George Dorset's talk did not interfere with the range of his
neighbour's thoughts. He was a mournful dyspeptic, intent on
finding out the deleterious ingredients of every dish and
diverted from this care only by the sound of his wife's voice. On
this occasion, however, Mrs. Dorset took no part in the general
conversation. She sat talking in low murmurs with Selden, and
turning a contemptuous and denuded shoulder toward her host, who,
far from resenting his exclusion, plunged into the excesses of
the MENU with the joyous irresponsibility of a free man. To Mr.
Dorset, however, his wife's attitude was a subject of such
evident concern that, when he was not scraping the sauce from his
fish, or scooping the moist bread-crumbs from the interior of his
roll, he sat straining his thin neck for a glimpse of her between
the lights.
Mrs. Trenor, as it chanced, had placed the husband and wife on
opposite sides of the table, and Lily was therefore able to
observe Mrs. Dorset also, and by carrying her glance a few feet
farther, to set up a rapid comparison between Lawrence Selden and
Mr. Gryce. It was that comparison which was her undoing. Why else
had she suddenly grown interested in Selden? She had known him
for eight years or more: ever since her return to America he had
formed a part of her background. She had always been glad to sit
next to him at dinner, had found him more agreeable than most
men, and had vaguely wished that he possessed the other qualities
needful to fix her attention; but till now she had been too busy
with her own affairs to regard him as more than one of the
pleasant accessories of life. Miss Bart was a keen reader of her
own heart, and she saw that her sudden preoccupation with Selden
was due to the fact that his presence shed a new light on her
surroundings. Not that he was notably brilliant or exceptional;
in his own profession he was surpassed by more than one man who
had bored Lily through many a weary dinner. It was rather that he
had preserved a certain social detachment, a happy air of viewing
the show objectively, of having points of contact outside the
great gilt cage in which they were all huddled for the mob to
gape at. How alluring the world outside the cage appeared
to Lily, as she heard its door clang on her! In reality, as she
knew, the door never clanged: it stood always open; but most of
the captives were like flies in a bottle, and having once flown
in, could never regain their freedom. It was Selden's distinction
that he had never forgotten the way out.
That was the secret of his way of readjusting her vision. Lily,
turning her eyes from him, found herself scanning her little
world through his retina: it was as though the pink lamps had
been shut off and the dusty daylight let in. She looked down the
long table, studying its occupants one by one, from Gus Trenor,
with his heavy carnivorous head sunk between his shoulders, as he
preyed on a jellied plover, to his wife, at the opposite end of
the long bank of orchids, suggestive, with her glaring
good-looks, of a jeweller's window lit by electricity. And
between the two, what a long stretch of vacuity! How dreary and
trivial these people were! Lily reviewed them with a scornful
impatience: Carry Fisher, with her shoulders, her eyes, her
divorces, her general air of embodying a "spicy paragraph"; young
Silverton, who had meant to live on proof-reading and write an
epic, and who now lived on his friends and had become critical of
truffles; Alice Wetherall, an animated visiting-list, whose most
fervid convictions turned on the wording of invitations and the
engraving of dinner-cards; Wetherall, with his perpetual nervous
nod of acquiescence, his air of agreeing with people before he
knew what they were saying; Jack Stepney, with his confident
smile and anxious eyes, half way between the sheriff and an
heiress; Gwen Van Osburgh, with all the guileless confidence of a
young girl who has always been told that there is no one richer
than her father.
Lily smiled at her classification of her friends. How different
they had seemed to her a few hours ago! Then they had symbolized
what she was gaining, now they stood for what she was giving up.
That very afternoon they had seemed full of brilliant qualities;
now she saw that they were merely dull in a loud way. Under the
glitter of their opportunities she saw the poverty of their
achievement. It was not that she wanted them to be more
disinterested; but she would have liked them to be more
picturesque. And she had a shamed recollection of the way
in which, a few hours since, she had felt the centripetal force
of their standards. She closed her eyes an instant, and the
vacuous routine of the life she had chosen stretched before her
like a long white road without dip or turning: it was true she
was to roll over it in a carriage instead of trudging it on foot,
but sometimes the pedestrian enjoys the diversion of a short cut
which is denied to those on wheels.
She was roused by a chuckle which Mr. Dorset seemed to eject from
the depths of his lean throat.
"I say, do look at her," he exclaimed, turning to Miss Bart with
lugubrious merriment--"I beg your pardon, but do just look at my
wife making a fool of that poor devil over there! One would
really suppose she was gone on him--and it's all the other way
round, I assure you."
