Lily returns from the Van Osburgh wedding to Mrs Peniston's Fifth Avenue house, where October housekeeping feels like a religious retreat. The Dying Gladiator stares from the drawing-room window. Soapsuds block the stairs, and the charwoman of the Benedick looks up from her pail with the same stare Lily once met leaving Selden's rooms. Invitations have shrunk. Grace Stepney is the cousin her aunt would rather keep: sound on missing napkins, willing to sit when Lily dines out. Watching her own figure retreat down vistas of dullness, Lily sees a middle age like Grace's, a future of servitude to other people's whims.
A ring at the empty house brings Mrs Haffen, the Benedick charwoman, with a parcel wrapped in dirty newspaper. Her husband has lost the janitor's place. From Selden's waste-basket she has pieced together torn letters in Bertha Dorset's large disjointed hand. Haffen saw Lily talking to Rosedale on the steps the day she left Selden's rooms, and she has come to sell what she thinks are Lily's own letters. Under the chandelier Lily understands the other side of a joke her world has smiled at for four years. George Dorset's temper would give the possessor of those letters the power to overthrow Bertha's whole existence, and Selden would be convicted of a negligence the world does not pardon.
Lily is revolted, but she bargains rather than ring for the woman to be put out. Haffen names an exorbitant sum; Lily offers half; the duel ends with the packet in her hand and the door closed. She means to destroy what Selden meant to destroy. Before she can carry the letters upstairs, Mrs Peniston comes in, cuirassed in jet, and extracts a third account of the wedding. Molly thought Bertha Dorset the best-dressed woman there. Bertha, in tremendous spirits, has told Molly she made the match between Evie Van Osburgh and Percy Gryce, and Cornelia Van Alstyne is surprised because she had heard Lily was to marry him.
In her own room Lily turns toward the grate, then lets that intention go. Her aunt's words have revived Bertha smiling, flattered, holding her up to ridicule in the allusive jargon their set uses instead of blood. She lights a taper, ties and seals the packet, and lays it in the despatch-box. The money that bought it is Gus Trenor's.
Coming Up in Chapter 10
The autumn drags at Mrs Peniston's house, broken only by Judy Trenor's notes asking why Lily has not come back to Bellomont. Spending the newly acquired money is the only excitement that lightens the days. That freedom will carry her from a shop meeting with Gerty Farish to a Thanksgiving camp in the Adirondacks.
