The afternoon was warm, and propinquity made her more than usually conscious that he was red and massive and that beads of moisture had caused the dust of the train to adhere unpleasantly to the broad expanse of cheek and neck which he turned to her; but she was aware also, from the look in his small, dull eyes, that the contact with her freshness and slenderness was as agreeable to him as the sight of a cooling beverage.

  The perception of this fact helped her to answer gaily: “It’s not often I have the chance. There are too many ladies to dispute the privilege with me.”

  “The privilege of driving me home? Well, I’m glad you won the race, anyhow. But I know what really happened; my wife sent you. Now didn’t she?”

  He had the dull man’s unexpected flashes of astuteness, and Lily could not help joining in the laugh with which he had pounced on the truth.

  “You see, Judy thinks I’m the safest person for you to be with; and she’s quite right,” she rejoined.

  “Oh, is she, though? If she is, it’s because you wouldn’t waste your time on an old hulk like me. We married men have to put up with what we can get; all the prizes are for the clever chaps who’ve kept a free foot. Let me light a cigar, will you? I’ve had a beastly day of it.”

  He drew up in the shade of the village street and passed the reins to her while he held a match to his cigar. The little flame under his hand cast a deeper crimson on his puffing face, and Lily averted her eyes with a momentary feeling of repugnance. And yet some women thought him handsome!

  As she handed back the reins, she said sympathetically: “Did you have such a lot of tiresome things to do?”

  “I should say so—rather!” Trenor, who was seldom listened to, either by his wife or her friends, settled down into the rare enjoyment of a confidential talk. “You don’t know how a fellow has to hustle to keep this kind of thing going.” He waved his whip in the direction of the Bellomont acres, which lay outspread before them in opulent undulations. “Judy has no idea of what she spends—not that there isn’t plenty to keep the thing going,” he interrupted himself, “but a man has got to keep his eyes open and pick up all the tips he can. My father and mother used to live like fighting-cocks on their income, and put by a good bit of it too—luckily for me—but at the pace we go now, I don’t know where I should be if it weren’t for taking a flyer now and then. The women all think—I mean Judy thinks—I’ve nothing to do but to go down town once a month and cut off coupons, but the truth is it takes a devilish lot of hard work to keep the machinery running. Not that I ought to complain to-day, though,” he went on after a moment, “for I did a very neat stroke of business, thanks to Stepney’s friend Rosedale. By the way, Miss Lily, I wish you’d try to persuade Judy to be decently civil to that chap. He’s going to be rich enough to buy us all out one of these days, and if she’d only ask him to dine now and then I could get almost anything out of him. The man is mad to know the people who don’t want to know him, and when a fellow’s in that state there is nothing he won’t do for the first woman who takes him up.”

  Lily hesitated a moment. The first part of her companion’s discourse had started an interesting train of thought, which was rudely interrupted by the mention of Mr. Rosedale’s name. She uttered a faint protest.

  “But you know Jack did try to take him about, and he was impossible.”

  “Oh, hang it—because he’s fat and shiny and has a shoppy manner! Well, all I can say is that the people who are clever enough to be civil to him now will make a mighty good thing of it. A few years from now he’ll be in it whether we want him or not, and then he won’t be giving away a half-a-million tip for a dinner.”

  Lily’s mind had reverted from the intrusive personality of Mr. Rosedale to the train of thought set in motion by Trenor’s first words. This vast, mysterious Wall Street world of “tips” and “deals”—might she not find in it the means of escape from her dreary predicament? She had often heard of women making money in this way through their friends; she had no more notion than most of her sex of the exact nature of the transaction, and its vagueness seemed to diminish its indelicacy. She could not, indeed, imagine herself in any extremity stooping to extract a “tip” from Mr. Rosedale; but at her side was a man in possession of that precious commodity, and who, as the husband of her dearest friend, stood to her in a relation of almost fraternal intimacy.

