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 fagged 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 bosom 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

wall-paper 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 queer-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 pallor 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 meant. 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 pallor 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 bosom 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.

Chapter 11

Lily, lingering for a moment on the corner, looked out on the

afternoon spectacle of Fifth Avenue. It was a day in late April,

and the sweetness of spring was in the air. It mitigated the

ugliness of the long crowded thoroughfare, blurred the gaunt

roof-lines, threw a mauve veil over the discouraging perspective of

the side streets, and gave a touch of poetry to the delicate haze

of green that marked the entrance to the Park.

As Lily stood there, she recognized several familiar faces in the

passing carriages. The season was over, and its ruling forces had

disbanded; but a few still lingered, delaying their departure for

Europe, or passing through town on their return from the South.

Among them was Mrs. Van Osburgh, swaying majestically in her

C-spring barouche, with Mrs. Percy Gryce at her side, and the new

heir to the Gryce millions enthroned before them on his nurse’s

knees. They were succeeded by Mrs. Hatch’s electric victoria, in

which that lady reclined in the lonely splendour of a spring toilet

obviously designed for company; and a moment or two later came Judy

Trenor, accompanied by Lady Skiddaw, who had come over for her

annual tarpon fishing and a dip into “the street.”

This fleeting glimpse of her past served to emphasize the sense

of aimlessness with which Lily at length turned toward home. She

had nothing to do for the rest of the day, nor for the days to

come; for the season was over in millinery as well as in society,

and a week earlier Mme. Regina had notified her that her services

were no longer required. Mme. Regina always reduced her staff on

the first of May, and Miss Bart’s attendance had of late been so

irregular—she had so often been unwell, and had done so little work

when she came—that it was only as a favour that her dismissal had

hitherto been deferred.

Lily did not question the justice of the decision. She was

conscious of having been forgetful, awkward and slow to learn. It

was bitter to acknowledge her inferiority even to herself, but the

fact had been brought home to her that as a bread-winner she could

never compete with professional ability. Since she had been brought

up to be ornamental, she could hardly blame herself for failing to

serve any practical purpose; but the discovery put an end to her

consoling sense of universal efficiency.

As she turned homeward her thoughts shrank in anticipation from the

fact that there would be nothing to get up for the next morning.

The luxury of lying late in bed was a pleasure belonging to the

life of ease; it had no part in the utilitarian existence of the

boarding-house. She liked to leave her room early, and to return to

it as late as possible; and she was walking slowly now in order to

postpone the detested approach to her doorstep.

But the doorstep, as she drew near it, acquired a sudden interest

from the fact that it was occupied—and indeed filled—by the

conspicuous figure of Mr. Rosedale, whose presence seemed to take

on an added amplitude from the meanness of his surroundings.

The sight stirred Lily with an irresistible sense of triumph.

Rosedale, a day or two after their chance meeting, had called to

enquire if she had recovered from her indisposition; but since

then she had not seen or heard from him, and his absence seemed

to betoken a struggle to keep away, to let her pass once more out

of his life. If this were the case, his return showed that the

struggle had been unsuccessful, for Lily knew he was not the man to

waste his time in an ineffectual sentimental dalliance. He was too

busy, too practical, and above all too much preoccupied with his

own advancement, to indulge in such unprofitable asides.

In the peacock-blue parlour, with its bunches of dried pampas

grass, and discoloured steel engravings of sentimental episodes,

he looked about him with unconcealed disgust, laying his hat

distrustfully on the dusty console adorned with a Rogers statuette.

Lily sat down on one of the plush and rosewood sofas, and he

deposited himself in a rocking-chair draped with a starched

antimacassar which scraped unpleasantly against the pink fold of

skin above his collar.

“My goodness—you can’t go on living here!” he exclaimed.

Lily smiled at his tone. “I am not sure that I can; but I have gone

over my expenses very carefully, and I rather think I shall be able

to manage it.”

“Be able to manage it? That’s not what I mean—it’s no place for

you!”

“It’s what I mean; for I have been out of work for the last week.”

“Out of work—out of work! What a way for you to talk! The idea

of your having to work—it’s preposterous.” He brought out his

sentences in short violent jerks, as though they were forced up

from a deep inner crater of indignation. “It’s a farce—a crazy

farce,” he repeated, his eyes fixed on the long vista of the room

reflected in the blotched glass between the windows.

Lily continued to meet his expostulations with a smile. “I don’t

know why I should regard myself as an exception——” she began.

“Because you ARE; that’s why; and your being in a place like this

is a damnable outrage. I can’t talk of it calmly.”

She had in truth never seen him so shaken out of his usual

glibness; and there was something almost moving to her in his

inarticulate struggle with his emotions.

He rose with a start which left the rocking-chair quivering on its

beam ends, and placed himself squarely before her.

“Look here, Miss Lily, I’m going to Europe next week: going over

to Paris and London for a couple of months—and I can’t leave you

like this. I can’t do it. I know it’s none of my business—you’ve

let me understand that often enough; but things are worse with you

now than they have been before, and you must see that you’ve got to

accept help from somebody. You spoke to me the other day about some

debt to Trenor. I know what you mean—and I respect you for feeling

as you do about it.”

A blush of surprise rose to Lily’s pale face, but before she could

interrupt him he had continued eagerly: “Well, I’ll lend you the

money to pay Trenor; and I won’t—I—see here, don’t take me up

till I’ve finished. What I mean is, it’ll be a plain business

arrangement, such as one man would make with another. Now, what

have you got to say against that?”

Lily’s blush deepened to a glow in which humiliation and gratitude

were mingled; and both sentiments revealed themselves in the

unexpected gentleness of her reply.

“Only this: that it is exactly what Gus Trenor proposed; and that

I can never again be sure of understanding the plainest business

arrangement.” Then, realizing that this answer contained a germ

of injustice, she added, even more kindly: “Not that I don’t

appreciate your kindness—that I’m not grateful for it. But a

business arrangement between us would in any case be impossible,

because I shall have no security to give when my debt to Gus Trenor

has been paid.”

Rosedale received this statement in silence: he seemed to feel the

note of finality in her voice, yet to be unable to accept it as

closing the question between them.

In the silence Lily had a clear perception of what was passing

through his mind. Whatever perplexity he felt as to the

inexorableness of her course—however little he penetrated its

motive—she saw that it unmistakably tended to strengthen her hold

over him. It was as though the sense in her of unexplained scruples

and resistances had the same attraction as the delicacy of feature,

the fastidiousness of manner, which gave her an external rarity,

an air of being impossible to match. As he advanced in social

experience this uniqueness had acquired a greater value for him,

as though he were a collector who had learned to distinguish minor

differences of design and quality in some long-coveted object.

Lily, perceiving all this, understood that he would marry her

at once, on the sole condition of a reconciliation with Mrs.

Dorset; and the temptation was the less easy to put aside because,

little by little, circumstances were breaking down her dislike

for Rosedale. The dislike, indeed, still subsisted; but it was

penetrated here and there by the perception of mitigating qualities

in him: of a certain gross kindliness, a rather helpless fidelity

of sentiment, which seemed to be struggling through the hard

surface of his material ambitions.

Reading his dismissal in her eyes, he held out his hand with a

gesture which conveyed something of this inarticulate conflict.

“If you’d only let me, I’d set you up over them all—I’d put you

where you could wipe your feet on ’em!” he declared; and it touched

her oddly to see that his new passion had not altered his old

standard of values.

