The House of Mirth

ook I, Chapter 14

Gerty Farish, the morning after the Wellington Brys’ entertainment,
woke from dreams as happy as Lily’s. If they were less vivid in
hue, more subdued to the half-tints of her personality and her
experience, they were for that very reason better suited to her
mental vision. Such flashes of joy as Lily moved in would have
blinded Miss Farish, who was accustomed, in the way of happiness,
to such scant light as shone through the cracks of other people’s
lives.

Now she was the centre of a little illumination of her own: a mild
but unmistakable beam, compounded of Lawrence Selden’s growing
kindness to herself and the discovery that he extended his liking
to Lily Bart. If these two factors seem incompatible to the student
of feminine psychology, it must be remembered that Gerty had always
been a parasite in the moral order, living on the crumbs of other
tables, and content to look through the window at the banquet
spread for her friends. Now that she was enjoying a little private
feast of her own, it would have seemed incredibly selfish not to
lay a plate for a friend; and there was no one with whom she would
rather have shared her enjoyment than Miss Bart.

As to the nature of Selden’s growing kindness, Gerty would no
more have dared to define it than she would have tried to learn
a butterfly’s colours by knocking the dust from its wings. To
seize on the wonder would be to brush off its bloom, and perhaps
see it fade and stiffen in her hand: better the sense of beauty
palpitating out of reach, while she held her breath and watched
where it would alight. Yet Selden’s manner at the Brys’ had brought
the flutter of wings so close that they seemed to be beating in
her own heart. She had never seen him so alert, so responsive,
so attentive to what she had to say. His habitual manner had an
absent-minded kindliness which she accepted, and was grateful for,
as the liveliest sentiment her presence was likely to inspire; but
she was quick to feel in him a change implying that for once she
could give pleasure as well as receive it.

And it was so delightful that this higher degree of sympathy should
be reached through their interest in Lily Bart!

Gerty’s affection for her friend—a sentiment that had learned
to keep itself alive on the scantiest diet—had grown to active
adoration since Lily’s restless curiosity had drawn her into the
circle of Miss Farish’s work. Lily’s taste of beneficence had
wakened in her a momentary appetite for well-doing. Her visit to
the Girls’ Club had first brought her in contact with the dramatic
contrasts of life. She had always accepted with philosophic
calm the fact that such existences as hers were pedestalled on
foundations of obscure humanity. The dreary limbo of dinginess lay
all around and beneath that little illuminated circle in which life
reached its finest efflorescence, as the mud and sleet of a winter
night enclose a hot-house filled with tropical flowers. All this
was in the natural order of things, and the orchid basking in its
artificially created atmosphere could round the delicate curves of
its petals undisturbed by the ice on the panes.

But it is one thing to live comfortably with the abstract
conception of poverty, another to be brought in contact with its
human embodiments. Lily had never conceived of these victims of
fate otherwise than in the mass. That the mass was composed of
individual lives, innumerable separate centres of sensation, with
her own eager reachings for pleasure, her own fierce revulsions
from pain—that some of these bundles of feeling were clothed in
shapes not so unlike her own, with eyes meant to look on gladness,
and young lips shaped for love—this discovery gave Lily one of
those sudden shocks of pity that sometimes decentralize a life.
Lily’s nature was incapable of such renewal: she could feel other
demands only through her own, and no pain was long vivid which
did not press on an answering nerve. But for the moment she was
drawn out of herself by the interest of her direct relation with
a world so unlike her own. She had supplemented her first gift by
personal assistance to one or two of Miss Farish’s most appealing
subjects, and the admiration and interest her presence excited
among the tired workers at the club ministered in a new form to her
insatiable desire to please.

Gerty Farish was not a close enough reader of character to
disentangle the mixed threads of which Lily’s philanthropy was
woven. She supposed her beautiful friend to be actuated by the
same motive as herself—that sharpening of the moral vision which
makes all human suffering so near and insistent that the other
aspects of life fade into remoteness. Gerty lived by such simple
formulas that she did not hesitate to class her friend’s state
with the emotional “change of heart” to which her dealings with
the poor had accustomed her; and she rejoiced in the thought that
she had been the humble instrument of this renewal. Now she had
an answer to all criticisms of Lily’s conduct: as she had said,
she knew “the real Lily,” and the discovery that Selden shared her
knowledge raised her placid acceptance of life to a dazzled sense
of its possibilities—a sense farther enlarged, in the course of the
afternoon, by the receipt of a telegram from Selden asking if he
might dine with her that evening.

