imperilled, if not lost, by her association with Mrs. Hatch.
Once again, Lily had withdrawn from an ambiguous situation in time to save her
self-respect, but too late for public vindication.
Freddy Van Osburgh was not to marry Mrs. Hatch; he had been rescued at the eleventh
hour--some said by the efforts of Gus Trenor and Rosedale--and despatched to
Europe with old Ned Van Alstyne; but the
risk he had run would always be ascribed to Miss Bart's connivance, and would somehow
serve as a summing-up and corroboration of the vague general distrust of her.
It was a relief to those who had hung back from her to find themselves thus justified,
and they were inclined to insist a little on her connection with the Hatch case in
order to show that they had been right.
Gerty's quest, at any rate, brought up against a solid wall of resistance; and
even when Carry Fisher, momentarily penitent for her share in the Hatch affair,
joined her efforts to Miss Farish's, they met with no better success.
Gerty had tried to veil her failure in tender ambiguities; but Carry, always the
soul of candour, put the case squarely to her friend.
"I went straight to Judy Trenor; she has fewer prejudices than the others, and
besides she's always hated Bertha Dorset. But what HAVE you done to her, Lily?
At the very first word about giving you a start she flamed out about some money you'd
got from Gus; I never knew her so hot before.
You know she'll let him do anything but spend money on his friends: the only reason
she's decent to me now is that she knows I'm not hard up.--He speculated for you,
you say?
Well, what's the harm? He had no business to lose.
He DIDN'T lose? Then what on earth--but I never COULD
understand you, Lily!"
The end of it was that, after anxious enquiry and much deliberation, Mrs. Fisher
and Gerty, for once oddly united in their effort to help their friend, decided on
placing her in the work-room of Mme. Regina's renowned millinery establishment.
Even this arrangement was not effected without considerable negotiation, for Mme.
Regina had a strong prejudice against untrained assistance, and was induced to
yield only by the fact that she owed the
patronage of Mrs. Bry and Mrs. Gormer to Carry Fisher's influence.
She had been willing from the first to employ Lily in the show-room: as a
displayer of hats, a fashionable beauty might be a valuable asset.
But to this suggestion Miss Bart opposed a negative which Gerty emphatically
supported, while Mrs. Fisher, inwardly unconvinced, but resigned to this latest
proof of Lily's unreason, agreed that
perhaps in the end it would be more useful that she should learn the trade.
To Regina's work-room Lily was therefore committed by her friends, and there Mrs.
Fisher left her with a sigh of relief, while Gerty's watchfulness continued to
hover over her at a distance.
Lily had taken up her work early in January: it was now two months later, and
she was still being rebuked for her inability to sew spangles on a hat-frame.
As she returned to her work she heard a titter pass down the tables.
She knew she was an object of criticism and amusement to the other work-women.
They were, of course, aware of her history- -the exact situation of every girl in the
room was known and freely discussed by all the others--but the knowledge did not
produce in them any awkward sense of class
distinction: it merely explained why her untutored fingers were still blundering
over the rudiments of the trade.
Lily had no desire that they should recognize any social difference in her; but
she had hoped to be received as their equal, and perhaps before long to show
herself their superior by a special
deftness of touch, and it was humiliating to find that, after two months of drudgery,
she still betrayed her lack of early training.
Remote was the day when she might aspire to exercise the talents she felt confident of
possessing; only experienced workers were entrusted with the delicate art of shaping
and trimming the hat, and the forewoman
still held her inexorably to the routine of preparatory work.
She began to rip the spangles from the frame, listening absently to the buzz of
talk which rose and fell with the coming and going of Miss Haines's active figure.
The air was closer than usual, because Miss Haines, who had a cold, had not allowed a
window to be opened even during the noon recess; and Lily's head was so heavy with
the weight of a sleepless night that the
chatter of her companions had the incoherence of a dream.
"I TOLD her he'd never look at her again; and he didn't.
I wouldn't have, either--I think she acted real mean to him.
He took her to the Arion Ball, and had a hack for her both ways....
She's taken ten bottles, and her headaches don't seem no better--but she's written a
testimonial to say the first bottle cured her, and she got five dollars and her
picture in the paper....
