The rain has stopped, but the weariness has not. Lily walks until Bryant Park offers a bench in the glare of an electric lamp. There is nothing to go home to but a cheerless room and the bottle of chloral by her bed. The drug is the only spot of light, and she is already afraid it is losing its power. She remembers the chemist's warning against increasing the dose, and the capricious action of the drug. She lingers, hoping exhaustion will reinforce it. A poorly dressed young woman stops and names her. It is Nettie Struther, once Nettie Crane, a girl from Gerty Farish's club whom Lily sent to a mountain sanatorium. The irony lands at once: the money she used was Gus Trenor's. Nettie will not leave her in the damp. Her husband George is on the night-shift, and the baby will be four months old the day after tomorrow. She leads Lily three blocks to a kitchen that is extraordinarily small and almost miraculously clean.
Nettie warms a bottle for the child and talks as if she has been saving the visit for years. She used to wish Miss Bart could see her now. She tells the rest without polish. She had been more than sick when Lily sent her away: a travelling man had given her his mother's wedding ring and then stopped writing. George, who had been brought up with her and knew, asked her to marry him anyway. If he cared enough to have her as she was, she could begin over. She names the baby Marry Anto'nette after an actress who reminded her of Lily. When Nettie wishes she could help in return, Lily holds out her arms. The child sinks trustfully against her breast. The weight increases until it seems to enter her and become part of herself. She promises to come back, then goes alone down the tenement stairs feeling, for a moment, stronger.
The boarding-house dinner is already underway when she returns. In her room a sudden fever of activity takes her. She spreads out the last handsome dresses, survivals of the Sabrina and London, and then draws the Reynolds dress from the tableaux at the bottom of the trunk. The folds give off an odour of violets from the night she stood with Selden and disowned her fate. A tap at the door brings a letter from her aunt's executors. A cheque for the full ten thousand dollars flutters to the floor. The estate has been settled sooner than planned. Ten months earlier that sum meant penury; now it looks like wealth. Her cheque-book is less kind. After unpaid bills she will have barely enough for three or four months. What frightens her more than shabby middle age is the clutch of solitude, the sense of being rootless, mere spin-drift. Her first glimpse of continuity came in Nettie's kitchen: a bird's nest on the edge of a cliff, built by the man's faith as well as the woman's courage.
She means to use the cheque to pay Trenor, and she also sees herself putting it off in the morning, slipping into tolerance of the debt. The thought terrifies her. She draws the cheque from the desk, addresses it to her bank, writes a cheque for Trenor, and lays both letters side by side without a word. Then she measures the soothing drops and knows the regular dose will be powerless. She has already raised it to its highest limit. Tonight she increases it. The chemist warned her. If sleep comes, it might be a sleep without waking. She swallows the glass, blows out the candle, and waits. The drug works slowly. She stirs and understands why she does not feel alone. Nettie Struther's child is lying on her arm. She hollows her arm to pillow the downy head. A dark flash of loneliness tears through; she starts up, thinks she has lost the child, then feels the tender pressure again, yields to it, and sleeps.
Coming Up in Chapter 29
The next morning rises mild and bright, with a promise of summer in the air. Sunlight slants down Lily's street, gilds the paintless railings of the doorstep, and strikes her darkened window. Selden hurries through the squalor with a youthful sense of adventure, his course leading only to her boarding-house doorstep.
