These thoughts so engaged her that she fell into a gait hardly
likely to carry her to church before the sermon, and at length,
having passed from the gardens to the wood-path beyond, so far
forgot her intention as to sink into a rustic seat at a bend of
the walk. The spot was charming, and Lily was not insensible to
the charm, or to the fact that her presence enhanced it; but she
was not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in
company, and the combination of a handsome girl and a romantic
scene struck her as too good to be wasted. No one, however,
appeared to profit by the opportunity; and after a half hour of
fruitless waiting she rose and wandered on. She felt a stealing
sense of fatigue as she walked; the sparkle had died out of her,
and the taste of life was stale on her lips. She hardly knew what
she had been seeking, or why the failure to find it had so
blotted the light from her sky: she was only aware of a vague
sense of failure, of an inner isolation deeper than the
loneliness about her.
Her footsteps flagged, and she stood gazing listlessly ahead,
digging the ferny edge of the path with the tip of her sunshade.
As she did so a step sounded behind her, and she saw Selden at
her side.
"How fast you walk!" he remarked. "I thought I should never catch
up with you."
She answered gaily: "You must be quite breathless! I've been
sitting under that tree for an hour."
"Waiting for me, I hope?" he rejoined; and she said with a vague
laugh:
"Well--waiting to see if you would come."
"I seize the distinction, but I don't mind it, since doing the
one involved doing the other. But weren't you sure that I should
come?"
"If I waited long enough--but you see I had only a limited time
to give to the experiment."
"Why limited? Limited by luncheon?"
"No; by my other engagement."
"Your engagement to go to church with Muriel and Hilda?"
"No; but to come home from church with another person."
"Ah, I see; I might have known you were fully provided with
alternatives. And is the other person coming home this way?"
Lily laughed again. "That's just what I don't know; and to find
out, it is my business to get to church before the service is
over."
"Exactly; and it is my business to prevent your doing so; in
which case the other person, piqued by your absence, will form
the desperate resolve of driving back in the omnibus."
Lily received this with fresh appreciation; his nonsense was like
the bubbling of her inner mood. "Is that what you would do in
such an emergency?" she enquired.
Selden looked at her with solemnity. "I am here to prove to you,"
he cried, "what I am capable of doing in an emergency!"
"Walking a mile in an hour--you must own that the omnibus would
be quicker!"
"Ah--but will he find you in the end? That's the only test of
success."
They looked at each other with the same luxury of enjoyment that
they had felt in exchanging absurdities over his tea-table; but
suddenly Lily's face changed, and she said: "Well, if it is, he
has succeeded."
Selden, following her glance, perceived a party of people
advancing toward them from the farther bend of the path. Lady
Cressida had evidently insisted on walking home, and the rest of
the church-goers had thought it their duty to accompany
her. Lily's companion looked rapidly from one to the other of the
two men of the party; Wetherall walking respectfully at Lady
Cressida's side with his little sidelong look of nervous
attention, and Percy Gryce bringing up the rear with Mrs.
Wetherall and the Trenors.
"Ah--now I see why you were getting up your Americana!" Selden
exclaimed with a note of the freest admiration but the blush with
which the sally was received checked whatever amplifications he
had meant to give it.
That Lily Bart should object to being bantered about her suitors,
or even about her means of attracting them, was so new to Selden
that he had a momentary flash of surprise, which lit up a number
of possibilities; but she rose gallantly to the defence of her
confusion, by saying, as its object approached: "That was why I
was waiting for you--to thank you for having given me so many
points!"
"Ah, you can hardly do justice to the subject in such a short
time," said Selden, as the Trenor girls caught sight of Miss
Bart; and while she signalled a response to their boisterous
greeting, he added quickly: "Won't you devote your afternoon to
it? You know I must be off tomorrow morning. We'll take a walk,
and you can thank me at your leisure."
The afternoon was perfect. A deeper stillness possessed the air,
and the glitter of the American autumn was tempered by a haze
which diffused the brightness without dulling it.
In the woody hollows of the park there was already a faint chill;
but as the ground rose the air grew lighter, and ascending the
long slopes beyond the high-road, Lily and her companion reached
a zone of lingering summer. The path wound across a meadow with
scattered trees; then it dipped into a lane plumed with asters
and purpling sprays of bramble, whence, through the light quiver
of ash-leaves, the country unrolled itself in pastoral distances.
Higher up, the lane showed thickening tufts of fern and of the
creeping glossy verdure of shaded slopes; trees began to overhang
it, and the shade deepened to the checkered dusk of a
beech-grove. The boles of the trees stood well apart, with only a
light feathering of undergrowth; the path wound along the edge of
the wood, now and then looking out on a sunlit pasture or on an
orchard spangled with fruit.
