Kabanata Kabanata 3 · 第3章

Bridge at Bellomont usually lasted till the small hours; and when

Lily went to bed that night she had played too long for her own

good.

Feeling no desire for the self-communion which awaited her in her

room, she lingered on the broad stairway, looking down into the

hall below, where the last card-players were grouped about the tray

of tall glasses and silver-collared decanters which the butler had

just placed on a low table near the fire.

The hall was arcaded, with a gallery supported on columns of

pale yellow marble. Tall clumps of flowering plants were grouped

against a background of dark foliage in the angles of the walls.

On the crimson carpet a deer-hound and two or three spaniels dozed

luxuriously before the fire, and the light from the great central

lantern overhead shed a brightness on the women’s hair and struck

sparks from their jewels as they moved.

There were moments when such scenes delighted Lily, when they

gratified her sense of beauty and her craving for the external

finish of life; there were others when they gave a sharper edge

to the meagreness of her own opportunities. This was one of the

moments when the sense of contrast was uppermost, and she turned

away impatiently as Mrs. George Dorset, glittering in serpentine

spangles, drew Percy Gryce in her wake to a confidential nook

beneath the gallery.

It was not that Miss Bart was afraid of losing her newly-acquired

hold over Mr. Gryce. Mrs. Dorset might startle or dazzle him,

but she had neither the skill nor the patience to effect his

capture. She was too self-engrossed to penetrate the recesses of

his shyness, and besides, why should she care to give herself the

trouble? At most it might amuse her to make sport of his simplicity

for an evening—after that he would be merely a burden to her, and

knowing this, she was far too experienced to encourage him. But

the mere thought of that other woman, who could take a man up and

toss him aside as she willed, without having to regard him as a

possible factor in her plans, filled Lily Bart with envy. She had

been bored all the afternoon by Percy Gryce—the mere thought seemed

to waken an echo of his droning voice—but she could not ignore him

on the morrow, she must follow up her success, must submit to more

boredom, must be ready with fresh compliances and adaptabilities,

and all on the bare chance that he might ultimately decide to do

her the honour of boring her for life.

It was a hateful fate—but how escape from it? What choice had she?

To be herself, or a Gerty Farish. As she entered her bedroom, with

its softly-shaded lights, her lace dressing-gown lying across

the silken bedspread, her little embroidered slippers before the

fire, a vase of carnations filling the air with perfume, and

the last novels and magazines lying uncut on a table beside the

reading-lamp, she had a vision of Miss Farish’s cramped flat, with

its cheap conveniences and hideous wall-papers. No; she was not

made for mean and shabby surroundings, for the squalid compromises

of poverty. Her whole being dilated in an atmosphere of luxury; it

was the background she required, the only climate she could breathe

in. But the luxury of others was not what she wanted. A few years

ago it had sufficed her: she had taken her daily meed of pleasure

without caring who provided it. Now she was beginning to chafe at

the obligations it imposed, to feel herself a mere pensioner on the

splendour which had once seemed to belong to her. There were even

moments when she was conscious of having to pay her way.

For a long time she had refused to play bridge. She knew she could

not afford it, and she was afraid of acquiring so expensive a

taste. She had seen the danger exemplified in more than one of her

associates—in young Ned Silverton, for instance, the charming fair

boy now seated in abject rapture at the elbow of Mrs. Fisher, a

striking divorcee with eyes and gowns as emphatic as the head-lines

of her “case.” Lily could remember when young Silverton had

stumbled into their circle, with the air of a strayed Arcadian

who has published charming sonnets in his college journal. Since

then he had developed a taste for Mrs. Fisher and bridge, and the

latter at least had involved him in expenses from which he had been

more than once rescued by harassed maiden sisters, who treasured

the sonnets, and went without sugar in their tea to keep their

darling afloat. Ned’s case was familiar to Lily: she had seen his

charming eyes—which had a good deal more poetry in them than the

sonnets—change from surprise to amusement, and from amusement

to anxiety, as he passed under the spell of the terrible god of

chance; and she was afraid of discovering the same symptoms in her

own case.