While Gerty was lost in the happy bustle which this announcement
produced in her small household, Selden was at one with her in
thinking with intensity of Lily Bart. The case which had called him
to Albany was not complicated enough to absorb all his attention,
and he had the professional faculty of keeping a part of his mind
free when its services were not needed. This part—which at the
moment seemed dangerously like the whole—was filled to the brim
with the sensations of the previous evening. Selden understood the
symptoms: he recognized the fact that he was paying up, as there
had always been a chance of his having to pay up, for the voluntary
exclusions of his past. He had meant to keep free from permanent
ties, not from any poverty of feeling, but because, in a different
way, he was, as much as Lily, the victim of his environment. There
had been a germ of truth in his declaration to Gerty Farish that he
had never wanted to marry a “nice” girl: the adjective connoting,
in his cousin’s vocabulary, certain utilitarian qualities which
are apt to preclude the luxury of charm. Now it had been Selden’s
fate to have a charming mother: her graceful portrait, all smiles
and Cashmere, still emitted a faded scent of the undefinable
quality. His father was the kind of man who delights in a charming
woman: who quotes her, stimulates her, and keeps her perennially
charming. Neither one of the couple cared for money, but their
disdain of it took the form of always spending a little more than
was prudent. If their house was shabby, it was exquisitely kept; if
there were good books on the shelves there were also good dishes
on the table. Selden senior had an eye for a picture, his wife an
understanding of old lace; and both were so conscious of restraint
and discrimination in buying that they never quite knew how it was
that the bills mounted up.

Though many of Selden’s friends would have called his parents poor,
he had grown up in an atmosphere where restricted means were felt
only as a check on aimless profusion: where the few possessions
were so good that their rarity gave them a merited relief, and
abstinence was combined with elegance in a way exemplified by Mrs.
Selden’s knack of wearing her old velvet as if it were new. A man
has the advantage of being delivered early from the home point of
view, and before Selden left college he had learned that there
are as many different ways of going without money as of spending
it. Unfortunately, he found no way as agreeable as that practised
at home; and his views of womankind in especial were tinged by
the remembrance of the one woman who had given him his sense of
“values.” It was from her that he inherited his detachment from
the sumptuary side of life: the stoic’s carelessness of material
things, combined with the Epicurean’s pleasure in them. Life shorn
of either feeling appeared to him a diminished thing; and nowhere
was the blending of the two ingredients so essential as in the
character of a pretty woman.

It had always seemed to Selden that experience offered a great deal
besides the sentimental adventure, yet he could vividly conceive of
a love which should broaden and deepen till it became the central
fact of life. What he could not accept, in his own case, was the
makeshift alternative of a relation that should be less than this:
that should leave some portions of his nature unsatisfied, while it
put an undue strain on others. He would not, in other words, yield
to the growth of an affection which might appeal to pity yet leave
the understanding untouched: sympathy should no more delude him
than a trick of the eyes, the grace of helplessness than a curve of
the cheek.

But now—that little BUT passed like a sponge over all his vows.
His reasoned-out resistances seemed for the moment so much less
important than the question as to when Lily would receive his
note! He yielded himself to the charm of trivial preoccupations,
wondering at what hour her reply would be sent, with what words
it would begin. As to its import he had no doubt—he was as sure
of her surrender as of his own. And so he had leisure to muse on
all its exquisite details, as a hard worker, on a holiday morning,
might lie still and watch the beam of light travel gradually
across his room. But if the new light dazzled, it did not blind
him. He could still discern the outline of facts, though his own
relation to them had changed. He was no less conscious than before
of what was said of Lily Bart, but he could separate the woman he
knew from the vulgar estimate of her. His mind turned to Gerty
Farish’s words, and the wisdom of the world seemed a groping thing
beside the insight of innocence. BLESSED ARE THE PURE IN HEART,
FOR THEY SHALL SEE GOD—even the hidden god in their neighbour’s
breast! Selden was in the state of impassioned self-absorption
that the first surrender to love produces. His craving was for the
companionship of one whose point of view should justify his own,
who should confirm, by deliberate observation, the truth to which
his intuitions had leaped. He could not wait for the midday recess,
but seized a moment’s leisure in court to scribble his telegram to
Gerty Farish.

Reaching town, he was driven direct to his club, where he hoped a
note from Miss Bart might await him. But his box contained only
a line of rapturous assent from Gerty, and he was turning away
disappointed when he was hailed by a voice from the smoking room.

“Hallo, Lawrence! Dining here? Take a bite with me—I’ve ordered a
canvas-back.”

He discovered Trenor, in his day clothes, sitting, with a tall
glass at his elbow, behind the folds of a sporting journal.

Selden thanked him, but pleaded an engagement.

