It was at this point, perhaps, that a joy just trying its wings in Gerty’s heart dropped to earth and lay still. She sat facing Selden, repeating mechanically: “No, she has never been understood–-” and all the while she herself seemed to be sitting in the centre of a great glare of comprehension. The little confidential room, where a moment ago their thoughts had touched elbows like their chairs, grew to unfriendly vastness, separating her from Selden by all the length of her new vision of the future–and that future stretched out interminably, with her lonely figure toiling down it, a mere speck on the solitude.
“She is herself with a few people only; and you are one of them,” she heard Selden saying. And again: “Be good to her, Gerty, won’t you?” and: “She has it in her to become whatever she is believed to be–you’ll help her by believing the best of her?”
The words beat on Gerty’s brain like the sound of a language which has seemed familiar at a distance, but on approaching is found to be unintelligible. He had come to talk to her of Lily–that was all! There had been a third at the feast she had spread for him, and that third had taken her own place. She tried to follow what he was saying, to cling to her own part in the talk–but it was all as meaningless as the boom of waves in a drowning head, and she felt, as the drowning may feel, that to sink would be nothing beside the pain of struggling to keep up.
Selden rose, and she drew a deep breath, feeling that soon she could yield to the blessed waves.
“Mrs. Fisher’s? You say she was dining there? There’s music afterward; I believe I had a card from her.” He glanced at the foolish pink-faced clock that was drumming out this hideous hour. “A quarter past ten? I might look in there now; the Fisher evenings are amusing. I haven’t kept you up too late, Gerty? You look tired–I’ve rambled on and bored you.” And in the unwonted overflow of his feelings, he left a cousinly kiss upon her cheek.
At Mrs. Fisher’s, through the cigar-smoke of the studio, a dozen voices greeted Selden. A song was pending as he entered, and he dropped into a seat near his hostess, his eyes roaming in search of Miss Bart. But she was not there, and the discovery gave him a pang out of all proportion to its seriousness; since the note in his breast-pocket assured him that at four the next day they would meet. To his impatience it seemed immeasurably long to wait, and half-ashamed of the impulse, he leaned to Mrs. Fisher to ask, as the music ceased, if Miss Bart had not dined with her.
“Lily? She’s just gone. She had to run off, I forget where. Wasn’t she wonderful last night?”
“Who’s that? Lily?” asked Jack Stepney, from the depths of a neighbouring arm-chair. “Really, you know, I’m no prude, but when it comes to a girl standing there as if she was up at auction–I thought seriously of speaking to cousin Julia.”
“You didn’t know Jack had become our social censor?” Mrs. Fisher said to Selden with a laugh; and Stepney spluttered, amid the general derision: “But she’s a cousin, hang it, and when a man’s married–Town Talk was full of her this morning.”
“Yes: lively reading that was,” said Mr. Ned Van Alstyne, stroking his moustache to hide the smile behind it. “Buy the dirty sheet? No, of course not; some fellow showed it to me–but I’d heard the stories before. When a girl’s as good-looking as that she’d better marry; then no questions are asked. In our imperfectly organized society there is no provision as yet for the young woman who claims the privileges of marriage without assuming its obligations.”
“Well, I understand Lily is about to assume them in the shape of Mr. Rosedale,” Mrs. Fisher said with a laugh.
“Rosedale–good heavens!” exclaimed Van Alstyne, dropping his eye-glass. “Stepney, that’s your fault for foisting the brute on us.”
“Oh, confound it, you know, we don’t marry Rosedale in our family,” Stepney languidly protested; but his wife, who sat in oppressive bridal finery at the other side of the room, quelled him with the judicial reflection: “In Lily’s circumstances it’s a mistake to have too high a standard.”