For in the last year she had found that her hostesses expected her

to take a place at the card-table. It was one of the taxes she

had to pay for their prolonged hospitality, and for the dresses

and trinkets which occasionally replenished her insufficient

wardrobe. And since she had played regularly the passion had grown

on her. Once or twice of late she had won a large sum, and instead

of keeping it against future losses, had spent it in dress or

jewelry; and the desire to atone for this imprudence, combined

with the increasing exhilaration of the game, drove her to risk

higher stakes at each fresh venture. She tried to excuse herself

on the plea that, in the Trenor set, if one played at all one must

either play high or be set down as priggish or stingy; but she knew

that the gambling passion was upon her, and that in her present

surroundings there was small hope of resisting it.

Tonight the luck had been persistently bad, and the little gold

purse which hung among her trinkets was almost empty when she

returned to her room. She unlocked the wardrobe, and taking out her

jewel-case, looked under the tray for the roll of bills from which

she had replenished the purse before going down to dinner. Only

twenty dollars were left: the discovery was so startling that for a

moment she fancied she must have been robbed. Then she took paper

and pencil, and seating herself at the writing-table, tried to

reckon up what she had spent during the day. Her head was throbbing

with fatigue, and she had to go over the figures again and again;

but at last it became clear to her that she had lost three hundred

dollars at cards. She took out her cheque-book to see if her

balance was larger than she remembered, but found she had erred

in the other direction. Then she returned to her calculations;

but figure as she would, she could not conjure back the vanished

three hundred dollars. It was the sum she had set aside to pacify

her dress-maker—unless she should decide to use it as a sop to the

jeweller. At any rate, she had so many uses for it that its very

insufficiency had caused her to play high in the hope of doubling

it. But of course she had lost—she who needed every penny, while

Bertha Dorset, whose husband showered money on her, must have

pocketed at least five hundred, and Judy Trenor, who could have

afforded to lose a thousand a night, had left the table clutching

such a heap of bills that she had been unable to shake hands with

her guests when they bade her good night.

A world in which such things could be seemed a miserable place

to Lily Bart; but then she had never been able to understand the

laws of a universe which was so ready to leave her out of its

calculations.

She began to undress without ringing for her maid, whom she had

sent to bed. She had been long enough in bondage to other people’s

pleasure to be considerate of those who depended on hers, and in

her bitter moods it sometimes struck her that she and her maid were

in the same position, except that the latter received her wages

more regularly.

As she sat before the mirror brushing her hair, her face looked

hollow and pale, and she was frightened by two little lines near

her mouth, faint flaws in the smooth curve of the cheek.

“Oh, I must stop worrying!” she exclaimed. “Unless it’s the

electric light——” she reflected, springing up from her seat and

lighting the candles on the dressing-table.

She turned out the wall-lights, and peered at herself between the

candle-flames. The white oval of her face swam out waveringly from

a background of shadows, the uncertain light blurring it like a

haze; but the two lines about the mouth remained.

Lily rose and undressed in haste.

“It is only because I am tired and have such odious things to think

about,” she kept repeating; and it seemed an added injustice that

petty cares should leave a trace on the beauty which was her only

defence against them.

But the odious things were there, and remained with her. She

returned wearily to the thought of Percy Gryce, as a wayfarer picks

up a heavy load and toils on after a brief rest. She was almost

sure she had “landed” him: a few days’ work and she would win her

reward. But the reward itself seemed unpalatable just then: she

could get no zest from the thought of victory. It would be a rest

from worry, no more—and how little that would have seemed to her

a few years earlier! Her ambitions had shrunk gradually in the

desiccating air of failure. But why had she failed? Was it her own

fault or that of destiny?

She remembered how her mother, after they had lost their money, used

to say to her with a kind of fierce vindictiveness: “But you’ll get

it all back—you’ll get it all back, with your face.”... The

remembrance roused a whole train of association, and she lay in the

darkness reconstructing the past out of which her present had grown.

