________________________________________________
_ Having finally discovered that the seat adjoining Miss Bart's was
at her disposal, she possessed herself of it with a farther
displacement of her surroundings, explaining meanwhile that she
had come across from Mount Kisco in her motor-car that morning,
and had been kicking her heels for an hour at Garrisons, without
even the alleviation of a cigarette, her brute of a
husband having neglected to replenish her case before they parted
that morning.
"And at this hour of the day I don't suppose you've a single one
left, have you, Lily?" she plaintively concluded.
Miss Bart caught the startled glance of Mr. Percy Gryce, whose
own lips were never defiled by tobacco.
"What an absurd question, Bertha!" she exclaimed, blushing at the
thought of the store she had laid in at Lawrence Selden's.
"Why, don't you smoke? Since when have you given it up? What--you
never---And you don't either, Mr. Gryce? Ah, of course--how
stupid of me--I understand."
And Mrs. Dorset leaned back against her travelling cushions with
a smile which made Lily wish there had been no vacant seat beside
her own.
Bridge at Bellomont usually lasted till the small hours; and when
Lily went to bed that night she had played too long for her own
good.
Feeling no desire for the self-communion which awaited her in her
room, she lingered on the broad stairway, looking down into the
hall below, where the last card-players were grouped about the
tray of tall glasses and silver-collared decanters which the
butler had just placed on a low table near the fire.
The hall was arcaded, with a gallery supported on columns of pale
yellow marble. Tall clumps of flowering plants were grouped
against a background of dark foliage in the angles of the walls.
On the crimson carpet a deer-hound and two or three spaniels
dozed luxuriously before the fire, and the light from the great
central lantern overhead shed a brightness on the women's hair
and struck sparks from their jewels as they moved.
There were moments when such scenes delighted Lily, when they
gratified her sense of beauty and her craving for the external
finish of life; there were others when they gave a sharper edge
to the meagreness of her own opportunities. This was one of the
moments when the sense of contrast was uppermost, and she turned
away impatiently as Mrs. George Dorset, glittering in serpentine
spangles, drew Percy Gryce in her wake to a confidential nook
beneath the gallery.
It was not that Miss Bart was afraid of losing her newly-acquired
hold over Mr. Gryce. Mrs. Dorset might startle or dazzle him, but
she had neither the skill nor the patience to effect his capture.
She was too self-engrossed to penetrate the recesses of his
shyness, and besides, why should she care to give herself the
trouble? At most it might amuse her to make sport of his
simplicity for an evening--after that he would be merely a burden
to her, and knowing this, she was far too experienced to
encourage him. But the mere thought of that other woman, who
could take a man up and toss him aside as she willed, without
having to regard him as a possible factor in her plans, filled
Lily Bart with envy. She had been bored all the afternoon
by Percy Gryce--the mere thought seemed to waken an echo of his
droning voice--but she could not ignore him on the morrow, she
must follow up her success, must submit to more boredom, must be
ready with fresh compliances and adaptabilities, and all on the
bare chance that he might ultimately decide to do her the honour
of boring her for life.
It was a hateful fate--but how escape from it? What choice had
she? To be herself, or a Gerty Farish. As she entered her
bedroom, with its softly-shaded lights, her lace dressing-gown
lying across the silken bedspread, her little embroidered
slippers before the fire, a vase of carnations filling the air
with perfume, and the last novels and magazines lying uncut on a
table beside the reading-lamp, she had a vision of Miss Farish's
cramped flat, with its cheap conveniences and hideous
wall-papers. No; she was not made for mean and shabby
surroundings, for the squalid compromises of poverty. Her whole
being dilated in an atmosphere of luxury; it was the background
she required, the only climate she could breathe in. But the
luxury of others was not what she wanted. A few years ago it had
sufficed her: she had taken her daily meed of pleasure without
caring who provided it. Now she was beginning to chafe at the
obligations it imposed, to feel herself a mere pensioner on the
splendour which had once seemed to belong to her. There were even
moments when she was conscious of having to pay her way.
For a long time she had refused to play bridge. She knew she
could not afford it, and she was afraid of acquiring so expensive
a taste. She had seen the danger exemplified in more than one of
her associates--in young Ned Silverton, for instance, the
charming fair boy now seated in abject rapture at the elbow of
Mrs. Fisher, a striking divorcee with eyes and gowns as emphatic
as the head-lines of her "case." Lily could remember when young
Silverton had stumbled into their circle, with the air of a
strayed Arcadian who has published chamung sonnets in his college
journal. Since then he had developed a taste for Mrs. Fisher and
bridge, and the latter at least had involved him in expenses from
which he had been more than once rescued by harassed maiden
sisters, who treasured the sonnets, and went without sugar in
their tea to keep their darling afloat. Ned's case was
familiar to Lily: she had seen his charming eyes--which had a
good deal more poetry in them than the sonnets--change from
surprise to amusement, and from amusement to anxiety, as he
passed under the spell of the terrible god of chance; and she was
afraid of discovering the same symptoms in her own case.
