Carry, in her rare moments of prosperity, became so expansively maternal that Miss Bart sometimes wondered whether, if she could ever get time and money enough, she would not end by devoting them both to her daughter.

  “It’s a well-earned rest; I’ll say that for myself,” she continued, sinking down with a sigh of content on the pillowed lounge near the fire. “Louisa Bry is a stern task-master; I often used to wish myself back with the Gormers. Talk of love making people jealous and suspicious—it’s nothing to social ambition! Louisa used to lie awake at night wondering whether the women who called on us called on me because I was with her, or on her because she was with me; and she was always laying traps to find out what I thought. Of course I had to disown my oldest friends rather than let her suspect she owed me the chance of making a single acquaintance—when, all the while, that was what she had me there for and what she wrote me a handsome cheque for when the season was over!”

  Mrs. Fisher was not a woman who talked of herself without cause, and the practice of direct speech, far from precluding in her an occasional resort to circuitous methods, served rather, at crucial moments, the purpose of the juggler’s chatter while he shifts the contents of his sleeves. Through the haze of her cigarette smoke she continued to gaze meditatively at Miss Bart, who, having dismissed her maid, sat before the toilet-table shaking out over her shoulders the loosened undulations of her hair.

  “Your hair’s wonderful, Lily. Thinner—? What does that matter when it’s so light and alive? So many women’s worries seem to go straight to their hair, but yours looks as if there had never been an anxious thought under it. I never saw you look better than you did this evening. Mattie Gormer told me that Morpeth wanted to paint you; why don’t you let him?”

  Miss Bart’s immediate answer was to address a critical glance to the reflection of the countenance under discussion. Then she said with a slight touch of irritation: “I don’t care to accept a portrait from Paul Morpeth.”

  Mrs. Fisher mused. “N—no. And just now, especially—well, he can do you after you’re married.” She waited a moment, and then went on: “By the way, I had a visit from Mattie the other day. She turned up here last Sunday, and with Bertha Dorset, of all people in the world!”

  She paused again to measure the effect of this announcement on her hearer, but the brush in Miss Bart’s lifted hand maintained its unwavering stroke from brow to nape.

  “I never was more astonished,” Mrs. Fisher pursued. “I don’t know two women less predestined to intimacy—from Bertha’s standpoint, that is; for of course poor Mattie thinks it natural enough that she should be singled out; I’ve no doubt the rabbit always thinks it is fascinating the anaconda. Well, you know I’ve always told you that Mattie secretly longed to bore herself with the really fashionable; and now that the chance has come, I see that she’s capable of sacrificing all her old friends to it.”

  Lily laid aside her brush and turned a penetrating glance upon her friend. “Including me?” she suggested.

  “Ah, my dear,” murmured Mrs. Fisher, rising to push back a log from the hearth.

  “That’s what Bertha means, isn’t it?” Miss Bart went on steadily. “For of course she always means something; and before I left Long Island I saw that she was beginning to lay her toils for Mattie.”

  Mrs. Fisher sighed evasively. “She has her fast now, at any rate. To think of that loud independence of Mattie’s being only a subtler form of snobbishness! Bertha can already make her believe anything she pleases; and I’m afraid she’s begun, my poor child, by insinuating horrors about you.”

  Lily flushed under the shadow of her drooping hair. “The world is too vile,” she murmured, averting herself from Mrs. Fisher’s anxious scrutiny.

  “It’s not a pretty place; and the only way to keep a footing in it is to fight it on its own terms—and above all, my dear, not alone!” Mrs. Fisher gathered up her floating implications in a resolute grasp. “You’ve told me so little that I can only guess what has been happening; but in the rush we all live in, there’s no time to keep on hating any one without a cause, and if Bertha is still nasty enough to want to injure you with other people, it must be because she’s still afraid of you. From her standpoint there’s only one reason for being afraid of you; and my own idea is that if you want to punish her, you hold the means in your hand. I believe you can marry George Dorset to-morrow; but if you don’t care for that particular form of retaliation, the only thing to save you from Bertha is to marry somebody else.”

