Miss Bart had not revealed to Gerty the full extent of her anxiety. She was in fact in urgent and immediate need of money: money to meet the vulgar weekly claims which could neither be deferred nor evaded. To give up her apartment and shrink to the obscurity of a boarding-house or the provisional hospitality of a bed in Gerty Farish’s sitting-room was an expedient which could only postpone the problem confronting her; and it seemed wiser as well as more agreeable to remain where she was and find some means of earning her living. The possibility of having to do this was one which she had never before seriously considered, and the discovery that as a bread-winner she was likely to prove as helpless and ineffectual as poor Miss Silverton was a severe shock to her self-confidence.

  Having been accustomed to take herself at the popular valuation, as a person of energy and resource, naturally fitted to dominate any situation in which she found herself, she vaguely imagined that such gifts would be of value to seekers after social guidance; but there was unfortunately no specific head under which the art of saying and doing the right thing could be offered in the market, and even Mrs. Fisher’s resourcefulness failed before the difficulty of discovering a workable vein in the vague wealth of Lily’s graces. Mrs. Fisher was full of indirect expedients for enabling her friends to earn a living and could conscientiously assert that she had put several opportunities of this kind before Lily; but more legitimate methods of bread-winning were as much out of her line as they were beyond the capacity of the sufferers she was generally called upon to assist. Lily’s failure to profit by the chances already afforded her might, moreover, have justified the abandonment of farther effort on her behalf; but Mrs. Fisher’s inexhaustible good nature made her an adept at creating artificial demands in response to an actual supply. In the pursuance of this end she at once started on a voyage of discovery in Miss Bart’s behalf; and as the result of her explorations, she now summoned the latter with the announcement that she had “found something.”

  Left to herself, Gerty mused distressfully upon her friend’s plight and her own inability to relieve it. It was clear to her that Lily, for the present, had no wish for the kind of help she could give. Miss Farish could see no hope for her friend but in a life completely reorganized and detached from its old associations, whereas all Lily’s energies were centred in the determined effort to hold fast to those associations, to keep herself visibly identified with them, as long as the illusion could be maintained. Pitiable as such an attitude seemed to Gerty, she could not judge it as harshly as Selden, for instance, might have done. She had not forgotten the night of emotion when she and Lily had lain in each other’s arms and she had seemed to feel her very heart’s blood passing into her friend. The sacrifice she had made had seemed unavailing enough; no trace remained in Lily of the subduing influences of that hour; but Gerty’s tenderness, disciplined by long years of contact with obscure and inarticulate suffering, could wait on its object with a silent forbearance which took no account of time. She could not, however, deny herself the solace of taking anxious counsel with Lawrence Selden, with whom, since his return from Europe, she had renewed her old relation of cousinly confidence.

  Selden himself had never been aware of any change in their relation. He found Gerty as he had left her, simple, undemanding, and devoted, but with a quickened intelligence of the heart which he recognized without seeking to explain it. To Gerty herself, it would once have seemed impossible that she should ever again talk freely with him of Lily Bart; but what had passed in the secrecy of her own breast seemed to resolve itself, when the mist of the struggle cleared, into a breaking down of the bounds of self, a deflecting of the wasted personal emotion into the general current of human understanding.

  It was not till some two weeks after her visit from Lily that Gerty had the opportunity of communicating her fears to Selden. The latter, having presented himself on a Sunday afternoon, had lingered on through the dowdy animation of his cousin’s tea-hour, conscious of something in her voice and eye which solicited a word apart; and as soon as the last visitor was gone, Gerty opened her case by asking how lately he had seen Miss Bart.

  Selden’s perceptible pause gave her time for a slight stir of surprise.

  “I haven’t seen her at all; I’ve perpetually missed seeing her since she came back.”

  This unexpected admission made Gerty pause too, and she was still hesitating on the brink of her subject when he relieved her by adding: “I’ve wanted to see her, but she seems to have been absorbed by the Gormer set since her return from Europe.”

  “That’s all the more reason: she’s been very unhappy.”

  “Unhappy at being with the Gormers?”

  “Oh, I don’t defend her intimacy with the Gormers; but that too is at an end now, I think. You know people have been very unkind since Bertha Dorset quarrelled with her.”