Lily had no real intimacy with nature, but she had a passion for
the appropriate and could be keenly sensitive to a scene which
was the fitting background of her own sensations. The landscape
outspread below her seemed an enlargement of her present mood,
and she found something of herself in its calmness, its breadth,
its long free reaches. On the nearer slopes the sugar-maples
wavered like pyres of light; lower down was a massing of grey
orchards, and here and there the lingering green of an oak-grove.
Two or three red farm-houses dozed under the apple-trees, and the
white wooden spire of a village church showed beyond the shoulder
of the hill; while far below, in a haze of dust, the high-road
ran between the fields.
"Let us sit here," Selden suggested, as they reached an open
ledge of rock above which the beeches rose steeply between mossy
boulders.
Lily dropped down on the rock, glowing with her long climb. She
sat quiet, her lips parted by the stress of the ascent,
her eyes wandering peacefully over the broken ranges of the
landscape. Selden stretched himself on the grass at her feet,
tilting his hat against the level sun-rays, and clasping his
hands behind his head, which rested against the side of the rock.
He had no wish to make her talk; her quick-breathing silence
seemed a part of the general hush and harmony of things. In his
own mind there was only a lazy sense of pleasure, veiling the
sharp edges of sensation as the September haze veiled the scene
at their feet. But Lily, though her attitude was as calm as his,
was throbbing inwardly with a rush of thoughts. There were in her
at the moment two beings, one drawing deep breaths of freedom and
exhilaration, the other gasping for air in a little black
prison-house of fears. But gradually the captive's gasps grew
fainter, or the other paid less heed to them: the horizon
expanded, the air grew stronger, and the free spirit quivered for
flight.
She could not herself have explained the sense of buoyancy which
seemed to lift and swing her above the sun-suffused world at her
feet. Was it love, she wondered, or a mere fortuitous combination
of happy thoughts and sensations? How much of it was owing to the
spell of the perfect afternoon, the scent of the fading woods,
the thought of the dulness she had fled from? Lily had no
definite experience by which to test the quality of her feelings.
She had several times been in love with fortunes or careers, but
only once with a man. That was years ago, when she first came
out, and had been smitten with a romantic passion for a young
gentleman named Herbert Melson, who had blue eyes and a little
wave in his hair. Mr. Melson, who was possessed of no other
negotiable securities, had hastened to employ these in capturing
the eldest Miss Van Osburgh: since then he had grown stout and
wheezy, and was given to telling anecdotes about his children. If
Lily recalled this early emotion it was not to compare it with
that which now possessed her; the only point of comparison was
the sense of lightness, of emancipation, which she remembered
feeling, in the whirl of a waltz or the seclusion of a
conservatory, during the brief course of her youthful romance.
She had not known again till today that lightness, that glow of
freedom; but now it was something more than a blind groping of
the blood. The peculiar charm of her feeling for Selden
was that she understood it; she could put her finger on every
link of the chain that was drawing them together. Though his
popularity was of the quiet kind, felt rather than actively
expressed among his friends, she had never mistaken his
inconspicuousness for obscurity. His reputed cultivation was
generally regarded as a slight obstacle to easy intercourse, but
Lily, who prided herself on her broad-minded recognition of
literature, and always carried an Omar Khayam in her
travelling-bag, was attracted by this attribute, which she felt
would have had its distinction in an older society. It was,
moreover, one of his gifts to look his part; to have a height
which lifted his head above the crowd, and the keenly-modelled
dark features which, in a land of amorphous types, gave him the
air of belonging to a more specialized race, of carrying the
impress of a concentrated past. Expansive persons found him a
little dry, and very young girls thought him sarcastic; but this
air of friendly aloofness, as far removed as possible from any
assertion of personal advantage, was the quality which piqued
Lily's interest. Everything about him accorded with the
fastidious element in her taste, even to the light irony with
which he surveyed what seemed to her most sacred. She admired him
most of all, perhaps, for being able to convey as distinct a
sense of superiority as the richest man she had ever met.
It was the unconscious prolongation of this thought which led her
to say presently, with a laugh: "I have broken two engagements
for you today. How many have you broken for me?"
"None," said Selden calmly. "My only engagement at Bellomont was
with you."
She glanced down at him, faintly smiling.
"Did you really come to Bellomont to see me?"
"Of course I did."
Her look deepened meditatively. "Why?" she murmured, with an
accent which took all tinge of coquetry from the question.
"Because you're such a wonderful spectacle: I always like to see
what you are doing."