  VII

  The light projected on the situation by Mrs. Fisher had the cheerless distinctness of a winter dawn. It outlined the facts with a cold precision unmodified by shade or colour, and refracted, as it were, from the blank walls of the surrounding limitations: she had opened windows from which no sky was ever visible. But the idealist subdued to vulgar necessities must employ vulgar minds to draw the inferences to which he cannot stoop; and it was easier for Lily to let Mrs. Fisher formulate her case than to put it plainly to herself. Once confronted with it, however, she went the full length of its consequences; and these had never been more clearly present to her than when, the next afternoon, she set out for a walk with Rosedale.

  It was one of those still November days when the air is haunted with the light of summer, and something in the lines of the landscape and in the golden haze which bathed them recalled to Miss Bart the September afternoon when she had climbed the slopes of Bellomont with Selden. The importunate memory was kept before her by its ironic contrast to her present situation, since her walk with Selden had represented an irresistible flight from just such a climax as the present excursion was designed to bring about. But other memories importuned her also; the recollection of similar situations, as skilfully led up to, but through some malice of fortune, or her own unsteadiness of purpose, always failing of the intended result. Well, her purpose was steady enough now. She saw that the whole weary work of rehabilitation must begin again, and against far greater odds if Bertha Dorset should succeed in breaking up her friendship with the Gormers; and her longing for shelter and security was intensified by the passionate desire to triumph over Bertha, as only wealth and predominance could triumph over her. As the wife of Rosedale—the Rosedale she felt it in her power to create—she would at least present an invulnerable front to her enemy.

  She had to draw upon this thought, as upon some fiery stimulant, to keep up her part in the scene toward which Rosedale was too frankly tending. As she walked beside him, shrinking in every nerve from the way in which his look and tone made free of her, yet telling herself that this momentary endurance of his mood was the price she must pay for her ultimate power over him, she tried to calculate the exact point at which concession must turn to resistance, and the price he would have to pay be made equally clear to him. But his dapper self-confidence seemed impenetrable to such hints, and she had a sense of something hard and self-contained behind the superficial warmth of his manner.

  They had been seated for some time in the seclusion of a rocky glen above the lake when she suddenly cut short the culmination of an impassioned period by turning upon him the grave loveliness of her gaze.

  “I do believe what you say, Mr. Rosedale,” she said quietly; “and I am ready to marry you whenever you wish.”

  Rosedale, reddening to the roots of his glossy hair, received this announcement with a recoil which carried him to his feet, where he halted before her in an attitude of almost comic discomfiture.

  “For I suppose that is what you do wish,” she continued in the same quiet tone. “And though I was unable to consent when you spoke to me in this way before, I am ready, now that I know you so much better, to trust my happiness to your hands.”

  She spoke with the noble directness which she could command on such occasions, and which was like a large, steady light thrown across the tortuous darkness of the situation. In its inconvenient brightness Rosedale seemed to waver a moment, as though conscious that every avenue of escape was unpleasantly illuminated.

  Then he gave a short laugh, and drew out a gold cigarette-case, in which, with plump jewelled fingers, he groped for a gold-tipped cigarette. Selecting one, he paused to contemplate it a moment before saying: “My dear Miss Lily, I’m sorry if there’s been any little misapprehension between us—but you made me feel my suit was so hopeless that I had really no intention of renewing it.”

  Lily’s blood tingled with the grossness of the rebuff; but she checked the first leap of her anger and said in a tone of gentle dignity: “I have no one but myself to blame if I gave you the impression that my decision was final.”

  Her word-play was always too quick for him, and this reply held him in puzzled silence while she extended her hand and added, with the faintest inflection of sadness in her voice: “Before we bid each other good-bye, I want at least to thank you for having once thought of me as you did.”

  The touch of her hand, the moving softness of her look, thrilled a vulnerable fibre in Rosedale. It was her exquisite inaccessibleness, the sense of distance she could convey without a hint of disdain, that made it most difficult for him to give her up.

  “Why do you talk of saying good-bye? Ain’t we going to be good friends all the same?” he urged without releasing her hand.