Mrs. Trenor's hat? The one with the green Paradise?
Here, Miss Haines--it'll be ready right off....
That was one of the Trenor girls here yesterday with Mrs. George Dorset.
How'd I know?
Why, Madam sent for me to alter the flower in that Virot hat--the blue tulle: she's
tall and slight, with her hair fuzzed out-- a good deal like Mamie Leach, on'y
thinner...."
On and on it flowed, a current of meaningless sound, on which, startlingly
enough, a familiar name now and then floated to the surface.
It was the strangest part of Lily's strange experience, the hearing of these names, the
seeing the fragmentary and distorted image of the world she had lived in reflected in
the mirror of the working-girls' minds.
She had never before suspected the mixture of insatiable curiosity and contemptuous
freedom with which she and her kind were discussed in this underworld of toilers who
lived on their vanity and self-indulgence.
Every girl in Mme. Regina's work-room knew to whom the headgear in her hands was
destined, and had her opinion of its future wearer, and a definite knowledge of the
latter's place in the social system.
That Lily was a star fallen from that sky did not, after the first stir of curiosity
had subsided, materially add to their interest in her.
She had fallen, she had "gone under," and true to the ideal of their race, they were
awed only by success--by the gross tangible image of material achievement.
The consciousness of her different point of view merely kept them at a little distance
from her, as though she were a foreigner with whom it was an effort to talk.
"Miss Bart, if you can't sew those spangles on more regular I guess you'd better give
the hat to Miss Kilroy." Lily looked down ruefully at her handiwork.
The forewoman was right: the sewing on of the spangles was inexcusably bad.
What made her so much more clumsy than usual?
Was it a growing distaste for her task, or actual physical disability?
She felt tired and confused: it was an effort to put her thoughts together.
She rose and handed the hat to Miss Kilroy, who took it with a suppressed smile.
"I'm sorry; I'm afraid I am not well," she said to the forewoman.
Miss Haines offered no comment.
From the first she had augured ill of Mme. Regina's consenting to include a
fashionable apprentice among her workers.
In that temple of art no raw beginners were wanted, and Miss Haines would have been
more than human had she not taken a certain pleasure in seeing her forebodings
confirmed.
"You'd better go back to binding edges," she said drily.
Lily slipped out last among the band of liberated work-women.
She did not care to be mingled in their noisy dispersal: once in the street, she
always felt an irresistible return to her old standpoint, an instinctive shrinking
from all that was unpolished and promiscuous.
In the days--how distant they now seemed!-- when she had visited the Girls' Club with
Gerty Farish, she had felt an enlightened interest in the working-classes; but that
was because she looked down on them from
above, from the happy altitude of her grace and her beneficence.
Now that she was on a level with them, the point of view was less interesting.
She felt a touch on her arm, and met the penitent eye of Miss Kilroy.
"Miss Bart, I guess you can sew those spangles on as well as I can when you're
feeling right.
Miss Haines didn't act fair to you." Lily's colour rose at the unexpected
advance: it was a long time since real kindness had looked at her from any eyes
but Gerty's.
"Oh, thank you: I'm not particularly well, but Miss Haines was right.
I AM clumsy." "Well, it's mean work for anybody with a
headache."
Miss Kilroy paused irresolutely. "You ought to go right home and lay down.
Ever try orangeine?" "Thank you."
Lily held out her hand.
"It's very kind of you--I mean to go home." She looked gratefully at Miss Kilroy, but
neither knew what more to say.
Lily was aware that the other was on the point of offering to go home with her, but
she wanted to be alone and silent--even kindness, the sort of kindness that Miss
Kilroy could give, would have jarred on her just then.
"Thank you," she repeated as she turned away.
She struck westward through the dreary March twilight, toward the street where her
boarding-house stood. She had resolutely refused Gerty's offer of
hospitality.
Something of her mother's fierce shrinking from observation and sympathy was beginning
to develop in her, and the promiscuity of small quarters and close intimacy seemed,
on the whole, less endurable than the
solitude of a hall bedroom in a house where she could come and go unremarked among
other workers.
For a while she had been sustained by this desire for privacy and independence; but
now, perhaps from increasing physical weariness, the lassitude brought about by
hours of unwonted confinement, she was
beginning to feel acutely the ugliness and discomfort of her surroundings.