A house in which no one ever dined at home unless there was

“company”; a door-bell perpetually ringing; a hall-table showered

with square envelopes which were opened in haste, and oblong

envelopes which were allowed to gather dust in the depths of a

bronze jar; a series of French and English maids giving warning

amid a chaos of hurriedly-ransacked wardrobes and dress-closets;

an equally changing dynasty of nurses and footmen; quarrels in the

pantry, the kitchen and the drawing-room; precipitate trips to

Europe, and returns with gorged trunks and days of interminable

unpacking; semi-annual discussions as to where the summer should

be spent, grey interludes of economy and brilliant reactions of

expense—such was the setting of Lily Bart’s first memories.

Ruling the turbulent element called home was the vigorous and

determined figure of a mother still young enough to dance her

ball-dresses to rags, while the hazy outline of a neutral-tinted

father filled an intermediate space between the butler and the man

who came to wind the clocks. Even to the eyes of infancy, Mrs.

Hudson Bart had appeared young; but Lily could not recall the time

when her father had not been bald and slightly stooping, with

streaks of grey in his hair, and a tired walk. It was a shock to

her to learn afterward that he was but two years older than her

mother.

Lily seldom saw her father by daylight. All day he was “downtown”;

and in winter it was long after nightfall when she heard his fagged

step on the stairs and his hand on the school-room door. He would

kiss her in silence, and ask one or two questions of the nurse or

the governess; then Mrs. Bart’s maid would come to remind him that

he was dining out, and he would hurry away with a nod to Lily. In

summer, when he joined them for a Sunday at Newport or Southampton,

he was even more effaced and silent than in winter. It seemed

to tire him to rest, and he would sit for hours staring at the

sea-line from a quiet corner of the verandah, while the clatter of

his wife’s existence went on unheeded a few feet off. Generally,

however, Mrs. Bart and Lily went to Europe for the summer, and

before the steamer was half way over Mr. Bart had dipped below the

horizon. Sometimes his daughter heard him denounced for having

neglected to forward Mrs. Bart’s remittances; but for the most part

he was never mentioned or thought of till his patient stooping

figure presented itself on the New York dock as a buffer between

the magnitude of his wife’s luggage and the restrictions of the

American custom-house.

In this desultory yet agitated fashion life went on through Lily’s

teens: a zig-zag broken course down which the family craft glided

on a rapid current of amusement, tugged at by the underflow of

a perpetual need—the need of more money. Lily could not recall

the time when there had been money enough, and in some vague way

her father seemed always to blame for the deficiency. It could

certainly not be the fault of Mrs. Bart, who was spoken of by her

friends as a “wonderful manager.” Mrs. Bart was famous for the

unlimited effect she produced on limited means; and to the lady and

her acquaintances there was something heroic in living as though

one were much richer than one’s bank-book denoted.

Lily was naturally proud of her mother’s aptitude in this line: she

had been brought up in the faith that, whatever it cost, one must

have a good cook, and be what Mrs. Bart called “decently dressed.”

Mrs. Bart’s worst reproach to her husband was to ask him if he

expected her to “live like a pig”; and his replying in the negative

was always regarded as a justification for cabling to Paris for an

extra dress or two, and telephoning to the jeweller that he might,

after all, send home the turquoise bracelet which Mrs. Bart had

looked at that morning.

Lily knew people who “lived like pigs,” and their appearance and

surroundings justified her mother’s repugnance to that form of

existence. They were mostly cousins, who inhabited dingy houses

with engravings from Cole’s Voyage of Life on the drawing-room

walls, and slatternly parlour-maids who said “I’ll go and see”

to visitors calling at an hour when all right-minded persons are

conventionally if not actually out. The disgusting part of it was

that many of these cousins were rich, so that Lily imbibed the idea

that if people lived like pigs it was from choice, and through the

lack of any proper standard of conduct. This gave her a sense of

reflected superiority, and she did not need Mrs. Bart’s comments on

the family frumps and misers to foster her naturally lively taste

for splendour.

Lily was nineteen when circumstances caused her to revise her view

of the universe.

The previous year she had made a dazzling debut fringed by a heavy

thunder-cloud of bills. The light of the debut still lingered on

the horizon, but the cloud had thickened; and suddenly it broke.

