_ For a long time Mr. Gryce and the omnibus had the gravel sweep to
themselves; but, far from regretting this deplorable indifference
on the part of the other guests, he found himself nourishing the
hope that Miss Bart might be unaccompanied. The precious minutes
were flying, however; the big chestnuts pawed the ground and
flecked their impatient sides with foam; the coachman seemed to
be slowly petrifying on the box, and the groom on the doorstep;
and still the lady did not come. Suddenly, however, there was a
sound of voices and a rustle of skirts in the doorway, and Mr.
Gryce, restoring his watch to his pocket, turned with a nervous
start; but it was only to find himself handing Mrs. Wetherall
into the carriage.
The Wetheralls always went to church. They belonged to the vast
group of human automata who go through life without neglecting to
perform a single one of the gestures executed by the surrounding
puppets. It is true that the Bellomont puppets did not go to
church; but others equally important did--and Mr. and Mrs.
Wetherall's circle was so large that God was included in their
visiting-list. They appeared, therefore, punctual and resigned,
with the air of people bound for a dull "At Home," and after them
Hilda and Muriel straggled, yawning and pinning each other's
veils and ribbons as they came. They had promised Lily to go to
church with her, they declared, and Lily was such a dear old duck
that they didn't mind doing it to please her, though they
couldn't fancy what had put the idea in her head, and though for
their own part they would much rather have played lawn tennis
with Jack and Gwen, if she hadn't told them she was coming. The
Misses Trenor were followed by Lady Cressida Raith, a
weather-beaten person in Liberty silk and ethnological trinkets,
who, on seeing the omnibus, expressed her surprise that they were
not to walk across the park; but at Mrs. Wetherall's horrified
protest that the church was a mile away, her ladyship,
after a glance at the height of the other's heels, acquiesced in
the necessity of driving, and poor Mr. Gryce found himself
rolling off between four ladies for whose spiritual welfare he
felt not the least concern.
It might have afforded him some consolation could he have known
that Miss Bart had really meant to go to church. She had even
risen earlier than usual in the execution of her purpose. She had
an idea that the sight of her in a grey gown of devotional cut,
with her famous lashes drooped above a prayer-book, would put the
finishing touch to Mr. Gryce's subjugation, and render inevitable
a certain incident which she had resolved should form a part of
the walk they were to take together after luncheon. Her
intentions in short had never been more definite; but poor Lily,
for all the hard glaze of her exterior, was inwardly as malleable
as wax. Her faculty for adapting herself, for entering into other
people's feelings, if it served her now and then in small
contingencies, hampered her in the decisive moments of life. She
was like a water-plant in the flux of the tides, and today the
whole current of her mood was carrying her toward Lawrence
Selden. Why had he come? Was it to see herself or Bertha Dorset?
It was the last question which, at that moment, should have
engaged her. She might better have contented herself with
thinking that he had simply responded to the despairing summons
of his hostess, anxious to interpose him between herself and the
ill-humour of Mrs. Dorset. But Lily had not rested till she
learned from Mrs. Trenor that Selden had come of his own accord.
"He didn't even wire me--he just happened to find the trap at the
station. Perhaps it's not over with Bertha after all," Mrs.
Trenor musingly concluded; and went away to arrange her
dinner-cards accordingly.
Perhaps it was not, Lily reflected; but it should be soon, unless
she had lost her cunning. If Selden had come at Mrs. Dorset's
call, it was at her own that he would stay. So much the previous
evening had told her. Mrs. Trenor, true to her simple principle
of making her married friends happy, had placed Selden and Mrs.
Dorset next to each other at dinner; but, in obedience to the
time-honoured traditions of the match-maker, she had separated
Lily and Mr. Gryce, sending in the former with George
Dorset, while Mr. Gryce was coupled with Gwen Van Osburgh.
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. _