* * * * *

Lily took no sleeping-drops that night. She lay awake viewing her

situation in the crude light which Rosedale’s visit had shed on

it. In fending off the offer he was so plainly ready to renew, had

she not sacrificed to one of those abstract notions of honour that

might be called the conventionalities of the moral life? What debt

did she owe to a social order which had condemned and banished her

without trial? She had never been heard in her own defence; she was

innocent of the charge on which she had been found guilty; and the

irregularity of her conviction might seem to justify the use of

methods as irregular in recovering her lost rights. Bertha Dorset,

to save herself, had not scrupled to ruin her by an open falsehood;

why should she hesitate to make private use of the facts that

chance had put in her way? After all, half the opprobrium of such

an act lies in the name attached to it. Call it blackmail and it

becomes unthinkable; but explain that it injures no one, and that

the rights regained by it were unjustly forfeited, and he must be a

formalist indeed who can find no plea in its defence.

The arguments pleading for it with Lily were the old unanswerable

ones of the personal situation: the sense of injury, the sense

of failure, the passionate craving for a fair chance against the

selfish despotism of society. She had learned by experience that

she had neither the aptitude nor the moral constancy to remake her

life on new lines; to become a worker among workers, and let the

world of luxury and pleasure sweep by her unregarded. She could not

hold herself much to blame for this ineffectiveness, and she was

perhaps less to blame than she believed. Inherited tendencies had

combined with early training to make her the highly specialized

product she was: an organism as helpless out of its narrow range as

the sea-anemone torn from the rock. She had been fashioned to adorn

and delight; to what other end does nature round the rose-leaf and

paint the humming-bird’s breast? And was it her fault that the

purely decorative mission is less easily and harmoniously fulfilled

among social beings than in the world of nature? That it is apt

to be hampered by material necessities or complicated by moral

scruples?

These last were the two antagonistic forces which fought out their

battle in her breast during the long watches of the night; and

when she rose the next morning she hardly knew where the victory

lay. She was exhausted by the reaction of a night without sleep,

coming after many nights of rest artificially obtained; and in the

distorting light of fatigue the future stretched out before her

grey, interminable and desolate.

She lay late in bed, refusing the coffee and fried eggs which the

friendly Irish servant thrust through her door, and hating the

intimate domestic noises of the house and the cries and rumblings

of the street. Her week of idleness had brought home to her with

exaggerated force these small aggravations of the boarding-house

world, and she yearned for that other luxurious world, whose

machinery is so carefully concealed that one scene flows into

another without perceptible agency.

At length she rose and dressed. Since she had left Mme. Regina’s

she had spent her days in the streets, partly to escape from the

uncongenial promiscuities of the boarding-house, and partly in the

hope that physical fatigue would help her to sleep. But once out of

the house, she could not decide where to go; for she had avoided

Gerty since her dismissal from the milliner’s, and she was not sure

of a welcome anywhere else.

The morning was in harsh contrast to the previous day. A cold grey

sky threatened rain, and a high wind drove the dust in wild spirals

up and down the streets. Lily walked up Fifth Avenue toward the

Park, hoping to find a sheltered nook where she might sit; but the

wind chilled her, and after an hour’s wandering under the tossing

boughs she yielded to her increasing weariness, and took refuge in

a little restaurant in Fifty-ninth Street. She was not hungry, and

had meant to go without luncheon; but she was too tired to return

home, and the long perspective of white tables showed alluringly

through the windows.

The room was full of women and girls, all too much engaged in the

rapid absorption of tea and pie to remark her entrance. A hum

of shrill voices reverberated against the low ceiling, leaving

Lily shut out in a little circle of silence. She felt a sudden

pang of profound loneliness. She had lost the sense of time, and

it seemed to her as though she had not spoken to any one for

days. Her eyes sought the faces about her, craving a responsive

glance, some sign of an intuition of her trouble. But the sallow

preoccupied women, with their bags and note-books and rolls of

music, were all engrossed in their own affairs, and even those who

sat by themselves were busy running over proof-sheets or devouring

magazines between their hurried gulps of tea. Lily alone was

stranded in a great waste of disoccupation.

She drank several cups of the tea which was served with her portion

of stewed oysters, and her brain felt clearer and livelier when

she emerged once more into the street. She realized now that, as

she sat in the restaurant, she had unconsciously arrived at a

final decision. The discovery gave her an immediate illusion of

activity: it was exhilarating to think that she had actually a

reason for hurrying home. To prolong her enjoyment of the sensation

she decided to walk; but the distance was so great that she found

herself glancing nervously at the clocks on the way. One of the

surprises of her unoccupied state was the discovery that time, when

it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it, cannot

be trusted to move at any recognized pace. Usually it loiters; but

just when one has come to count upon its slowness, it may suddenly

break into a wild irrational gallop.

She found, however, on reaching home, that the hour was still early

enough for her to sit down and rest a few minutes before putting

her plan into execution. The delay did not perceptibly weaken her

resolve. She was frightened and yet stimulated by the reserved

force of resolution which she felt within herself: she saw it was

going to be easier, a great deal easier, than she had imagined.

At five o’clock she rose, unlocked her trunk, and took out a

sealed packet which she slipped into the bosom of her dress. Even

the contact with the packet did not shake her nerves as she had

half-expected it would. She seemed encased in a strong armour of

indifference, as though the vigorous exertion of her will had

finally benumbed her finer sensibilities.

She dressed herself once more for the street, locked her door and

went out. When she emerged on the pavement, the day was still

high, but a threat of rain darkened the sky and cold gusts shook

the signs projecting from the basement shops along the street. She

reached Fifth Avenue and began to walk slowly northward. She was

sufficiently familiar with Mrs. Dorset’s habits to know that she

could always be found at home after five. She might not, indeed, be

accessible to visitors, especially to a visitor so unwelcome, and

against whom it was quite possible that she had guarded herself by

special orders; but Lily had written a note which she meant to send

up with her name, and which she thought would secure her admission.

She had allowed herself time to walk to Mrs. Dorset’s, thinking

that the quick movement through the cold evening air would help

to steady her nerves; but she really felt no need of being

tranquillized. Her survey of the situation remained calm and

unwavering.

As she reached Fiftieth Street the clouds broke abruptly, and

a rush of cold rain slanted into her face. She had no umbrella

and the moisture quickly penetrated her thin spring dress. She

was still half a mile from her destination, and she decided to

walk across to Madison Avenue and take the electric car. As she

turned into the side street, a vague memory stirred in her. The

row of budding trees, the new brick and limestone house-fronts,

the Georgian flat-house with flower-boxes on its balconies, were

merged together into the setting of a familiar scene. It was

down this street that she had walked with Selden, that September

day two years ago; a few yards ahead was the doorway they had

entered together. The recollection loosened a throng of benumbed

sensations—longings, regrets, imaginings, the throbbing brood of

the only spring her heart had ever known. It was strange to find

herself passing his house on such an errand. She seemed suddenly

to see her action as he would see it—and the fact of his own

connection with it, the fact that, to attain her end, she must

trade on his name, and profit by a secret of his past, chilled her

blood with shame. What a long way she had travelled since the day

of their first talk together! Even then her feet had been set in

the path she was now following—even then she had resisted the hand

he had held out.

All her resentment of his fancied coldness was swept away in this

overwhelming rush of recollection. Twice he had been ready to

help her—to help her by loving her, as he had said—and if, the

third time, he had seemed to fail her, whom but herself could she

accuse?... Well, that part of her life was over; she did not know

why her thoughts still clung to it. But the sudden longing to see

him remained; it grew to hunger as she paused on the pavement

opposite his door. The street was dark and empty, swept by the

rain. She had a vision of his quiet room, of the bookshelves,

and the fire on the hearth. She looked up and saw a light in his

window; then she crossed the street and entered the house.

Chapter 12

The library looked as she had pictured it. The green-shaded lamps

made tranquil circles of light in the gathering dusk, a little fire

flickered on the hearth, and Selden’s easy-chair, which stood near

it, had been pushed aside when he rose to admit her.