  “Ah—” Selden exclaimed, rising abruptly to walk to the window, where he remained with his eyes on the darkening street while his cousin continued to explain: “Judy Trenor and her own family have deserted her too—and all because Bertha Dorset has said such horrible things. And she is very poor; you know Mrs. Peniston cut her off with a small legacy, after giving her to understand that she was to have everything.”

  “Yes, I know,” Selden assented curtly, turning back into the room, but only to stir about with restless steps in the circumscribed space between door and window. “Yes, she’s been abominably treated; but it’s unfortunately the precise thing that a man who wants to show his sympathy can’t say to her.”

  His words caused Gerty a slight chill of disappointment. “There would be other ways of showing your sympathy,” she suggested.

  Selden, with a slight laugh, sat down beside her on the little sofa which projected from the hearth. “What are you thinking of, you incorrigible missionary?” he asked.

  Gerty’s colour rose, and her blush was for a moment her only answer. Then she made it more explicit by saying: “I am thinking of the fact that you and she used to be great friends—that she used to care immensely for what you thought of her—and that if she takes your staying away as a sign of what you think now, I can imagine its adding a great deal to her unhappiness.”

  “My dear child, don’t add to it still more—at least to your conception of it—by attributing to her all sorts of susceptibilities of your own.” Selden, for his life, could not keep a note of dryness out of his voice; but he met Gerty’s look of perplexity by saying more mildly: “But though you immensely exaggerate the importance of anything I could do for Miss Bart, you can’t exaggerate my readiness to do it—if you ask me to.” He laid his hand for a moment on hers, and there passed between them, on the current of the rare contact, one of those exchanges of meaning which fill the hidden reservoirs of affection. Gerty had the feeling that he measured the cost of her request as plainly as she read the significance of his reply, and the sense of all that was suddenly clear between them made her next words easier to find.

  “I do ask you, then; I ask you because she once told me that you had been a help to her, and because she needs help now as she has never needed it before. You know how dependent she has always been on ease and luxury, how she has hated what was shabby and ugly and uncomfortable. She can’t help it; she was brought up with those ideas and has never been able to find her way out of them. But now all the things she cared for have been taken from her, and the people who taught her to care for them have abandoned her too; and it seems to me that if some one could reach out a hand and show her the other side, show her how much is left in life and in herself—” Gerty broke off, abashed at the sound of her own eloquence and impeded by the difficulty of giving precise expression to her vague yearning for her friend’s retrieval. “I can’t help her myself; she’s passed out of my reach,” she continued. “I think she’s afraid of being a burden to me. When she was last here, two weeks ago, she seemed dreadfully worried about her future; she said Carry Fisher was trying to find something for her to do. A few days later she wrote me that she had taken a position as private secretary and that I was not to be anxious, for everything was all right, and she would come in and tell me about it when she had time; but she has never come, and I don’t like to go to her because I am afraid of forcing myself on her when I’m not wanted. Once, when we were children, and I had rushed up after a long separation and thrown my arms about her, she said: ‘Please don’t kiss me unless I ask you to, Gerty’; and she did ask me, a minute later, but since then I’ve always waited to be asked.”

  Selden had listened in silence with the concentrated look which his thin, dark face could assume when he wished to guard it against any involuntary change of expression. When his cousin ended, he said with a slight smile: “Since you’ve learned the wisdom of waiting, I don’t see why you urge me to rush in”; but the troubled appeal of her eyes made him add, as he rose to take leave: “Still, I’ll do what you wish and not hold you responsible for my failure.”

  Selden’s avoidance of Miss Bart had not been as unintentional as he had allowed his cousin to think. At first, indeed, while the memory of their last hour at Monte Carlo still held the full heat of his indignation, he had anxiously watched for her return; but she had disappointed him by lingering in England, and when she finally reappeared it happened that business had called him to the West, whence he came back only to learn that she was starting for Alaska with the Gormers. The revelation of this suddenly established intimacy effectually chilled his desire to see her. If, at a moment when her whole life seemed to be breaking up, she could cheerfully commit its reconstruction to the Gormers, there was no reason why such accidents should ever strike her as irreparable. Every step she took seemed in fact to carry her farther from the region where, once or twice, he and she had met for an illumined moment; and the recognition of this fact, when its first pang had been surmounted, produced in him a sense of negative relief. It was much simpler for him to judge Miss Bart by her habitual conduct than by the rare deviations from it which had thrown her so disturbingly in his way; and every act of hers which made the recurrence of such deviations more unlikely confirmed the sense of relief with which he returned to the conventional view of her.