The suddenness added to the horror; and there were still times

when Lily relived with painful vividness every detail of the day

on which the blow fell. She and her mother had been seated at the

luncheon-table, over the CHAUFROIX and cold salmon of the previous

night’s dinner: it was one of Mrs. Bart’s few economies to consume

in private the expensive remnants of her hospitality. Lily was

feeling the pleasant languor which is youth’s penalty for dancing

till dawn; but her mother, in spite of a few lines about the mouth,

and under the yellow waves on her temples, was as alert, determined

and high in colour as if she had risen from an untroubled sleep.

In the centre of the table, between the melting MARRONS GLACES

and candied cherries, a pyramid of American Beauties lifted their

vigorous stems; they held their heads as high as Mrs. Bart, but

their rose-colour had turned to a dissipated purple, and Lily’s

sense of fitness was disturbed by their reappearance on the

luncheon-table.

“I really think, mother,” she said reproachfully, “we might

afford a few fresh flowers for luncheon. Just some jonquils or

lilies-of-the-valley—”

Mrs. Bart stared. Her own fastidiousness had its eye fixed on the

world, and she did not care how the luncheon-table looked when

there was no one present at it but the family. But she smiled at

her daughter’s innocence.

“Lilies-of-the-valley,” she said calmly, “cost two dollars a dozen

at this season.”

Lily was not impressed. She knew very little of the value of money.

“It would not take more than six dozen to fill that bowl,” she

argued.

“Six dozen what?” asked her father’s voice in the doorway.

The two women looked up in surprise; though it was a Saturday, the

sight of Mr. Bart at luncheon was an unwonted one. But neither

his wife nor his daughter was sufficiently interested to ask an

explanation.

Mr. Bart dropped into a chair, and sat gazing absently at the

fragment of jellied salmon which the butler had placed before him.

“I was only saying,” Lily began, “that I hate to see faded flowers

at luncheon; and mother says a bunch of lilies-of-the-valley would

not cost more than twelve dollars. Mayn’t I tell the florist to

send a few every day?”

She leaned confidently toward her father: he seldom refused her

anything, and Mrs. Bart had taught her to plead with him when her

own entreaties failed.

Mr. Bart sat motionless, his gaze still fixed on the salmon, and

his lower jaw dropped; he looked even paler than usual, and his

thin hair lay in untidy streaks on his forehead. Suddenly he looked

at his daughter and laughed. The laugh was so strange that Lily

coloured under it: she disliked being ridiculed, and her father

seemed to see something ridiculous in the request. Perhaps he

thought it foolish that she should trouble him about such a trifle.

“Twelve dollars—twelve dollars a day for flowers? Oh, certainly, my

dear—give him an order for twelve hundred.” He continued to laugh.

Mrs. Bart gave him a quick glance.

“You needn’t wait, Poleworth—I will ring for you,” she said to the

butler.

The butler withdrew with an air of silent disapproval, leaving the

remains of the CHAUFROIX on the sideboard.

“What is the matter, Hudson? Are you ill?” said Mrs. Bart severely.

She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making,

and it was odious to her that her husband should make a show of

himself before the servants.

“Are you ill?” she repeated.

“Ill?—— No, I’m ruined,” he said.

Lily made a frightened sound, and Mrs. Bart rose to her feet.

“Ruined——?” she cried; but controlling herself instantly, she

turned a calm face to Lily.

“Shut the pantry door,” she said.

Lily obeyed, and when she turned back into the room her father was

sitting with both elbows on the table, the plate of salmon between

them, and his head bowed on his hands.

Mrs. Bart stood over him with a white face which made her hair

unnaturally yellow. She looked at Lily as the latter approached:

her look was terrible, but her voice was modulated to a ghastly

cheerfulness.

“Your father is not well—he doesn’t know what he is saying. It

is nothing—but you had better go upstairs; and don’t talk to the

servants,” she added.