"How do you know what I should be doing if you were not here?"
Selden smiled. "I don't flatter myself that my coming has
deflected your course of action by a hair's breadth."
"That's absurd--since, if you were not here, I could obviously
not be taking a walk with you."
"No; but your taking a walk with me is only another way of making
use of your material. You are an artist and I happen to be the
bit of colour you are using today. It's a part of your cleverness
to be able to produce premeditated effects extemporaneously."
Lily smiled also: his words were too acute not to strike her
sense of humour. It was true that she meant to use the accident
of his presence as part of a very definite effect; or that, at
least, was the secret pretext she had found for breaking her
promise to walk with Mr. Gryce. She had sometimes been accused of
being too eager--even Judy Trenor had warned her to go slowly.
Well, she would not be too eager in this case; she would give her
suitor a longer taste of suspense. Where duty and inclination
jumped together, it was not in Lily's nature to hold them
asunder. She had excused herself from the walk on the plea of a
headache: the horrid headache which, in the morning, had
prevented her venturing to church. Her appearance at luncheon
justified the excuse. She looked languid, full of a suffering
sweetness; she carried a scent-bottle in her hand. Mr. Gryce was
new to such manifestations; he wondered rather nervously if she
were delicate, having far-reaching fears about the future of his
progeny. But sympathy won the day, and he besought her not to
expose herself: he always connected the outer air with ideas of
exposure.
Lily had received his sympathy with languid gratitude, urging
him, since she should be such poor company, to join the rest of
the party who, after luncheon, were starting in automobiles on a
visit to the Van Osburghs at Peekskill. Mr. Gryce was touched by
her disinterestedness, and, to escape from the threatened vacuity
of the afternoon, had taken her advice and departed mournfully,
in a dust-hood and goggles: as the motor-car plunged down the
avenue she smiled at his resemblance to a baffled beetle. Selden
had watched her manoeuvres with lazy amusement. She had made no
reply to his suggestion that they should spend the
afternoon together, but as her plan unfolded itself he felt
fairly confident of being included in it. The house was empty
when at length he heard her step on the stair and strolled out of
the billiard-room to join her.
She had on a hat and walking-dress, and the dogs were bounding at
her feet.
"I thought, after all, the air might do me good," she explained;
and he agreed that so simple a remedy was worth trying.
The excursionists would be gone at least four hours; Lily and
Selden had the whole afternoon before them, and the sense of
leisure and safety gave the last touch of lightness to her
spirit. With so much time to talk, and no definite object to be
led up to, she could taste the rare joys of mental vagrancy.
She felt so free from ulterior motives that she took up his
charge with a touch of resentment.
"I don't know," she said, "why you are always accusing me of
premeditation."
"I thought you confessed to it: you told me the other day that
you had to follow a certain line--and if one does a thing at all
it is a merit to do it thoroughly."
"If you mean that a girl who has no one to think for her is
obliged to think for herself, I am quite willing to accept the
imputation. But you must find me a dismal kind of person if you
suppose that I never yield to an impulse."
"Ah, but I don't suppose that: haven't I told you that your
genius lies in converting impulses into intentions?"
"My genius?" she echoed with a sudden note of weariness. "Is
there any final test of genius but success? And I certainly
haven't succeeded."
Selden pushed his hat back and took a side-glance at her.
"Success--what is success? I shall be interested to have your
definition."
"Success?" She hesitated. "Why, to get as much as one can out of
life, I suppose. It's a relative quality, after all. Isn't that
your idea of it?"
"My idea of it? God forbid!" He sat up with sudden energy,
resting his elbows on his knees and staring out upon the mellow
fields. "My idea of success," he said, "is personal freedom."
"Freedom? Freedom from worries?"
"From everything--from money, from poverty, from ease and
anxiety, from all the material accidents. To keep a kind of
republic of the spirit--that's what I call success."
She leaned forward with a responsive flash. "I know--I know--it's
strange; but that's just what I've been feeling today."
He met her eyes with the latent sweetness of his. "Is the feeling
so rare with you?" he said.
She blushed a little under his gaze. "You think me horribly
sordid, don't you? But perhaps it's rather that I never had any
choice. There was no one, I mean, to tell me about the republic
of the spirit."
"There never is--it's a country one has to find the way to one's
self."
"But I should never have found my way there if you hadn't told
me."
"Ah, there are sign-posts--but one has to know how to read them."
"Well, I have known, I have known!" she cried with a glow of
eagerness. "Whenever I see you, I find myself spelling out a
letter of the sign--and yesterday--last evening at dinner--I
suddenly saw a little way into your republic."
