It was no surprise to Lily to find that he had been selected as her only fellow-guest. Though she and her hostess had not met since the latter’s tentative discussion of her future, Lily knew that the acuteness which enabled Mrs. Fisher to lay a safe and pleasant course through a world of antagonistic forces was not infrequently exercised for the benefit of her friends. It was, in fact, characteristic of Carry that, while she actively gleaned her own stores from the fields of affluence, her real sympathies were on the other side–with the unlucky, the unpopular, the unsuccessful, with all her hungry fellow-toilers in the shorn stubble of success.
Mrs. Fisher’s experience guarded her against the mistake of exposing Lily, for the first evening, to the unmitigated impression of Rosedale’s personality. Kate Corby and two or three men dropped in to dinner, and Lily, alive to every detail of her friend’s method, saw that such opportunities as had been contrived for her were to be deferred till she had, as it were, gained courage to make effectual use of them. She had a sense of acquiescing in this plan with the passiveness of a sufferer resigned to the surgeon’s touch; and this feeling of almost lethargic helplessness continued when, after the departure of the guests, Mrs. Fisher followed her upstairs.
“May I come in and smoke a cigarette over your fire? If we talk in my room we shall disturb the child.” Mrs. Fisher looked about her with the eye of the solicitous hostess. “I hope you’ve managed to make yourself comfortable, dear? Isn’t it a jolly little house? It’s such a blessing to have a few quiet weeks with the baby.”
Carry, in her rare moments of prosperity, became so expansively maternal that Miss Bart sometimes wondered whether, if she could ever get time and money enough, she would not end by devoting them both to her daughter.
It’s a well-earned rest: I’ll say that for myself,” she continued, sinking down with a sigh of content on the pillowed lounge near the fire. “Louisa Bry is a stern task-master: I often used to wish myself back with the Gormers. Talk of love making people jealous and suspicious–it’s nothing to social ambition! Louisa used to lie awake at night wondering whether the women who called on us called on me because I was with her, or on her because she was with me; and she was always laying traps to find out what I thought. Of course I had to disown my oldest friends, rather than let her suspect she owed me the chance of making a single acquaintance–when, all the while, that was what she had me there for, and what she wrote me a handsome cheque for when the season was over!”
Mrs. Fisher was not a woman who talked of herself without cause, and the practice of direct speech, far from precluding in her an occasional resort to circuitous methods, served rather, at crucial moments, the purpose of the juggler’s chatter while he shifts the contents of his sleeves. Through the haze of her cigarette smoke she continued to gaze meditatively at Miss Bart, who, having dismissed her maid, sat before the toilet-table shaking out over her shoulders the loosened undulations of her hair.
“Your hair’s wonderful, Lily. Thinner–? What does that matter, when it’s so light and alive? So many women’s worries seem to go straight to their hair–but yours looks as if there had never been an anxious thought under it. I never saw you look better than you did this evening. Mattie Gormer told me that Morpeth wanted to paint you–why don’t you let him?”
Miss Bart’s immediate answer was to address a critical glance to the reflection of the countenance under discussion. Then she said, with a slight touch of irritation: “I don’t care to accept a portrait from Paul Morpeth.”
Mrs. Fisher mused. “N–no. And just now, especially–well, he can do you after you’re married.” She waited a moment, and then went on: “By the way, I had a visit from Mattie the other day. She turned up here last Sunday–and with Bertha Dorset, of all people in the world!”
She paused again to measure the effect of this announcement on her hearer, but the brush in Miss Bart’s lifted hand maintained its unwavering stroke from brow to nape.