Lily obeyed; she always obeyed when her mother spoke in that

voice. She had not been deceived by Mrs. Bart’s words: she knew

at once that they were ruined. In the dark hours which followed,

that awful fact overshadowed even her father’s slow and difficult

dying. To his wife he no longer counted: he had become extinct

when he ceased to fulfil his purpose, and she sat at his side

with the provisional air of a traveller who waits for a belated

train to start. Lily’s feelings were softer: she pitied him in a

frightened ineffectual way. But the fact that he was for the most

part unconscious, and that his attention, when she stole into the

room, drifted away from her after a moment, made him even more of a

stranger than in the nursery days when he had never come home till

after dark. She seemed always to have seen him through a blur—first

of sleepiness, then of distance and indifference—and now the fog

had thickened till he was almost indistinguishable. If she could

have performed any little services for him, or have exchanged with

him a few of those affecting words which an extensive perusal of

fiction had led her to connect with such occasions, the filial

instinct might have stirred in her; but her pity, finding no active

expression, remained in a state of spectatorship, overshadowed by

her mother’s grim unflagging resentment. Every look and act of Mrs.

Bart’s seemed to say: “You are sorry for him now—but you will feel

differently when you see what he has done to us.”

It was a relief to Lily when her father died.

Then a long winter set in. There was a little money left, but to

Mrs. Bart it seemed worse than nothing—the mere mockery of what

she was entitled to. What was the use of living if one had to live

like a pig? She sank into a kind of furious apathy, a state of

inert anger against fate. Her faculty for “managing” deserted her,

or she no longer took sufficient pride in it to exert it. It was

well enough to “manage” when by so doing one could keep one’s own

carriage; but when one’s best contrivance did not conceal the fact

that one had to go on foot, the effort was no longer worth making.

Lily and her mother wandered from place to place, now paying long

visits to relations whose house-keeping Mrs. Bart criticized, and

who deplored the fact that she let Lily breakfast in bed when the

girl had no prospects before her, and now vegetating in cheap

continental refuges, where Mrs. Bart held herself fiercely aloof

from the frugal tea-tables of her companions in misfortune. She was

especially careful to avoid her old friends and the scenes of her

former successes. To be poor seemed to her such a confession of

failure that it amounted to disgrace; and she detected a note of

condescension in the friendliest advances.

Only one thought consoled her, and that was the contemplation of

Lily’s beauty. She studied it with a kind of passion, as though

it were some weapon she had slowly fashioned for her vengeance.

It was the last asset in their fortunes, the nucleus around which

their life was to be rebuilt. She watched it jealously, as though

it were her own property and Lily its mere custodian; and she

tried to instil into the latter a sense of the responsibility that

such a charge involved. She followed in imagination the career

of other beauties, pointing out to her daughter what might be

achieved through such a gift, and dwelling on the awful warning of

those who, in spite of it, had failed to get what they wanted: to

Mrs. Bart, only stupidity could explain the lamentable denouement

of some of her examples. She was not above the inconsistency of

charging fate, rather than herself, with her own misfortunes; but

she inveighed so acrimoniously against love-matches that Lily would

have fancied her own marriage had been of that nature, had not Mrs.

Bart frequently assured her that she had been “talked into it”—by

whom, she never made clear.

Lily was duly impressed by the magnitude of her opportunities. The

dinginess of her present life threw into enchanting relief the

existence to which she felt herself entitled. To a less illuminated

intelligence Mrs. Bart’s counsels might have been dangerous; but

Lily understood that beauty is only the raw material of conquest,

and that to convert it into success other arts are required. She

knew that to betray any sense of superiority was a subtler form of

the stupidity her mother denounced, and it did not take her long

to learn that a beauty needs more tact than the possessor of an

average set of features.