The day's task done, she dreaded to return to her narrow room, with its blotched
wallpaper and shabby paint; and she hated every step of the walk thither, through the
degradation of a New York street in the
last stages of decline from fashion to commerce.
But what she dreaded most of all was having to pass the chemist's at the corner of
Sixth Avenue. She had meant to take another street: she
had usually done so of late.
But today her steps were irresistibly drawn toward the flaring plate-glass corner; she
tried to take the lower crossing, but a laden dray crowded her back, and she struck
across the street obliquely, reaching the
sidewalk just opposite the chemist's door. Over the counter she caught the eye of the
clerk who had waited on her before, and slipped the prescription into his hand.
There could be no question about the prescription: it was a copy of one of Mrs.
Hatch's, obligingly furnished by that lady's chemist.
Lily was confident that the clerk would fill it without hesitation; yet the nervous
dread of a refusal, or even of an expression of doubt, communicated itself to
her restless hands as she affected to
examine the bottles of perfume stacked on the glass case before her.
The clerk had read the prescription without comment; but in the act of handing out the
bottle he paused.
"You don't want to increase the dose, you know," he remarked.
Lily's heart contracted. What did he mean by looking at her in that
way?
"Of course not," she murmured, holding out her hand.
"That's all right: it's a ***-acting drug.
A drop or two more, and off you go--the doctors don't know why."
The dread lest he should question her, or keep the bottle back, choked the murmur of
acquiescence in her throat; and when at length she emerged safely from the shop she
was almost dizzy with the intensity of her relief.
The mere touch of the packet thrilled her tired nerves with the delicious promise of
a night of sleep, and in the reaction from her momentary fear she felt as if the first
fumes of drowsiness were already stealing over her.
In her confusion she stumbled against a man who was hurrying down the last steps of the
elevated station.
He drew back, and she heard her name uttered with surprise.
It was Rosedale, fur-coated, glossy and prosperous--but why did she seem to see him
so far off, and as if through a mist of splintered crystals?
Before she could account for the phenomenon she found herself shaking hands with him.
They had parted with scorn on her side and anger upon his; but all trace of these
emotions seemed to vanish as their hands met, and she was only aware of a confused
wish that she might continue to hold fast to him.
"Why, what's the matter, Miss Lily?
You're not well!" he exclaimed; and she forced her lips into a pallid smile of
reassurance. "I'm a little tired--it's nothing.
Stay with me a moment, please," she faltered.
That she should be asking this service of Rosedale!
He glanced at the dirty and unpropitious corner on which they stood, with the shriek
of the "elevated" and the tumult of trams and waggons contending hideously in their
ears.
"We can't stay here; but let me take you somewhere for a cup of tea.
The LONGWORTH is only a few yards off, and there'll be no one there at this hour."
A cup of tea in quiet, somewhere out of the noise and ugliness, seemed for the moment
the one solace she could bear.
A few steps brought them to the ladies' door of the hotel he had named, and a
moment later he was seated opposite to her, and the waiter had placed the tea-tray
between them.
"Not a drop of brandy or whiskey first? You look regularly done up, Miss Lily.
Well, take your tea strong, then; and, waiter, get a cushion for the lady's back."
Lily smiled faintly at the injunction to take her tea strong.
It was the temptation she was always struggling to resist.
Her craving for the keen stimulant was forever conflicting with that other craving
for sleep--the midnight craving which only the little phial in her hand could still.
But today, at any rate, the tea could hardly be too strong: she counted on it to
pour warmth and resolution into her empty veins.
As she leaned back before him, her lids drooping in utter lassitude, though the
first warm draught already tinged her face with returning life, Rosedale was seized
afresh by the poignant surprise of her beauty.
The dark pencilling of fatigue under her eyes, the morbid blue-veined pallour of the
temples, brought out the brightness of her hair and lips, as though all her ebbing
vitality were centred there.
Against the dull chocolate-coloured background of the restaurant, the purity of
her head stood out as it had never done in the most brightly-lit ball-room.
He looked at her with a startled uncomfortable feeling, as though her beauty
were a forgotten enemy that had lain in ambush and now sprang out on him unawares.
