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CHAPTER 3
Bridge at Bellomont usually lasted till the small hours; and when Lily went to bed that
night she had played too long for her own good.
Feeling no desire for the self-communion which awaited her in her room, she lingered
on the broad stairway, looking down into the hall below, where the last card-players
were grouped about the tray of tall glasses
and silver-collared decanters which the butler had just placed on a low table near
the fire. The hall was arcaded, with a gallery
supported on columns of pale yellow marble.
Tall clumps of flowering plants were grouped against a background of dark
foliage in the angles of the walls.
On the crimson carpet a deer-hound and two or three spaniels dozed luxuriously before
the fire, and the light from the great central lantern overhead shed a brightness
on the women's hair and struck sparks from their jewels as they moved.
There were moments when such scenes delighted Lily, when they gratified her
sense of beauty and her craving for the external finish of life; there were others
when they gave a sharper edge to the meagreness of her own opportunities.
This was one of the moments when the sense of contrast was uppermost, and she turned
away impatiently as Mrs. George Dorset, glittering in serpentine spangles, drew
Percy Gryce in her wake to a confidential nook beneath the gallery.
It was not that Miss Bart was afraid of losing her newly-acquired hold over Mr.
Gryce.
Mrs. Dorset might startle or dazzle him, but she had neither the skill nor the
patience to effect his capture.
She was too self-engrossed to penetrate the recesses of his shyness, and besides, why
should she care to give herself the trouble?
At most it might amuse her to make sport of his simplicity for an evening--after that
he would be merely a burden to her, and knowing this, she was far too experienced
to encourage him.
But the mere thought of that other woman, who could take a man up and toss him aside
as she willed, without having to regard him as a possible factor in her plans, filled
Lily Bart with envy.
She had been bored all the afternoon by Percy Gryce--the mere thought seemed to
waken an echo of his droning voice--but she could not ignore him on the morrow, she
must follow up her success, must submit to
more boredom, must be ready with fresh compliances and adaptabilities, and all on
the bare chance that he might ultimately decide to do her the honour of boring her
for life.
It was a hateful fate--but how escape from it?
What choice had she? To be herself, or a Gerty Farish.
As she entered her bedroom, with its softly-shaded lights, her lace dressing-
gown lying across the silken bedspread, her little embroidered slippers before the
fire, a vase of carnations filling the air
with perfume, and the last novels and magazines lying uncut on a table beside the
reading-lamp, she had a vision of Miss Farish's cramped flat, with its cheap
conveniences and hideous wall-papers.
No; she was not made for mean and shabby surroundings, for the squalid compromises
of poverty.
Her whole being dilated in an atmosphere of luxury; it was the background she required,
the only climate she could breathe in. But the luxury of others was not what she
wanted.
A few years ago it had sufficed her: she had taken her daily meed of pleasure
without caring who provided it.
Now she was beginning to chafe at the obligations it imposed, to feel herself a
mere pensioner on the splendour which had once seemed to belong to her.
There were even moments when she was conscious of having to pay her way.
For a long time she had refused to play bridge.
She knew she could not afford it, and she was afraid of acquiring so expensive a
taste.
She had seen the danger exemplified in more than one of her associates--in young Ned
Silverton, for instance, the charming fair boy now seated in abject rapture at the
elbow of Mrs. Fisher, a striking divorcee
with eyes and gowns as emphatic as the head-lines of her "case."
Lily could remember when young Silverton had stumbled into their circle, with the
air of a strayed Arcadian who has published chamung [Updater's note: charming?] sonnets
in his college journal.
Since then he had developed a taste for Mrs. Fisher and bridge, and the latter at
least had involved him in expenses from which he had been more than once rescued by
harassed maiden sisters, who treasured the
sonnets, and went without sugar in their tea to keep their darling afloat.
Ned's case was familiar to Lily: she had seen his charming eyes--which had a good
deal more poetry in them than the sonnets-- change from surprise to amusement, and from
amusement to anxiety, as he passed under
the spell of the terrible god of chance; and she was afraid of discovering the same
symptoms in her own case.
