ll chary type most inaccessible to impulses and emotions.
He had the kind of character in which prudence is a vice, and good advice
the most dangerous nourishment. But Lily had known the species before:
she was aware that such a guarded nature must find one huge outlet of
egoism, and she determined to be to him what his Americana had hitherto
been: the one possession in which he took sufficient pride to spend money
on it. She knew that this generosity to self is one of the forms of
meanness, and she resolved so to identify herself with her husband's
vanity that to gratify her wishes would be to him the most exquisite form
of self-indulgence. The system might at first necessitate a resort to
some of the very shifts and expedients from which she intended it should
free her; but she felt sure that in a short time she would be able to
play the game in her own way. How should she have distrusted her powers?
Her beauty itself was not the mere ephemeral possession it might have
been in the hands of inexperience: her skill in enhancing it, the care
she took of it, the use she made of it, seemed to give it a kind of
permanence. She felt she could trust it to carry her through to the end.

And the end, on the whole, was worthwhile. Life was not the mockery she
had thought it three days ago. There was room for her, after all, in this
crowded selfish world of pleasure whence, so short a time since, her
poverty had seemed to exclude her. These people whom she had ridiculed
and yet envied were glad to make a place for her in the charmed circle
about which all her desires revolved. They were not as brutal and
self-engrossed as she had fancied--or rather, since it would no longer be
necessary to flatter and humour them, that side of their nature became
less conspicuous. Society is a revolving body which is apt to be judged
according to its place in each man's heaven; and at present it was
turning its illuminated face to Lily.

In the rosy glow it diffused her companions seemed full of amiable
qualities. She liked their elegance, their lightness, their lack of
emphasis: even the self-assurance which at times was so like obtuseness
now seemed the natural sign of social ascendency. They were lords of the
only world she cared for, and they were ready to admit her to their ranks
and let her lord it with them. Already she felt within her a stealing
allegiance to their standards, an acceptance of their limitations, a
disbelief in the things