He had checked his first movement of surprise, and stood silent,

waiting for her to speak, while she paused a moment on the

threshold, assailed by a rush of memories.

The scene was unchanged. She recognized the row of shelves from

which he had taken down his La Bruyere, and the worn arm of the

chair he had leaned against while she examined the precious volume.

But then the wide September light had filled the room, making it

seem a part of the outer world: now the shaded lamps and the warm

hearth, detaching it from the gathering darkness of the street,

gave it a sweeter touch of intimacy.

Becoming gradually aware of the surprise under Selden’s silence,

Lily turned to him and said simply: “I came to tell you that I was

sorry for the way we parted—for what I said to you that day at Mrs.

Hatch’s.”

The words rose to her lips spontaneously. Even on her way up

the stairs, she had not thought of preparing a pretext for her

visit, but she now felt an intense longing to dispel the cloud of

misunderstanding that hung between them.

Selden returned her look with a smile. “I was sorry too that we

should have parted in that way; but I am not sure I didn’t bring it

on myself. Luckily I had foreseen the risk I was taking——”

“So that you really didn’t care——?” broke from her with a flash of

her old irony.

“So that I was prepared for the consequences,” he corrected

good-humouredly. “But we’ll talk of all this later. Do come and sit

by the fire. I can recommend that arm-chair, if you’ll let me put a

cushion behind you.”

While he spoke she had moved slowly to the middle of the room, and

paused near his writing-table, where the lamp, striking upward,

cast exaggerated shadows on the pallor of her delicately-hollowed

face.

“You look tired—do sit down,” he repeated gently.

She did not seem to hear the request. “I wanted you to know that I

left Mrs. Hatch immediately after I saw you,” she said, as though

continuing her confession.

“Yes—yes; I know,” he assented, with a rising tinge of

embarrassment.

“And that I did so because you told me to. Before you came I had

already begun to see that it would be impossible to remain with

her—for the reasons you gave me; but I wouldn’t admit it—I wouldn’t

let you see that I understood what you meant.”

“Ah, I might have trusted you to find your own way out—don’t

overwhelm me with the sense of my officiousness!”

His light tone, in which, had her nerves been steadier, she would

have recognized the mere effort to bridge over an awkward moment,

jarred on her passionate desire to be understood. In her strange

state of extra-lucidity, which gave her the sense of being already

at the heart of the situation, it seemed incredible that any one

should think it necessary to linger in the conventional outskirts

of word-play and evasion.

“It was not that—I was not ungrateful,” she insisted. But the power

of expression failed her suddenly; she felt a tremor in her throat,

and two tears gathered and fell slowly from her eyes.

Selden moved forward and took her hand. “You are very tired. Why

won’t you sit down and let me make you comfortable?”

He drew her to the arm-chair near the fire, and placed a cushion

behind her shoulders.

“And now you must let me make you some tea: you know I always have

that amount of hospitality at my command.”

She shook her head, and two more tears ran over. But she did not

weep easily, and the long habit of self-control reasserted itself,

though she was still too tremulous to speak.

“You know I can coax the water to boil in five minutes,” Selden

continued, speaking as though she were a troubled child.

His words recalled the vision of that other afternoon when they

had sat together over his tea-table and talked jestingly of her

future. There were moments when that day seemed more remote than

any other event in her life; and yet she could always relive it in

its minutest detail.

She made a gesture of refusal. “No: I drink too much tea. I would

rather sit quiet—I must go in a moment,” she added confusedly.

Selden continued to stand near her, leaning against the

mantelpiece. The tinge of constraint was beginning to be more

distinctly perceptible under the friendly ease of his manner. Her

self-absorption had not allowed her to perceive it at first; but

now that her consciousness was once more putting forth its eager

feelers, she saw that her presence was becoming an embarrassment

to him. Such a situation can be saved only by an immediate outrush

of feeling; and on Selden’s side the determining impulse was still

lacking.

The discovery did not disturb Lily as it might once have done.

She had passed beyond the phase of well-bred reciprocity, in

which every demonstration must be scrupulously proportioned to

the emotion it elicits, and generosity of feeling is the only

ostentation condemned. But the sense of loneliness returned with

redoubled force as she saw herself forever shut out from Selden’s

inmost self. She had come to him with no definite purpose; the mere

longing to see him had directed her; but the secret hope she had

carried with her suddenly revealed itself in its death-pang.

“I must go,” she repeated, making a motion to rise from her chair.

“But I may not see you again for a long time, and I wanted to

tell you that I have never forgotten the things you said to me at

Bellomont, and that sometimes—sometimes when I seemed farthest from

remembering them—they have helped me, and kept me from mistakes;

kept me from really becoming what many people have thought me.”

Strive as she would to put some order in her thoughts, the words

would not come more clearly; yet she felt that she could not leave

him without trying to make him understand that she had saved

herself whole from the seeming ruin of her life.

A change had come over Selden’s face as she spoke. Its guarded look

had yielded to an expression still untinged by personal emotion,

but full of a gentle understanding.

“I am glad to have you tell me that; but nothing I have said has

really made the difference. The difference is in yourself—it will

always be there. And since it IS there, it can’t really matter

to you what people think: you are so sure that your friends will

always understand you.”

“Ah, don’t say that—don’t say that what you have told me has made

no difference. It seems to shut me out—to leave me all alone

with the other people.” She had risen and stood before him, once

more completely mastered by the inner urgency of the moment. The

consciousness of his half-divined reluctance had vanished. Whether

he wished it or not, he must see her wholly for once before they

parted.

Her voice had gathered strength, and she looked him gravely in the

eyes as she continued. “Once—twice—you gave me the chance to escape

from my life, and I refused it: refused it because I was a coward.

Afterward I saw my mistake—I saw I could never be happy with what

had contented me before. But it was too late: you had judged me—I

understood. It was too late for happiness—but not too late to be

helped by the thought of what I had missed. That is all I have

lived on—don’t take it from me now! Even in my worst moments it has

been like a little light in the darkness. Some women are strong

enough to be good by themselves, but I needed the help of your

belief in me. Perhaps I might have resisted a great temptation, but

the little ones would have pulled me down. And then I remembered—I

remembered your saying that such a life could never satisfy me;

and I was ashamed to admit to myself that it could. That is what

you did for me—that is what I wanted to thank you for. I wanted to

tell you that I have always remembered; and that I have tried—tried

hard....”

She broke off suddenly. Her tears had risen again, and in drawing

out her handkerchief her fingers touched the packet in the folds

of her dress. A wave of colour suffused her, and the words died on

her lips. Then she lifted her eyes to his and went on in an altered

voice.

“I have tried hard—but life is difficult, and I am a very useless

person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I

was just a screw or a cog in the great machine I called life, and

when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else.

What can one do when one finds that one only fits into one hole?

One must get back to it or be thrown out into the rubbish heap—and

you don’t know what it’s like in the rubbish heap!”

Her lips wavered into a smile—she had been distracted by the

whimsical remembrance of the confidences she had made to him, two

years earlier, in that very room. Then she had been planning to

marry Percy Gryce—what was it she was planning now?

The blood had risen strongly under Selden’s dark skin, but his

emotion showed itself only in an added seriousness of manner.

“You have something to tell me—do you mean to marry?” he said

abruptly.

Lily’s eyes did not falter, but a look of wonder, of puzzled

self-interrogation, formed itself slowly in their depths. In

the light of his question, she had paused to ask herself if her

decision had really been taken when she entered the room.

“You always told me I should have to come to it sooner or later!”

she said with a faint smile.

“And you have come to it now?”

