His object in calling was to ask her to go to the opera in his box on the opening night, and seeing her hesitate he said persuasively: “Mrs. Fisher is coming, and I’ve secured a tremendous admirer of yours, who’ll never forgive me if you don’t accept.”

  As Lily’s silence left him with this allusion on his hands, he added with a confidential smile: “Gus Trenor has promised to come to town on purpose. I fancy he’d go a good deal farther for the pleasure of seeing you.”

  Miss Bart felt an inward motion of annoyance; it was distasteful enough to hear her name coupled with Trenor’s, and on Rosedale’s lips the allusion was peculiarly unpleasant.

  “The Trenors are my best friends; I think we should all go a long way to see each other,” she said, absorbing herself in the preparation of fresh tea.

  Her visitor’s smile grew increasingly intimate. “Well, I wasn’t thinking of Mrs. Trenor at the moment—they say Gus doesn’t always, you know.” Then, dimly conscious that he had not struck the right note, he added with a well-meant effort at diversion: “How’s your luck been going in Wall Street, by the way? I hear Gus pulled off a nice little pile for you last month.”

  Lily put down the tea-caddy with an abrupt gesture. She felt that her hands were trembling and clasped them on her knee to steady them; but her lip trembled too, and for a moment she was afraid the tremor might communicate itself to her voice. When she spoke, however, it was in a tone of perfect lightness.

  “Ah, yes—I had a little bit of money to invest, and Mr. Trenor, who helps me about such matters, advised my putting it in stocks instead of a mortgage, as my aunt’s agent wanted me to do; and as it happened, I made a lucky ‘turn’—is that what you call it? For you make a great many yourself, I believe.”

  She was smiling back at him now, relaxing the tension of her attitude and admitting him, by imperceptible gradations of glance and manner, a step farther toward intimacy. The protective instinct always nerved her to successful dissimulation, and it was not the first time she had used her beauty to divert attention from an inconvenient topic.

  When Mr. Rosedale took leave, he carried with him not only her acceptance of his invitation but a general sense of having comported himself in a way calculated to advance his cause. He had always believed he had a light touch and a knowing way with women, and the prompt manner in which Miss Bart (as he would have phrased it) had “come into line,” confirmed his confidence in his powers of handling the skittish sex. Her way of glossing over the transaction with Trenor he regarded at once as a tribute to his own acuteness and a confirmation of his suspicions. The girl was evidently nervous, and Mr. Rosedale, if he saw no other means of advancing his acquaintance with her, was not above taking advantage of her nervousness.

  He left Lily to a passion of disgust and fear. It seemed incredible that Gus Trenor should have spoken of her to Rosedale. With all his faults, Trenor had the safeguard of his traditions and was the less likely to overstep them because they were so purely instinctive. But Lily recalled with a pang that there were convivial moments when, as Judy had confided to her, Gus “talked foolishly”; in one of these, no doubt, the fatal word had slipped from him. As for Rosedale, she did not, after the first shock, greatly care what conclusions he had drawn. Though usually adroit enough where her own interests were concerned, she made the mistake, not uncommon to persons in whom the social habits are instinctive, of supposing that the inability to acquire them quickly implies a general dulness. Because a blue-bottle bangs irrationally against a window-pane, the drawing-room naturalist may forget that under less artificial conditions it is capable of measuring distances and drawing conclusions with all the accuracy needful to its welfare; and the fact that Mr. Rosedale’s drawing-room manner lacked perspective made Lily class him with Trenor and the other dull men she knew, and assume that a little flattery and the occasional acceptance of his hospitality would suffice to render him innocuous. However, there could be no doubt of the expediency of showing herself in his box on the opening night of the opera; and after all, since Judy Trenor had promised to take him up that winter, it was as well to reap the advantage of being first in the field.