  She drew it away quietly. “What is your idea of being good friends?” she returned with a slight smile. “Making love to me without asking me to marry you?”

  Rosedale laughed with a recovered sense of ease. “Well, that’s about the size of it, I suppose. I can’t help making love to you—I don’t see how any man could; but I don’t mean to ask you to marry me as long as I can keep out of it.”

  She continued to smile. “I like your frankness, but I am afraid our friendship can hardly continue on those terms.”

  She turned away as though to mark that its final term had in fact been reached, and he followed her for a few steps with a baffled sense of her having after all kept the game in her own hands.

  “Miss Lily—” he began impulsively, but she walked on without seeming to hear him.

  He overtook her in a few quick strides and laid an entreating hand on her arm. “Miss Lily, don’t hurry away like that. You’re beastly hard on a fellow; but if you don’t mind speaking the truth, I don’t see why you shouldn’t allow me to do the same.”

  She had paused a moment with raised brows, drawing away instinctively from his touch, though she made no effort to evade his words.

  “I was under the impression,” she rejoined, “that you had done so without waiting for my permission.”

  “Well—why shouldn’t you hear my reasons for doing it, then? We’re neither of us such new hands that a little plain speaking is going to hurt us. I’m all broken up on you; there’s nothing new in that. I’m more in love with you than I was this time last year; but I’ve got to face the fact that the situation is changed.”

  She continued to confront him with the same air of ironic composure. “You mean to say that I’m not as desirable a match as you thought me?”

  “Yes, that’s what I do mean,” he answered resolutely. “I won’t go into what’s happened. I don’t believe the stories about you; I don’t want to believe them. But they’re there, and my not believing them ain’t going to alter the situation.”

  She flushed to her temples, but the extremity of her need checked the retort on her lip, and she continued to face him composedly. “If they are not true,” she said, “doesn’t that alter the situation?”

  He met this with a steady gaze of his small, stock-taking eyes, which made her feel herself no more than some super-fine human merchandise. “I believe it does in novels, but I’m certain it don’t in real life. You know that as well as I do; if we’re speaking the truth, let’s speak the whole truth. Last year I was wild to marry you, and you wouldn’t look at me; this year—well, you appear to be willing. Now, what has changed in the interval? Your situation, that’s all. Then you thought you could do better; now—”

  “You think you can?” broke from her ironically.

  “Why, yes, I do; in one way, that is.” He stood before her, his hands in his pockets, his chest sturdily expanded under its vivid waistcoat. “It’s this way, you see. I’ve had a pretty steady grind of it these last years, working up my social position. Think it’s funny I should say that? Why should I mind saying I want to get into society? A man ain’t ashamed to say he wants to own a racing stable or a picture gallery. Well, a taste for society’s just another kind of hobby. Perhaps I want to get even with some of the people who cold-shouldered me last year—put it that way if it sounds better. Anyhow, I want to have the run of the best houses; and I’m getting it too, little by little. But I know the quickest way to queer yourself with the right people is to be seen with the wrong ones, and that’s the reason I want to avoid mistakes.”

  Miss Bart continued to stand before him in a silence that might have expressed either mockery or a half-reluctant respect for his candour, and after a moment’s pause he went on: “There it is, you see. I’m more in love with you than ever, but if I married you now I’d queer myself for good and all, and everything I’ve worked for all these years would be wasted.”

  She received this with a look from which all tinge of resentment had faded. After the tissue of social falsehoods in which she had so long moved, it was refreshing to step into the open daylight of an avowed expediency.

  “I understand you,” she said. “A year ago I should have been of use to you, and now I should be an encumbrance; and I like you for telling me so quite honestly.” She extended her hand with a smile.

  Again the gesture had a disturbing effect upon Mr. Rosedale’s self-command. “By George, you’re a dead game sport, you are!” he exclaimed; and as she began once more to move away, he broke out suddenly: “Miss Lily—stop. You know I don’t believe those stories. I believe they were all got up by a woman who didn’t hesitate to sacrifice you to her own convenience—”

  Lily drew away with a movement of quick disdain; it was easier to endure his insolence than his commiseration.