  In her inmost heart Lily knew it was not by appealing to the fraternal instinct that she was likely to move Gus Trenor; but this way of explaining the situation helped to drape its crudity, and she was always scrupulous about keeping up appearances to herself. Her personal fastidiousness had a moral equivalent, and when she made a tour of inspection in her own mind, there were certain closed doors she did not open.

  As they reached the gates of Bellomont, she turned to Trenor with a smile.

  “The afternoon is so perfect—don’t you want to drive me a little farther? I’ve been rather out of spirits all day, and it’s so restful to be away from people, with some one who won’t mind if I’m a little dull.”

  She looked so plaintively lovely as she proffered the request, so trustfully sure of his sympathy and understanding, that Trenor felt himself wishing that his wife could see how other women treated him—not battered wire-pullers like Mrs. Fisher, but a girl that most men would have given their boots to get such a look from.

  “Out of spirits? Why on earth should you ever be out of spirits? Is your last box of Doucet dresses a failure, or did Judy rook you out of everything at bridge last night?”

  Lily shook her head with a sigh. “I have had to give up Doucet; and bridge too—I can’t afford it. In fact I can’t afford any of the things my friends do, and I am afraid Judy often thinks me a bore because I don’t play cards any longer and because I am not as smartly dressed as the other women. But you will think me a bore too if I talk to you about my worries, and I only mention them because I want you to do me a favour—the very greatest of favours.”

  Her eyes sought his once more, and she smiled inwardly at the tinge of apprehension that she read in them.

  “Why, of course—if it’s anything I can manage—” He broke off, and she guessed that his enjoyment was disturbed by the remembrance of Mrs. Fisher’s methods.

  “The greatest of favours,” she rejoined gently. “The fact is, Judy is angry with me, and I want you to make my peace.”

  “Angry with you? Oh, come, nonsense—” his relief broke through in a laugh. “Why, you know she’s devoted to you.”

  “She is the best friend I have, and that is why I mind having to vex her. But I daresay you know what she has wanted me to do. She has set her heart—poor dear—on my marrying—marrying a great deal of money.”

  She paused with a slight falter of embarrassment, and Trenor, turning abruptly, fixed on her a look of growing intelligence.

  “A great deal of money? Oh, by Jove—you don’t mean Gryce? What—you do? Oh, no, of course I won’t mention it—you can trust me to keep my mouth shut—but Gryce—good Lord, Gryce! Did Judy really think you could bring yourself to marry that portentous little ass? But you couldn’t, eh? And so you gave him the sack, and that’s the reason why he lit out by the first train this morning?” He leaned back, spreading himself farther across the seat, as if dilated by the joyful sense of his own discernment. “How on earth could Judy think you would do such a thing? I could have told her you’d never put up with such a little milksop!”

  Lily sighed more deeply. “I sometimes think,” she murmured, “that men understand a woman’s motives better than other women do.”

  “Some men—I’m certain of it! I could have told Judy,” he repeated, exulting in the implied superiority over his wife.

  “I thought you would understand; that’s why I wanted to speak to you,” Miss Bart rejoined. “I can’t make that kind of marriage; it’s impossible. But neither can I go on living as all the women in my set do. I am almost entirely dependent on my aunt, and though she is very kind to me, she makes me no regular allowance, and lately I’ve lost money at cards, and I don’t dare tell her about it. I have paid my card debts, of course, but there is hardly anything left for my other expenses, and if I go on with my present life I shall be in horrible difficulties. I have a tiny income of my own, but I’m afraid it’s badly invested, for it seems to bring in less every year, and I am so ignorant of money matters that I don’t know if my aunt’s agent, who looks after it, is a good adviser.” She paused a moment, and added in a lighter tone: “I didn’t mean to bore you with all this, but I want your help in making Judy understand that I can’t, at present, go on living as one must live among you all. I am going away to-morrow to join my aunt at Richfield, and I shall stay there for the rest of the autumn, and dismiss my maid and learn how to mend my own clothes.”