  For a day or two after Rosedale’s visit, Lily’s thoughts were dogged by the consciousness of Trenor’s shadowy claim, and she wished she had a clearer notion of the exact nature of the transaction which seemed to have put her in his power; but her mind shrank from any unusual application, and she was always helplessly puzzled by figures. Moreover, she had not seen Trenor since the day of the Van Osburgh wedding, and in his continued absence the trace of Rosedale’s words was soon effaced by other impressions.

  When the opening night of the opera came, her apprehensions had so completely vanished that the sight of Trenor’s ruddy countenance in the back of Mr. Rosedale’s box filled her with a sense of pleasant reassurance. Lily had not quite reconciled herself to the necessity of appearing as Rosedale’s guest on so conspicuous an occasion, and it was a relief to find herself supported by any one of her own set—for Mrs. Fisher’s social habits were too promiscuous for her presence to justify Miss Bart’s.

  To Lily, always inspirited by the prospect of showing her beauty in public and conscious to-night of all the added enhancements of dress, the insistency of Trenor’s gaze merged itself in the general stream of admiring looks of which she felt herself the centre. Ah, it was good to be young, to be radiant, to glow with the sense of slenderness, strength, and elasticity, of well-poised lines and happy tints, to feel one’s self lifted to a height apart by that incommunicable grace which is the bodily counterpart of genius!

  All means seemed justifiable to attain such an end, or rather, by a happy shifting of lights with which practice had familiarized Miss Bart, the cause shrank to a pin-point in the general brightness of the effect. But brilliant young ladies, a little blinded by their own effulgence, are apt to forget that the modest satellite drowned in their light is still performing its own revolutions and generating heat at its own rate. If Lily’s poetic enjoyment of the moment was undisturbed by the base thought that her gown and opera cloak had been indirectly paid for by Gus Trenor, the latter had not sufficient poetry in his composition to lose sight of these prosaic facts. He knew only that he had never seen Lily look smarter in her life, that there wasn’t a woman in the house who showed off good clothes as she did, and that hitherto he, to whom she owed the opportunity of making this display, had reaped no return beyond that of gazing at her in company with several hundred other pairs of eyes.

  It came to Lily therefore as a disagreeable surprise when, in the back of the box, where they found themselves alone between two acts, Trenor said without preamble and in a tone of sulky authority: “Look here, Lily, how is a fellow ever to see anything of you? I’m in town three or four days in the week, and you know a line to the club will always find me, but you don’t seem to remember my existence now-a-days unless you want to get a tip out of me.”

  The fact that the remark was in distinctly bad taste did not make it any easier to answer, for Lily was vividly aware that it was not the moment for that drawing up of her slim figure and surprised lifting of the brows by which she usually quelled incipient signs of familiarity.

  “I’m very much flattered by your wanting to see me,” she returned, essaying lightness instead, “but unless you have mislaid my address, it would have been easy to find me any afternoon at my aunt’s—in fact, I rather expected you to look me up there.”

  If she hoped to mollify him by this last concession, the attempt was a failure, for he only replied, with the familiar lowering of the brows that made him look his dullest when he was angry: “Hang going to your aunt’s and wasting the afternoon listening to a lot of other chaps talking to you! You know I’m not the kind to sit in a crowd and jaw—I’d always rather clear out when that sort of circus is going on. But why can’t we go off somewhere on a little lark together—a nice quiet little expedition like that drive at Bellomont, the day you met me at the station?”

  He leaned unpleasantly close in order to convey this suggestion, and she fancied she caught a significant aroma which explained the dark flush on his face and the glistening dampness of his forehead.

  The idea that any rash answer might provoke an unpleasant outburst tempered her disgust with caution, and she answered with a laugh: “I don’t see how one can very well take country drives in town, but I am not always surrounded by an admiring throng, and if you will let me know what afternoon you are coming I will arrange things so that we can have a nice quiet talk.”

  “Hang talking! That’s what you always say,” returned Trenor, whose expletives lacked variety. “You put me off with that at the Van Osburgh wedding; but the plain English of it is that now you’ve got what you wanted out of me, you’d rather have any other fellow about.”