For in the last year she had found that her hostesses expected her to take a place at
the card-table.
It was one of the taxes she had to pay for their prolonged hospitality, and for the
dresses and trinkets which occasionally replenished her insufficient wardrobe.
And since she had played regularly the passion had grown on her.
Once or twice of late she had won a large sum, and instead of keeping it against
future losses, had spent it in dress or jewelry; and the desire to atone for this
imprudence, combined with the increasing
exhilaration of the game, drove her to risk higher stakes at each fresh venture.
She tried to excuse herself on the plea that, in the Trenor set, if one played at
all one must either play high or be set down as priggish or stingy; but she knew
that the gambling passion was upon her, and
that in her present surroundings there was small hope of resisting it.
Tonight the luck had been persistently bad, and the little gold purse which hung among
her trinkets was almost empty when she returned to her room.
She unlocked the wardrobe, and taking out her jewel-case, looked under the tray for
the roll of bills from which she had replenished the purse before going down to
dinner.
Only twenty dollars were left: the discovery was so startling that for a
moment she fancied she must have been robbed.
Then she took paper and pencil, and seating herself at the writing-table, tried to
reckon up what she had spent during the day.
Her head was throbbing with fatigue, and she had to go over the figures again and
again; but at last it became clear to her that she had lost three hundred dollars at
cards.
She took out her cheque-book to see if her balance was larger than she remembered, but
found she had erred in the other direction.
Then she returned to her calculations; but figure as she would, she could not conjure
back the vanished three hundred dollars.
It was the sum she had set aside to pacify her dress-maker--unless she should decide
to use it as a sop to the jeweller.
At any rate, she had so many uses for it that its very insufficiency had caused her
to play high in the hope of doubling it.
But of course she had lost--she who needed every penny, while Bertha Dorset, whose
husband showered money on her, must have pocketed at least five hundred, and Judy
Trenor, who could have afforded to lose a
thousand a night, had left the table clutching such a heap of bills that she had
been unable to shake hands with her guests when they bade her good night.
A world in which such things could be seemed a miserable place to Lily Bart; but
then she had never been able to understand the laws of a universe which was so ready
to leave her out of its calculations.
She began to undress without ringing for her maid, whom she had sent to bed.
She had been long enough in bondage to other people's pleasure to be considerate
of those who depended on hers, and in her bitter moods it sometimes struck her that
she and her maid were in the same position,
except that the latter received her wages more regularly.
As she sat before the mirror brushing her hair, her face looked hollow and pale, and
she was frightened by two little lines near her mouth, faint flaws in the smooth curve
of the cheek.
"Oh, I must stop worrying!" she exclaimed. "Unless it's the electric light----" she
reflected, springing up from her seat and lighting the candles on the dressing-table.
She turned out the wall-lights, and peered at herself between the candle-flames.
The white oval of her face swam out waveringly from a background of shadows,
the uncertain light blurring it like a haze; but the two lines about the mouth
remained.
Lily rose and undressed in haste.
"It is only because I am tired and have such odious things to think about," she
kept repeating; and it seemed an added injustice that petty cares should leave a
trace on the beauty which was her only defence against them.
But the odious things were there, and remained with her.
She returned wearily to the thought of Percy Gryce, as a wayfarer picks up a heavy
load and toils on after a brief rest.
She was almost sure she had "landed" him: a few days' work and she would win her
reward.
But the reward itself seemed unpalatable just then: she could get no zest from the
thought of victory.
It would be a rest from worry, no more--and how little that would have seemed to her a
few years earlier! Her ambitions had shrunk gradually in the
desiccating air of failure.
But why had she failed? Was it her own fault or that of destiny?
She remembered how her mother, after they had lost their money, used to say to her
with a kind of fierce vindictiveness: "But you'll get it all back--you'll get it all
back, with your face."...The remembrance
roused a whole train of association, and she lay in the darkness reconstructing the
past out of which her present had grown.