“Hang it, I believe every man in town has an engagement tonight. I
shall have the club to myself. You know how I’m living this winter,
rattling round in that empty house. My wife meant to come to town
today, but she’s put it off again, and how is a fellow to dine
alone in a room with the looking-glasses covered, and nothing but
a bottle of Harvey sauce on the sideboard? I say, Lawrence, chuck
your engagement and take pity on me—it gives me the blue devils to
dine alone, and there’s nobody but that canting ass Wetherall in
the club.”

“Sorry, Gus—I can’t do it.”

As Selden turned away, he noticed the dark flush on Trenor’s face,
the unpleasant moisture of his intensely white forehead, the way
his jewelled rings were wedged in the creases of his fat red
fingers. Certainly the beast was predominating—the beast at the
bottom of the glass. And he had heard this man’s name coupled with
Lily’s! Bah—the thought sickened him; all the way back to his rooms
he was haunted by the sight of Trenor’s fat creased hands——

On his table lay the note: Lily had sent it to his rooms. He knew
what was in it before he broke the seal—a grey seal with BEYOND!
beneath a flying ship. Ah, he would take her beyond—beyond the
ugliness, the pettiness, the attrition and corrosion of the soul——

* * * * *

Gerty’s little sitting-room sparkled with welcome when Selden
entered it. Its modest “effects,” compact of enamel paint and
ingenuity, spoke to him in the language just then sweetest to his
ear. It is surprising how little narrow walls and a low ceiling
matter, when the roof of the soul has suddenly been raised. Gerty
sparkled too; or at least shone with a tempered radiance. He had
never before noticed that she had “points”—really, some good fellow
might do worse.... Over the little dinner (and here, again, the
effects were wonderful) he told her she ought to marry—he was in a
mood to pair off the whole world. She had made the caramel custard
with her own hands? It was sinful to keep such gifts to herself.
He reflected with a throb of pride that Lily could trim her own
hats—she had told him so the day of their walk at Bellomont.

He did not speak of Lily till after dinner. During the little
repast he kept the talk on his hostess, who, fluttered at being
the centre of observation, shone as rosy as the candle-shades she
had manufactured for the occasion. Selden evinced an extraordinary
interest in her household arrangements: complimented her on the
ingenuity with which she had utilized every inch of her small
quarters, asked how her servant managed about afternoons out,
learned that one may improvise delicious dinners in a chafing-dish,
and uttered thoughtful generalizations on the burden of a large
establishment.

When they were in the sitting-room again, where they fitted as
snugly as bits in a puzzle, and she had brewed the coffee, and
poured it into her grandmother’s egg-shell cups, his eye, as he
leaned back, basking in the warm fragrance, lighted on a recent
photograph of Miss Bart, and the desired transition was effected
without an effort. The photograph was well enough—but to catch
her as she had looked last night! Gerty agreed with him—never had
she been so radiant. But could photography capture that light?
There had been a new look in her face—something different; yes,
Selden agreed there had been something different. The coffee was
so exquisite that he asked for a second cup: such a contrast to
the watery stuff at the club! Ah, your poor bachelor with his
impersonal club fare, alternating with the equally impersonal
CUISINE of the dinner-party! A man who lived in lodgings missed
the best part of life—he pictured the flavourless solitude of
Trenor’s repast, and felt a moment’s compassion for the man.... But
to return to Lily—and again and again he returned, questioning,
conjecturing, leading Gerty on, draining her inmost thoughts of
their stored tenderness for her friend.

At first she poured herself out unstintingly, happy in this perfect
communion of their sympathies. His understanding of Lily helped
to confirm her own belief in her friend. They dwelt together on
the fact that Lily had had no chance. Gerty instanced her generous
impulses—her restlessness and discontent. The fact that her life
had never satisfied her proved that she was made for better things.
She might have married more than once—the conventional rich
marriage which she had been taught to consider the sole end of
existence—but when the opportunity came she had always shrunk from
it. Percy Gryce, for instance, had been in love with her—every one
at Bellomont had supposed them to be engaged, and her dismissal
of him was thought inexplicable. This view of the Gryce incident
chimed too well with Selden’s mood not to be instantly adopted
by him, with a flash of retrospective contempt for what had once
seemed the obvious solution. If rejection there had been—and he
wondered now that he had ever doubted it!—then he held the key to
the secret, and the hillsides of Bellomont were lit up, not with
sunset, but with dawn. It was he who had wavered and disowned the
face of opportunity—and the joy now warming his breast might have
been a familiar inmate if he had captured it in its first flight.