To clear the air he tried to take an easy tone with her.
"Why, Miss Lily, I haven't seen you for an age.
I didn't know what had become of you."
As he spoke, he was checked by an embarrassing sense of the complications to
which this might lead.
Though he had not seen her he had heard of her; he knew of her connection with Mrs.
Hatch, and of the talk resulting from it.
Mrs. Hatch's MILIEU was one which he had once assiduously frequented, and now as
devoutly shunned.
Lily, to whom the tea had restored her usual clearness of mind, saw what was in
his thoughts and said with a slight smile: "You would not be likely to know about me.
I have joined the working classes."
He stared in genuine wonder. "You don't mean--?
Why, what on earth are you doing?"
"Learning to be a milliner--at least TRYING to learn," she hastily qualified the
statement. Rosedale suppressed a low whistle of
surprise.
"Come off--you ain't serious, are you?" "Perfectly serious.
I'm obliged to work for my living." "But I understood--I thought you were with
Norma Hatch."
"You heard I had gone to her as her secretary?"
"Something of the kind, I believe." He leaned forward to refill her cup.
Lily guessed the possibilities of embarrassment which the topic held for him,
and raising her eyes to his, she said suddenly: "I left her two months ago."
Rosedale continued to fumble awkwardly with the tea-pot, and she felt sure that he had
heard what had been said of her. But what was there that Rosedale did not
hear?
"Wasn't it a soft berth?" he enquired, with an attempt at lightness.
"Too soft--one might have sunk in too deep."
Lily rested one arm on the edge of the table, and sat looking at him more intently
than she had ever looked before.
An uncontrollable impulse was urging her to put her case to this man, from whose
curiosity she had always so fiercely defended herself.
"You know Mrs. Hatch, I think?
Well, perhaps you can understand that she might make things too easy for one."
Rosedale looked faintly puzzled, and she remembered that allusiveness was lost on
him.
"It was no place for you, anyhow," he agreed, so suffused and immersed in the
light of her full gaze that he found himself being drawn into strange depths of
intimacy.
He who had had to subsist on mere fugitive glances, looks winged in flight and swiftly
lost under covert, now found her eyes settling on him with a brooding intensity
that fairly dazzled him.
"I left," Lily continued, "lest people should say I was helping Mrs. Hatch to
marry Freddy Van Osburgh--who is not in the least too good for her--and as they still
continue to say it, I see that I might as well have stayed where I was."
"Oh, Freddy----" Rosedale brushed aside the topic with an air of its unimportance which
gave a sense of the immense perspective he had acquired.
"Freddy don't count--but I knew YOU weren't mixed up in that.
It ain't your style."
Lily coloured slightly: she could not conceal from herself that the words gave
her pleasure.
She would have liked to sit there, drinking more tea, and continuing to talk of herself
to Rosedale.
But the old habit of observing the conventions reminded her that it was time
to bring their colloquy to an end, and she made a faint motion to push back her chair.
Rosedale stopped her with a protesting gesture.
"Wait a minute--don't go yet; sit quiet and rest a little longer.
You look thoroughly played out.
And you haven't told me----" He broke off, conscious of going farther than he had
She saw the struggle and understood it; understood also the nature of the spell to
which he yielded as, with his eyes on her face, he began again abruptly: "What on
earth did you mean by saying just now that you were learning to be a milliner?"
"Just what I said. I am an apprentice at Regina's."
"Good Lord--YOU?
But what for? I knew your aunt had turned you down: Mrs.
Fisher told me about it. But I understood you got a legacy from her-
"I got ten thousand dollars; but the legacy is not to be paid till next summer."
"Well, but--look here: you could BORROW on it any time you wanted."
She shook her head gravely.
"No; for I owe it already." "Owe it?
The whole ten thousand?" "Every penny."
She paused, and then continued abruptly, with her eyes on his face: "I think Gus
Trenor spoke to you once about having made some money for me in stocks."
She waited, and Rosedale, congested with embarrassment, muttered that he remembered
something of the kind.
"He made about nine thousand dollars," Lily pursued, in the same tone of eager
communicativeness.