A house in which no one ever dined at home unless there was "company"; a door-bell
perpetually ringing; a hall-table showered with square envelopes which were opened in
haste, and oblong envelopes which were
allowed to gather dust in the depths of a bronze jar; a series of French and English
maids giving warning amid a chaos of hurriedly-ransacked wardrobes and dress-
closets; an equally changing dynasty of
nurses and footmen; quarrels in the pantry, the kitchen and the drawing-room;
precipitate trips to Europe, and returns with gorged trunks and days of interminable
unpacking; semi-annual discussions as to
where the summer should be spent, grey interludes of economy and brilliant
reactions of expense--such was the setting of Lily Bart's first memories.
Ruling the turbulent element called home was the vigorous and determined figure of a
mother still young enough to dance her ball-dresses to rags, while the hazy
outline of a neutral-tinted father filled
an intermediate space between the butler and the man who came to wind the clocks.
Even to the eyes of infancy, Mrs. Hudson Bart had appeared young; but Lily could not
recall the time when her father had not been bald and slightly stooping, with
streaks of grey in his hair, and a tired walk.
It was a shock to her to learn afterward that he was but two years older than her
mother.
Lily seldom saw her father by daylight. All day he was "down town"; and in winter
it was long after nightfall when she heard his *** step on the stairs and his hand
on the school-room door.
He would kiss her in silence, and ask one or two questions of the nurse or the
governess; then Mrs. Bart's maid would come to remind him that he was dining out, and
he would hurry away with a nod to Lily.
In summer, when he joined them for a Sunday at Newport or Southampton, he was even more
effaced and silent than in winter.
It seemed to tire him to rest, and he would sit for hours staring at the sea-line from
a quiet corner of the verandah, while the clatter of his wife's existence went on
unheeded a few feet off.
Generally, however, Mrs. Bart and Lily went to Europe for the summer, and before the
steamer was half way over Mr. Bart had dipped below the horizon.
Sometimes his daughter heard him denounced for having neglected to forward Mrs. Bart's
remittances; but for the most part he was never mentioned or thought of till his
patient stooping figure presented itself on
the New York dock as a buffer between the magnitude of his wife's luggage and the
restrictions of the American custom-house.
In this desultory yet agitated fashion life went on through Lily's teens: a zig-zag
broken course down which the family craft glided on a rapid current of amusement,
tugged at by the underflow of a perpetual need--the need of more money.
Lily could not recall the time when there had been money enough, and in some vague
way her father seemed always to blame for the deficiency.
It could certainly not be the fault of Mrs. Bart, who was spoken of by her friends as a
"wonderful manager."
Mrs. Bart was famous for the unlimited effect she produced on limited means; and
to the lady and her acquaintances there was something heroic in living as though one
were much richer than one's bank-book denoted.
Lily was naturally proud of her mother's aptitude in this line: she had been brought
up in the faith that, whatever it cost, one must have a good cook, and be what Mrs.
Bart called "decently dressed."
Mrs. Bart's worst reproach to her husband was to ask him if he expected her to "live
like a pig"; and his replying in the negative was always regarded as a
justification for cabling to Paris for an
extra dress or two, and telephoning to the jeweller that he might, after all, send
home the turquoise bracelet which Mrs. Bart had looked at that morning.
Lily knew people who "lived like pigs," and their appearance and surroundings justified
her mother's repugnance to that form of existence.
They were mostly cousins, who inhabited dingy houses with engravings from Cole's
Voyage of Life on the drawing-room walls, and slatternly parlour-maids who said "I'll
go and see" to visitors calling at an hour
when all right-minded persons are conventionally if not actually out.
The disgusting part of it was that many of these cousins were rich, so that Lily
imbibed the idea that if people lived like pigs it was from choice, and through the
lack of any proper standard of conduct.
This gave her a sense of reflected superiority, and she did not need Mrs.
Bart's comments on the family frumps and misers to foster her naturally lively taste
for splendour.
Lily was nineteen when circumstances caused her to revise her view of the universe.
The previous year she had made a dazzling debut fringed by a heavy thunder-cloud of
bills.