“I shall have to come to it—presently. But there is something else

I must come to first.” She paused again, trying to transmit to her

voice the steadiness of her recovered smile. “There is some one

I must say goodbye to. Oh, not YOU—we are sure to see each other

again—but the Lily Bart you knew. I have kept her with me all this

time, but now we are going to part, and I have brought her back

to you—I am going to leave her here. When I go out presently she

will not go with me. I shall like to think that she has stayed with

you—and she’ll be no trouble, she’ll take up no room.”

She went toward him, and put out her hand, still smiling. “Will you

let her stay with you?” she asked.

He caught her hand, and she felt in his the vibration of feeling

that had not yet risen to his lips. “Lily—can’t I help you?” he

exclaimed.

She looked at him gently. “Do you remember what you said to me

once? That you could help me only by loving me? Well—you did love

me for a moment; and it helped me. It has always helped me. But the

moment is gone—it was I who let it go. And one must go on living.

Goodbye.”

She laid her other hand on his, and they looked at each other with

a kind of solemnity, as though they stood in the presence of death.

Something in truth lay dead between them—the love she had killed in

him and could no longer call to life. But something lived between

them also, and leaped up in her like an imperishable flame: it was

the love his love had kindled, the passion of her soul for his.

In its light everything else dwindled and fell away from her. She

understood now that she could not go forth and leave her old self

with him: that self must indeed live on in his presence, but it

must still continue to be hers.

Selden had retained her hand, and continued to scrutinize her with

a strange sense of foreboding. The external aspect of the situation

had vanished for him as completely as for her: he felt it only as

one of those rare moments which lift the veil from their faces as

they pass.

“Lily,” he said in a low voice, “you mustn’t speak in this way. I

can’t let you go without knowing what you mean to do. Things may

change—but they don’t pass. You can never go out of my life.”

She met his eyes with an illumined look. “No,” she said. “I see

that now. Let us always be friends. Then I shall feel safe,

whatever happens.”

“Whatever happens? What do you mean? What is going to happen?”

She turned away quietly and walked toward the hearth.

“Nothing at present—except that I am very cold, and that before I

go you must make up the fire for me.”

She knelt on the hearth-rug, stretching her hands to the embers.

Puzzled by the sudden change in her tone, he mechanically gathered

a handful of wood from the basket and tossed it on the fire. As he

did so, he noticed how thin her hands looked against the rising

light of the flames. He saw too, under the loose lines of her

dress, how the curves of her figure had shrunk to angularity; he

remembered long afterward how the red play of the flame sharpened

the depression of her nostrils, and intensified the blackness of

the shadows which struck up from her cheekbones to her eyes. She

knelt there for a few moments in silence; a silence which he dared

not break. When she rose he fancied that he saw her draw something

from her dress and drop it into the fire; but he hardly noticed

the gesture at the time. His faculties seemed tranced, and he was

still groping for the word to break the spell. She went up to him

and laid her hands on his shoulders. “Goodbye,” she said, and as he

bent over her she touched his forehead with her lips.

Chapter 13

The street-lamps were lit, but the rain had ceased, and there was

a momentary revival of light in the upper sky. Lily walked on

unconscious of her surroundings. She was still treading the buoyant

ether which emanates from the high moments of life. But gradually

it shrank away from her and she felt the dull pavement beneath

her feet. The sense of weariness returned with accumulated force,

and for a moment she felt that she could walk no farther. She had

reached the corner of Forty-first Street and Fifth Avenue, and she

remembered that in Bryant Park there were seats where she might

rest.

That melancholy pleasure-ground was almost deserted when she

entered it, and she sank down on an empty bench in the glare of

an electric street-lamp. The warmth of the fire had passed out of

her veins, and she told herself that she must not sit long in the

penetrating dampness which struck up from the wet asphalt. But her

will-power seemed to have spent itself in a last great effort, and

she was lost in the blank reaction which follows on an unwonted

expenditure of energy. And besides, what was there to go home to?

Nothing but the silence of her cheerless room—that silence of the

night which may be more racking to tired nerves than the most

discordant noises: that, and the bottle of chloral by her bed.

The thought of the chloral was the only spot of light in the dark

prospect: she could feel its lulling influence stealing over her

already. But she was troubled by the thought that it was losing

its power—she dared not go back to it too soon. Of late the sleep

it had brought her had been more broken and less profound; there

had been nights when she was perpetually floating up through it

to consciousness. What if the effect of the drug should gradually

fail, as all narcotics were said to fail? She remembered the

chemist’s warning against increasing the dose; and she had heard

before of the capricious and incalculable action of the drug. Her

dread of returning to a sleepless night was so great that she

lingered on, hoping that excessive weariness would reinforce the

waning power of the chloral.

Night had now closed in, and the roar of traffic in Forty-second

Street was dying out. As complete darkness fell on the square the

lingering occupants of the benches rose and dispersed; but now and

then a stray figure, hurrying homeward, struck across the path

where Lily sat, looming black for a moment in the white circle of

electric light. One or two of these passers-by slackened their

pace to glance curiously at her lonely figure; but she was hardly

conscious of their scrutiny.

Suddenly, however, she became aware that one of the passing shadows

remained stationary between her line of vision and the gleaming

asphalt; and raising her eyes she saw a young woman bending over

her.

“Excuse me—are you sick?—Why, it’s Miss Bart!” a half-familiar

voice exclaimed.

Lily looked up. The speaker was a poorly-dressed young woman

with a bundle under her arm. Her face had the air of unwholesome

refinement which ill-health and over-work may produce, but its

common prettiness was redeemed by the strong and generous curve of

the lips.

“You don’t remember me,” she continued, brightening with the

pleasure of recognition, “but I’d know you anywhere, I’ve thought

of you such a lot. I guess my folks all know your name by heart.

I was one of the girls at Miss Farish’s club—you helped me to go

to the country that time I had lung-trouble. My name’s Nettie

Struther. It was Nettie Crane then—but I daresay you don’t remember

that either.”

Yes: Lily was beginning to remember. The episode of Nettie Crane’s

timely rescue from disease had been one of the most satisfying

incidents of her connection with Gerty’s charitable work. She had

furnished the girl with the means to go to a sanatorium in the

mountains: it struck her now with a peculiar irony that the money

she had used had been Gus Trenor’s.

She tried to reply, to assure the speaker that she had not

forgotten; but her voice failed in the effort, and she felt herself

sinking under a great wave of physical weakness. Nettie Struther,

with a startled exclamation, sat down and slipped a shabbily-clad

arm behind her back.

“Why, Miss Bart, you ARE sick. Just lean on me a little till you

feel better.”

A faint glow of returning strength seemed to pass into Lily from

the pressure of the supporting arm.

“I’m only tired—it is nothing,” she found voice to say in a moment;

and then, as she met the timid appeal of her companion’s eyes, she

added involuntarily: “I have been unhappy—in great trouble.”

“YOU in trouble? I’ve always thought of you as being so high up,

where everything was just grand. Sometimes, when I felt real mean,

and got to wondering why things were so queerly fixed in the world,

I used to remember that you were having a lovely time, anyhow, and

that seemed to show there was a kind of justice somewhere. But

you mustn’t sit here too long—it’s fearfully damp. Don’t you feel

strong enough to walk on a little ways now?” she broke off.

“Yes—yes; I must go home,” Lily murmured, rising.

Her eyes rested wonderingly on the thin shabby figure at her side.

She had known Nettie Crane as one of the discouraged victims of

over-work and anaemic parentage: one of the superfluous fragments

of life destined to be swept prematurely into that social

refuse-heap of which Lily had so lately expressed her dread. But

Nettie Struther’s frail envelope was now alive with hope and

energy: whatever fate the future reserved for her, she would not be

cast into the refuse-heap without a struggle.

“I am very glad to have seen you,” Lily continued, summoning a

smile to her unsteady lips. “It’ll be my turn to think of you as

happy—and the world will seem a less unjust place to me too.”