"At the time, I understood that he was speculating with my own money: it was
incredibly stupid of me, but I knew nothing of business.
Afterward I found out that he had NOT used my money--that what he said he had made for
me he had really given me.
It was meant in kindness, of course; but it was not the sort of obligation one could
remain under.
Unfortunately I had spent the money before I discovered my mistake; and so my legacy
will have to go to pay it back. That is the reason why I am trying to learn
a trade."
She made the statement clearly, deliberately, with pauses between the
sentences, so that each should have time to sink deeply into her hearer's mind.
She had a passionate desire that some one should know the truth about this
transaction, and also that the rumour of her intention to repay the money should
reach Judy Trenor's ears.
And it had suddenly occurred to her that Rosedale, who had surprised Trenor's
confidence, was the fitting person to receive and transmit her version of the
facts.
She had even felt a momentary exhilaration at the thought of thus relieving herself of
her detested secret; but the sensation gradually faded in the telling, and as she
ended her pallour was suffused with a deep blush of misery.
Rosedale continued to stare at her in wonder; but the wonder took the turn she
had least expected.
"But see here--if that's the case, it cleans you out altogether?"
He put it to her as if she had not grasped the consequences of her act; as if her
incorrigible ignorance of business were about to precipitate her into a fresh act
of folly.
"Altogether--yes," she calmly agreed. He sat silent, his thick hands clasped on
the table, his little puzzled eyes exploring the recesses of the deserted
restaurant.
"See here--that's fine," he exclaimed abruptly.
Lily rose from her seat with a deprecating laugh.
"Oh, no--it's merely a bore," she asserted, gathering together the ends of her feather
scarf. Rosedale remained seated, too intent on his
thoughts to notice her movement.
"Miss Lily, if you want any backing--I like pluck----" broke from him disconnectedly.
"Thank you." She held out her hand.
"Your tea has given me a tremendous backing.
I feel equal to anything now."
Her gesture seemed to show a definite intention of dismissal, but her companion
had tossed a bill to the waiter, and was slipping his short arms into his expensive
overcoat.
"Wait a minute--you've got to let me walk home with you," he said.
Lily uttered no protest, and when he had paused to make sure of his change they
emerged from the hotel and crossed Sixth Avenue again.
As she led the way westward past a long line of areas which, through the distortion
of their paintless rails, revealed with increasing candour the DISJECTA MEMBRA of
bygone dinners, Lily felt that Rosedale was
taking contemptuous note of the neighbourhood; and before the doorstep at
which she finally paused he looked up with an air of incredulous disgust.
"This isn't the place?
Some one told me you were living with Miss Farish."
"No: I am boarding here. I have lived too long on my friends."
He continued to scan the blistered brown stone front, the windows draped with
discoloured lace, and the Pompeian decoration of the muddy vestibule; then he
looked back at her face and said with a
visible effort: "You'll let me come and see you some day?"
She smiled, recognizing the heroism of the offer to the point of being frankly touched
by it.
"Thank you--I shall be very glad," she made answer, in the first sincere words she had
ever spoken to him.
That evening in her own room Miss Bart--who had fled early from the heavy fumes of the
basement dinner-table--sat musing upon the impulse which had led her to unbosom
herself to Rosedale.
Beneath it she discovered an increasing sense of loneliness--a dread of returning
to the solitude of her room, while she could be anywhere else, or in any company
but her own.
Circumstances, of late, had combined to cut her off more and more from her few
remaining friends. On Carry Fisher's part the withdrawal was
perhaps not quite involuntary.
Having made her final effort on Lily's behalf, and landed her safely in Mme.
Regina's work-room, Mrs. Fisher seemed disposed to rest from her labours; and
Lily, understanding the reason, could not condemn her.
Carry had in fact come dangerously near to being involved in the episode of Mrs. Norma
Hatch, and it had taken some verbal ingenuity to extricate herself.
She frankly owned to having brought Lily and Mrs. Hatch together, but then she did
not know Mrs. Hatch--she had expressly warned Lily that she did not know Mrs.
Hatch--and besides, she was not Lily's
keeper, and really the girl was old enough to take care of herself.