It was at this point, perhaps, that a joy just trying its
wings in Gerty’s heart dropped to earth and lay still. She sat
facing Selden, repeating mechanically: “No, she has never been
understood——” and all the while she herself seemed to be sitting
in the centre of a great glare of comprehension. The little
confidential room, where a moment ago their thoughts had touched
elbows like their chairs, grew to unfriendly vastness, separating
her from Selden by all the length of her new vision of the
future—and that future stretched out interminably, with her lonely
figure toiling down it, a mere speck on the solitude.

“She is herself with a few people only; and you are one of them,”
she heard Selden saying. And again: “Be good to her, Gerty, won’t
you?” and: “She has it in her to become whatever she is believed to
be—you’ll help her by believing the best of her?”

The words beat on Gerty’s brain like the sound of a language which
has seemed familiar at a distance, but on approaching is found to
be unintelligible. He had come to talk to her of Lily—that was all!
There had been a third at the feast she had spread for him, and
that third had taken her own place. She tried to follow what he
was saying, to cling to her own part in the talk—but it was all as
meaningless as the boom of waves in a drowning head, and she felt,
as the drowning may feel, that to sink would be nothing beside the
pain of struggling to keep up.

Selden rose, and she drew a deep breath, feeling that soon she
could yield to the blessed waves.

“Mrs. Fisher’s? You say she was dining there? There’s music
afterward; I believe I had a card from her.” He glanced at the
foolish pink-faced clock that was drumming out this hideous hour.
“A quarter past ten? I might look in there now; the Fisher evenings
are amusing. I haven’t kept you up too late, Gerty? You look
tired—I’ve rambled on and bored you.” And in the unwonted overflow
of his feelings, he left a cousinly kiss upon her cheek.

* * * * *

At Mrs. Fisher’s, through the cigar smoke of the studio, a dozen
voices greeted Selden. A song was pending as he entered, and he
dropped into a seat near his hostess, his eyes roaming in search
of Miss Bart. But she was not there, and the discovery gave him a
pang out of all proportion to its seriousness; since the note in
his breast-pocket assured him that at four the next day they would
meet. To his impatience it seemed immeasurably long to wait, and
half-ashamed of the impulse, he leaned to Mrs. Fisher to ask, as
the music ceased, if Miss Bart had not dined with her.

“Lily? She’s just gone. She had to run off, I forget where. Wasn’t
she wonderful last night?”

“Who’s that? Lily?” asked Jack Stepney, from the depths of a
neighbouring arm-chair. “Really, you know, I’m no prude, but when
it comes to a girl standing there as if she was up at auction—I
thought seriously of speaking to cousin Julia.”

“You didn’t know Jack had become our social censor?” Mrs. Fisher
said to Selden with a laugh; and Stepney spluttered, amid the
general derision: “But she’s a cousin, hang it, and when a man’s
married—TOWN TALK was full of her this morning.”

“Yes: lively reading that was,” said Mr. Ned Van Alstyne, stroking
his moustache to hide the smile behind it. “Buy the dirty sheet?
No, of course not; some fellow showed it to me—but I’d heard the
stories before. When a girl’s as good-looking as that she’d better
marry; then no questions are asked. In our imperfectly organized
society there is no provision as yet for the young woman who claims
the privileges of marriage without assuming its obligations.”

“Well, I understand Lily is about to assume them in the shape of
Mr. Rosedale,” Mrs. Fisher said with a laugh.

“Rosedale—good heavens!” exclaimed Van Alstyne, dropping his
eye-glass. “Stepney, that’s your fault for foisting the brute on
us.”

“Oh, confound it, you know, we don’t MARRY Rosedale in our family,”
Stepney languidly protested; but his wife, who sat in oppressive
bridal finery at the other side of the room, quelled him with the
judicial reflection: “In Lily’s circumstances it’s a mistake to
have too high a standard.”

“I hear even Rosedale has been scared by the talk lately,” Mrs.
Fisher rejoined; “but the sight of her last night sent him off his
head. What do you think he said to me after her TABLEAU? ‘My God,
Mrs. Fisher, if I could get Paul Morpeth to paint her like that,
the picture’d appreciate a hundred per cent in ten years.’”

“By Jove,—but isn’t she about somewhere?” exclaimed Van Alstyne,
restoring his glass with an uneasy glance.

“No; she ran off while you were all mixing the punch down stairs.
Where was she going, by the way? What’s on tonight? I hadn’t heard
of anything.”

“Oh, not a party, I think,” said an inexperienced young Farish who
had arrived late. “I put her in her cab as I was coming in, and she
gave the driver the Trenors’ address.”