Thus adjured, Lily turned her eyes on the spectacle which was
affording Mr. Dorset such legitimate mirth. It certainly
appeared, as he said, that Mrs. Dorset was the more active
participant in the scene: her neighbour seemed to receive her
advances with a temperate zest which did not distract him from
his dinner. The sight restored Lily's good humour, and knowing
the peculiar disguise which Mr. Dorset's marital fears assumed,
she asked gaily: "Aren't you horribly jealous of her?"
Dorset greeted the sally with delight. "Oh, abominably--you've
just hit it--keeps me awake at night. The doctors tell me that's
what has knocked my digestion out--being so infernally jealous of
her.--I can't eat a mouthful of this stuff, you know," he added
suddenly, pushing back his plate with a clouded countenance; and
Lily, unfailingly adaptable, accorded her radiant attention to
his prolonged denunciation of other people's cooks, with a
supplementary tirade on the toxic qualities of melted butter.
It was not often that he found so ready an ear; and, being a man
as well as a dyspeptic, it may be that as he poured his
grievances into it he was not insensible to its rosy symmetry. At
any rate he engaged Lily so long that the sweets were being
handed when she caught a phrase on her other side, where Miss
Corby, the comic woman of the company, was bantering Jack Stepney
on his approaching engagement. Miss Corby's role was
jocularity: she always entered the conversation with a
handspring.
"And of course you'll have Sim Rosedale as best man!" Lily heard
her fling out as the climax of her prognostications; and Stepney
responded, as if struck: "Jove, that's an idea. What a thumping
present I'd get out of him!"
SIM ROSEDALE! The name, made more odious by its diminutive,
obtruded itself on Lily's thoughts like a leer. It stood for one
of the many hated possibilities hovering on the edge of life. If
she did not marry Percy Gryce, the day might come when she would
have to be civil to such men as Rosedale. IF SHE DID NOT MARRY
HIM? But she meant to marry him--she was sure of him and sure of
herself. She drew back with a shiver from the pleasant paths in
which her thoughts had been straying, and set her feet once more
in the middle of the long white road.... When she went upstairs
that night she found that the late post had brought her a fresh
batch of bills. Mrs. Peniston, who was a conscientious woman, had
forwarded them all to Bellomont.
Miss Bart, accordingly, rose the next morning with the most
earnest conviction that it was her duty to go to church. She tore
herself betimes from the lingering enjoyment of her
breakfast-tray, rang to have her grey gown laid out, and
despatched her maid to borrow a prayer-book from Mrs. Trenor.
But her course was too purely reasonable not to contain the germs
of rebellion. No sooner were her preparations made than they
roused a smothered sense of resistance. A small spark was enough
to kindle Lily's imagination, and the sight of the grey dress and
the borrowed prayer-book flashed a long light down the years. She
would have to go to church with Percy Gryce every Sunday. They
would have a front pew in the most expensive church in New York,
and his name would figure handsomely in the list of parish
charities. In a few years, when he grew stouter, he would be made
a warden. Once in the winter the rector would come to dine, and
her husband would beg her to go over the list and see that no
DIVORCEES were included, except those who had showed signs of
penitence by being re-married to the very wealthy. There was
nothing especially arduous in this round of relgious
obligations; but it stood for a fraction of that great bulk of
boredom which loomed across her path. And who could consent to be
bored on such a morning? Lily had slept well, and her bath had
filled her with a pleasant glow, which was becomingly reflected
in the clear curve of her cheek. No lines were visible this
morning, or else the glass was at a happier angle.
And the day was the accomplice of her mood: it was a day for
impulse and truancy. The light air seemed full of powdered gold;
below the dewy bloom of the lawns the woodlands blushed and
smouldered, and the hills across the river swam in molten blue.
Every drop of blood in Lily's veins invited her to happiness.
The sound of wheels roused her from these musings, and leaning
behind her shutters she saw the omnibus take up its freight. She
was too late, then--but the fact did not alarm her. A glimpse of
Mr. Gryce's crestfallen face even suggested that she had done
wisely in absenting herself, since the disappointment he so
candidly betrayed would surely whet his appetite for the
afternoon walk. That walk she did not mean to miss; one glance at
the bills on her writing-table was enough to recall its
necessity. But meanwhile she had the morning to herself, and
could muse pleasantly on the disposal of its hours. She was
familiar enough with the habits of Bellomont to know that she was
likely to have a free field till luncheon. She had seen the
Wetheralls, the Trenor girls and Lady Cressida packed safely into
the omnibus; Judy Trenor was sure to be having her hair
shampooed; Carry Fisher had doubtless carried off her host for a
drive; Ned Silverton was probably smoking the cigarette of young
despair in his bedroom; and Kate Corby was certain to be playing
tennis with Jack Stepney and Miss Van Osburgh. Of the ladies,
this left only Mrs. Dorset unaccounted for, and Mrs. Dorset never
came down till luncheon: her doctors, she averred, had forbidden
her to expose herself to the crude air of the morning.
