buffs and put up with delays. But he was
prompt to perceive that the general dulness of the season afforded him an
unusual opportunity to shine, and he set about with patient industry to
form a background for his growing glory. Mrs. Fisher was of immense
service to him at this period. She had set off so many newcomers on the
social stage that she was like one of those pieces of stock scenery which
tell the experienced spectator exactly what is going to take place. But
Mr. Rosedale wanted, in the long run, a more individual environment. He
was sensitive to shades of difference which Miss Bart would never have
credited him with perceiving, because he had no corresponding variations
of manner; and it was becoming more and more clear to him that Miss Bart
herself possessed precisely the complementary qualities needed to round
off his social personality.

Such details did not fall within the range of Mrs. Peniston's vision.
Like many minds of panoramic sweep, hers was apt to overlook the MINUTIAE
of the foreground, and she was much more likely to know where Carry
Fisher had found the Welly Brys' CHEF for them, than what was happening
to her own niece. She was not, however, without purveyors of information
ready to supplement her deficiencies. Grace Stepney's mind was like a
kind of moral fly-paper, to which the buzzing items of gossip were drawn
by a fatal attraction, and where they hung fast in the toils of an
inexorable memory. Lily would have been surprised to know how many
trivial facts concerning herself were lodged in Miss Stepney's head. She
was quite aware that she was of interest to dingy people, but she assumed
that there is only one form of dinginess, and that admiration for
brilliancy is the natural expression of its inferior state. She knew that
Gerty Farish admired her blindly, and therefore supposed that she
inspired the same sentiments in Grace Stepney, whom she classified as a
Gerty Farish without the saving traits of youth and enthusiasm.

In reality, the two differed from each other as much as they differed
from the object of their mutual contemplation. Miss Farish's heart was a
fountain of tender illusions, Miss Stepney's a precise register of facts
as manifested in their relation to herself. She had sensibilities which,
to Lily, would have seemed comic in a person with a freckled nose and red
eyelids, who lived in a boarding-house and admired Mrs. Peniston's
drawing-room; but poor Grace's limitations ga