The light of the debut still lingered on the horizon, but the cloud had thickened;
and suddenly it broke.
The suddenness added to the horror; and there were still times when Lily relived
with painful vividness every detail of the day on which the blow fell.
She and her mother had been seated at the luncheon-table, over the CHAUFROIX and cold
salmon of the previous night's dinner: it was one of Mrs. Bart's few economies to
consume in private the expensive remnants of her hospitality.
Lily was feeling the pleasant languor which is youth's penalty for dancing till dawn;
but her mother, in spite of a few lines about the mouth, and under the yellow waves
on her temples, was as alert, determined
and high in colour as if she had risen from an untroubled sleep.
In the centre of the table, between the melting MARRONS GLACES and candied
cherries, a pyramid of American Beauties lifted their vigorous stems; they held
their heads as high as Mrs. Bart, but their
rose-colour had turned to a dissipated purple, and Lily's sense of fitness was
disturbed by their reappearance on the luncheon-table.
"I really think, mother," she said reproachfully, "we might afford a few fresh
flowers for luncheon. Just some jonquils or lilies-of-the-valley-
-"
Mrs. Bart stared. Her own fastidiousness had its eye fixed on
the world, and she did not care how the luncheon-table looked when there was no one
present at it but the family.
But she smiled at her daughter's innocence. "Lilies-of-the-valley," she said calmly,
"cost two dollars a dozen at this season." Lily was not impressed.
She knew very little of the value of money.
"It would not take more than six dozen to fill that bowl," she argued.
"Six dozen what?" asked her father's voice in the doorway.
The two women looked up in surprise; though it was a Saturday, the sight of Mr. Bart at
luncheon was an unwonted one.
But neither his wife nor his daughter was sufficiently interested to ask an
explanation.
Mr. Bart dropped into a chair, and sat gazing absently at the fragment of jellied
salmon which the butler had placed before him.
"I was only saying," Lily began, "that I hate to see faded flowers at luncheon; and
mother says a bunch of lilies-of-the-valley would not cost more than twelve dollars.
Mayn't I tell the florist to send a few every day?"
She leaned confidently toward her father: he seldom refused her anything, and Mrs.
Bart had taught her to plead with him when her own entreaties failed.
Mr. Bart sat motionless, his gaze still fixed on the salmon, and his lower jaw
dropped; he looked even paler than usual, and his thin hair lay in untidy streaks on
his forehead.
Suddenly he looked at his daughter and laughed.
The laugh was so strange that Lily coloured under it: she disliked being ridiculed, and
her father seemed to see something ridiculous in the request.
Perhaps he thought it foolish that she should trouble him about such a trifle.
"Twelve dollars--twelve dollars a day for flowers?
Oh, certainly, my dear--give him an order for twelve hundred."
He continued to laugh. Mrs. Bart gave him a quick glance.
"You needn't wait, Poleworth--I will ring for you," she said to the butler.
The butler withdrew with an air of silent disapproval, leaving the remains of the
CHAUFROIX on the sideboard.
"What is the matter, Hudson? Are you ill?" said Mrs. Bart severely.
She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making, and it was odious to
her that her husband should make a show of himself before the servants.
"Are you ill?" she repeated.
"Ill?---- No, I'm ruined," he said. Lily made a frightened sound, and Mrs. Bart
rose to her feet.
"Ruined----?" she cried; but controlling herself instantly, she turned a calm face
to Lily. "Shut the pantry door," she said.
Lily obeyed, and when she turned back into the room her father was sitting with both
elbows on the table, the plate of salmon between them, and his head bowed on his
hands.
Mrs. Bart stood over him with a white face which made her hair unnaturally yellow.
She looked at Lily as the latter approached: her look was terrible, but her
voice was modulated to a ghastly cheerfulness.
"Your father is not well--he doesn't know what he is saying.
It is nothing--but you had better go upstairs; and don't talk to the servants,"
she added.
Lily obeyed; she always obeyed when her mother spoke in that voice.
She had not been deceived by Mrs. Bart's words: she knew at once that they were
ruined.