“The Trenors’?” exclaimed Mrs. Jack Stepney. “Why, the house is
closed—Judy telephoned me from Bellomont this evening.”

“Did she? That’s queer. I’m sure I’m not mistaken. Well, come now,
Trenor’s there, anyhow—I—oh, well—the fact is, I’ve no head for
numbers,” he broke off, admonished by the nudge of an adjoining
foot, and the smile that circled the room.

In its unpleasant light Selden had risen and was shaking hands with
his hostess. The air of the place stifled him, and he wondered why
he had stayed in it so long.

On the doorstep he stood still, remembering a phrase of Lily’s:
“It seems to me you spend a good deal of time in the element you
disapprove of.”

Well—what had brought him there but the quest of her? It was her
element, not his. But he would lift her out of it, take her beyond!
That BEYOND! on her letter was like a cry for rescue. He knew
that Perseus’s task is not done when he has loosed Andromeda’s
chains, for her limbs are numb with bondage, and she cannot rise
and walk, but clings to him with dragging arms as he beats back to
land with his burden. Well, he had strength for both—it was her
weakness which had put the strength in him. It was not, alas, a
clean rush of waves they had to win through, but a clogging morass
of old associations and habits, and for the moment its vapours
were in his throat. But he would see clearer, breathe freer in her
presence: she was at once the dead weight at his breast and the
spar which should float them to safety. He smiled at the whirl of
metaphor with which he was trying to build up a defence against the
influences of the last hour. It was pitiable that he, who knew the
mixed motives on which social judgments depend, should still feel
himself so swayed by them. How could he lift Lily to a freer vision
of life, if his own view of her was to be coloured by any mind in
which he saw her reflected?

The moral oppression had produced a physical craving for air, and
he strode on, opening his lungs to the reverberating coldness of
the night. At the corner of Fifth Avenue Van Alstyne hailed him
with an offer of company.

“Walking? A good thing to blow the smoke out of one’s head. Now
that women have taken to tobacco we live in a bath of nicotine.
It would be a curious thing to study the effect of cigarettes on
the relation of the sexes. Smoke is almost as great a solvent as
divorce: both tend to obscure the moral issue.”

Nothing could have been less consonant with Selden’s mood than
Van Alstyne’s after-dinner aphorisms, but as long as the latter
confined himself to generalities his listener’s nerves were in
control. Happily Van Alstyne prided himself on his summing-up of
social aspects, and with Selden for audience was eager to show the
sureness of his touch. Mrs. Fisher lived in an East side street
near the Park, and as the two men walked down Fifth Avenue the new
architectural developments of that versatile thoroughfare invited
Van Alstyne’s comment.

“That Greiner house, now—a typical rung in the social ladder! The
man who built it came from a MILIEU where all the dishes are put
on the table at once. His facade is a complete architectural meal;
if he had omitted a style his friends might have thought the money
had given out. Not a bad purchase for Rosedale, though: attracts
attention, and awes the Western sight-seer. By and bye he’ll get
out of that phase, and want something that the crowd will pass and
the few pause before. Especially if he marries my clever cousin——”

Selden dashed in with the query: “And the Wellington Brys’? Rather
clever of its kind, don’t you think?”

They were just beneath the wide white facade, with its rich
restraint of line, which suggested the clever corseting of a
redundant figure.

“That’s the next stage: the desire to imply that one has been to
Europe, and has a standard. I’m sure Mrs. Bry thinks her house
a copy of the TRIANON; in America every marble house with gilt
furniture is thought to be a copy of the TRIANON. What a clever
chap that architect is, though—how he takes his client’s measure!
He has put the whole of Mrs. Bry in his use of the composite
order. Now for the Trenors, you remember, he chose the Corinthian:
exuberant, but based on the best precedent. The Trenor house is
one of his best things—doesn’t look like a banqueting-hall turned
inside out. I hear Mrs. Trenor wants to build out a new ball-room,
and that divergence from Gus on that point keeps her at Bellomont.
The dimensions of the Brys’ ball-room must rankle: you may be sure
she knows ’em as well as if she’d been there last night with a
yard-measure. Who said she was in town, by the way? That Farish
boy? She isn’t, I know; Mrs. Stepney was right; the house is dark,
you see: I suppose Gus lives in the back.”

He had halted opposite the Trenors’ corner, and Selden perforce
stayed his steps also. The house loomed obscure and uninhabited;
only an oblong gleam above the door spoke of provisional occupancy.

