of a traveller
who waits for a belated train to start. Lily's feelings were softer: she
pitied him in a frightened ineffectual way. But the fact that he was for
the most part unconscious, and that his attention, when she stole into
the room, drifted away from her after a moment, made him even more of a
stranger than in the nursery days when he had never come home till after
dark. She seemed always to have seen him through a blur--first of
sleepiness, then of distance and indifference--and now the fog had
thickened till he was almost indistinguishable. If she could have
performed any little services for him, or have exchanged with him a few
of those affecting words which an extensive perusal of fiction had led
her to connect with such occasions, the filial instinct might have
stirred in her; but her pity, finding no active expression, remained in a
state of spectatorship, overshadowed by her mother's grim unflagging
resentment. Every look and act of Mrs. Bart's seemed to say: "You are
sorry for him now--but you will feel differently when you see what he has
done to us."

It was a relief to Lily when her father died.

Then a long winter set in. There was a little money left, but to Mrs.
Bart it seemed worse than nothing--the mere mockery of what she was
entitled to. What was the use of living if one had to live like a pig?
She sank into a kind of furious apathy, a state of inert anger against
fate. Her faculty for "managing" deserted her, or she no longer took
sufficient pride in it to exert it. It was well enough to "manage" when
by so doing one could keep one's own carriage; but when one's best
contrivance did not conceal the fact that one had to go on foot, the
effort was no longer worth making.

Lily and her mother wandered from place to place, now paying long visits
to relations whose house-keeping Mrs. Bart criticized, and who deplored
the fact that she let Lily breakfast in bed when the girl had no
prospects before her, and now vegetating in cheap continental refuges,
where Mrs. Bart held herself fiercely aloof from the frugal tea-tables of
her companions in misfortune. She was especially careful to avoid her old
friends and the scenes of her former successes. To be poor seemed to her
such a confession of failure that it amounted to disgrace; and she
detected a note of condescension in the friendliest advances.

Only one thought consoled her, and that was the contemplation of Lily's
beauty. She studied it with