  “You are very kind, but I don’t think we need discuss the matter farther.”

  But Rosedale’s natural imperviousness to hints made it easy for him to brush such resistance aside. “I don’t want to discuss anything; I just want to put a plain case before you,” he persisted.

  She paused in spite of herself, held by the note of a new purpose in his look and tone; and he went on, keeping his eyes firmly upon her: “The wonder to me is that you’ve waited so long to get square with that woman, when you’ve had the power in your hands.” She continued silent under the rush of astonishment that his words produced, and he moved a step closer to ask with low-toned directness: “Why don’t you use those letters of hers you bought last year?”

  Lily stood speechless under the shock of the interrogation. In the words preceding it she had conjectured, at most, an allusion to her supposed influence over George Dorset; nor did the astonishing indelicacy of the reference diminish the likelihood of Rosedale’s resorting to it. But now she saw how far short of the mark she had fallen; and the surprise of learning that he had discovered the secret of the letters left her, for the moment, unconscious of the special use to which he was in the act of putting his knowledge.

  Her temporary loss of self-possession gave him time to press his point; and he went on quickly, as though to secure completer control of the situation: “You see, I know where you stand—I know how completely she’s in your power. That sounds like stage-talk, don’t it? But there’s a lot of truth in some of those old gags, and I don’t suppose you bought those letters simply because you’re collecting autographs.”

  She continued to look at him with a deepening bewilderment; her only clear impression resolved itself into a scared sense of his power.

  “You’re wondering how I found out about ’em?” he went on, answering her look with a note of conscious pride. “Perhaps you’ve forgotten that I’m the owner of the Benedick; but never mind about that now. Getting on to things is a mighty useful accomplishment in business, and I’ve simply extended it to my private affairs. For this is partly my affair, you see; at least, it depends on you to make it so. Let’s look the situation straight in the eye. Mrs. Dorset, for reasons we needn’t go into, did you a beastly bad turn last spring. Everybody knows what Mrs. Dorset is, and her best friends wouldn’t believe her on oath where their own interests were concerned; but as long as they’re out of the row, it’s much easier to follow her lead than to set themselves against it, and you’ve simply been sacrificed to their laziness and selfishness. Isn’t that a pretty fair statement of the case? Well, some people say you’ve got the neatest kind of an answer in your hands: that George Dorset would marry you to-morrow if you’d tell him all you know and give him the chance to show the lady the door. I daresay he would; but you don’t seem to care for that particular form of getting even, and taking a purely business view of the question, I think you’re right. In a deal like that, nobody comes out with perfectly clean hands, and the only way for you to start fresh is to get Bertha Dorset to back you up instead of trying to fight her.”

  He paused long enough to draw breath, but not to give her time for the expression of her gathering resistance; and as he pressed on, expounding and elucidating his idea with the directness of the man who has no doubts of his cause, she found the indignation gradually freezing on her lip, found herself held fast in the grasp of his argument by the mere cold strength of its presentation. There was no time now to wonder how he had heard of her obtaining the letters; all her world was dark outside the monstrous glare of his scheme for using them. And it was not, after the first moment, the horror of the idea that held her spell-bound, subdued to his will; it was rather its subtle affinity to her own inmost cravings. He would marry her to-morrow if she could regain Bertha Dorset’s friendship; and to induce the open resumption of that friendship and the tacit retractation of all that had caused its withdrawal, she had only to put to the lady the latent menace contained in the packet so miraculously delivered into her hands. Lily saw in a flash the advantage of this course over that which poor Dorset had pressed upon her. The other plan depended for its success on the infliction of an open injury, while this reduced the transaction to a private understanding, of which no third person need have the remotest hint. Put by Rosedale in terms of business-like give-and-take, this understanding took on the harmless air of a mutual accommodation, like a transfer of property or a revision of boundary lines. It certainly simplified life to view it as a perpetual adjustment, a play of party politics, in which every concession had its recognized equivalent; Lily’s tired mind was fascinated by this escape from fluctuating ethical estimates into a region of concrete weights and measures.