Selden was still looking at her, but with a changed eye. Hitherto
he had found, in her presence and her talk, the aesthetic
amusement which a reflective man is apt to seek in desultory
intercourse with pretty women. His attitude had been one of
admiring spectatorship, and he would have been almost sorry to
detect in her any emotional weakness which should interfere with
the fulfilment of her aims. But now the hint of this weakness had
become the most interesting thing about her. He had come on her
that morning in a moment of disarray; her face had been pale and
altered, and the diminution of her beauty had lent her a poignant
charm. THAT IS HOW SHE LOOKS WHEN SHE IS ALONE! had been his
first thought; and the second was to note in her the change which
his coming produced. It was the danger-point of their intercourse
that he could not doubt the spontaneity of her liking. From
whatever angle he viewed their dawning intimacy, he could not see
it as part of her scheme of life; and to be the unforeseen
element in a career so accurately planned was stimulating
even to a man who had renounced sentimental experiments.
"Well," he said, "did it make you want to see more? Are you going
to become one of us?"
He had drawn out his cigarettes as he spoke, and she reached her
hand toward the case.
"Oh, do give me one--I haven't smoked for days!"
"Why such unnatural abstinence? Everybody smokes at Bellomont."
"Yes--but it is not considered becoming in a JEUNE FILLE A
MARIER; and at the present moment I am a JEUNE FILLE A MARIER.
"Ah, then I'm afraid we can't let you into the republic."
"Why not? Is it a celibate order?"
"Not in the least, though I'm bound to say there are not many
married people in it. But you will marry some one very rich, and
it's as hard for rich people to get into as the kingdom of
heaven."
"That's unjust, I think, because, as I understand it, one of the
conditions of citizenship is not to think too much about money,
and the only way not to think about money is to have a great deal
of it."
"You might as well say that the only way not to think about air
is to have enough to breathe. That is true enough in a sense; but
your lungs are thinking about the air, if you are not. And so it
is with your rich people--they may not be thinking of money, but
they're breathing it all the while; take them into another
element and see how they squirm and gasp!"
Lily sat gazing absently through the blue rings of her
cigarette-smoke.
"It seems to me," she said at length, "that you spend a good deal
of your time in the element you disapprove of."
Selden received this thrust without discomposure. "Yes; but I
have tried to remain amphibious: it's all right as long as one's
lungs can work in another air. The real alchemy consists in being
able to turn gold back again into something else; and that's the
secret that most of your friends have lost."
Lily mused. "Don't you think," she rejoined after a moment, "that
the people who find fault with society are too apt to regard it
as an end and not a means, just as the people who despise
money speak as if its only use were to be kept in bags and
gloated over? Isn't it fairer to look at them both as
opportunities, which may be used either stupidly or
intelligently, according to the capacity of the user?"
"That is certainly the sane view; but the queer thing about
society is that the people who regard it as an end are those who
are in it, and not the critics on the fence. It's just the other
way with most shows--the audience may be under the illusion, but
the actors know that real life is on the other side of the
footlights. The people who take society as an escape from work
are putting it to its proper use; but when it becomes the thing
worked for it distorts all the relations of life." Selden raised
himself on his elbow. "Good heavens!" he went on, "I don't
underrate the decorative side of life. It seems to me the sense
of splendour has justified itself by what it has produced. The
worst of it is that so much human nature is used up in the
process. If we're all the raw stuff of the cosmic effects, one
would rather be the fire that tempers a sword than the fish that
dyes a purple cloak. And a society like ours wastes such good
material in producing its little patch of purple! Look at a boy
like Ned Silverton--he's really too good to be used to refurbish
anybody's social shabbiness. There's a lad just setting out to
discover the universe: isn't it a pity he should end by finding
it in Mrs. Fisher's drawing-room?"
"Ned is a dear boy, and I hope he will keep his illusions long
enough to write some nice poetry about them; but do you think it
is only in society that he is likely to lose them?"
Selden answered her with a shrug. "Why do we call all our
generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths? Isn't it a
sufficient condemnation of society to find one's self accepting
such phraseology? I very nearly acquired the jargon at
Silverton's age, and I know how names can alter the colour of
beliefs."
She had never heard him speak with such energy of affirmation.
His habitual touch was that of the eclectic, who lightly turns
over and compares; and she was moved by this sudden glimpse into
the laboratory where his faiths were formed.
"Ah, you are as bad as the other sectarians," she exclaimed;
"why do you call your republic a republic? It is a closed corporation,
and you create arbitrary objections in order to keep people out."
"It is not MY republic; if it were, I should have a COUP D'ETAT
and seat you on the throne."
"Whereas, in reality, you think I can never even get my foot
across the threshold? Oh, I understand what you mean. You despise
my ambitions--you think them unworthy of me!"