To the remaining members of the party Lily gave no special
thought; wherever they were, they were not likely to interfere
with her plans. These, for the moment, took the shape of assuming
a dress somewhat more rustic and summerlike in style than the
garment she had first selected, and rustling downstairs,
sunshade in hand, with the disengaged air of a lady in quest of
exercise. The great hall was empty but for the knot of dogs by
the fire, who, taking in at a glance the outdoor aspect of Miss
Bart, were upon her at once with lavish offers of companionship.
She put aside the ramming paws which conveyed these offers, and
assuring the joyous volunteers that she might presently have a
use for their company, sauntered on through the empty
drawing-room to the library at the end of the house. The library
was almost the only surviving portion of the old manor-house of
Bellomont: a long spacious room, revealing the traditions of the
mother-country in its classically-cased doors, the Dutch tiles of
the chimney, and the elaborate hob-grate with its shining brass
urns. A few family portraits of lantern-jawed gentlemen in
tie-wigs, and ladies with large head-dresses and small bodies,
hung between the shelves lined with pleasantly-shabby books:
books mostly contemporaneous with the ancestors in question, and
to which the subsequent Trenors had made no perceptible
additions. The library at Bellomont was in fact never used for
reading, though it had a certain popularity as a smoking-room or
a quiet retreat for flirtation. It had occurred to Lily, however,
that it might on this occasion have been resorted to by the only
member of the party in the least likely to put it to its original
use. She advanced noiselessly over the dense old rug scattered
with easy-chairs, and before she reached the middle of the room
she saw that she had not been mistaken. Lawrence Selden was in
fact seated at its farther end; but though a book lay on his
knee, his attention was not engaged with it, but directed to a
lady whose lace-dad figure, as she leaned back in an adjoining
chair, detached itself with exaggerated slimness against the
dusky leather upholstery.
Lily paused as she caught sight of the group; for a moment she
seemed about to withdraw, but thinking better of this, she
announced her approach by a slight shake of her skirts which made
the couple raise their heads, Mrs. Dorset with a look of frank
displeasure, and Selden with his usual quiet smile. The sight of
his composure had a disturbing effect on Lily; but to be
disturbed was in her case to make a more brilliant effort at
self-possession.
"Dear me, am I late?" she asked, putting a hand in his as he
advanced to greet her.
"Late for what?" enquired Mrs. Dorset tartly. "Not for luncheon,
certainly--but perhaps you had an earlier engagement?"
"Yes, I had," said Lily confidingly.
"Really? Perhaps I am in the way, then? But Mr. Selden is
entirely at your disposal." Mrs. Dorset was pale with temper, and
her antagonist felt a certain pleasure in prolonging her
distress.
"Oh, dear, no--do stay," she said good-humouredly. "I don't in
the least want to drive you away."
"You're awfully good, dear, but I never interfere with Mr.
Selden's engagements."
The remark was uttered with a little air of proprietorship not
lost on its object, who concealed a faint blush of annoyance by
stooping to pick up the book he had dropped at Lily's approach.
The latter's eyes widened charmingly and she broke into a light
laugh.
"But I have no engagement with Mr. Selden! My engagement was to
go to church; and I'm afraid the omnibus has started without me.
HAS it started, do you know?"
She turned to Selden, who replied that he had heard it drive away
some time since.
"Ah, then I shall have to walk; I promised Hilda and Muriel to go
to church with them. It's too late to walk there, you say? Well,
I shall have the credit of trying, at any rate--and the advantage
of escaping part of the service. I'm not so sorry for myself,
after all!"
And with a bright nod to the couple on whom she had intruded,
Miss Bart strolled through the glass doors and carried her
rustling grace down the long perspective of the garden walk.
She was taking her way churchward, but at no very quick pace; a
fact not lost on one of her observers, who stood in the doorway
looking after her with an air of puzzled amusement. The truth is
that she was conscious of a somewhat keen shock of
disappointment. All her plans for the day had been built on the
assumption that it was to see her that Selden had come to
Bellomont. She had expected, when she came down
stairs, to
find him on the watch for her; and she had found him, instead, in
a situation which might well denote that he had been on the watch
for another lady. Was it possible, after all, that he had come
for Bertha Dorset? The latter had acted on the assumption to the
extent of appearing at an hour when she never showed herself to
ordinary mortals, and Lily, for the moment, saw no way of putting
her in the wrong. It did not occur to her that Selden might have
been actuated merely by the desire to spend a Sunday out of town:
women never learn to dispense with the sentimental motive in
their judgments of men. But Lily was not easily disconcerted;
competition put her on her mettle, and she reflected that
Selden's coming, if it did not declare him to be still in Mrs.
Dorset's toils, showed him to be so completely free from them
that he was not afraid of her proximity.