  But Gerty Farish’s words had sufficed to make him see how little this view was really his and how impossible it was for him to live quietly with the thought of Lily Bart. To hear that she was in need of help—even such vague help as he could offer—was to be at once repossessed by that thought; and by the time he reached the street he had sufficiently convinced himself of the urgency of his cousin’s appeal to turn his steps directly toward Lily’s hotel.

  There his zeal met a check in the unforeseen news that Miss Bart had moved away; but on his pressing his inquiries, the clerk remembered that she had left an address, for which he presently began to search through his books.

  It was certainly strange that she should have taken this step without letting Gerty Farish know of her decision, and Selden waited with a vague sense of uneasiness while the address was sought for. The process lasted long enough for uneasiness to turn to apprehension; but when at length a slip of paper was handed him and he read on it: “Care of Mrs. Norma Hatch, Emporium Hotel,” his apprehension passed into an incredulous stare, and this into the gesture of disgust with which he tore the paper in two and turned to walk quickly homeward.

  IX

  When Lily woke on the morning after her translation to the Emporium Hotel, her first feeling was one of purely physical satisfaction. The force of contrast gave an added keenness to the luxury of lying once more in a soft-pillowed bed and looking across a spacious sunlit room at a breakfast-table set invitingly near the fire. Analysis and introspection might come later, but for the moment she was not even troubled by the excesses of the upholstery or the restless convolutions of the furniture. The sense of being once more lapped and folded in ease, as in some dense mild medium impenetrable to discomfort, effectually stilled the faintest note of criticism.

  When, the afternoon before, she had presented herself to the lady to whom Carry Fisher had directed her, she had been conscious of entering a new world. Carry’s vague presentment of Mrs. Norma Hatch (whose reversion to her Christian name was explained as the result of her latest divorce) left her under the implication of coming “from the West,” with the not unusual extenuation of having brought a great deal of money with her. She was, in short, rich, helpless, unplaced: the very subject for Lily’s hand. Mrs. Fisher had not specified the line her friend was to take; she owned herself unacquainted with Mrs. Hatch, whom she “knew about” through Melville Stancy, a lawyer in his leisure moments and the Falstaff of a certain section of festive club life. Socially, Mr. Stancy might have been said to form a connecting link between the Gormer world and the more dimly lit region on which Miss Bart now found herself entering. It was, however, only figuratively that the illumination of Mrs. Hatch’s world could be described as dim; in actual fact, Lily found her seated in a blaze of electric light, impartially projected from various ornamental excrescences on a vast concavity of pink damask and gilding, from which she rose like Venus from her shell. The analogy was justified by the appearance of the lady, whose large-eyed prettiness had the fixity of something impaled and shown under glass. This did not preclude the immediate discovery that she was some years younger than her visitor and that under her showiness, her ease, the aggression of her dress and voice there persisted that ineradicable innocence which, in ladies of her nationality, so curiously coexists with startling extremes of experience.

  The environment in which Lily found herself was as strange to her as its inhabitants. She was unacquainted with the world of the fashionable New York hotel, a world over-heated, over-upholstered, and over-fitted with mechanical appliances for the gratification of fantastic requirements, while the comforts of a civilized life were as unattainable as in a desert. Through this atmosphere of torrid splendour moved wan beings as richly upholstered as the furniture, beings without definite pursuits or permanent relations, who drifted on a languid tide of curiosity from restaurant to concert-hall, from palm-garden to music-room, from “art exhibit” to dressmaker’s opening. High-stepping horses or elaborately equipped motors waited to carry these ladies into vague metropolitan distances, whence they returned, still more wan from the weight of their sables, to be sucked back into the stifling inertia of the hotel routine. Somewhere behind them, in the background of their lives, there was doubtless a real past, peopled by real human activities; they themselves were probably the product of strong ambitions, persistent energies, diversified contacts with the wholesome roughness of life; yet they had no more real existence than the poet’s shades in limbo.