Selden smiled, but not ironically. "Well, isn't that a tribute? I
think them quite worthy of most of the people who live by them."
She had turned to gaze on him gravely. "But isn't it possible
that, if I had the opportunities of these people, I might make a
better use of them? Money stands for all kinds of things--its
purchasing quality isn't limited to diamonds and motor-cars."
"Not in the least: you might expiate your enjoyment of them by
founding a hospital."
"But if you think they are what I should really enjoy, you must
think my ambitions are good enough for me."
Selden met this appeal with a laugh. "Ah, my dear Miss Bart, I am
not divine Providence, to guarantee your enjoying the things you
are trying to get!"
"Then the best you can say for me is, that after struggling to
get them I probably shan't like them?" She drew a deep breath.
"What a miserable future you foresee for me!"
"Well--have you never foreseen it for yourself?" The slow colour
rose to her cheek, not a blush of excitement but drawn from the
deep wells of feeling; it was as if the effort of her spirit had
produced it.
"Often and often," she said. "But it looks so much darker when
you show it to me!"
He made no answer to this exclamation, and for a while they sat
silent, while something throbbed between them in the wide quiet
of the air.
But suddenly she turned on him with a kind of vehemence. "Why do
you do this to me?" she cried. "Why do you make the things I have
chosen seem hateful to me, if you have nothing to give me
instead?"
The words roused Selden from the musing fit into which he had
fallen. He himself did not know why he had led their talk along
such lines; it was the last use he would have imagined himself
making of an afternoon's solitude with Miss Bart. But it was one
of those moments when neither seemed to speak deliberately, when
an indwelling voice in each called to the other across unsounded
depths of feeling.
"No, I have nothing to give you instead," he said, sitting up and
turning so that he faced her. "If I had, it should be yours, you
know."
She received this abrupt declaration in a way even stranger than
the manner of its making: she dropped her face on her hands and
he saw that for a moment she wept.
It was for a moment only, however; for when he leaned nearer and
drew down her hands with a gesture less passionate than grave,
she turned on him a face softened but not disfigured by emotion,
and he said to himself, somewhat cruelly, that even her weeping
was an art.
The reflection steadied his voice as he asked, between pity and
irony: "Isn't it natural that I should try to belittle all the
things I can't offer you?"
Her face brightened at this, but she drew her hand away, not with
a gesture of coquetry, but as though renouncing something to
which she had no claim.
"But you belittle ME, don't you," she returned gently, "in being
so sure they are the only things I care for?"
Selden felt an inner start; but it was only the last quiver of
his egoism. Almost at once he answered quite simply: "But you do
care for them, don't you? And no wishing of mine can alter that."
He had so completely ceased to consider how far this might carry
him, that he had a distinct sense of disappointment when she
turned on him a face sparkling with derision.
"Ah," she cried, "for all your fine phrases you're really as
great a coward as I am, for you wouldn't have made one of them if
you hadn't been so sure of my answer."
The shock of this retort had the effect of crystallizing Selden's
wavering intentions.
"I am not so sure of your answer," he said quietly. "And I do you
the justice to believe that you are not either."
It was her turn to look at him with surprise; and after a
moment--"Do you want to marry me?" she asked.
He broke into a laugh. "No, I don't want to--but perhaps I should
if you did!"
"That's what I told you--you're so sure of me that you can amuse
yourself with experiments." She drew back the hand he had
regained, and sat looking down on him sadly.
"I am not making experiments," he returned. "Or if I am, it is
not on you but on myself. I don't know what effect they are going
to have on me--but if marrying you is one of them, I will take
the risk."
She smiled faintly. "It would be a great risk, certainly--I have
never concealed from you how great."
"Ah, it's you who are the coward!" he exclaimed.
She had risen, and he stood facing her with his eyes on hers. The
soft isolation of the falling day enveloped them: they seemed
lifted into a finer air. All the exquisite influences of the hour
trembled in their veins, and drew them to each other as the
loosened leaves were drawn to the earth.
"It's you who are the coward," he repeated, catching her hands in
his.
She leaned on him for a moment, as if with a drop of tired wings:
he felt as though her heart were beating rather with the stress
of a long flight than the thrill of new distances. Then, drawing
back with a little smile of warning--"I shall look hideous in
dowdy clothes; but I can trim my own hats," she declared.
They stood silent for a while after this, smiling at each other
like adventurous children who have climbed to a forbidden height
from which they discover a new world. The actual world at their
feet was veiling itself in dimness, and across the valley a clear
moon rose in the denser blue.
Suddenly they heard a remote sound, like the hum of a giant
insect, and following the high-road, which wound whiter through
the surrounding twilight, a black object rushed across their
vision.
Lily started from her attitude of absorption; her smile faded and
she began to move toward the lane.
"I had no idea it was so late! We shall not be back till after
dark," she said, almost impatiently.
