_ Rosedale, as she listened, seemed to read in her silence not only
a gradual acquiescence in his plan, but a dangerously far-
reaching perception of the chances it offered; for as she
continued to stand before him without speaking, he broke out,
with a quick return upon himself: "You see how simple it is,
don't you? Well, don't be carried away by the idea that it's TOO simple.
It isn't exactly as if you'd started in with a clean
bill of health. Now we're talking let's call things by
their right names, and clear the whole business up. You know well
enough that Bertha Dorset couldn't have touched you if there
hadn't been--well--questions asked before--little points of
interrogation, eh? Bound to happen to a good-looking girl with
stingy relatives, I suppose; anyhow, they DID happen, and she
found the ground prepared for her. Do you see where I'm coming
out? You don't want these little questions cropping up again.
It's one thing to get Bertha Dorset into line--but what you want
is to keep her there. You can frighten her fast enough--but how
are you going to keep her frightened? By showing her that you're
as powerful as she is. All the letters in the world won't do that
for you as you are now; but with a big backing behind you, you'll
keep her just where you want her to be. That's MY share in the
business--that's what I'm offering you. You can't put the thing
through without me--don't run away with any idea that you can. In
six months you'd be back again among your old worries, or worse
ones; and here I am, ready to lift you out of 'em tomorrow if you
say so. DO you say so, Miss Lily?" he added, moving suddenly
nearer.
The words, and the movement which accompanied them, combined to
startle Lily out of the state of tranced subservience into which
she had insensibly slipped. Light comes in devious ways to the
groping consciousness, and it came to her now through the
disgusted perception that her would-be accomplice assumed, as a
matter of course, the likelihood of her distrusting him and
perhaps trying to cheat him of his share of the spoils. This
glimpse of his inner mind seemed to present the whole transaction
in a new aspect, and she saw that the essential baseness of the
act lay in its freedom from risk.
She drew back with a quick gesture of rejection, saying, in a
voice that was a surprise to her own ears: "You are
mistaken--quite mistaken--both in the facts and in what you infer
from them."
Rosedale stared a moment, puzzled by her sudden dash in a
direction so different from that toward which she had appeared to
be letting him guide her.
"Now what on earth does that mean? I thought we understood each
other!" he exclaimed; and to her murmur of "Ah, we do NOW," he
retorted with a sudden burst of violence: "I suppose it's because
the letters are to HIM, then? Well, I'll be damned if I see what
thanks you've got from him!"
The autumn days declined to winter. Once more the leisure world
was in transition between country and town, and Fifth Avenue,
still deserted at the week-end, showed from Monday to Friday a
broadening stream of carriages between house-fronts gradually
restored to consciousness.
The Horse Show, some two weeks earlier, had produced a passing
semblance of reanimation, filling the theatres and restaurants
with a human display of the same costly and high-stepping kind as
circled daily about its ring. In Miss Bart's world the Horse
Show, and the public it attracted, had ostensibly come to be
classed among the spectacles disdained of the elect; but, as the
feudal lord might sally forth to join in the dance on his village
green, so society, unofficially and incidentally, still
condescended to look in upon the scene. Mrs. Gormer, among the
rest, was not above seizing such an occasion for the display of
herself and her horses; and Lily was given one or two
opportunities of appearing at her friend's side in the most
conspicuous box the house afforded. But this lingering semblance
of intimacy made her only the more conscious of a change in the
relation between Mattie and herself, of a dawning discrimination,
a gradually formed social standard, emerging from Mrs. Gormer's
chaotic view of life. It was inevitable that Lily herself should
constitute the first sacrifice to this new ideal, and she knew
that, once the Gormers were established in town, the whole drift
of fashionable life would facilitate Mattie's detachment from
her. She had, in short, failed to make herself indispensable; or
rather, her at tempt to do so had been thwarted by an influence
stronger than any she could exert. That influence, in its last
analysis, was simply the power of money: Bertha Dorset's social
credit was based on an impregnable bank-account.
Lily knew that Rosedale had overstated neither the difficulty of
her own position nor the completeness of the vindication he
offered. once Bertha's match in material resources, her superior
gifts would make it easy for her to dominate her adversary. An
understanding of what such domination would mean, and of the
disadvantages accruing from her rejection of it, was
brought home to Lily with increasing clearness during the early
weeks of the winter. Hitherto, she had kept up a semblance of
movement outside the main flow of the social current; but with
the return to town, and the concentrating of scattered
activities, the mere fact of not slipping back naturally into her
old habits of life marked her as being unmistakably excluded from
them. If one were not a part of the season's fixed routine, one
swung unsphered in a void of social non-existence. Lily, for all
her dissatisfied dreaming, had never really conceived the
possibility of revolving about a different centre: it was easy
enough to despise the world, but decidedly difficult to find any
other habitable region. Her sense of irony never quite deserted
her, and she could still note, with self-directed derision, the
abnormal value suddenly acquired by the most tiresome and
insignificant details of her former life. Its very drudgeries had
a charm now that she was involuntarily released from them:
card-leaving, note-writing, enforced civilities to the dull and
elderly, and the smiling endurance of tedious dinners--how
pleasantly such obligations would have filled the emptiness of
her days! She did indeed leave cards in plenty; she kept herself,
with a smiling and valiant persistence, well in the eye of her
world; nor did she suffer any of those gross rebuffs which
sometimes produce a wholesome reaction of contempt in their
victim. Society did not turn away from her, it simply drifted by,
preoccupied and inattentive, letting her feel, to the full
measure of her humbled pride, how completely she had been the
creature of its favour.
She had rejected Rosedale's suggestion with a promptness of scorn
almost surprising to herself: she had not lost her capacity for
high flashes of indignation. But she could not breathe long on
the heights; there had been nothing in her training to develop
any continuity of moral strength: what she craved, and really
felt herself entitled to, was a situation in which the noblest
attitude should also be the easiest. Hitherto her intermittent
impulses of resistance had sufficed to maintain her self-respect.
If she slipped she recovered her footing, and it was only
afterward that she was aware of having recovered it each time on
a slightly lower level. She had rejected Rosedale's offer without
conscious effort; her whole being had risen against it;
and she did not yet perceive that, by the mere act of listening
to him, she had learned to live with ideas which would once have
been intolerable to her. _