_ The performance over, Selden's first impulse was to seek Miss
Bart. During the interlude of music which succeeded the TABLEAUX,
the actors had seated themselves here and there in the audience,
diversifying its conventional appearance by the varied
picturesqueness of their dress. Lily, however, was not among
them, and her absence served to protract the effect she had
produced on Selden: it would have broken the spell to see her too
soon in the surroundings from which accident had so happily
detached her. They had not met since the day of the Van Osburgh
wedding, and on his side the avoidance had been intentional.
Tonight, however, he knew that, sooner or later, he should find
himself at her side; and though he let the dispersing crowd drift
him whither it would, without making an immediate effort to reach
her, his procrastination was not due to any lingering resistance,
but to the desire to luxuriate a moment in the sense of complete
surrender.
Lily had not an instant's doubt as to the meaning of the murmur
greeting her appearance. No other tableau had been received with
that precise note of approval: it had obviously been called forth
by herself, and not by the picture she impersonated. She had
feared at the last moment that she was risking too much in
dispensing with the advantages of a more sumptuous setting, and
the completeness of her triumph gave her an intoxicating sense of
recovered power. Not caring to diminish the impression she had
produced, she held herself aloof from the audience till the
movement of dispersal before supper, and thus had a second
opportunity of showing herself to advantage, as the throng poured
slowly into the empty drawing-room where she was standing.
She was soon the centre of a group which increased and renewed
itself as the circulation became general, and the individual
comments on her success were a delightful prolongation of
the collective applause. At such moments she lost something of
her natural fastidiousness, and cared less for the quality of the
admiration received than for its quantity. Differences of
personality were merged in a warm atmosphere of praise, in which
her beauty expanded like a flower in sunlight; and if Selden had
approached a moment or two sooner he would have seen her turning
on Ned Van Alstyne and George Dorset the look he had dreamed of
capturing for himself.
Fortune willed, however, that the hurried approach of Mrs.
Fisher, as whose aide-de-camp Van Alstyne was acting, should
break up the group before Selden reached the threshold of the
room. One or two of the men wandered off in search of their
partners for supper, and the others, noticing Selden's approach,
gave way to him in accordance with the tacit freemasonry of the
ball-room. Lily was therefore standing alone when he reached her;
and finding the expected look in her eye, he had the satisfaction
of supposing he had kindled it. The look did indeed deepen as it
rested on him, for even in that moment of self-intoxication Lily
felt the quicker beat of life that his nearness always produced.
She read, too, in his answering gaze the delicious confirmation
of her triumph, and for the moment it seemed to her that it was
for him only she cared to be beautiful.
Selden had given her his arm without speaking. She took it in
silence, and they moved away, not toward the supper-room, but
against the tide which was setting thither. The faces about her
flowed by like the streaming images of sleep: she hardly noticed
where Selden was leading her, till they passed through a glass
doorway at the end of the long suite of rooms and stood suddenly
in the fragrant hush of a garden. Gravel grated beneath their
feet, and about them was the transparent dimness of a midsummer
night. Hanging lights made emerald caverns in the depths of
foliage, and whitened the spray of a fountain falling among
lilies. The magic place was deserted: there was no sound but the
splash of the water on the lily-pads, and a distant drift of
music that might have been blown across a sleeping lake.
Selden and Lily stood still, accepting the unreality of the scene
as a part of their own dream-like sensations. It would not have
surprised them to feel a summer breeze on their faces, or
to see the lights among the boughs reduplicated in the arch of a
starry sky. The strange solitude about them was no stranger than
the sweetness of being alone in it together. At length Lily
withdrew her hand, and moved away a step, so that her white-robed
slimness was outlined against the dusk of the branches. Selden
followed her, and still without speaking they seated themselves
on a bench beside the fountain.
Suddenly she raised her eyes with the beseeching earnestness of a
child. "You never speak to me--you think hard things of me," she
murmured.
"I think of you at any rate, God knows!" he said.