Selden was looking at her with surprise: it took him a moment to
regain his usual view of her; then he said, with an
uncontrollable note of dryness: "That was not one of our party;
the motor was going the other way."
"I know--I know---" She paused, and he saw her redden through the
twilight. "But I told them I was not well--that I should not go
out. Let us go down!" she murmured.
Selden continued to look at her; then he drew his cigarette-case
from his pocket and slowly lit a cigarette. It seemed to him
necessary, at that moment, to proclaim, by some habitual gesture
of this sort, his recovered hold on the actual: he had an almost
puerile wish to let his companion see that, their flight over, he
had landed on his feet.
She waited while the spark flickered under his curved palm; then
he held out the cigarettes to her.
She took one with an unsteady hand, and putting it to her lips,
leaned forward to draw her light from his. In the indistinctness
the little red gleam lit up the lower part of her face, and he
saw her mouth tremble into a smile.
"Were you serious?" she asked, with an odd thrill of gaiety which
she might have caught up, in haste, from a heap of stock
inflections, without having time to select the just note.
Selden's voice was under better control. "Why not?" he returned.
"You see I took no risks in being so." And as she continued to
stand before him, a little pale under the retort, he added
quickly: "Let us go down."
It spoke much for the depth of Mrs. Trenor's friendship that her
voice, in admonishing Miss Bart, took the same note of personal
despair as if she had been lamenting the collapse of a
house-party.
"All I can say is, Lily, that I can't make you out!" She leaned
back, sighing, in the morning abandon of lace and muslin, turning
an indifferent shoulder to the heaped-up importunities of her
desk, while she considered, with the eye of a physician who has
given up the case, the erect exterior of the patient confronting
her.
"If you hadn't told me you were going in for him seriously--but
I'm sure you made that plain enough from the beginning! Why else
did you ask me to let you off bridge, and to keep away Carry and
Kate Corby? I don't suppose you did it because he amused you; we
could none of us imagine your putting up with him for a moment
unless you meant to marry him. And I'm sure everybody played
fair! They all wanted to help it along. Even Bertha kept her
hands off--I will say that--till Lawrence came down and you
dragged him away from her. After that she had a right to
retaliate--why on earth did you interfere with her? You've known
Lawrence Selden for years--why did you behave as if you had just
discovered him? If you had a grudge against Bertha it was a
stupid time to show it--you could have paid her back just as well
after you were married! I told you Bertha was dangerous. She was
in an odious mood when she came here, but Lawrence's turning up
put her in a good humour, and if you'd only let her think he came
for HER it would have never occurred to her to play you this
trick. Oh, Lily, you'll never do anything if you're not serious!"
Miss Bart accepted this exhortation in a spirit of the purest
impartiality. Why should she have been angry? It was the voice of
her own conscience which spoke to her through Mrs. Trenor's
reproachful accents. But even to her own conscience she must
trump up a semblance of defence. "I only took a day off--I
thought he meant to stay on all this week, and I knew Mr. Selden
was leaving this morning."
Mrs. Trenor brushed aside the plea with a gesture which laid bare
its weakness.
"He did mean to stay--that's the worst of it. It shows that he's
run away from you; that Bertha's done her work and poisoned him
thoroughly."
Lily gave a slight laugh. "Oh, if he's running I'll overtake
him!"
Her friend threw out an arresting hand. "Whatever you do, Lily,
do nothing!"
Miss Bart received the warning with a smile. "I don't mean,
literally, to take the next train. There are ways---" But she did
not go on to specify them.
Mrs. Trenor sharply corrected the tense. "There WERE ways--plenty
of them! I didn't suppose you needed to have them pointed out.
But don't deceive yourself--he's thoroughly frightened. He has
run straight home to his mother, and she'll protect him!"
"Oh, to the death," Lily agreed, dimpling at the vision.
"How you can LAUGH---" her friend rebuked her; and she dropped
back to a soberer perception of things with the question: "What
was it Bertha really told him?"
"Don't ask me--horrors! She seemed to have raked up everything.
Oh, you know what I mean--of course there isn't anything, REALLY;
but I suppose she brought in Prince Varigliano--and Lord
Hubert--and there was some story of your having borrowed money of
old Ned Van Alstyne: did you ever?"
"He is my father's cousin," Miss Bart interposed.
"Well, of course she left THAT out. It seems Ned told Carry
Fisher; and she told Bertha, naturally. They're all alike, you
know: they hold their tongues for years, and you think you're
safe, but when their opportunity comes they remember everything."
Lily had grown pale: her voice had a harsh note in it. "It was
some money I lost at bridge at the Van Osburghs'. I repaid it, of
course."
"Ah, well, they wouldn't remember that; besides, it was the idea
of the gambling debt that frightened Percy. Oh, Bertha knew her
man--she knew just what to tell him!"