“They’ve bought the house at the back: it gives them a hundred and
fifty feet in the side street. There’s where the ball-room’s to
be, with a gallery connecting it: billiard-room and so on above.
I suggested changing the entrance, and carrying the drawing-room
across the whole Fifth Avenue front; you see the front door
corresponds with the windows——”

The walking-stick which Van Alstyne swung in demonstration dropped
to a startled “Hallo!” as the door opened and two figures were seen
silhouetted against the hall-light. At the same moment a hansom
halted at the curb-stone, and one of the figures floated down to it
in a haze of evening draperies; while the other, black and bulky,
remained persistently projected against the light.

For an immeasurable second the two spectators of the incident were
silent; then the house-door closed, the hansom rolled off, and the
whole scene slipped by as if with the turn of a stereopticon.

Van Alstyne dropped his eye-glass with a low whistle.

“A—hem—nothing of this, eh, Selden? As one of the family, I know I
may count on you—appearances are deceptive—and Fifth Avenue is so
imperfectly lighted——”

“Goodnight,” said Selden, turning sharply down the side street
without seeing the other’s extended hand.

* * * * *

Alone with her cousin’s kiss, Gerty stared upon her thoughts. He
had kissed her before—but not with another woman on his lips. If
he had spared her that she could have drowned quietly, welcoming
the dark flood as it submerged her. But now the flood was shot
through with glory, and it was harder to drown at sunrise than in
darkness. Gerty hid her face from the light, but it pierced to the
crannies of her soul. She had been so contented, life had seemed
so simple and sufficient—why had he come to trouble her with new
hopes? And Lily—Lily, her best friend! Woman-like, she accused
the woman. Perhaps, had it not been for Lily, her fond imagining
might have become truth. Selden had always liked her—had understood
and sympathized with the modest independence of her life. He, who
had the reputation of weighing all things in the nice balance of
fastidious perceptions, had been uncritical and simple in his view
of her: his cleverness had never overawed her because she had felt
at home in his heart. And now she was thrust out, and the door
barred against her by Lily’s hand! Lily, for whose admission there
she herself had pleaded! The situation was lighted up by a dreary
flash of irony. She knew Selden—she saw how the force of her faith
in Lily must have helped to dispel his hesitations. She remembered,
too, how Lily had talked of him—she saw herself bringing the two
together, making them known to each other. On Selden’s part, no
doubt, the wound inflicted was inconscient; he had never guessed
her foolish secret; but Lily—Lily must have known! When, in such
matters, are a woman’s perceptions at fault? And if she knew, then
she had deliberately despoiled her friend, and in mere wantonness
of power, since, even to Gerty’s suddenly flaming jealousy, it
seemed incredible that Lily should wish to be Selden’s wife. Lily
might be incapable of marrying for money, but she was equally
incapable of living without it, and Selden’s eager investigations
into the small economies of house-keeping made him appear to Gerty
as tragically duped as herself.

She remained long in her sitting-room, where the embers were
crumbling to cold grey, and the lamp paled under its gay shade.
Just beneath it stood the photograph of Lily Bart, looking out
imperially on the cheap gimcracks, the cramped furniture of the
little room. Could Selden picture her in such an interior? Gerty
felt the poverty, the insignificance of her surroundings: she
beheld her life as it must appear to Lily. And the cruelty of
Lily’s judgments smote upon her memory. She saw that she had
dressed her idol with attributes of her own making. When had Lily
ever really felt, or pitied, or understood? All she wanted was
the taste of new experiences: she seemed like some cruel creature
experimenting in a laboratory.

The pink-faced clock drummed out another hour, and Gerty rose with
a start. She had an appointment early the next morning with a
district visitor on the East side. She put out her lamp, covered
the fire, and went into her bedroom to undress. In the little glass
above her dressing-table she saw her face reflected against the
shadows of the room, and tears blotted the reflection. What right
had she to dream the dreams of loveliness? A dull face invited a
dull fate. She cried quietly as she undressed, laying aside her
clothes with her habitual precision, setting everything in order
for the next day, when the old life must be taken up as though
there had been no break in its routine. Her servant did not come
till eight o’clock, and she prepared her own tea-tray and placed it
beside the bed. Then she locked the door of the flat, extinguished
her light and lay down. But on her bed sleep would not come, and
she lay face to face with the fact that she hated Lily Bart. It
closed with her in the darkness like some formless evil to be
blindly grappled with. Reason, judgment, renunciation, all the
sane daylight forces, were beaten back in the sharp struggle for
self-preservation. She wanted happiness—wanted it as fiercely and
unscrupulously as Lily did, but without Lily’s power of obtaining
it. And in her conscious impotence she lay shivering, and hated her
friend——

A ring at the door-bell caught her to her feet. She struck a
light and stood startled, listening. For a moment her heart beat
incoherently, then she felt the sobering touch of fact, and
remembered that such calls were not unknown in her charitable work.
She flung on her dressing-gown to answer the summons, and unlocking
her door, confronted the shining vision of Lily Bart.