"Then why do we never see each other? Why can't we be friends?
You promised once to help me," she continued in the same tone, as
though the words were drawn from her unwillingly.
"The only way I can help you is by loving you," Selden said in a
low voice.
She made no reply, but her face turned to him with the soft
motion of a flower. His own met it slowly, and their lips
touched. She drew back and rose from her seat. Selden rose too,
and they stood facing each other. Suddenly she caught his hand
and pressed it a moment against her cheek.
"Ah, love me, love me--but don't tell me so!" she sighed with her
eyes in his; and before he could speak she had turned and slipped
through the arch of boughs, disappearing in the brightness of the
room beyond.
Selden stood where she had left him. He knew too well the
transiency of exquisite moments to attempt to follow her; but
presently he reentered the house and made his way through the
deserted rooms to the door. A few sumptuously-cloaked ladies were
already gathered in the marble vestibule, and in the coat-room he
found Van Alstyne and Gus Trenor.
The former, at Selden's approach, paused in the careful selection
of a cigar from one of the silver boxes invitingly set out near
the door.
"Hallo, Selden, going too? You're an Epicurean like myself, I
see: you don't want to see all those goddesses gobbling terrapin.
Gad, what a show of good-looking women; but not one of
'em could touch that little cousin of mine. Talk of
jewels--what's a woman want with jewels when she's got herself to
show? The trouble is that all these fal-bals they wear cover up
their figures when they've got 'em. I never knew till tonight
what an outline Lily has."
"It's not her fault if everybody don't know it now," growled
Trenor, flushed with the struggle of getting into his fur-lined
coat. "Damned bad taste, I call it--no, no cigar for me. You
can't tell what you're smoking in one of these new houses--likely
as not the CHEF buys the cigars. Stay for supper? Not if I know
it! When people crowd their rooms so that you can't get near any
one you want to speak to, I'd as soon sup in the elevated at the
rush hour. My wife was dead right to stay away: she says life's
too short to spend it in breaking in new people."
Lily woke from happy dreams to find two notes at her bedside.
One was from Mrs. Trenor, who announced that she was coming to
town that afternoon for a flying visit, and hoped Miss Bart would
be able to dine with her. The other was from Selden. He wrote
briefly that an important case called him to Albany, whence he
would be unable to return till the evening, and asked Lily to let
him know at what hour on the following day she would see him.
Lily, leaning back among her pillows, gazed musingly at his
letter. The scene in the Brys' conservatory had been like a part
of her dreams; she had not expected to wake to such evidence of
its reality. Her first movement was one of annoyance: this
unforeseen act of Selden's added another complication to life. It
was so unlike him to yield to such an irrational impulse! Did he
really mean to ask her to marry him? She had once shown him the
impossibility of such a hope, and his subsequent behaviour seemed
to prove that he had accepted the situation with a reasonableness
somewhat mortifying to her vanity. It was all the more agreeable
to find that this reason ableness was maintained only at the cost
of not seeing her; but, though nothing in life was as sweet as
the sense of her power over him, she saw the danger of allowing
the episode of the previous night to have a sequel. Since she
could not marry him, it would be kinder to him, as well as easier
for herself, to write a line amicably evading his request to see
her: he was not the man to mistake such a hint, and when next
they met it would be on their usual friendly footing.
Lily sprang out of bed, and went straight to her desk. She wanted
to write at once, while she could trust to the strength of her
resolve. She was still languid from her brief sleep and the
exhilaration of the evening, and the sight of Selden's writing
brought back the culminating moment of her triumph: the moment
when she had read in his eyes that no philosophy was proof
against her power. It would be pleasant to have that sensation
again . . . no one else could give it to her in its fulness; and
she could not bear to mar her mood of luxurious
retrospection by an act of definite refusal. She took up her pen
and wrote hastily: "TOMORROW AT FOUR;" murmuring to herself, as
she slipped the sheet into its envelope: "I can easily put him
off when tomorrow comes." _