For in the last year she had found that her hostesses expected
her to take a place at the card-table. It was one of the taxes
she had to pay for their prolonged hospitality, and for the
dresses and trinkets which occasionally replenished her
insufficient wardrobe. And since she had played regularly the
passion had grown on her. Once or twice of late she had won a
large sum, and instead of keeping it against future losses, had
spent it in dress or jewelry; and the desire to atone for this
imprudence, combined with the increasing exhilaration of the
game, drove her to risk higher stakes at each fresh venture. She
tried to excuse herself on the plea that, in the Trenor set, if
one played at all one must either play high or be set down as
priggish or stingy; but she knew that the gambling passion was
upon her, and that in her present surroundings there was small
hope of resisting it.
Tonight the luck had been persistently bad, and the little gold
purse which hung among her trinkets was almost empty when she
returned to her room. She unlocked the wardrobe, and taking out
her jewel-case, looked under the tray for the roll of bills from
which she had replenished the purse before going down to dinner.
Only twenty dollars were left: the discovery was so startling
that for a moment she fancied she must have been robbed. Then she
took paper and pencil, and seating herself at the writing-table,
tried to reckon up what she had spent during the day. Her head
was throbbing with fatigue, and she had to go over the figures
again and again; but at last it became clear to her that she had
lost three hundred dollars at cards. She took out her cheque-book
to see if her balance was larger than she remembered, but found
she had erred in the other direction. Then she returned to her
calculations; but figure as she would, she could not conjure back
the vanished three hundred dollars. It was the sum she had set
aside to pacify her dress-maker--unless she should decide to use
it as a sop to the jeweller. At any rate, she had so many
uses for it that its very insufficiency had caused her to play
high in the hope of doubling it. But of course she had lost--she
who needed every penny, while Bertha Dorset, whose husband
showered money on her, must have pocketed at least five hundred,
and Judy Trenor, who could have afforded to lose a thousand a
night, had left the table clutching such a heap of bills that she
had been unable to shake hands with her guests when they bade her
good night.
A world in which such things could be seemed a miserable place to
Lily Bart; but then she had never been able to understand the
laws of a universe which was so ready to leave her out of its
calculations.
She began to undress without ringing for her maid, whom she had
sent to bed. She had been long enough in bondage to other
people's pleasure to be considerate of those who depended on
hers, and in her bitter moods it sometimes struck her that she
and her maid were in the same position, except that the latter
received her wages more regularly.
As she sat before the mirror brushing her hair, her face looked
hollow and pale, and she was frightened by two little lines near
her mouth, faint flaws in the smooth curve of the cheek.
"Oh, I must stop worrying!" she exclaimed. "Unless it's the
electric light---" she reflected, springing up from her seat and
lighting the candles on the dressing-table.
She turned out the wall-lights, and peered at herself between the
candle-flames. The white oval of her face swam out waveringly
from a background of shadows, the uncertain light blurring it
like a haze; but the two lines about the mouth remained.
Lily rose and undressed in haste.
"It is only because I am tired and have such odious things to
think about," she kept repeating; and it seemed an added
injustice that petty cares should leave a trace on the beauty
which was her only defence against them.
But the odious things were there, and remained with her. She
returned wearily to the thought of Percy Gryce, as a wayfarer
picks up a heavy load and toils on after a brief rest. She was
almost sure she had "landed" him: a few days' work and she would
win her reward. But the reward itself seemed upalatable
just then: she could get no zest from the thought of victory. It
would be a rest from worry, no more--and how little that would
have seemed to her a few years earlier! Her ambitions had shrunk
gradually in the desiccating air of failure. But why had she
failed? Was it her own fault or that of destiny?
She remembered how her mother, after they had lost their money,
used to say to her with a kind of fierce vindictiveness: "But
you'll get it all back--you'll get it all back, with your face."
. . . The remembrance roused a whole train of association, and
she lay in the darkness reconstructing the past out of which her
present had grown.
A house in which no one ever dined at home unless there was
"company"; a door-bell perpetually ringing; a hall-table showered
with square envelopes which were opened in haste, and oblong
envelopes which were allowed to gather dust in the depths of a
bronze jar; a series of French and English maids giving warning
amid a chaos of hurriedly-ransacked wardrobes and dress-closets;
an equally changing dynasty of nurses and footmen; quarrels in
the pantry, the kitchen and the drawing-room; precipitate trips
to Europe, and returns with gorged trunks and days of
interminable unpacking; semi-annual discussions as to where the
summer should be spent, grey interludes of economy and brilliant
reactions of expense--such was the setting of Lily Bart's first
memories.
Ruling the turbulent element called home was the vigorous and
determined figure of a mother still young enough to dance her
ball-dresses to rags, while the hazy outline of a neutral-tinted
father filled an intermediate space between the butler and the
man who came to wind the clocks. Even to the eyes of infancy,
Mrs. Hudson Bart had appeared young; but Lily could not recall
the time when her father had not been bald and slightly stooping,
with streaks of grey in his hair, and a tired walk. It was a
shock to her to learn afterward that he was but two years older
than her mother. _
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