“Oh, but I can’t leave you like this—you’re not fit to go home

alone. And I can’t go with you either!” Nettie Struther wailed

with a start of recollection. “You see, it’s my husband’s

night-shift—he’s a motor-man—and the friend I leave the baby with

has to step upstairs to get HER husband’s supper at seven. I didn’t

tell you I had a baby, did I? She’ll be four months old day after

tomorrow, and to look at her you wouldn’t think I’d ever had a sick

day. I’d give anything to show you the baby, Miss Bart, and we live

right down the street here—it’s only three blocks off.” She lifted

her eyes tentatively to Lily’s face, and then added with a burst

of courage: “Why won’t you get right into the cars and come home

with me while I get baby’s supper? It’s real warm in our kitchen,

and you can rest there, and I’ll take YOU home as soon as ever she

drops off to sleep.”

It WAS warm in the kitchen, which, when Nettie Struther’s match had

made a flame leap from the gas-jet above the table, revealed itself

to Lily as extraordinarily small and almost miraculously clean. A

fire shone through the polished flanks of the iron stove, and near

it stood a crib in which a baby was sitting upright, with incipient

anxiety struggling for expression on a countenance still placid

with sleep.

Having passionately celebrated her reunion with her offspring, and

excused herself in cryptic language for the lateness of her return,

Nettie restored the baby to the crib and shyly invited Miss Bart to

the rocking-chair near the stove.

“We’ve got a parlour too,” she explained with pardonable pride;

“but I guess it’s warmer in here, and I don’t want to leave you

alone while I’m getting baby’s supper.”

On receiving Lily’s assurance that she much preferred the friendly

proximity of the kitchen fire, Mrs. Struther proceeded to prepare a

bottle of infantile food, which she tenderly applied to the baby’s

impatient lips; and while the ensuing degustation went on, she

seated herself with a beaming countenance beside her visitor.

“You’re sure you won’t let me warm up a drop of coffee for you,

Miss Bart? There’s some of baby’s fresh milk left over—well,

maybe you’d rather just sit quiet and rest a little while. It’s

too lovely having you here. I’ve thought of it so often that I

can’t believe it’s really come true. I’ve said to George again

and again: ‘I just wish Miss Bart could see me NOW—’ and I used

to watch for your name in the papers, and we’d talk over what you

were doing, and read the descriptions of the dresses you wore. I

haven’t seen your name for a long time, though, and I began to be

afraid you were sick, and it worried me so that George said I’d get

sick myself, fretting about it.” Her lips broke into a reminiscent

smile. “Well, I can’t afford to be sick again, that’s a fact: the

last spell nearly finished me. When you sent me off that time I

never thought I’d come back alive, and I didn’t much care if I did.

You see I didn’t know about George and the baby then.”

She paused to readjust the bottle to the child’s bubbling mouth.

“You precious—don’t you be in too much of a hurry! Was it mad with

mommer for getting its supper so late? Marry Anto’nette—that’s what

we call her: after the French queen in that play at the Garden—I

told George the actress reminded me of you, and that made me fancy

the name.... I never thought I’d get married, you know, and I’d

never have had the heart to go on working just for myself.”

She broke off again, and meeting the encouragement in Lily’s eyes,

went on, with a flush rising under her anaemic skin: “You see I

wasn’t only just SICK that time you sent me off—I was dreadfully

unhappy too. I’d known a gentleman where I was employed—I don’t

know as you remember I did type-writing in a big importing

firm—and—well—I thought we were to be married: he’d gone steady

with me six months and given me his mother’s wedding ring. But I

presume he was too stylish for me—he travelled for the firm, and

had seen a great deal of society. Work girls aren’t looked after

the way you are, and they don’t always know how to look after

themselves. I didn’t . . . and it pretty near killed me when he

went away and left off writing....

“It was then I came down sick—I thought it was the end of

everything. I guess it would have been if you hadn’t sent me off.

But when I found I was getting well I began to take heart in spite

of myself. And then, when I got back home, George came round and

asked me to marry him. At first I thought I couldn’t, because we’d

been brought up together, and I knew he knew about me. But after a

while I began to see that that made it easier. I never could have

told another man, and I’d never have married without telling; but

if George cared for me enough to have me as I was, I didn’t see why

I shouldn’t begin over again—and I did.”

The strength of the victory shone forth from her as she lifted

her irradiated face from the child on her knees. “But, mercy, I

didn’t mean to go on like this about myself, with you sitting there

looking so fagged out. Only it’s so lovely having you here, and

letting you see just how you’ve helped me.” The baby had sunk back

blissfully replete, and Mrs. Struther softly rose to lay the bottle

aside. Then she paused before Miss Bart.

“I only wish I could help YOU—but I suppose there’s nothing on

earth I could do,” she murmured wistfully.

Lily, instead of answering, rose with a smile and held out her

arms; and the mother, understanding the gesture, laid her child in

them.

The baby, feeling herself detached from her habitual anchorage,

made an instinctive motion of resistance; but the soothing

influences of digestion prevailed, and Lily felt the soft weight

sink trustfully against her breast. The child’s confidence in its

safety thrilled her with a sense of warmth and returning life, and

she bent over, wondering at the rosy blur of the little face, the

empty clearness of the eyes, the vague tendrilly motions of the

folding and unfolding fingers. At first the burden in her arms

seemed as light as a pink cloud or a heap of down, but as she

continued to hold it the weight increased, sinking deeper, and

penetrating her with a strange sense of weakness, as though the

child entered into her and became a part of herself.

She looked up, and saw Nettie’s eyes resting on her with tenderness

and exultation.

“Wouldn’t it be too lovely for anything if she could grow up to be

just like you? Of course I know she never COULD—but mothers are

always dreaming the craziest things for their children.”

Lily clasped the child close for a moment and laid her back in her

mother’s arms.

“Oh, she must not do that—I should be afraid to come and see

her too often!” she said with a smile; and then, resisting Mrs.

Struther’s anxious offer of companionship, and reiterating the

promise that of course she would come back soon, and make George’s

acquaintance, and see the baby in her bath, she passed out of the

kitchen and went alone down the tenement stairs.

* * * * *

As she reached the street she realized that she felt stronger

and happier: the little episode had done her good. It was the

first time she had ever come across the results of her spasmodic

benevolence, and the surprised sense of human fellowship took the

mortal chill from her heart.

It was not till she entered her own door that she felt the reaction

of a deeper loneliness. It was long after seven o’clock, and the

light and odours proceeding from the basement made it manifest that

the boarding-house dinner had begun. She hastened up to her room,

lit the gas, and began to dress. She did not mean to pamper herself

any longer, to go without food because her surroundings made it

unpalatable. Since it was her fate to live in a boarding-house, she

must learn to fall in with the conditions of the life. Nevertheless

she was glad that, when she descended to the heat and glare of the

dining-room, the repast was nearly over.

* * * * *

In her own room again, she was seized with a sudden fever of

activity. For weeks past she had been too listless and indifferent

to set her possessions in order, but now she began to examine

systematically the contents of her drawers and cupboard. She had a

few handsome dresses left—survivals of her last phase of splendour,

on the Sabrina and in London—but when she had been obliged to

part with her maid she had given the woman a generous share of

her cast-off apparel. The remaining dresses, though they had lost

their freshness, still kept the long unerring lines, the sweep

and amplitude of the great artist’s stroke, and as she spread

them out on the bed the scenes in which they had been worn rose

vividly before her. An association lurked in every fold: each fall

of lace and gleam of embroidery was like a letter in the record

of her past. She was startled to find how the atmosphere of her

old life enveloped her. But, after all, it was the life she had

been made for: every dawning tendency in her had been carefully

directed toward it, all her interests and activities had been

taught to centre around it. She was like some rare flower grown for

exhibition, a flower from which every bud had been nipped except

the crowning blossom of her beauty.