  At this picture of loveliness in distress, the pathos of which was heightened by the light touch with which it was drawn, a murmur of indignant sympathy broke from Trenor. Twenty-four hours earlier, if his wife had consulted him on the subject of Miss Bart’s future, he would have said that a girl with extravagant tastes and no money had better marry the first rich man she could get; but with the subject of discussion at his side, turning to him for sympathy, making him feel that he understood her better than her dearest friends, and confirming the assurance by the appeal of her exquisite nearness, he was ready to swear that such a marriage was a desecration and that as a man of honour he was bound to do all he could to protect her from the results of her disinterestedness. This impulse was reinforced by the reflection that if she had married Gryce she would have been surrounded by flattery and approval, whereas having refused to sacrifice herself to expediency, she was left to bear the whole cost of her resistance. Hang it, if he could find a way out of such difficulties for a professional sponge like Carry Fisher, who was simply a mental habit corresponding to the physical titillations of the cigarette or the cock-tail, he could surely do as much for a girl who appealed to his highest sympathies and who brought her troubles to him with the trustfulness of a child.

  Trenor and Miss Bart prolonged their drive till long after sunset; and before it was over he had tried, with some show of success, to prove to her that if she would only trust him, he could make a handsome sum of money for her without endangering the small amount she possessed. She was too genuinely ignorant of the manipulations of the stock-market to understand his technical explanations, or even perhaps to perceive that certain points in them were slurred; the haziness enveloping the transaction served as a veil for her embarrassment, and through the general blur her hopes dilated like lamps in a fog. She understood only that her modest investments were to be mysteriously multiplied without risk to herself; and the assurance that this miracle would take place within a short time, that there would be no tedious interval for suspense and reaction, relieved her of her lingering scruples.

  Again she felt the lightening of her load, and with it the release of repressed activities. Her immediate worries conjured, it was easy to resolve that she would never again find herself in such straits, and as the need of economy and self-denial receded from her foreground, she felt herself ready to meet any other demand which life might make. Even the immediate one of letting Trenor, as they drove homeward, lean a little nearer and rest his hand reassuringly on hers, cost her only a momentary shiver of reluctance. It was part of the game to make him feel that her appeal had been an uncalculated impulse, provoked by the liking he inspired; and the renewed sense of power in handling men, while it consoled her wounded vanity, helped also to obscure the thought of the claim at which his manner hinted. He was a coarse, dull man who under all his show of authority was a mere supernumerary in the costly show for which his money paid; surely, to a clever girl, it would be easy to hold him by his vanity, and so keep the obligation on his side.

  VIII

  The first thousand-dollar cheque which Lily received with a blotted scrawl from Gus Trenor strengthened her self-confidence in the exact degree to which it effaced her debts.

  The transaction had justified itself by its results: she saw now how absurd it would have been to let any primitive scruple deprive her of this easy means of appeasing her creditors. Lily felt really virtuous as she dispensed the sum in sops to her tradesmen, and the fact that a fresh order accompanied each payment did not lessen her sense of disinterestedness. How many women, in her place, would have given the orders without making the payment!

  She had found it reassuringly easy to keep Trenor in a good humour. To listen to his stories, to receive his confidences and laugh at his jokes seemed for the moment all that was required of her, and the complacency with which her hostess regarded these attentions freed them of the least hint of ambiguity. Mrs. Trenor evidently assumed that Lily’s growing intimacy with her husband was simply an indirect way of returning her own kindness.

  “I’m so glad you and Gus have become such good friends,” she said approvingly. “It’s too delightful of you to be so nice to him and put up with all his tiresome stories. I know what they are because I had to listen to them when we were engaged; I’m sure he is telling the same ones still. And now I shan’t always have to be asking Carry Fisher here to keep him in a good humour. She’s a perfect vulture, you know; and she hasn’t the least moral sense. She is always getting Gus to speculate for her, and I’m sure she never pays when she loses.”