In the dark hours which followed, that awful fact overshadowed even her father's
slow and difficult dying.
To his wife he no longer counted: he had become extinct when he ceased to fulfil his
purpose, and she sat at his side with the provisional air of a traveller who waits
for a belated train to start.
Lily's feelings were softer: she pitied him in a frightened ineffectual way.
But the fact that he was for the most part unconscious, and that his attention, when
she stole into the room, drifted away from her after a moment, made him even more of a
stranger than in the nursery days when he had never come home till after dark.
She seemed always to have seen him through a blur--first of sleepiness, then of
distance and indifference--and now the fog had thickened till he was almost
indistinguishable.
If she could have performed any little services for him, or have exchanged with
him a few of those affecting words which an extensive perusal of fiction had led her to
connect with such occasions, the filial
instinct might have stirred in her; but her pity, finding no active expression,
remained in a state of spectatorship, overshadowed by her mother's grim
unflagging resentment.
Every look and act of Mrs. Bart's seemed to say: "You are sorry for him now--but you
will feel differently when you see what he has done to us."
It was a relief to Lily when her father died.
Then a long winter set in.
There was a little money left, but to Mrs. Bart it seemed worse than nothing--the mere
mockery of what she was entitled to. What was the use of living if one had to
live like a pig?
She sank into a kind of furious apathy, a state of inert anger against fate.
Her faculty for "managing" deserted her, or she no longer took sufficient pride in it
to exert it.
It was well enough to "manage" when by so doing one could keep one's own carriage;
but when one's best contrivance did not conceal the fact that one had to go on
foot, the effort was no longer worth making.
Lily and her mother wandered from place to place, now paying long visits to relations
whose house-keeping Mrs. Bart criticized, and who deplored the fact that she let Lily
breakfast in bed when the girl had no
prospects before her, and now vegetating in cheap continental refuges, where Mrs. Bart
held herself fiercely aloof from the frugal tea-tables of her companions in misfortune.
She was especially careful to avoid her old friends and the scenes of her former
successes.
To be poor seemed to her such a confession of failure that it amounted to disgrace;
and she detected a note of condescension in the friendliest advances.
Only one thought consoled her, and that was the contemplation of Lily's beauty.
She studied it with a kind of passion, as though it were some weapon she had slowly
fashioned for her vengeance.
It was the last asset in their fortunes, the nucleus around which their life was to
be rebuilt.
She watched it jealously, as though it were her own property and Lily its mere
custodian; and she tried to instil into the latter a sense of the responsibility that
such a charge involved.
She followed in imagination the career of other beauties, pointing out to her
daughter what might be achieved through such a gift, and dwelling on the awful
warning of those who, in spite of it, had
failed to get what they wanted: to Mrs. Bart, only stupidity could explain the
lamentable denouement of some of her examples.
She was not above the inconsistency of charging fate, rather than herself, with
her own misfortunes; but she inveighed so acrimoniously against love-matches that
Lily would have fancied her own marriage
had been of that nature, had not Mrs. Bart frequently assured her that she had been
"talked into it"--by whom, she never made clear.
Lily was duly impressed by the magnitude of her opportunities.
The dinginess of her present life threw into enchanting relief the existence to
which she felt herself entitled.
To a less illuminated intelligence Mrs. Bart's counsels might have been dangerous;
but Lily understood that beauty is only the raw material of conquest, and that to
convert it into success other arts are required.
She knew that to betray any sense of superiority was a subtler form of the
stupidity her mother denounced, and it did not take her long to learn that a beauty
needs more tact than the possessor of an average set of features.
Her ambitions were not as crude as Mrs. Bart's.
It had been among that lady's grievances that her husband--in the early days, before
he was too tired--had wasted his evenings in what she vaguely described as "reading
poetry"; and among the effects packed off
to auction after his death were a score or two of dingy volumes which had struggled
for existence among the boots and medicine bottles of his dressing-room shelves.
There was in Lily a vein of sentiment, perhaps transmitted from this source, which
gave an idealizing touch to her most prosaic purposes.