Gerty’s first movement was one of revulsion. She shrank back as
though Lily’s presence flashed too sudden a light upon her misery.
Then she heard her name in a cry, had a glimpse of her friend’s
face, and felt herself caught and clung to.

“Lily—what is it?” she exclaimed.

Miss Bart released her, and stood breathing brokenly, like one who
has gained shelter after a long flight.

“I was so cold—I couldn’t go home. Have you a fire?”

Gerty’s compassionate instincts, responding to the swift call of
habit, swept aside all her reluctances. Lily was simply some one
who needed help—for what reason, there was no time to pause and
conjecture: disciplined sympathy checked the wonder on Gerty’s
lips, and made her draw her friend silently into the sitting-room
and seat her by the darkened hearth.

“There is kindling wood here: the fire will burn in a minute.”

She knelt down, and the flame leapt under her rapid hands. It
flashed strangely through the tears which still blurred her eyes,
and smote on the white ruin of Lily’s face. The girls looked at
each other in silence; then Lily repeated: “I couldn’t go home.”

“No—no—you came here, dear! You’re cold and tired—sit quiet, and
I’ll make you some tea.”

Gerty had unconsciously adopted the soothing note of her trade:
all personal feeling was merged in the sense of ministry, and
experience had taught her that the bleeding must be stayed before
the wound is probed.

Lily sat quiet, leaning to the fire: the clatter of cups behind her
soothed her as familiar noises hush a child whom silence has kept
wakeful. But when Gerty stood at her side with the tea she pushed
it away, and turned an estranged eye on the familiar room.

“I came here because I couldn’t bear to be alone,” she said.

Gerty set down the cup and knelt beside her.

“Lily! Something has happened—can’t you tell me?”

“I couldn’t bear to lie awake in my room till morning. I hate my
room at Aunt Julia’s—so I came here——”

She stirred suddenly, broke from her apathy, and clung to Gerty in
a fresh burst of fear.

“Oh, Gerty, the furies . . . you know the noise of their
wings—alone, at night, in the dark? But you don’t know—there is
nothing to make the dark dreadful to you——”

The words, flashing back on Gerty’s last hours, struck from her a
faint derisive murmur; but Lily, in the blaze of her own misery,
was blinded to everything outside it.

“You’ll let me stay? I shan’t mind when daylight comes—Is
it late? Is the night nearly over? It must be awful to be
sleepless—everything stands by the bed and stares——”

Miss Farish caught her straying hands. “Lily, look at me! Something
has happened—an accident? You have been frightened—what has
frightened you? Tell me if you can—a word or two—so that I can help
you.”

Lily shook her head.

“I am not frightened: that’s not the word. Can you imagine looking
into your glass some morning and seeing a disfigurement—some
hideous change that has come to you while you slept? Well, I seem
to myself like that—I can’t bear to see myself in my own thoughts—I
hate ugliness, you know—I’ve always turned from it—but I can’t
explain to you—you wouldn’t understand.”

She lifted her head and her eyes fell on the clock.

“How long the night is! And I know I shan’t sleep tomorrow. Some
one told me my father used to lie sleepless and think of horrors.
And he was not wicked, only unfortunate—and I see now how he must
have suffered, lying alone with his thoughts! But I am bad—a bad
girl—all my thoughts are bad—I have always had bad people about
me. Is that any excuse? I thought I could manage my own life—I was
proud—proud! but now I’m on their level——”

Sobs shook her, and she bowed to them like a tree in a dry storm.

Gerty knelt beside her, waiting, with the patience born of
experience, till this gust of misery should loosen fresh speech.
She had first imagined some physical shock, some peril of the
crowded streets, since Lily was presumably on her way home from
Carry Fisher’s; but she now saw that other nerve-centres were
smitten, and her mind trembled back from conjecture.

Lily’s sobs ceased, and she lifted her head.

“There are bad girls in your slums. Tell me—do they ever pick
themselves up? Ever forget, and feel as they did before?”

“Lily! you mustn’t speak so—you’re dreaming.”

“Don’t they always go from bad to worse? There’s no turning
back—your old self rejects you, and shuts you out.”

She rose, stretching her arms as if in utter physical weariness.
“Go to bed, dear! You work hard and get up early. I’ll watch here
by the fire, and you’ll leave the light, and your door open. All
I want is to feel that you are near me.” She laid both hands on
Gerty’s shoulders, with a smile that was like sunrise on a sea
strewn with wreckage.