  His voice had risen sharply with the last words, and Lily flushed with annoyance, but she kept command of the situation and laid a persuasive hand on his arm.

  “Don’t be foolish, Gus; I can’t let you talk to me in that ridiculous way. If you really want to see me, why shouldn’t we take a walk in the park some afternoon? I agree with you that it’s amusing to be rustic in town, and if you like I’ll meet you there, and we’ll go and feed the squirrels, and you shall take me out on the lake in the steam-gondola.”

  She smiled as she spoke, letting her eyes rest on his in a way that took the edge from her banter and made him suddenly malleable to her will.

  “All right, then; that’s a go. Will you come tomorrow? To-morrow at three o’clock, at the end of the Mall? I’ll be there sharp, remember; you won’t go back on me, Lily?”

  But to Miss Bart’s relief the repetition of her promise was cut short by the opening of the box door to admit George Dorset.

  Trenor sulkily yielded his place, and Lily turned a brilliant smile on the new-comer. She had not talked with Dorset since their visit at Bellomont, but something in his look and manner told her that he recalled the friendly footing on which they had last met. He was not a man to whom the expression of admiration came easily; his long sallow face and distrustful eyes seemed always barricaded against the expansive emotions. But where her own influence was concerned, Lily’s intuitions sent out thread-like feelers, and as she made room for him on the narrow sofa, she was sure he found a dumb pleasure in being near her. Few women took the trouble to make themselves agreeable to Dorset, and Lily had been kind to him at Bellomont and was now smiling on him with a divine renewal of kindness.

  “Well, here we are, in for another six months of caterwauling,” he began complainingly. “Not a shade of difference between this year and last except that the women have got new clothes and the singers haven’t got new voices. My wife’s musical, you know—puts me through a course of this every winter. It isn’t so bad on Italian nights; then she comes late, and there’s time to digest. But when they give Wagner we have to rush dinner, and I pay up for it. And the draughts are damnable—asphyxia in front and pleurisy in the back. There’s Trenor leaving the box without drawing the curtain! With a hide like that draughts don’t make any difference. Did you ever watch Trenor eat? If you did, you’d wonder why he’s alive; I suppose he’s leather inside too. But I came to say that my wife wants you to come down to our place next Sunday. Do for heaven’s sake say yes. She’s got a lot of bores coming—intellectual ones, I mean; that’s her new line, you know, and I’m not sure it ain’t worse than the music. Some of ’em have long hair, and they start an argument with the soup and don’t notice when things are handed to them. The consequence is the dinner gets cold, and I have dyspepsia. That silly ass Silverton brings them to the house—he writes poetry, you know, and Bertha and he are getting tremendously thick. She could write better than any of ’em if she chose, and I don’t blame her for wanting clever fellows about; all I say is: ‘Don’t let me see ’em eat!’ ”

  The gist of this strange communication gave Lily a distinct thrill of pleasure. Under ordinary circumstances, there would have been nothing surprising in an invitation from Bertha Dorset, but since the Bellomont episode, an unavowed hostility had kept the two women apart. Now, with a start of inner wonder, Lily felt that her thirst for retaliation had died out. If you would forgive your enemy, says the Malay proverb, first inflict a hurt on him; and Lily was experiencing the truth of the apothegm. If she had destroyed Mrs. Dorset’s letters, she might have continued to hate her; but the fact that they remained in her possession had fed her resentment to satiety.

  She uttered a smiling acceptance, hailing in the renewal of the tie an escape from Trenor’s importunities.

  XI

  Meanwhile, the holidays had gone by and the season was beginning. Fifth Avenue had become a nightly torrent of carriages surging upward to the fashionable quarters about the park, where illuminated windows and outspread awnings betokened the usual routine of hospitality. Other tributary currents crossed the main stream, bearing their freight to the theatres, restaurants, or opera; and Mrs. Peniston, from the secluded watch-tower of her upper window, could tell to a nicety just when the chronic volume of sound was increased by the sudden influx setting toward a Van Osburgh ball or when the multiplication of wheels meant merely that the opera was over or that there was a big supper at Sherry’s.