She liked to think of her beauty as a power for good, as giving her the opportunity to
attain a position where she should make her influence felt in the vague diffusion of
refinement and good taste.
She was fond of pictures and flowers, and of sentimental fiction, and she could not
help thinking that the possession of such tastes ennobled her desire for worldly
advantages.
She would not indeed have cared to marry a man who was merely rich: she was secretly
ashamed of her mother's crude passion for money.
Lily's preference would have been for an English nobleman with political ambitions
and vast estates; or, for second choice, an Italian prince with a castle in the
Apennines and an hereditary office in the Vatican.
Lost causes had a romantic charm for her, and she liked to picture herself as
standing aloof from the vulgar press of the Quirinal, and sacrificing her pleasure to
the claims of an immemorial tradition....
How long ago and how far off it all seemed! Those ambitions were hardly more futile and
childish than the earlier ones which had centred about the possession of a French
jointed doll with real hair.
Was it only ten years since she had wavered in imagination between the English earl and
the Italian prince? Relentlessly her mind travelled on over the
dreary interval....
After two years of hungry roaming Mrs. Bart had died----died of a deep disgust.
She had hated dinginess, and it was her fate to be dingy.
Her visions of a brilliant marriage for Lily had faded after the first year.
"People can't marry you if they don't see you--and how can they see you in these
holes where we're stuck?"
That was the burden of her lament; and her last adjuration to her daughter was to
escape from dinginess if she could. "Don't let it creep up on you and drag you
down.
Fight your way out of it somehow--you're young and can do it," she insisted.
She had died during one of their brief visits to New York, and there Lily at once
became the centre of a family council composed of the wealthy relatives whom she
had been taught to despise for living like pigs.
It may be that they had an inkling of the sentiments in which she had been brought
up, for none of them manifested a very lively desire for her company; indeed, the
question threatened to remain unsolved till
Mrs. Peniston with a sigh announced: "I'll try her for a year."
Every one was surprised, but one and all concealed their surprise, lest Mrs.
Peniston should be alarmed by it into reconsidering her decision.
Mrs. Peniston was Mr. Bart's widowed sister, and if she was by no means the
richest of the family group, its other members nevertheless abounded in reasons
why she was clearly destined by Providence to assume the charge of Lily.
In the first place she was alone, and it would be charming for her to have a young
companion.
Then she sometimes travelled, and Lily's familiarity with foreign customs--deplored
as a misfortune by her more conservative relatives--would at least enable her to act
as a kind of courier.
But as a matter of fact Mrs. Peniston had not been affected by these considerations.
She had taken the girl simply because no one else would have her, and because she
had the kind of moral MAUVAISE HONTE which makes the public display of selfishness
difficult, though it does not interfere with its private indulgence.
It would have been impossible for Mrs. Peniston to be heroic on a desert island,
but with the eyes of her little world upon her she took a certain pleasure in her act.
She reaped the reward to which disinterestedness is entitled, and found an
agreeable companion in her niece.
She had expected to find Lily headstrong, critical and "foreign"--for even Mrs.
Peniston, though she occasionally went abroad, had the family dread of
foreignness--but the girl showed a pliancy,
which, to a more penetrating mind than her aunt's, might have been less reassuring
than the open selfishness of youth.
Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is
less easy to break than a stiff one. Mrs. Peniston, however, did not suffer from
her niece's adaptability.
Lily had no intention of taking advantage of her aunt's good nature.
She was in truth grateful for the refuge offered her: Mrs. Peniston's opulent
interior was at least not externally dingy.
But dinginess is a quality which assumes all manner of disguises; and Lily soon
found that it was as latent in the expensive routine of her aunt's life as in
the makeshift existence of a continental pension.
Mrs. Peniston was one of the episodical persons who form the padding of life.
It was impossible to believe that she had herself ever been a focus of activities.
The most vivid thing about her was the fact that her grandmother had been a Van
Alstyne.
This connection with the well-fed and industrious stock of early New York
revealed itself in the glacial neatness of Mrs. Peniston's drawing-room and in the
excellence of her cuisine.
