Lily knows she has been taking wrong turnings, but she still tells herself that letting Gus Trenor make a little money for her is harmless. She spends freely, blames Bertha Dorset for her troubles, and uses a renewed friendliness with the Dorsets for social sanction while Bertha experiments with Ned Silverton. A walk in the Park with Trenor is not a success. He has been touched by the fall in stocks, and she feels control slipping. Judy Trenor, still at Bellomont, no longer urges her back. A weekend among poky people who do not play bridge shows a faint coldness in the other ladies, and caustic allusions to the Wellington Brys and to Rosedale, the man who has bought the Greiner house. She leaves conscious of having failed in every purpose that took her there.
In town the Welly Brys, counselled by Carry Fisher, stake their new house on an evening of tableaux vivants. Lawrence Selden yields to the invitation and finds Gerty Farish beside him, talking of Lily at the Girls' Club and of Rosedale's thousand-dollar gift. When the curtain opens on Reynolds's Mrs Lloyd, the room reacts as if the living woman, not the picture, has been called forth. No other tableau receives that precise note of approval. Lily, who has risked a plain dress, feels recovered power rush back and holds herself aloof until the movement toward supper.
Selden has avoided her since the Van Osburgh wedding. Tonight he lets the crowd drift him, then takes her arm against the tide. They pass through a glass doorway into a garden of gravel, hanging lights, and a fountain falling among lilies. She asks why they never see each other. He says the only way he can help her is by loving her. Their lips touch. She catches his hand against her cheek and asks him to love her but not to tell her so, then slips back through the arch of boughs.
Carry Fisher has already broken up the group that was praising her. In the coat-room Selden finds Ned Van Alstyne and Gus Trenor. Van Alstyne says he never knew till tonight what an outline Lily has. Trenor, flushed in his fur-lined coat, growls that it is damned bad taste, refuses a cigar, and will not stay for supper. His wife, he says, was dead right to stay away: life is too short to spend it breaking in new people. In the garden she has asked Selden to love her and not to say it. In the coat-room Gus Trenor is already naming what the room has just been shown.
Coming Up in Chapter 13
Lily agrees to dine with Judy Trenor, still glowing from the Brys' party, but the invitation is a lure. Gus has lied to get her alone, and the empty house on Fifth Avenue is about to become the scene she cannot charm her way out of.