  Miss Bart could shudder at this state of things without the embarrassment of a personal application. Her own position was surely quite different. There could be no question of her not paying when she lost, since Trenor had assured her that she was certain not to lose. In sending her the cheque he had explained that he had made five thousand for her out of Rosedale’s “tip,” and had put four thousand back in the same venture, as there was the promise of another “big rise”; she understood therefore that he was now speculating with her own money and that she consequently owed him no more than the gratitude which such a trifling service demanded. She vaguely supposed that to raise the first sum, he had borrowed on her securities; but this was a point over which her curiosity did not linger. It was concentrated for the moment on the probable date of the next “big rise.”

  The news of this event was received by her some weeks later, on the occasion of Jack Stepney’s marriage to Miss Van Osburgh. As a cousin of the bridegroom, Miss Bart had been asked to act as bridesmaid; but she had declined on the plea that since she was much taller than the other attendant virgins, her presence might mar the symmetry of the group. The truth was, she had attended too many brides to the altar; when next seen there she meant to be the chief figure in the ceremony. She knew the pleasantries made at the expense of young girls who have been too long before the public, and she was resolved to avoid such assumptions of youthfulness as might lead people to think her older than she really was.

  The Van Osburgh marriage was celebrated in the village church near the paternal estate on the Hudson. It was the “simple country wedding” to which guests are convoyed in special trains, and from which the hordes of the uninvited have to be fended off by the intervention of the police. While these sylvan rites were taking place in a church packed with fashion and festooned with orchids, the representatives of the press were threading their way, note-book in hand, through the labyrinth of wedding presents, and the agent of a cinematograph syndicate was setting up his apparatus at the church door. It was the kind of scene in which Lily had often pictured herself as taking the principal part, and on this occasion the fact that she was once more merely a casual spectator instead of the mystically veiled figure occupying the centre of attention strengthened her resolve to assume the latter part before the year was over. The fact that her immediate anxieties were relieved did not blind her to a possibility of their recurrence; it merely gave her enough buoyancy to rise once more above her doubts and feel a renewed faith in her beauty, her power, and her general fitness to attract a brilliant destiny. It could not be that one conscious of such aptitudes for mastery and enjoyment was doomed to a perpetuity of failure, and her mistakes looked easily reparable in the light of her restored self-confidence.

  A special appositeness was given to these reflections by the discovery in a neighbouring pew of the serious profile and neatly trimmed beard of Mr. Percy Gryce. There was something almost bridal in his own aspect; his large white gardenia had a symbolic air that struck Lily as a good omen. After all, seen in an assemblage of his kind he was not ridiculous looking; a friendly critic might have called his heaviness weighty, and he was at his best in the attitude of vacant passivity which brings out the oddities of the restless. She fancied he was the kind of man whose sentimental associations would be stirred by the conventional imagery of a wedding, and she pictured herself in the seclusion of the Van Osburgh conservatories, playing skilfully upon sensibilities thus prepared for her touch. In fact, when she looked at the other women about her and recalled the image she had brought away from her own glass, it did not seem as though any special skill would be needed to repair her blunder and bring him once more to her feet.

  The sight of Selden’s dark head in a pew almost facing her disturbed for a moment the balance of her complacency. The rise of her blood as their eyes met was succeeded by a contrary motion, a wave of resistance and withdrawal. She did not wish to see him again, not because she feared his influence, but because his presence always had the effect of cheapening her aspirations, of throwing her whole world out of focus. Besides, he was a living reminder of the worst mistake in her career, and the fact that he had been its cause did not soften her feelings toward him. She could still imagine an ideal state of existence in which, all else being superadded, intercourse with Selden might be the last touch of luxury; but in the world as it was, such a privilege was likely to cost more than it was worth.