She belonged to the class of old New Yorkers who have always lived well, dressed
expensively, and done little else; and to these inherited obligations Mrs. Peniston
faithfully conformed.
She had always been a looker-on at life, and her mind resembled one of those little
mirrors which her Dutch ancestors were accustomed to affix to their upper windows,
so that from the depths of an impenetrable
domesticity they might see what was happening in the street.
Mrs. Peniston was the owner of a country- place in New Jersey, but she had never
lived there since her husband's death--a remote event, which appeared to dwell in
her memory chiefly as a dividing point in
the personal reminiscences that formed the staple of her conversation.
She was a woman who remembered dates with intensity, and could tell at a moment's
notice whether the drawing-room curtains had been renewed before or after Mr.
Peniston's last illness.
Mrs. Peniston thought the country lonely and trees damp, and cherished a vague fear
of meeting a bull.
To guard against such contingencies she frequented the more populous watering-
places, where she installed herself impersonally in a hired house and looked on
at life through the matting screen of her verandah.
In the care of such a guardian, it soon became clear to Lily that she was to enjoy
only the material advantages of good food and expensive clothing; and, though far
from underrating these, she would gladly
have exchanged them for what Mrs. Bart had taught her to regard as opportunities.
She sighed to think what her mother's fierce energies would have accomplished,
had they been coupled with Mrs. Peniston's resources.
Lily had abundant energy of her own, but it was restricted by the necessity of adapting
herself to her aunt's habits.
She saw that at all costs she must keep Mrs. Peniston's favour till, as Mrs. Bart
would have phrased it, she could stand on her own legs.
Lily had no mind for the vagabond life of the poor relation, and to adapt herself to
Mrs. Peniston she had, to some degree, to assume that lady's passive attitude.
She had fancied at first that it would be easy to draw her aunt into the whirl of her
own activities, but there was a static force in Mrs. Peniston against which her
niece's efforts spent themselves in vain.
To attempt to bring her into active relation with life was like tugging at a
piece of furniture which has been screwed to the floor.
She did not, indeed, expect Lily to remain equally immovable: she had all the American
guardian's indulgence for the volatility of youth.
She had indulgence also for certain other habits of her niece's.
It seemed to her natural that Lily should spend all her money on dress, and she
supplemented the girl's scanty income by occasional "handsome presents" meant to be
applied to the same purpose.
Lily, who was intensely practical, would have preferred a fixed allowance; but Mrs.
Peniston liked the periodical recurrence of gratitude evoked by unexpected cheques, and
was perhaps shrewd enough to perceive that
such a method of giving kept alive in her niece a salutary sense of dependence.
Beyond this, Mrs. Peniston had not felt called upon to do anything for her charge:
she had simply stood aside and let her take the field.
Lily had taken it, at first with the confidence of assured possessorship, then
with gradually narrowing demands, till now she found herself actually struggling for a
foothold on the broad space which had once seemed her own for the asking.
How it happened she did not yet know.
Sometimes she thought it was because Mrs. Peniston had been too passive, and again
she feared it was because she herself had not been passive enough.
Had she shown an undue eagerness for victory?
Had she lacked patience, pliancy and dissimulation?
Whether she charged herself with these faults or absolved herself from them, made
no difference in the sum-total of her failure.
Younger and plainer girls had been married off by dozens, and she was nine-and-twenty,
and still Miss Bart.
She was beginning to have fits of angry rebellion against fate, when she longed to
drop out of the race and make an independent life for herself.
But what manner of life would it be?
She had barely enough money to pay her dress-makers' bills and her gambling debts;
and none of the desultory interests which she dignified with the name of tastes was
pronounced enough to enable her to live contentedly in obscurity.
Ah, no--she was too intelligent not to be honest with herself.
She knew that she hated dinginess as much as her mother had hated it, and to her last
breath she meant to fight against it, dragging herself up again and again above
its flood till she gained the bright
pinnacles of success which presented such a slippery surface to her clutch.