Lily's experiment with honest work begins with a humiliation small enough to hold in one hand. In Mme. Regina's fashionable millinery shop the tall forewoman drops a condemned structure of wire and net on the table and says every spangle is sewed on crooked. Twenty tired women bend over their tables in the harsh north light. They are fairly paid and not starving, yet the youngest is as dull and colourless as the middle-aged. Only Lily's skin still shows blood moving, and that now burns with vexation as she strips the hat-frame. Gerty had hoped Lily's knack for trimming hats would mean a little green-and-white shop of her own. That vision died at the first enquiry. Fashionable patrons will not back a name already damaged by Mrs. Hatch, and Judy Trenor flames out at the first word of giving Lily a start, because of money from Gus. Carry Fisher and Gerty, oddly united, place her in Regina's work-room instead. Regina would have used her in the show-room as a displayer of hats. Lily refuses. She wants to learn the trade.
Two months later she is still held to preparatory work. The other girls know her history and find it only an explanation for clumsy fingers. Familiar names float through their talk: Mrs. Trenor's green Paradise, a Trenor girl yesterday with Mrs. George Dorset. Lily hears her old world reflected in the working-girls' minds, mixed with curiosity and contempt. When she cannot sew the spangles more regularly, the forewoman sends the hat to Miss Kilroy and puts Lily back to binding edges. Miss Kilroy later touches her arm and says Miss Haines did not act fair. Kindness from anyone but Gerty is so rare that Lily's colour rises. She walks home through a street declining from fashion to commerce, dreading most the chemist's on Sixth Avenue. She has a copy of Mrs. Hatch's prescription. The clerk fills it, then warns her not to increase the dose: a drop or two more, and off you go. The touch of the packet promises sleep. In her relief she stumbles against Rosedale, glossy and prosperous, coming down from the elevated.
He takes her to the Longworth for strong tea. She tells him she has joined the working-classes and is trying to learn to be a milliner. He has heard she was with Norma Hatch. She left two months ago, lest people say she was helping Hatch marry Freddy Van Osburgh; they say it anyway. Then she tells him the truth she has wanted someone to carry to Judy Trenor. Gus made about nine thousand dollars for her. She thought he was speculating with her own money. Afterward she found he had given it. The obligation is not one she can remain under. Her aunt's ten thousand, unpaid until next summer, must go to pay it back. That is why she is learning a trade. Rosedale stares, then says that if that is the case it cleans her out altogether. She agrees. He says it is fine. He likes pluck. He walks her to the blistered boarding-house she would not share with Gerty, and asks if he may come and see her. She answers in the first sincere words she has ever spoken to him.
That night she sees what the confession has opened. Carry has withdrawn after landing her at Regina's. Gerty still holds fast, but Lily avoids her for fear of meeting Selden. The drug gives her dreamless annihilation and a morning illusion of renewal, yet the small pay will never discharge Trenor, and she knows she cannot trust her own continuity of purpose. Rosedale is ready to lend her money. Close at hand, locked among her papers, lie the means of ending Bertha's pursuit. The only hope of getting through the night sits in the little bottle at her bedside; how much longer that hope will last she dares not conjecture.
