Gerty Farish wakes the morning after the Wellington Brys' entertainment inside a mild light of her own. Selden's growing kindness, and the discovery that he also likes Lily Bart, feel like a private feast she would rather share than keep. She has always lived on crumbs from other tables. A telegram arrives asking if he may dine with her that evening, and she bustles through her small household as if kindness might be turning into love. While she prepares the room, Selden is in Albany with the same name filling the free part of his mind. The case cannot hold him. He has meant to keep free of permanent ties, but that little reservation is gone. He writes Lily, sure of her surrender, and scribbles a second message to Gerty because he wants a companion who will confirm, by deliberate observation, the truth his intuitions have already leapt to. Blessed are the pure in heart: he wants Gerty's innocence to ratify what he already believes about Lily.
Reaching town he goes straight to his club, hoping for Lily's note. The box holds only Gerty's rapturous assent. Trenor, in day clothes with a tall glass beside a sporting journal, offers him a canvas-back and complains of dining alone in a shuttered house. Judy has put off coming to town again. Selden refuses. The dark flush on Trenor's face, the jewelled rings wedged in fat fingers, and the gossip that couples this man with Lily sicken him all the way home. On his table lies her note at last, a grey seal with BEYOND! under a flying ship. He tells himself he will take her beyond the ugliness. At Gerty's the sitting-room sparkles with enamel paint and ingenuity. She has made the caramel custard with her own hands, poured coffee into her grandmother's egg-shell cups, and he says she ought to marry. He does not speak of Lily till after dinner. Then a photograph does the work, and he returns to her again and again, draining Gerty's stored tenderness, adopting her generous reading of the Gryce refusal, asking her to believe the best of Lily and to be good to her. Gerty understands she was never the romance. A third guest has taken her place at the feast. He leaves a cousinly kiss on her cheek and goes to look for Lily at Carry Fisher's.
Through the cigar smoke of the studio a dozen voices greet him. Lily has already gone. Jack Stepney talks of a girl standing as if up at auction and of Town Talk that morning. Van Alstyne says a girl that good-looking had better marry. Carry Fisher laughs that Lily is about to assume obligations in the shape of Mr Rosedale, and that even Rosedale had been scared by the talk until last night's tableau sent him off his head. An inexperienced young Farish, arriving late, says he put Lily in her cab and heard her give the Trenors' address. Mrs Jack Stepney answers that the house is closed; Judy telephoned from Bellomont. The smile that circles the room is enough. Selden leaves, walks down Fifth Avenue with Van Alstyne, and is forced to halt opposite the Trenors' dark facade. Only an oblong gleam above the door speaks of anyone inside. The door opens. A woman in evening draperies floats down to a hansom. A black bulky figure stays projected against the hall light. Van Alstyne asks him to say nothing. Selden turns sharply down the side street without taking the offered hand.
Alone with that cousinly kiss, Gerty stares at the lamp and the imperial photograph, and on her bed she meets the fact that she hates Lily Bart. She wanted happiness as fiercely as Lily, without Lily's power of obtaining it. A ring at the door pulls her up. She unlocks the flat on the shining vision of her friend, frozen and broken, begging not to be left alone with the noise of the furies' wings. Gerty seats her by the darkened hearth, kindles the fire, and asks what has happened. Lily cannot name Trenor. When Gerty says, with a flash of heroism, that Lawrence Selden went from this room to find her, the name unlocks everything. Lily asks whether, if she told him the whole story, he would loathe her or save her from loathing herself. Gerty sees her chance of happiness surge past, and will not take it. Yes, she says: she knows him; he will help you. They lie down on the one bed. Lily's breathing goes regular in the hollow of Gerty's arm. Gerty has just given the man away, and she does not sleep.
