“I never was more astonished,” Mrs. Fisher pursued. “I don’t know two women less predestined to intimacy–from Bertha’s standpoint, that is; for of course poor Mattie thinks it natural enough that she should be singled out–I’ve no doubt the rabbit always thinks it is fascinating the anaconda. Well, you know I’ve always told you that Mattie secretly longed to bore herself with the really fashionable; and now that the chance has come, I see that she’s capable of sacrificing all her old friends to it.”
Lily laid aside her brush and turned a penetrating glance upon her friend. “Including ME?” she suggested.
“Ah, my dear,” murmured Mrs. Fisher, rising to push back a log from the hearth.
“That’s what Bertha means, isn’t it?” Miss Bart went on steadily. “For of course she always means something; and before I left Long Island I saw that she was beginning to lay her toils for Mattie.”
Mrs. Fisher sighed evasively. “She has her fast now, at any rate. To think of that loud independence of Mattie’s being only a subtler form of snobbishness! Bertha can already make her believe anything she pleases–and I’m afraid she’s begun, my poor child, by insinuating horrors about you.”
Lily flushed under the shadow of her drooping hair. “The world is too vile,” she murmured, averting herself from Mrs. Fisher’s anxious scrutiny.
“It’s not a pretty place; and the only way to keep a footing in it is to fight it on its own terms–and above all, my dear, not alone!” Mrs. Fisher gathered up her floating implications in a resolute grasp. “You’ve told me so little that I can only guess what has been happening; but in the rush we all live in there’s no time to keep on hating any one without a cause, and if Bertha is still nasty enough to want to injure you with other people it must be because she’s still afraid of you. From her standpoint there’s only one reason for being afraid of you; and my own idea is that, if you want to punish her, you hold the means in your hand. I believe you can marry George Dorset tomorrow; but if you don’t care for that particular form of retaliation, the only thing to save you from Bertha is to marry somebody else.”
The light projected on the situation by Mrs. Fisher had the cheerless distinctness of a winter dawn. It outlined the facts with a cold precision unmodified by shade or colour, and refracted, as it were, from the blank walls of the surrounding limitations: she had opened windows from which no sky was ever visible. But the idealist subdued to vulgar necessities must employ vulgar minds to draw the inferences to which he cannot stoop; and it was easier for Lily to let Mrs. Fisher formulate her case than to put it plainly to herself. Once confronted with it, however, she went the full length of its consequences; and these had never been more clearly present to her than when, the next afternoon, she set out for a walk with Rosedale.
It was one of those still November days when the air is haunted with the light of summer, and something in the lines of the landscape, and in the golden haze which bathed them, recalled to Miss Bart the September afternoon when she had climbed the slopes of Bellomont with Selden. The importunate memory was kept before her by its ironic contrast to her present situation, since her walk with Selden had represented an irresistible flight from just such a climax as the present excursion was designed to bring about. But other memories importuned her also; the recollection of similar situations, as skillfully led up to, but through some malice of fortune, or her own unsteadiness of purpose, always failing of the intended result. Well, her purpose was steady enough now. She saw that the whole weary work of rehabilitation must begin again, and against far greater odds, if Bertha Dorset should succeed in breaking up her friendship with the Gormers; and her longing for shelter and security was intensified by the passionate desire to triumph over Bertha, as only wealth and predominance could triumph over her. As the wife of Rosedale–the Rosedale she felt it in her power to create–she would at least present an invulnerable front to her enemy.