  Lily had not been long in this pallid world without discovering that Mrs. Hatch was its most substantial figure. That lady, though still floating in the void, showed faint symptoms of developing an outline; and in this endeavour she was actively seconded by Mr. Melville Stancy. It was Mr. Stancy, a man of large, resounding presence, suggestive of convivial occasions and of a chivalry finding expression in “first-night” boxes and thousand-dollar bonbonnie‘res, who had transplanted Mrs. Hatch from the scene of her first development to the higher stage of hotel life in the metropolis. It was he who had selected the horses with which she had taken the blue ribbon at the show, had introduced her to the photographer whose portraits of her formed the recurring ornament of “Sunday Supplements,” and had got together the group which constituted her social world. It was a small group still, with heterogeneous figures suspended in large, unpeopled spaces; but Lily did not take long to learn that its regulation was no longer in Mr. Stancy’s hands. As often happens, the pupil had outstripped the teacher, and Mrs. Hatch was already aware of heights of elegance as well as depths of luxury beyond the world of the Emporium. This discovery at once produced in her a craving for higher guidance, for the adroit feminine hand which should give the right turn to her correspondence, the right “look” to her hats, the right succession to the items of her menus. It was, in short, as the regulator of a germinating social life that Miss Bart’s guidance was required, her ostensible duties as secretary being restricted by the fact that Mrs. Hatch, as yet, knew hardly any one to write to.

  The daily details of Mrs. Hatch’s existence were as strange to Lily as its general tenor. The lady’s habits were marked by an Oriental indolence and disorder peculiarly trying to her companion. Mrs. Hatch and her friends seemed to float together outside the bounds of time and space. No definite hours were kept; no fixed obligations existed: night and day flowed into one another in a blue of confused and retarded engagements so that one had the impression of lunching at the tea-hour, while dinner was often merged in the noisy after-theatre supper which prolonged Mrs. Hatch’s vigil till daylight.

  Through this jumble of futile activities came and went a strange throng of hangers-on—manicures, beauty-doctors, hair-dressers, teachers of bridge, of French, of “physical development”: figures sometimes indistinguishable by their appearance or by Mrs. Hatch’s relation to them from the visitors constituting her recognized society. But strangest of all to Lily was the encounter, in this latter group, of several of her acquaintances. She had supposed, and not without relief, that she was passing, for the moment, completely out of her own circle; but she found that Mr. Stancy, one side of whose sprawling existence overlapped the edge of Mrs. Fisher’s world, had drawn several of its brightest ornaments into the circle of the Emporium. To find Ned Silverton among the habitual frequenters of Mrs. Hatch’s drawing-room was one of Lily’s first astonishments, but she soon discovered that he was not Mr. Stancy’s most important recruit. It was on little Freddy Van Osburgh, the small slim heir of the Van Osburgh millions, that the attention of Mrs. Hatch’s group was centred. Freddy, barely out of college, had risen above the horizon since Lily’s eclipse, and she now saw with surprise what an effulgence he shed on the outer twilight of Mrs. Hatch’s existence. This, then, was one of the things that young men “went in” for when released from the official social routine; this was the kind of “previous engagement” that so frequently caused them to disappoint the hopes of anxious hostesses. Lily had an odd sense of being behind the social tapestry, on the side where the threads were knotted and the loose ends hung. For a moment she found a certain amusement in the show, and in her own share of it; the situation had an ease and unconventionality distinctly refreshing after her experience of the irony of conventions. But these flashes of amusement were but brief reactions from the long disgust of her days. Compared with the vast, gilded void of Mrs. Hatch’s existence, the life of Lily’s former friends seemed packed with ordered activities. Even the most irresponsible pretty woman of her acquaintance had her inherited obligations, her conventional benevolences, her share in the working of the great civic machine; and all hung together in the solidarity of these traditional functions. The performance of specific duties would have simplified Miss Bart’s position, but the vague attendance on Mrs. Hatch was not without its perplexities.