Her ambitions were not as crude as Mrs. Bart’s. It had been among

that lady’s grievances that her husband—in the early days, before

he was too tired—had wasted his evenings in what she vaguely

described as “reading poetry”; and among the effects packed off to

auction after his death were a score or two of dingy volumes which

had struggled for existence among the boots and medicine bottles of

his dressing-room shelves. There was in Lily a vein of sentiment,

perhaps transmitted from this source, which gave an idealizing

touch to her most prosaic purposes. She liked to think of her

beauty as a power for good, as giving her the opportunity to attain

a position where she should make her influence felt in the vague

diffusion of refinement and good taste. She was fond of pictures

and flowers, and of sentimental fiction, and she could not help

thinking that the possession of such tastes ennobled her desire for

worldly advantages. She would not indeed have cared to marry a man

who was merely rich: she was secretly ashamed of her mother’s crude

passion for money. Lily’s preference would have been for an English

nobleman with political ambitions and vast estates; or, for second

choice, an Italian prince with a castle in the Apennines and an

hereditary office in the Vatican. Lost causes had a romantic charm

for her, and she liked to picture herself as standing aloof from

the vulgar press of the Quirinal, and sacrificing her pleasure to

the claims of an immemorial tradition....

How long ago and how far off it all seemed! Those ambitions were

hardly more futile and childish than the earlier ones which had

centred about the possession of a French jointed doll with real

hair. Was it only ten years since she had wavered in imagination

between the English earl and the Italian prince? Relentlessly her

mind travelled on over the dreary interval....

After two years of hungry roaming Mrs. Bart had died——died of a

deep disgust. She had hated dinginess, and it was her fate to be

dingy. Her visions of a brilliant marriage for Lily had faded after

the first year.

“People can’t marry you if they don’t see you—and how can they see

you in these holes where we’re stuck?” That was the burden of her

lament; and her last adjuration to her daughter was to escape from

dinginess if she could.

“Don’t let it creep up on you and drag you down. Fight your way out

of it somehow—you’re young and can do it,” she insisted.

She had died during one of their brief visits to New York, and

there Lily at once became the centre of a family council composed

of the wealthy relatives whom she had been taught to despise

for living like pigs. It may be that they had an inkling of the

sentiments in which she had been brought up, for none of them

manifested a very lively desire for her company; indeed, the

question threatened to remain unsolved till Mrs. Peniston with a

sigh announced: “I’ll try her for a year.”

Every one was surprised, but one and all concealed their surprise,

lest Mrs. Peniston should be alarmed by it into reconsidering her

decision.

Mrs. Peniston was Mr. Bart’s widowed sister, and if she was by

no means the richest of the family group, its other members

nevertheless abounded in reasons why she was clearly destined by

Providence to assume the charge of Lily. In the first place she was

alone, and it would be charming for her to have a young companion.

Then she sometimes travelled, and Lily’s familiarity with foreign

customs—deplored as a misfortune by her more conservative

relatives—would at least enable her to act as a kind of courier.

But as a matter of fact Mrs. Peniston had not been affected by

these considerations. She had taken the girl simply because no one

else would have her, and because she had the kind of moral MAUVAISE

HONTE which makes the public display of selfishness difficult,

though it does not interfere with its private indulgence. It would

have been impossible for Mrs. Peniston to be heroic on a desert

island, but with the eyes of her little world upon her she took a

certain pleasure in her act.

She reaped the reward to which disinterestedness is entitled,

and found an agreeable companion in her niece. She had expected

to find Lily headstrong, critical and “foreign”—for even Mrs.

Peniston, though she occasionally went abroad, had the family dread

of foreignness—but the girl showed a pliancy, which, to a more

penetrating mind than her aunt’s, might have been less reassuring

than the open selfishness of youth. Misfortune had made Lily supple

instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to

break than a stiff one.

Mrs. Peniston, however, did not suffer from her niece’s

adaptability. Lily had no intention of taking advantage of her

aunt’s good-nature. She was in truth grateful for the refuge

offered her: Mrs. Peniston’s opulent interior was at least not

externally dingy. But dinginess is a quality which assumes all

manner of disguises; and Lily soon found that it was as latent

in the expensive routine of her aunt’s life as in the makeshift

existence of a continental pension.