“I can’t leave you, Lily. Come and lie on my bed. Your hands are
frozen—you must undress and be made warm.” Gerty paused with sudden
compunction. “But Mrs. Peniston—it’s past midnight! What will she
think?”

“She goes to bed. I have a latchkey. It doesn’t matter—I can’t go
back there.”

“There’s no need to: you shall stay here. But you must tell me
where you have been. Listen, Lily—it will help you to speak!” She
regained Miss Bart’s hands, and pressed them against her. “Try to
tell me—it will clear your poor head. Listen—you were dining at
Carry Fisher’s.” Gerty paused and added with a flash of heroism:
“Lawrence Selden went from here to find you.”

At the word, Lily’s face melted from locked anguish to the open
misery of a child. Her lips trembled and her gaze widened with
tears.

“He went to find me? And I missed him! Oh, Gerty, he tried to help
me. He told me—he warned me long ago—he foresaw that I should grow
hateful to myself!”

The name, as Gerty saw with a clutch at the heart, had loosened
the springs of self-pity in her friend’s dry breast, and tear by
tear Lily poured out the measure of her anguish. She had dropped
sideways in Gerty’s big arm-chair, her head buried where lately
Selden’s had leaned, in a beauty of abandonment that drove home to
Gerty’s aching senses the inevitableness of her own defeat. Ah,
it needed no deliberate purpose on Lily’s part to rob her of her
dream! To look on that prone loveliness was to see in it a natural
force, to recognize that love and power belong to such as Lily, as
renunciation and service are the lot of those they despoil. But if
Selden’s infatuation seemed a fatal necessity, the effect that his
name produced shook Gerty’s steadfastness with a last pang. Men
pass through such superhuman loves and outlive them: they are the
probation subduing the heart to human joys. How gladly Gerty would
have welcomed the ministry of healing: how willingly have soothed
the sufferer back to tolerance of life! But Lily’s self-betrayal
took this last hope from her. The mortal maid on the shore is
helpless against the siren who loves her prey: such victims are
floated back dead from their adventure.

Lily sprang up and caught her with strong hands. “Gerty, you
know him—you understand him—tell me; if I went to him, if I told
him everything—if I said: ‘I am bad through and through—I want
admiration, I want excitement, I want money—’ yes, MONEY! That’s my
shame, Gerty—and it’s known, it’s said of me—it’s what men think of
me—If I said it all to him—told him the whole story—said plainly:
‘I’ve sunk lower than the lowest, for I’ve taken what they take,
and not paid as they pay’—oh, Gerty, you know him, you can speak
for him: if I told him everything would he loathe me? Or would he
pity me, and understand me, and save me from loathing myself?”

Gerty stood cold and passive. She knew the hour of her probation
had come, and her poor heart beat wildly against its destiny. As a
dark river sweeps by under a lightning flash, she saw her chance of
happiness surge past under a flash of temptation. What prevented
her from saying: “He is like other men?” She was not so sure of
him, after all! But to do so would have been like blaspheming her
love. She could not put him before herself in any light but the
noblest: she must trust him to the height of her own passion.

“Yes: I know him; he will help you,” she said; and in a moment
Lily’s passion was weeping itself out against her breast.

There was but one bed in the little flat, and the two girls lay
down on it side by side when Gerty had unlaced Lily’s dress
and persuaded her to put her lips to the warm tea. The light
extinguished, they lay still in the darkness, Gerty shrinking
to the outer edge of the narrow couch to avoid contact with her
bed-fellow. Knowing that Lily disliked to be caressed, she had long
ago learned to check her demonstrative impulses toward her friend.
But tonight every fibre in her body shrank from Lily’s nearness:
it was torture to listen to her breathing, and feel the sheet stir
with it. As Lily turned, and settled to completer rest, a strand
of her hair swept Gerty’s cheek with its fragrance. Everything
about her was warm and soft and scented: even the stains of her
grief became her as rain-drops do the beaten rose. But as Gerty lay
with arms drawn down her side, in the motionless narrowness of an
effigy, she felt a stir of sobs from the breathing warmth beside
her, and Lily flung out her hand, groped for her friend’s, and held
it fast.

“Hold me, Gerty, hold me, or I shall think of things,” she moaned;
and Gerty silently slipped an arm under her, pillowing her head in
its hollow as a mother makes a nest for a tossing child. In the
warm hollow Lily lay still and her breathing grew low and regular.
Her hand still clung to Gerty’s as if to ward off evil dreams, but
the hold of her fingers relaxed, her head sank deeper into its
shelter, and Gerty felt that she slept.