  Mrs. Peniston followed the rise and culmination of the season as keenly as the most active sharer in its gaieties; and as a looker-on, she enjoyed opportunities of comparison and generalization such as those who take part must proverbially forego. No one could have kept a more accurate record of social fluctuations or have put a more unerring finger on the distinguishing features of each season: its dulness, its extravagance, its lack of balls or excess of divorces. She had a special memory for the vicissitudes of the “new people” who rose to the surface with each recurring tide, and were either submerged beneath its rush or landed triumphantly beyond the reach of envious breakers; and she was apt to display a remarkable retrospective insight into their ultimate fate so that when they had fulfilled their destiny, she was almost always able to say to Grace Stepney—the recipient of her prophecies—that she had known exactly what would happen.

  This particular season Mrs. Peniston would have characterized as that in which everybody “felt poor” except the Welly Brys and Mr. Simon Rosedale. It had been a bad autumn in Wall Street, where prices fell in accordance with that peculiar law which proves railway stocks and bales of cotton to be more sensitive to the allotment of executive power than many estimable citizens trained to all the advantages of self-government. Even fortunes supposed to be independent of the market either betrayed a secret dependence on it or suffered from a sympathetic affection: fashion sulked in its country-houses or came to town incognito, general entertainments were discountenanced, and informality and short dinners became the fashion.

  But society, amused for a while at playing Cinderella, soon wearied of the hearthside rôle, and welcomed the fairy godmother in the shape of any magician powerful enough to turn the shrunken pumpkin back again into the golden coach. The mere fact of growing richer at a time when most people’s investments are shrinking is calculated to attract envious attention; and according to Wall Street rumours, Welly Bry and Rosedale had found the secret of performing this miracle.

  Rosedale, in particular, was said to have doubled his fortune, and there was talk of his buying the newly finished house of one of the victims of the crash, who, in the space of twelve short months, had made the same number of millions, built a house in Fifth Avenue, filled a picture-gallery with old masters, entertained all New York in it, and been smuggled out of the country between a trained nurse and a doctor while his creditors mounted guard over the old masters and his guests explained to each other that they had dined with him only because they wanted to see the pictures. Mr. Rosedale meant to have a less meteoric career. He knew he should have to go slowly, and the instincts of his race fitted him to suffer rebuffs and put up with delays. But he was prompt to perceive that the general dulness of the season afforded him an unusual opportunity to shine, and he set about with patient industry to form a background for his growing glory. Mrs. Fisher was of immense service to him at this period. She had set off so many newcomers on the social stage that she was like one of those pieces of stock scenery which tell the experienced spectator exactly what is going to take place. But Mr. Rosedale wanted, in the long run, a more individual environment. He was sensitive to shades of difference which Miss Bart would never have credited him with perceiving because he had no corresponding variations of manner; and it was becoming more and more clear to him that Miss Bart herself possessed precisely the complementary qualities needed to round off his social personality.

  Such details did not fall within the range of Mrs. Peniston’s vision. Like many minds of panoramic sweep, hers was apt to overlook the minutiae of the foreground, and she was much more likely to know where Carry Fisher had found the Welly Brys’ chef for them than what was happening to her own niece. She was not, however, without purveyors of information ready to supplement her deficiencies. Grace Stepney’s mind was like a kind of moral fly-paper, to which the buzzing items of gossip were drawn by a fatal attraction, and where they hung fast in the toils of an inexorable memory. Lily would have been surprised to know how many trivial facts concerning herself were lodged in Miss Stepney’s head. She was quite aware that she was of interest to dingy people, but she assumed that there is only one form of dinginess and that admiration for brilliancy is the natural expression of its inferior state. She knew that Gerty Farish admired her blindly, and therefore supposed that she inspired the same sentiments in Grace Stepney, whom she classified as a Gerty Farish without the saving traits of youth and enthusiasm.