Last of all, she drew forth from the bottom of her trunk a heap

of white drapery which fell shapelessly across her arm. It was

the Reynolds dress she had worn in the Bry TABLEAUX. It had been

impossible for her to give it away, but she had never seen it since

that night, and the long flexible folds, as she shook them out,

gave forth an odour of violets which came to her like a breath

from the flower-edged fountain where she had stood with Lawrence

Selden and disowned her fate. She put back the dresses one by one,

laying away with each some gleam of light, some note of laughter,

some stray waft from the rosy shores of pleasure. She was still in

a state of highly-wrought impressionability, and every hint of the

past sent a lingering tremor along her nerves.

She had just closed her trunk on the white folds of the Reynolds

dress when she heard a tap at her door, and the red fist of the

Irish maid-servant thrust in a belated letter. Carrying it to the

light, Lily read with surprise the address stamped on the upper

corner of the envelope. It was a business communication from the

office of her aunt’s executors, and she wondered what unexpected

development had caused them to break silence before the appointed

time. She opened the envelope and a cheque fluttered to the floor.

As she stooped to pick it up the blood rushed to her face. The

cheque represented the full amount of Mrs. Peniston’s legacy, and

the letter accompanying it explained that the executors, having

adjusted the business of the estate with less delay than they had

expected, had decided to anticipate the date fixed for the payment

of the bequests.

Lily sat down beside the desk at the foot of her bed, and spreading

out the cheque, read over and over the TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS written

across it in a steely business hand. Ten months earlier the amount

it stood for had represented the depths of penury; but her standard

of values had changed in the interval, and now visions of wealth

lurked in every flourish of the pen. As she continued to gaze at

it, she felt the glitter of the visions mounting to her brain,

and after a while she lifted the lid of the desk and slipped the

magic formula out of sight. It was easier to think without those

five figures dancing before her eyes; and she had a great deal of

thinking to do before she slept.

She opened her cheque-book, and plunged into such anxious

calculations as had prolonged her vigil at Bellomont on the night

when she had decided to marry Percy Gryce. Poverty simplifies

book-keeping, and her financial situation was easier to ascertain

than it had been then; but she had not yet learned the control of

money, and during her transient phase of luxury at the Emporium she

had slipped back into habits of extravagance which still impaired

her slender balance. A careful examination of her cheque-book, and

of the unpaid bills in her desk, showed that, when the latter had

been settled, she would have barely enough to live on for the next

three or four months; and even after that, if she were to continue

her present way of living, without earning any additional money,

all incidental expenses must be reduced to the vanishing point.

She hid her eyes with a shudder, beholding herself at the entrance

of that ever-narrowing perspective down which she had seen Miss

Silverton’s dowdy figure take its despondent way.

It was no longer, however, from the vision of material poverty that

she turned with the greatest shrinking. She had a sense of deeper

impoverishment—of an inner destitution compared to which outward

conditions dwindled into insignificance. It was indeed miserable to

be poor—to look forward to a shabby, anxious middle-age, leading

by dreary degrees of economy and self-denial to gradual absorption

in the dingy communal existence of the boarding-house. But there

was something more miserable still—it was the clutch of solitude at

her heart, the sense of being swept like a stray uprooted growth

down the heedless current of the years. That was the feeling which

possessed her now—the feeling of being something rootless and

ephemeral, mere spin-drift of the whirling surface of existence,

without anything to which the poor little tentacles of self could

cling before the awful flood submerged them. And as she looked

back she saw that there had never been a time when she had had any

real relation to life. Her parents too had been rootless, blown

hither and thither on every wind of fashion, without any personal

existence to shelter them from its shifting gusts. She herself had

grown up without any one spot of earth being dearer to her than

another: there was no centre of early pieties, of grave endearing

traditions, to which her heart could revert and from which it could

draw strength for itself and tenderness for others. In whatever

form a slowly-accumulated past lives in the blood—whether in the

concrete image of the old house stored with visual memories, or

in the conception of the house not built with hands, but made

up of inherited passions and loyalties—it has the same power of

broadening and deepening the individual existence, of attaching

it by mysterious links of kinship to all the mighty sum of human

striving.

Such a vision of the solidarity of life had never before come to

Lily. She had had a premonition of it in the blind motions of her

mating-instinct; but they had been checked by the disintegrating

influences of the life about her. All the men and women she

knew were like atoms whirling away from each other in some wild

centrifugal dance: her first glimpse of the continuity of life had

come to her that evening in Nettie Struther’s kitchen.

The poor little working-girl who had found strength to gather up

the fragments of her life, and build herself a shelter with them,

seemed to Lily to have reached the central truth of existence. It

was a meagre enough life, on the grim edge of poverty, with scant

margin for possibilities of sickness or mischance, but it had the

frail audacious permanence of a bird’s nest built on the edge of a

cliff—a mere wisp of leaves and straw, yet so put together that the

lives entrusted to it may hang safely over the abyss.

Yes—but it had taken two to build the nest; the man’s faith as well

as the woman’s courage. Lily remembered Nettie’s words: I KNEW HE

KNEW ABOUT ME. Her husband’s faith in her had made her renewal

possible—it is so easy for a woman to become what the man she loves

believes her to be! Well—Selden had twice been ready to stake his

faith on Lily Bart; but the third trial had been too severe for

his endurance. The very quality of his love had made it the more

impossible to recall to life. If it had been a simple instinct of

the blood, the power of her beauty might have revived it. But the

fact that it struck deeper, that it was inextricably wound up with

inherited habits of thought and feeling, made it as impossible to

restore to growth as a deep-rooted plant torn from its bed. Selden

had given her of his best; but he was as incapable as herself of an

uncritical return to former states of feeling.

There remained to her, as she had told him, the uplifting memory

of his faith in her; but she had not reached the age when a woman

can live on her memories. As she held Nettie Struther’s child in

her arms the frozen currents of youth had loosed themselves and

run warm in her veins: the old life-hunger possessed her, and all

her being clamoured for its share of personal happiness. Yes—it

was happiness she still wanted, and the glimpse she had caught of

it made everything else of no account. One by one she had detached

herself from the baser possibilities, and she saw that nothing now

remained to her but the emptiness of renunciation.

It was growing late, and an immense weariness once more possessed

her. It was not the stealing sense of sleep, but a vivid wakeful

fatigue, a wan lucidity of mind against which all the possibilities

of the future were shadowed forth gigantically. She was appalled

by the intense cleanness of the vision; she seemed to have broken

through the merciful veil which intervenes between intention and

action, and to see exactly what she would do in all the long

days to come. There was the cheque in her desk, for instance—she

meant to use it in paying her debt to Trenor; but she foresaw

that when the morning came she would put off doing so, would slip

into gradual tolerance of the debt. The thought terrified her—she

dreaded to fall from the height of her last moment with Lawrence

Selden. But how could she trust herself to keep her footing?

She knew the strength of the opposing impulses—she could feel

the countless hands of habit dragging her back into some fresh

compromise with fate. She felt an intense longing to prolong,

to perpetuate, the momentary exaltation of her spirit. If only

life could end now—end on this tragic yet sweet vision of lost

possibilities, which gave her a sense of kinship with all the

loving and foregoing in the world!

She reached out suddenly and, drawing the cheque from her

writing-desk, enclosed it in an envelope which she addressed to

her bank. She then wrote out a cheque for Trenor, and placing it,

without an accompanying word, in an envelope inscribed with his

name, laid the two letters side by side on her desk. After that

she continued to sit at the table, sorting her papers and writing,

till the intense silence of the house reminded her of the lateness

of the hour. In the street the noise of wheels had ceased, and

the rumble of the “elevated” came only at long intervals through

the deep unnatural hush. In the mysterious nocturnal separation

from all outward signs of life, she felt herself more strangely

confronted with her fate. The sensation made her brain reel,

and she tried to shut out consciousness by pressing her hands

against her eyes. But the terrible silence and emptiness seemed to

symbolize her future—she felt as though the house, the street, the

world were all empty, and she alone left sentient in a lifeless

universe.