Mrs. Peniston was one of the episodical persons who form the

padding of life. It was impossible to believe that she had herself

ever been a focus of activities. The most vivid thing about her

was the fact that her grandmother had been a Van Alstyne. This

connection with the well-fed and industrious stock of early New

York revealed itself in the glacial neatness of Mrs. Peniston’s

drawing-room and in the excellence of her cuisine. She belonged

to the class of old New Yorkers who have always lived well,

dressed expensively, and done little else; and to these inherited

obligations Mrs. Peniston faithfully conformed. She had always

been a looker-on at life, and her mind resembled one of those

little mirrors which her Dutch ancestors were accustomed to affix

to their upper windows, so that from the depths of an impenetrable

domesticity they might see what was happening in the street.

Mrs. Peniston was the owner of a country-place in New Jersey,

but she had never lived there since her husband’s death—a remote

event, which appeared to dwell in her memory chiefly as a dividing

point in the personal reminiscences that formed the staple of her

conversation. She was a woman who remembered dates with intensity,

and could tell at a moment’s notice whether the drawing-room

curtains had been renewed before or after Mr. Peniston’s last

illness.

Mrs. Peniston thought the country lonely and trees damp, and

cherished a vague fear of meeting a bull. To guard against such

contingencies she frequented the more populous watering-places,

where she installed herself impersonally in a hired house and

looked on at life through the matting screen of her verandah. In

the care of such a guardian, it soon became clear to Lily that

she was to enjoy only the material advantages of good food and

expensive clothing; and, though far from underrating these, she

would gladly have exchanged them for what Mrs. Bart had taught her

to regard as opportunities. She sighed to think what her mother’s

fierce energies would have accomplished, had they been coupled

with Mrs. Peniston’s resources. Lily had abundant energy of her

own, but it was restricted by the necessity of adapting herself to

her aunt’s habits. She saw that at all costs she must keep Mrs.

Peniston’s favour till, as Mrs. Bart would have phrased it, she

could stand on her own legs. Lily had no mind for the vagabond life

of the poor relation, and to adapt herself to Mrs. Peniston she

had, to some degree, to assume that lady’s passive attitude. She

had fancied at first that it would be easy to draw her aunt into

the whirl of her own activities, but there was a static force in

Mrs. Peniston against which her niece’s efforts spent themselves

in vain. To attempt to bring her into active relation with life

was like tugging at a piece of furniture which has been screwed

to the floor. She did not, indeed, expect Lily to remain equally

immovable: she had all the American guardian’s indulgence for the

volatility of youth.

She had indulgence also for certain other habits of her niece’s.

It seemed to her natural that Lily should spend all her money on

dress, and she supplemented the girl’s scanty income by occasional

“handsome presents” meant to be applied to the same purpose.

Lily, who was intensely practical, would have preferred a fixed

allowance; but Mrs. Peniston liked the periodical recurrence of

gratitude evoked by unexpected cheques, and was perhaps shrewd

enough to perceive that such a method of giving kept alive in her

niece a salutary sense of dependence.

Beyond this, Mrs. Peniston had not felt called upon to do anything

for her charge: she had simply stood aside and let her take the

field. Lily had taken it, at first with the confidence of assured

possessorship, then with gradually narrowing demands, till now

she found herself actually struggling for a foothold on the

broad space which had once seemed her own for the asking. How it

happened she did not yet know. Sometimes she thought it was because

Mrs. Peniston had been too passive, and again she feared it was

because she herself had not been passive enough. Had she shown an

undue eagerness for victory? Had she lacked patience, pliancy and

dissimulation? Whether she charged herself with these faults or

absolved herself from them, made no difference in the sum-total

of her failure. Younger and plainer girls had been married off by

dozens, and she was nine-and-twenty, and still Miss Bart.

She was beginning to have fits of angry rebellion against fate,

when she longed to drop out of the race and make an independent

life for herself. But what manner of life would it be? She had

barely enough money to pay her dress-makers’ bills and her gambling

debts; and none of the desultory interests which she dignified with

the name of tastes was pronounced enough to enable her to live

contentedly in obscurity. Ah, no—she was too intelligent not to be

honest with herself. She knew that she hated dinginess as much as

her mother had hated it, and to her last breath she meant to fight

against it, dragging herself up again and again above its flood

till she gained the bright pinnacles of success which presented

such a slippery surface to her clutch.