Carry did not put her own case so brutally, but she allowed it to be thus put for her
by her latest *** friend, Mrs. Jack Stepney: Mrs. Stepney, trembling over the
narrowness of her only brother's escape,
but eager to vindicate Mrs. Fisher, at whose house she could count on the "jolly
parties" which had become a necessity to her since marriage had emancipated her from
the Van Osburgh point of view.
Lily understood the situation and could make allowances for it.
Carry had been a good friend to her in difficult days, and perhaps only a
friendship like Gerty's could be proof against such an increasing strain.
Gerty's friendship did indeed hold fast; yet Lily was beginning to avoid her also.
For she could not go to Gerty's without risk of meeting Selden; and to meet him now
would be pure pain.
It was pain enough even to think of him, whether she considered him in the
distinctness of her waking thoughts, or felt the obsession of his presence through
the blur of her tormented nights.
That was one of the reasons why she had turned again to Mrs. Hatch's prescription.
In the uneasy snatches of her natural dreams he came to her sometimes in the old
guise of fellowship and tenderness; and she would rise from the sweet delusion mocked
and emptied of her courage.
But in the sleep which the phial procured she sank far below such half-waking
visitations, sank into depths of dreamless annihilation from which she woke each
morning with an obliterated past.
Gradually, to be sure, the stress of the old thoughts would return; but at least
they did not importune her waking hour.
The drug gave her a momentary illusion of complete renewal, from which she drew
strength to take up her daily work. The strength was more and more needed as
the perplexities of her future increased.
She knew that to Gerty and Mrs. Fisher she was only passing through a temporary period
of probation, since they believed that the apprenticeship she was serving at Mme.
Regina's would enable her, when Mrs.
Peniston's legacy was paid, to realize the vision of the green-and-white shop with the
fuller competence acquired by her preliminary training.
But to Lily herself, aware that the legacy could not be put to such a use, the
preliminary training seemed a wasted effort.
She understood clearly enough that, even if she could ever learn to compete with hands
formed from childhood for their special work, the small pay she received would not
be a sufficient addition to her income to compensate her for such drudgery.
And the realization of this fact brought her recurringly face to face with the
temptation to use the legacy in establishing her business.
Once installed, and in command of her own work-women, she believed she had sufficient
tact and ability to attract a fashionable CLIENTELE; and if the business succeeded
she could gradually lay aside money enough to discharge her debt to Trenor.
But the task might take years to accomplish, even if she continued to stint
herself to the utmost; and meanwhile her pride would be crushed under the weight of
an intolerable obligation.
These were her superficial considerations; but under them lurked the secret dread that
the obligation might not always remain intolerable.
She knew she could not count on her continuity of purpose, and what really
frightened her was the thought that she might gradually accommodate herself to
remaining indefinitely in Trenor's debt, as
she had accommodated herself to the part allotted her on the Sabrina, and as she had
so nearly drifted into acquiescing with Stancy's scheme for the advancement of Mrs.
Hatch.
Her danger lay, as she knew, in her old incurable dread of discomfort and poverty;
in the fear of that mounting tide of dinginess against which her mother had so
passionately warned her.
And now a new vista of peril opened before her.
She understood that Rosedale was ready to lend her money; and the longing to take
advantage of his offer began to haunt her insidiously.
It was of course impossible to accept a loan from Rosedale; but proximate
possibilities hovered temptingly before her.
She was quite sure that he would come and see her again, and almost sure that, if he
did, she could bring him to the point of offering to marry her on the terms she had
previously rejected.
Would she still reject them if they were offered?
More and more, with every fresh mischance befalling her, did the pursuing furies seem
to take the shape of Bertha Dorset; and close at hand, safely locked among her
papers, lay the means of ending their pursuit.
The temptation, which her scorn of Rosedale had once enabled her to reject, now
insistently returned upon her; and how much strength was left her to oppose it?
What little there was must at any rate be husbanded to the utmost; she could not
trust herself again to the perils of a sleepless night.
Through the long hours of silence the dark spirit of fatigue and loneliness crouched
upon her breast, leaving her so drained of bodily strength that her morning thoughts
swam in a haze of weakness.
The only hope of renewal lay in the little bottle at her bed-side; and how much longer
that hope would last she dared not conjecture.
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