But this was the verge of delirium . . . she had never hung so

near the dizzy brink of the unreal. Sleep was what she wanted—she

remembered that she had not closed her eyes for two nights. The

little bottle was at her bed-side, waiting to lay its spell upon

her. She rose and undressed hastily, hungering now for the touch of

her pillow. She felt so profoundly tired that she thought she must

fall asleep at once; but as soon as she had lain down every nerve

started once more into separate wakefulness. It was as though a

great blaze of electric light had been turned on in her head, and

her poor little anguished self shrank and cowered in it, without

knowing where to take refuge.

She had not imagined that such a multiplication of wakefulness

was possible: her whole past was reenacting itself at a hundred

different points of consciousness. Where was the drug that could

still this legion of insurgent nerves? The sense of exhaustion

would have been sweet compared to this shrill beat of activities;

but weariness had dropped from her as though some cruel stimulant

had been forced into her veins.

She could bear it—yes, she could bear it; but what strength would

be left her the next day? Perspective had disappeared—the next day

pressed close upon her, and on its heels came the days that were to

follow—they swarmed about her like a shrieking mob. She must shut

them out for a few hours; she must take a brief bath of oblivion.

She put out her hand, and measured the soothing drops into a glass;

but as she did so, she knew they would be powerless against the

supernatural lucidity of her brain. She had long since raised the

dose to its highest limit, but tonight she felt she must increase

it. She knew she took a slight risk in doing so—she remembered

the chemist’s warning. If sleep came at all, it might be a sleep

without waking. But after all that was but one chance in a hundred:

the action of the drug was incalculable, and the addition of a few

drops to the regular dose would probably do no more than procure

for her the rest she so desperately needed....

She did not, in truth, consider the question very closely—the

physical craving for sleep was her only sustained sensation. Her

mind shrank from the glare of thought as instinctively as eyes

contract in a blaze of light—darkness, darkness was what she must

have at any cost. She raised herself in bed and swallowed the

contents of the glass; then she blew out her candle and lay down.

She lay very still, waiting with a sensuous pleasure for the first

effects of the soporific. She knew in advance what form they would

take—the gradual cessation of the inner throb, the soft approach

of passiveness, as though an invisible hand made magic passes over

her in the darkness. The very slowness and hesitancy of the effect

increased its fascination: it was delicious to lean over and look

down into the dim abysses of unconsciousness. Tonight the drug

seemed to work more slowly than usual: each passionate pulse had to

be stilled in turn, and it was long before she felt them dropping

into abeyance, like sentinels falling asleep at their posts. But

gradually the sense of complete subjugation came over her, and she

wondered languidly what had made her feel so uneasy and excited.

She saw now that there was nothing to be excited about—she had

returned to her normal view of life. Tomorrow would not be so

difficult after all: she felt sure that she would have the strength

to meet it. She did not quite remember what it was that she had

been afraid to meet, but the uncertainty no longer troubled her.

She had been unhappy, and now she was happy—she had felt herself

alone, and now the sense of loneliness had vanished.

She stirred once, and turned on her side, and as she did so, she

suddenly understood why she did not feel herself alone. It was

odd—but Nettie Struther’s child was lying on her arm: she felt

the pressure of its little head against her shoulder. She did not

know how it had come there, but she felt no great surprise at the

fact, only a gentle penetrating thrill of warmth and pleasure.

She settled herself into an easier position, hollowing her arm to

pillow the round downy head, and holding her breath lest a sound

should disturb the sleeping child.

As she lay there she said to herself that there was something she

must tell Selden, some word she had found that should make life

clear between them. She tried to repeat the word, which lingered

vague and luminous on the far edge of thought—she was afraid of not

remembering it when she woke; and if she could only remember it and

say it to him, she felt that everything would be well.

Slowly the thought of the word faded, and sleep began to enfold

her. She struggled faintly against it, feeling that she ought

to keep awake on account of the baby; but even this feeling was

gradually lost in an indistinct sense of drowsy peace, through

which, of a sudden, a dark flash of loneliness and terror tore its

way.

She started up again, cold and trembling with the shock: for a

moment she seemed to have lost her hold of the child. But no—she

was mistaken—the tender pressure of its body was still close to

hers: the recovered warmth flowed through her once more, she

yielded to it, sank into it, and slept.

Chapter 14

The next morning rose mild and bright, with a promise of summer

in the air. The sunlight slanted joyously down Lily’s street,

mellowed the blistered house-front, gilded the paintless railings

of the doorstep, and struck prismatic glories from the panes of her

darkened window.

When such a day coincides with the inner mood there is intoxication

in its breath; and Selden, hastening along the street through the

squalor of its morning confidences, felt himself thrilling with a

youthful sense of adventure. He had cut loose from the familiar

shores of habit, and launched himself on uncharted seas of emotion;

all the old tests and measures were left behind, and his course was

to be shaped by new stars.

That course, for the moment, led merely to Miss Bart’s

boarding-house; but its shabby doorstep had suddenly become the

threshold of the untried. As he approached he looked up at the

triple row of windows, wondering boyishly which one of them

was hers. It was nine o’clock, and the house, being tenanted

by workers, already showed an awakened front to the street. He

remembered afterward having noticed that only one blind was down.

He noticed too that there was a pot of pansies on one of the window

sills, and at once concluded that the window must be hers: it was

inevitable that he should connect her with the one touch of beauty

in the dingy scene.

Nine o’clock was an early hour for a visit, but Selden had passed

beyond all such conventional observances. He only knew that he must

see Lily Bart at once—he had found the word he meant to say to her,

and it could not wait another moment to be said. It was strange

that it had not come to his lips sooner—that he had let her pass

from him the evening before without being able to speak it. But

what did that matter, now that a new day had come? It was not a

word for twilight, but for the morning.

Selden ran eagerly up the steps and pulled the bell; and even in

his state of self-absorption it came as a sharp surprise to him

that the door should open so promptly. It was still more of a

surprise to see, as he entered, that it had been opened by Gerty

Farish—and that behind her, in an agitated blur, several other

figures ominously loomed.

“Lawrence!” Gerty cried in a strange voice, “how could you get

here so quickly?”—and the trembling hand she laid on him seemed

instantly to close about his heart.

He noticed the other faces, vague with fear and conjecture—he saw

the landlady’s imposing bulk sway professionally toward him; but

he shrank back, putting up his hand, while his eyes mechanically

mounted the steep black walnut stairs, up which he was immediately

aware that his cousin was about to lead him.

A voice in the background said that the doctor might be back at any

minute—and that nothing, upstairs, was to be disturbed. Some one

else exclaimed: “It was the greatest mercy—” then Selden felt that

Gerty had taken him gently by the hand, and that they were to be

suffered to go up alone.

In silence they mounted the three flights, and walked along the

passage to a closed door. Gerty opened the door, and Selden went

in after her. Though the blind was down, the irresistible sunlight

poured a tempered golden flood into the room, and in its light

Selden saw a narrow bed along the wall, and on the bed, with

motionless hands and calm unrecognizing face, the semblance of Lily

Bart.

That it was her real self, every pulse in him ardently denied. Her

real self had lain warm on his heart but a few hours earlier—what

had he to do with this estranged and tranquil face which, for the

first time, neither paled nor brightened at his coming?

Gerty, strangely tranquil too, with the conscious self-control of

one who has ministered to much pain, stood by the bed, speaking

gently, as if transmitting a final message.

“The doctor found a bottle of chloral—she had been sleeping badly

for a long time, and she must have taken an overdose by mistake....

There is no doubt of that—no doubt—there will be no question—he has

been very kind. I told him that you and I would like to be left

alone with her—to go over her things before any one else comes. I

know it is what she would have wished.”

Selden was hardly conscious of what she said. He stood looking down

on the sleeping face which seemed to lie like a delicate impalpable

mask over the living lineaments he had known. He felt that the real

Lily was still there, close to him, yet invisible and inaccessible;

and the tenuity of the barrier between them mocked him with a sense

of helplessness. There had never been more than a little impalpable

barrier between them—and yet he had suffered it to keep them apart!

And now, though it seemed slighter and frailer than ever, it had

suddenly hardened to adamant, and he might beat his life out

against it in vain.

He had dropped on his knees beside the bed, but a touch from Gerty

aroused him. He stood up, and as their eyes met he was struck by

the extraordinary light in his cousin’s face.

“You understand what the doctor has gone for? He has promised that

there shall be no trouble—but of course the formalities must be

gone through. And I asked him to give us time to look through her

things first——”

He nodded, and she glanced about the small bare room. “It won’t

take long,” she concluded.

“No—it won’t take long,” he agreed.

She held his hand in hers a moment longer, and then, with a last

look at the bed, moved silently toward the door. On the threshold

she paused to add: “You will find me downstairs if you want me.”

Selden roused himself to detain her. “But why are you going? She

would have wished——”

Gerty shook her head with a smile. “No: this is what she would have

wished——” and as she spoke a light broke through Selden’s stony

misery, and he saw deep into the hidden things of love.

The door closed on Gerty, and he stood alone with the motionless

sleeper on the bed. His impulse was to return to her side, to fall

on his knees, and rest his throbbing head against the peaceful

cheek on the pillow. They had never been at peace together, they

two; and now he felt himself drawn downward into the strange

mysterious depths of her tranquillity.

But he remembered Gerty’s warning words—he knew that, though time

had ceased in this room, its feet were hastening relentlessly

toward the door. Gerty had given him this supreme half hour, and he

must use it as she willed.

He turned and looked about him, sternly compelling himself to

regain his consciousness of outward things. There was very little

furniture in the room. The shabby chest of drawers was spread

with a lace cover, and set out with a few gold-topped boxes and

bottles, a rose-coloured pin-cushion, a glass tray strewn with

tortoise-shell hair-pins—he shrank from the poignant intimacy of

these trifles, and from the blank surface of the toilet-mirror

above them.

These were the only traces of luxury, of that clinging to the

minute observance of personal seemliness, which showed what her

other renunciations must have cost. There was no other token

of her personality about the room, unless it showed itself in

the scrupulous neatness of the scant articles of furniture: a

washing-stand, two chairs, a small writing-desk, and the little

table near the bed. On this table stood the empty bottle and glass,

and from these also he averted his eyes.

The desk was closed, but on its slanting lid lay two letters which

he took up. One bore the address of a bank, and as it was stamped

and sealed, Selden, after a moment’s hesitation, laid it aside. On

the other letter he read Gus Trenor’s name; and the flap of the

envelope was still ungummed.

Temptation leapt on him like the stab of a knife. He staggered

under it, steadying himself against the desk. Why had she been

writing to Trenor—writing, presumably, just after their parting

of the previous evening? The thought unhallowed the memory of

that last hour, made a mock of the word he had come to speak, and

defiled even the reconciling silence upon which it fell. He felt

himself flung back on all the ugly uncertainties from which he

thought he had cast loose forever. After all, what did he know of

her life? Only as much as she had chosen to show him, and measured

by the world’s estimate, how little that was! By what right—the

letter in his hand seemed to ask—by what right was it he who now

passed into her confidence through the gate which death had left

unbarred? His heart cried out that it was by right of their last

hour together, the hour when she herself had placed the key in

his hand. Yes—but what if the letter to Trenor had been written

afterward?

He put it from him with sudden loathing, and setting his lips,

addressed himself resolutely to what remained of his task. After

all, that task would be easier to perform, now that his personal

stake in it was annulled.

He raised the lid of the desk, and saw within it a cheque-book

and a few packets of bills and letters, arranged with the orderly

precision which characterized all her personal habits. He looked

through the letters first, because it was the most difficult part

of the work. They proved to be few and unimportant, but among them

he found, with a strange commotion of the heart, the note he had

written her the day after the Brys’ entertainment.

“When may I come to you?”—his words overwhelmed him with a

realization of the cowardice which had driven him from her at the

very moment of attainment. Yes—he had always feared his fate, and

he was too honest to disown his cowardice now; for had not all his

old doubts started to life again at the mere sight of Trenor’s name?

He laid the note in his card-case, folding it away carefully, as

something made precious by the fact that she had held it so; then,

growing once more aware of the lapse of time, he continued his

examination of the papers.

To his surprise, he found that all the bills were receipted; there

was not an unpaid account among them. He opened the cheque-book,

and saw that, the very night before, a cheque of ten thousand

dollars from Mrs. Peniston’s executors had been entered in it.

The legacy, then, had been paid sooner than Gerty had led him

to expect. But, turning another page or two, he discovered with

astonishment that, in spite of this recent accession of funds, the

balance had already declined to a few dollars. A rapid glance at

the stubs of the last cheques, all of which bore the date of the

previous day, showed that between four or five hundred dollars of

the legacy had been spent in the settlement of bills, while the

remaining thousands were comprehended in one cheque, made out, at

the same time, to Charles Augustus Trenor.

Selden laid the book aside, and sank into the chair beside the

desk. He leaned his elbows on it, and hid his face in his hands.

The bitter waters of life surged high about him, their sterile

taste was on his lips. Did the cheque to Trenor explain the mystery

or deepen it? At first his mind refused to act—he felt only the

taint of such a transaction between a man like Trenor and a girl

like Lily Bart. Then, gradually, his troubled vision cleared,

old hints and rumours came back to him, and out of the very

insinuations he had feared to probe, he constructed an explanation

of the mystery. It was true, then, that she had taken money from

Trenor; but true also, as the contents of the little desk declared,

that the obligation had been intolerable to her, and that at the

first opportunity she had freed herself from it, though the act

left her face to face with bare unmitigated poverty.

That was all he knew—all he could hope to unravel of the story.

The mute lips on the pillow refused him more than this—unless

indeed they had told him the rest in the kiss they had left upon

his forehead. Yes, he could now read into that farewell all that

his heart craved to find there; he could even draw from it courage

not to accuse himself for having failed to reach the height of his

opportunity.

He saw that all the conditions of life had conspired to keep them

apart; since his very detachment from the external influences which

swayed her had increased his spiritual fastidiousness, and made it

more difficult for him to live and love uncritically. But at least

he HAD loved her—had been willing to stake his future on his faith

in her—and if the moment had been fated to pass from them before

they could seize it, he saw now that, for both, it had been saved

whole out of the ruin of their lives.

It was this moment of love, this fleeting victory over themselves,

which had kept them from atrophy and extinction; which, in her, had

reached out to him in every struggle against the influence of her

surroundings, and in him, had kept alive the faith that now drew

him penitent and reconciled to her side.

He knelt by the bed and bent over her, draining their last moment

to its lees; and in the silence there passed between them the word

which made all clear.

THE END

=Transcriber’s Note=:

1. I have modernized this text by modernizing the contractions: do

n’t becomes don’t, etc.

2. I have retained the British spelling of words like favour and

colour.

3. I found and corrected one instance of the name “Gertie,” which I

changed to “Gerty” to be consistent with rest of the book.

Linda Ruoff